U.S. Not Prepared to take on Russia / Col Doug Macgregor

January 31, 2023

The War and the Future

January 31, 2023

Source

By Batiushka

Foreword: Stop Living in the Past

Since the historic Special Military Operation to liberate the peoples of the Ukraine from their US puppet tyrants in Kiev began on 24 February 2022, the post-1945 settlement has been over. In fact, it should have been over with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or, at latest, at the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. However, the USA was blinded by its exceptionalist hubris as ‘the only Superpower’ and engaged in its latest fantasy of destroying Islam, which it mistakenly saw as a serious rival, arrogantly dismissing Russia, China and India as minor players. So, as a sectarian rogue-state, the USA began its war of terror on all who thought differently, which it so humiliatingly lost. This can be seen in the dramatic pictures of the last flights out of Kabul in 2021.

In other words, after the end of the Soviet Union, which had been born directly out of World War One and formally founded in 1922, the end of the American Union (= NATO) should have followed, and with it the end of the worldwide American Empire. Thus, today NATO is an anachronism, well past its best before date, which is why has begun meddling all over the world, from the foothills of the Himalaya to the Pacific Ocean. NATO is just like the alphabet soup of other US organisations and fronts, IMF, EU, WTO, OECD, G7, G20 and UN, with its mere five Security Council members, including minor Great Britain and France. What might await us as a result of the liberation of the Ukraine on the centenary of the 1945 settlement, in 2045?

1. After the Ukraine

First of all, probably within the next fifteen months, we shall see the full liberation of the Ukraine. With the eastern Novorossija half of the Ukraine returning to Russia, the remaining half, Central and Western Ukraine, perhaps minus Zakarpattia (returning to Hungary as an autonomous region under the Balogh brothers) and Chernivtsy (returning to Romania), will return to being Malorossija, its capital in Kiev. Thus, the way will at last be open to form the Confederation of Rus’. The at last freed East Slav lands and peoples, Eurasian Russia and the Eastern European Belarus and Malorossija, could together form such a Confederation of Rus’, with a total population of just under 200 million.

2. The Reconfiguration of Eurasia

After the Ukrainian question has been solved and the USA has lost its political, military and, above all, economic power to bully the rest of the world, all of us in Eurasia will be able to start living in our new-found Freedom and building Justice and Prosperity for all. We foresee first of all the expansion of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).

a. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)

At present consisting of the Russian Federation, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the EEU will surely be joined by a host of other countries, including firstly China, by now reunited with Taiwan, and Mongolia, then India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Cambodia. They will be followed by the rest of Asia (60% of world population). Thus, the EEU will largely replace the present SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation). However, true to its Eurasian name, the Economic Union will also receive and grant applications from a new organisation in North-Western Eurasia. This could be called the European Economic Alliance (EEA). This could be formed through the economic co-operation of all forty-four countries in the extreme western tip of Eurasia, to be known simply as ‘Europe’. This will include what was once known as Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe, representing nearly 7% of world population.

b. The European Economic Alliance (EEA)

This Confederation could be formed as EU coercion collapses, with Brussels disarmed as the American Union of NATO dissolves. This will follow the long-overdue withdrawal of US occupying forces from Europe and the closure of their bases. All there will find freedom again. The founding member of the EEA would perhaps be Hungary and its Capital could be fixed in Budapest in honour of Hungarian courage and its geographical closeness to the resource-rich Confederation of Rus’, the gateway to Eurasia, on which the EEA will be so dependent. The Budapest Parliament building would make a fine administrative headquarters for the EEA. Other countries would follow Hungary like dominos, possibly in the following ten phases, after rebellions in each European country, one after another overthrowing their corrupt US-installed puppet-elites. This would resemble the rebellions that took place with a domino effect in the then Soviet Eastern bloc between 1989 and 1991.

i. The Western Balkan Four

After the European Economic Alliance has been founded by Hungary, it would next be joined by Serbia. No longer held under the heel of the US bully, the ancestrally Serbian province of Kosovo would return to Serbia. However, this would only be possible if its Albanian inhabitants, like those also in Montenegro and North Macedonia, first moved to Albania. For this to happen they would have to be attracted by a huge package of investment and development to pull Albania out of grinding poverty and chronic corruption and into prosperity, to make int into a magnet for Albanians. We suggest that China could invest in the massive rebuilding, and building, of infrastructure in Albania, as China already has a history of links with Albania. With such a just solution, all Albanians could at last live decently and work in decent jobs in their own country and not be forced to live like cuckoos in the countries of others. On this Albania could join the EEA. At this point Montenegro, (North) Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina could also join the EEA. These countries would perhaps form together with Serbia a Trade and Cultural Federation, perhaps to be called Yuzhnoslavia, though each would absolutely retain its political independence. Investment in Yuzhnoslavia could come from the Confederation of Rus’.

ii. The Eastern Balkan Three

After their example, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria would almost immediately join the EEA, attracted by links with Eurasia and the resources and linked culture of the Confederation of Rus’.

iii. The Greek World

They would naturally be followed by Greece and Cyprus, in the latter of which Russian investment is already huge. These three phases, i, ii and iii, of linking up with the Confederation of Rus, but remaining as sovereign nations within the EEA, would complete the reconstitution and restoration of the Orthosphere. This is the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth, whose natural centre has for 500 years been Russia.

iv. The Former Habsburgs

Next would come Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Lands and Austria.

v. Italia

They would naturally be followed by Italy, San Marino and Malta.

vi. Germania

The real turning-point would come if these countries were followed by the central domino of Germany. Germany, fixed between Western and Eastern Europe, knows that it cannot live without Russia and countries and markets to its east. It would immediately be followed by Germany-dependent Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.

vii. Nordia

Closely linked to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and finally Finland would follow almost at once.

viii. Gallia

After Germany, France, which is so dependent on Germany, with Monaco and then Switzerland and Liechtenstein, would also be obliged to join the EEA in fairly quick succession.

ix. Iberia

Spain, with newly-independent Catalonia, and then Andorra and Portugal would swiftly follow France.

x. The Isolationists, East and West

Now we come to the end of this game of dominoes. The last mohicans, the once irreductibly isolationist Russophobes, the Johnson fantasy, would realise that they could no longer remain alone. The people would revolt against their elite-imposed poverty and depopulation and the absurd propaganda down the generations. First, Estonia, under pressure from Finland, and then in a chain, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland could join the EEA. However, the first three would have to throw off their US puppet-elites and at once grant human rights to their Russian minorities.

Then, under economic pressure from Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the British Isles and Ireland, would at last follow. Thus, now separated into their four natural components, there would appear an independent England, freed after a millennium of the delusional yoke of the invented ‘Great Britain’ (an invention on a similar scale of delusion to the old ‘Ukraine’) and of the British Establishment. Immediately would follow newly-independent Scotland and Wales and a united Ireland. After the collapse of the oppressive British Establishment elite and their London-run institutions, the people and the pragmatists would proclaim that there is no alternative to co-operating with Eurasia through joining the EEA. All the more so, given the debt crisis, chaos, division and poverty in the USA, the former British colony which had become Britain’s colonial and ideological master. Step by step, opened archives would reveal the MI5 and MI6 manipulations like Litvinenko, MH 17, the Skripals, the Kerch Bridge explosion and the Nordstream destruction and how the tabloid media (the whole British media, including the State-run mouthpiece of the BBC) were used to perpetrate these lies.

3. Outside Eurasia: Continental Councils, the Inter-Continental G30 and The World Alliance

Thus, a united Eurasia (some 70% of world population) will stand together with Africa (17% of world population), Latin America (South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean – 8% of world population), and the small Northern America (under 5% of world population) and even smaller Oceania (a tiny 0.5% share of world population, with its economies increasingly dominated by China. This would only be natural justice, as the Pacific islanders originated from Taiwan). Each Continent could elect a Council, creating a Eurasian Council, an African Council, a Latin American Council, a Northern America Council (basically, the USA, or whatever it will break up into, with Canada and Greenland) and an Oceanian Council (Australia, New Zealand, Western New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia). Each Council would be made up of all the nations in its Continent.

On an Inter-Continental level, there could also be formed the G30. This would be composed of all 30 nations of the world which each have a population of over 50 million + Australia, representing all Oceania, and would replace BRICS, the G7 and the G20. These nations in order of size at present are: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Confederation of Rus, Bangladesh, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam, DR Congo, Turkey, Iran, Germany, Korea, Thailand, France, Italy, Tanzania, South Africa, England, Myanmar, Kenya, Colombia and Australia. 18 are in Eurasia (13 in Asia and 5 Europe-based), 7 in Africa, 3 in Latin America and 1 each in Northern America and Oceania). The composition could change as the populations of new countries grow to more than 50 million or alternatively some contract to fewer than 50 million.

On a global level, the 235 nations of the world, including the 143 with populations of under ten million and the 75 with under one million, could assemble in a World Alliance, replacing the old New-York UN. The Capital of the Alliance could be fixed in a central position, not in an off-centre position like New York, but in the Eurasian heartland, for example, in Yalta in the Crimea. Its Security Council could be composed of the ten most populous nations, essentially all regional powers in the new multipolar world: China (also speaking for Oceania), India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, the Confederation of Rus’ (the only country with the vast majority of its population in Europe, which it would therefore represent), Bangladesh and Mexico. Six are in Eurasia, two in Latin America, one in Africa and one in Northern America.

Afterword: Towards the Future

Fantasy? Fiction? Faction? Frankly, if only 10% of the above came to pass, that in itself would be world-transforming. And if you dismiss the above out of hand, just think for a moment of how all would have mocked predictions of the generational chain of World War I (1914), World War II (1939), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and in quick succession the fall of the Soviet bloc, and, on the centenary of World War I, in 2014, the US-orchestrated coup in Kiev which has led directly to the world-changing events which began in the Ukraine in 2022, the centenary of the USSR. Yet it all happened. In 2021 nobody had predicted the events in the Ukraine either, for nobody could have imagined the Mariana Trench depth of the suicidal stupidity of the Anglozionist elite.

A generation ago, as a Russian Orthodox priest stranded in Western Europe, the Northern Sahara, as so much of it seems to be, I did not dream of any of this. Would I live to see the revival of corruption-bound, post-Soviet Russia, enslaved to and humiliated by the West and all its vices? My impression then was that the whole world was living on borrowed time. Then came the miracle of the events of August 2000 in Russia and the appearance of President Putin. After the shamefulness and shamelessness of the CIA’s useful idiot, the drunkard Yeltsin, Putin was a miracle. And I began to think that I would live to see the future. And since 24 February 2022 I have been living it. The English Shakespeare once wrote in his Twelfth Night: What’s to come is still unsure’. I will agree, but I will still try to pierce the darkness to glimpse the light.

31 January 2023

Desperate actions

January 31, 2023

Source

by Hugo Dionísio

Something is changing on Mount Olympus and it is leaving in tatters the union of tendencies connected to the U.S.-state falconry. To understand and predict the actions of the political elite that commands, through their transnational mandataries, our destinies, implies knowing what one of the most important US defense think tanks reflects and publishes. This research leads us to an entity that rarely appears in the “informative” moments of the North Atlantic press: the RAND Corporation.

RAND’s best-known moment with regard to the conflict in Eastern Europe is signaled by the publication of the report “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground”. This report contains the entire menu of malfeasance that, in the claims made public and repeated by the US power summit, would lead to a fulminating defeat of the political, economic, and military power of the Russian Federation.

The analysis expressed publicly, by the various political actors, was that the Russian Federation was nothing more than “a gasoline bomb with nuclear weapons,” a “paper tiger” with a GDP equal to that of Holland, and a people gagged by a “mad dictator” who remained in power only through “authoritarianism” and “repression”.

Based on an analysis whose information seemed to substantiate such political positions, the RAND report advocated a type of intervention, some of which were well reported – others not so well reported – in the official press. This was the case with the attempted “colored” revolutions made in CIA in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Central Asian countries, which, together with Georgia and Moldova, would probably be “promoted” and “supported” to the condition of an actual Ukraine. The Russian Federation, having to meet all the fires, some because they would become proxy armies (like Ukraine), others turned into bases of destabilizing operations launched by the CIA, would eventually “extend” itself until it broke into pieces and collapsed, putting an end to the current threat. Even without this partition, a point could always be reached where, after the destruction of the incumbent political power, a more docile “regime” would be installed, pointing to a more “advantageous position on the ground.”

Given to be known only in 2019, we are forced to note that this strategy had long been in preparation, especially since the Russian president lost hope that he could count on a Western “partnership” and announce the end of the unipolar world. Fact is, the report has a logical connection with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (US national defense strategy).

At any rate, this strategy points to the “Yugoslavization” of the Russian Federation. The truth is that the constant itinerary of this work has been followed almost scrupulously by the U.S. security and defense establishment: “colored” revolutions; states transformed into proxy armies; communication and disinformation campaigns; destabilization and sabotage operations; economic sanctions and embargoes. A menu of fulminating “democratic” activities on the rise!

And why is it important to talk about this today? It is important because in the last few days a new paper from the RAND corporation was published, but this time in reverse, a study entitled “Avoiding a Long War U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.”

If the previous works pointed to the goals that Anthony Blinken, Biden, Nuland and Kirby have so often trumpeted, namely, a long-lasting conflict that would exhaust Russian energies so that the obstacle could be removed by force if necessary, the study published this time points to the realization of a cost-benefit ratio between the costs and risks resulting from a long war with Moscow and the benefits that the U.S. can derive from a trajectory that is expected to escalate and could result in a direct confrontation.

Something has changed and in what ways. First it was triumphalism and threat destruction, now a long conflict brings risks and costs that prevent the US from focusing on more pressing priorities. Where do we stand? At first it was intended, precisely, a long-lasting conflict… Now, not only does it carry costs and risks, but it seems to be Russia itself that is more comfortable with the foreseeable extension of the conflict in time, to the point of appointing Gerasimov as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, envisaging more than one theater of operations simultaneously (RAND pointed to the bilateral Polish possibility).

According to the site http://www.moonofalabama.org , one of the best sources on US foreign policy, the publication of this study does not come by chance, but after an attempt by the US Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, to promote an internal debate on possible peace negotiations with Biden. Having lost the battle in the White House, and unable to persuade Biden, as he only listens to Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan (the hawks on duty), he opted for the public display of his claim, calling for the start of negotiations first and, perhaps, leading to the publication of this study later.

The problem is, as Tyler Durden writes in one of today’s best opinion sites http://www.zerohedge.com , in his article “The most egregious Mistake”, going back and reversing the direction of US policy in this matter is simply not an option. The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame. Hence, these efforts by Mark Miller should result in very little, except the deepening of internal fractures, which may be positive. The fact is, there are already people who intend to step out of this path to the abyss.

Now, unlike the various writings on the subject, which tend to explain the impossibility of reversing the direction of the current suicidal strategy, with the sectarianism of the official narrative, which only offers certainties and unequivocal results, according to which, initially, this strategy did not result from a necessity but from a choice, translated into the so-called “egregious error”, I, personally, tend to consider that it was not an “error”, nor even less a choice, but rather, an act of desperation.

The alternative – American – narrative to the official current says that the outlined strategy represented an existential threat for Russia, but not for the United States. For the US, it would be possible to take other paths than that of creating this conflict.

In my view, this is a condescending position that devalues the feelings of urgency that resulted from the catastrophic analysis (never made public) that many have probably made of the state of American hegemony. The fact is that while the US has spent 8 trillion dollars on the war on terror, channeling all its diplomatic, economic and military efforts into it… What have Russia and China done?

While the U.S. used the pretext of terrorism (which they themselves have so often fomented and used as a weapon against political opponents – Syria, for example) to dominate the world’s largest oil reserves (in the Middle East), sidelining other natural resources, which today are important (such as lithium, for example), China developed its infrastructure, industry, army and, above all, its international trade platform, today known as the Belt and Road Initiative. During this period, the global south was able to experience a new form of “soft power”, which instead of demanding privatizations, dollarization of the economy, and reformulation of the political system in the manner that was most convenient, of which the IMF and the World Bank were the proxies on duty, the integration into the BRI only requires that the projects facilitate trade between countries (hence the infrastructure). In exchange for natural resources, these countries – instead of Western corporations and “investment” translated into the purchase of public companies – receive schools, hospitals, 4G and 5G networks, ports, airports, bridges, and the bigger and more challenging the better.

Not even the propaganda of the “debt trap”, well known to the IMF and the association treaties with the USA, prevented more than 120 countries from joining this network. Meanwhile and in the same period of time, Russia was able to get back on its feet from the neoliberal nightmare of the 1990s, recovering its industry and, above all, its self-esteem and national pride. A mortal sin in the eyes of the white house. Eurasian integration (EUEA), international cooperation (BRICS) and infrastructure (INSTC) projects have been made that circumvent US influence across the seas, which helps shield the economies of the countries involved.

While this multipolar world was being born in the beards of the most arrogant and sectarian hawks, the military industrial complex focused its attentions on the war on terror. Our news reports at the time, instead of Ukraine, began and ended with suicide bombings and time bombs. Until…

When information about this world began to emerge in the form of hard data, panic began to set in. It was around the time of 2017/18. Of course, from my perspective, this panic cannot be confessed. Its externalization began to emerge through Euromaidan, pressure and destabilization on less aligned Latin American nations, with the arrest of Lula da Silva and other national leaders with whose policies the white house was not comfortable. Gradually we saw U.S. foreign policy shift back toward dominance of natural resources and markets and less toward terrorism. They even “abandoned” the Middle East, leaving only the Zionist and Kurdish watchdogs. It was the time of the news that opened and closed with Venezuela.

However, this reversal of course already denoted, in my opinion, a kind of race against time. Time that had to be won.

Faced with the continuous loss of ground, we have reached the time of Covid (which according to many is a White House “card”, provoked or opportunistic, we shall see in due time) and the construction of a military strategy that has been elected as the last of the means – far from being remote – to “contain” China, recently classified as an “existential threat”. The confrontation in the Pacific would pass through the creation of an Eastern NATO, baptized AUKUS. In this strategy, the obstacles that could tip the balance in favor of the enemy had to be removed. That obstacle is the Russian Federation. The conclusion of a true strategic alliance between the Russian Federation and China shows that the leaders of these two countries no longer have any illusions about the real intentions of the United States. The more they are together, the greater their protection and the greater the threat to the United States.

This is where the “Ukrainian” option comes in! The strategy of extending Russia until it left was not an option. It was a desperate action. Absolutely! And why?

I say this not only because of what I mentioned earlier and the urgency that the elite leaders of the Transnational Corporations (the backbone of the U.S. Empire) must have felt at the information that was reaching them. At this stage, it must be said that the “failure” of the Chinese strategy played a part in this desperation. For the corporate elite who control the political power in the US, the economic “opening” of China would certainly lead (I don’t know what science they based their opinion on) to the destruction of the Communist Party’s power and the installation of a neo-liberal type government. Hong Kong will have already been a forced step, as these folks believed that the process would be more or less “natural”, resulting in a “USSR” type collapse, this time in China. But no… By around 2018 it was already being said in the white house that they would have to learn to live with China as it was. There would be no new “Tiananmen” in sight.

For the transnational corporate elite there is no cooperation. There is domination. After all, that is the fuel and the adrenaline of empire. Anyone’s. But back to Eastern Europe, why do I say that the Ukrainian choice was desperate?

First it was forced. And it was forced because it resulted from the failure of people like Navalny and other neoliberal puppets, who should have been able to produce an attrition of United Russia’s power. The preferred option is always the one that involves the internal deconstruction and submission of the adversary. Failing this, the only option left is the military one. The military is the component in which the United States still considers itself superior.

The RAND report pointed to a set of “tasks” that should be accomplished in order to achieve the goal of “extending Russia” and thus achieve a “more advantageous position on the ground. Has that desideratum been achieved? No, not by a long shot.

First, the “color” revolutions in Belarus and Kazakhstan failed. Not only did they fail to remove their respective rulers, they worsened their situation on the ground by strengthening Russia’s power over those countries (the respective governments “saved” by it). Second, they failed the sanctions from 2014 onward by not destroying the Russian economy. Worse, they gave the country an ability to live with the West’s sanctions. The sanctions were “the” development opportunity, the missing pretext to move from an economy based solely on resource extraction, to an industrial, in some cases cutting-edge and full-cycle economy, i.e., with key sectors sovereign and shielded against sabotage maneuvers, from the outside. Third, Georgia did not take the bait and set itself up as a proxy army, failing the plan of creating several battlefronts. Out of all this the Russian Federation came out stronger.

While the outward discourse, for ideological and strategic reasons, continued to be that of the “fuel station,” the actions denoted only desperation. The very instrumentalization of the Minsk agreements, agreements sanctioned by the UN, as a way to gain time to arm Ukraine, totally discredited the West in the eyes of the global south. Anyone who deceives like this, a country like Russia, by relying on a process like the Minsk one, is capable of anything.

The fact that they managed to “convince” a country to sacrifice itself for the sake of the power of another, basing this “convincing” on the establishment of a neo-Nazi doctrine, recovering Bandera (directly responsible for the death of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews), based on xenophobia, racial and cultural hatred, leading that country to a coup d’état perpetrated by forces comparable to the SS, and making all these people look like martyrs and heroes, and even removing the Azov battalion from the list of extremist organizations… It was another stab in the back of the confidence of a world composed of nations whose memories have not yet been erased and who know what bad things fascism and Nazism brought them. This same world also knows the decisive contribution that the USSR – and Russia, for that matter – made in the 20th century to the defeat of colonialism and to the national liberation of the majority of humanity.

It was also about liberation from the clutches of Western imperialism and colonialism. From the same West that used plunder as a moment of primitive appropriation of wealth, that allowed it to first achieve development, and then used it to further subjugate the plundered. No, this world no longer trusts the West. This world is not the same world that the corporate media claims to be with Zelinsky.

The official discourse denied all this reality and sold an illusion, according to which, Ukraine, with the help of the powerful NATO, would win, without appeal or aggravation, a war of attrition against Russia. Of course, the victory would be so resounding that the attrition would not even begin, for at the first sanctions, power would fall to the street. Even the thousands of Russian agents the CIA has in its pocket weren’t able to pull it off. Power not only fell but strengthened, demonstrating that the proud nation that, being harried from without, turns on itself is yet to be born. RAND’s assumptions kept getting further and further from being true.

According to the imbecility resulting from the superiority complex of Western elites, a country with 3% of global GDP would not stand a chance against the mighty G7/NATO/US. Which says a lot about the GDP method as a way of characterizing an economy. As “old man” Marx explained, only labor produces wealth and only the transformation of matter into something with use value translates that wealth. This is the “real economy” of which Martyanov speaks so much. Unlike the speculative and ultra-financialized economy of the West, Russia has a real economy, which produces things with use value. With “real” use value, without which we cannot live, unlike an iPhone or a Chanel perfume. In fact, the global south has been gradually discovering that it has the resources, the technology and the wealth to have a real economy. And it doesn’t need the West for that. It is the West that cannot live without the global south, not the other way around. The global south has figured it out, and so has the US.

Seeing this, and watching the deplorable spectacle that is the constant confiscation of sovereign amounts deposited in dollars or euros, which the West, at the behest of the US, steals so much, today we are witnessing a movement away from the dollar…

In this, too, we have much despair, such as the process that led to the “installation” of a Guaido in Venezuela or the successive attempts at a “colored” revolution in Iran. In both cases, the two countries saw their reservations “frozen” in the G7/NATO/EU space. If this move by itself had already put many countries on their guard, since it was no longer only the “communist” Cuba and the People’s Republic of Korea, this time, the freezing and intended confiscation of Russian reserves clearly pushed the panic button. Any country, regardless of size, if it does not accept submission, is subject to confiscation of everything it has in currencies of the collective West.

The result? The result is BRICS+ and the basket of currencies, the proposal for a Latin American currency between Brazil and Argentina, the return to gold, cryptoyuan and the multiplication of exchanges in national currencies, as is already happening between the Eurasian countries, Iran, China, India, Turkey and Russia, recently joined by Pakistan, or the case of Saudi Arabia and China. The challenge seems to be simple: escape the “cursed” currencies, but without appearing to do so urgently, lest everything fall into place.

This result was obvious and has been predicted so many times over the past decade. Even in unsuspecting channels from the point of view of neoliberal ideology like Bloomberg or Politico. But not even these warnings have deterred the suicidal arrogance and prepotency that results from 500 years of Western racial supremacy.

Today, after Annalena Berbock confirmed to us that we have been dragged into a war, without any democratic background discussion and public reflection, except for endless hours of “slava Ukraini” propaganda in the corporate media; such a war also starts from an underestimation of the military and industrial capabilities of the Russian federation itself. If we read the report made by the Congress a couple of years ago about the military capabilities of the Russian Federation, we would see that the general conclusion was something like: a lot of weapons, but unsophisticated, with precision problems and outdated in relation to the U.S. But this is not the story told by the more than 7,500 tanks shot down, the more than 300 planes, more than 200 helicopters and, most important of all, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, mainly of soldiers (Zaluzhny reportedly told the Pentagon that there were 232,000, CIA sources say 305,000, and Chinese intelligence is already talking about 500,000 to 680,000). Whether it is the smallest or the smallest, especially when compared to the Russian losses, it gives us a catastrophic idea of the disproportion of forces. We are indeed witnessing a process of demilitarization and denazification.

With this background, the sending of tanks was discussed, in another episode of “wonder weapons”. But this time, and after the others did not have the desired effect, the US no longer wants to throw more arms sales deals on the back burner, as happened with the “wonderful” HIMAR or M777. Send their Abrahms tanks there and soon the number of sales would drop. So, let the Germans send their Panzer-Gepard there. Sholz didn’t want to? When I heard him say that he would only send them if… I immediately thought, “he still hasn’t received the non-refusable request from Biden and friends”. It didn’t take a day for pictures of the tanks to appear on their way to Poland, even before the public announcement. This is the Germany of today: a cluster of Teutonic identity riders mounted on unicorns, wearing pink armor, and holding sunflowers instead of swords. How sad!

Be that as it may, a spring campaign is being prepared in which, to defend the USA, another 100,000 forcibly recruited Ukrainian soldiers will be sacrificed in the name of Bandera (the videos of people being caught in the streets, in shopping malls, hiding from the police… are multiplying at breakneck speed)!

Having already guaranteed the defeat of the offensive (come on… a country like FR would rather sacrifice millions of its best children than submit to some Western empire), the US is already preparing for the next desperate maneuver. Playing Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile follow the so far frustrated attempts at “colored” revolution (the others are learning how to disarm the CIA’s NGO army), to get more candidates for the post of “ukraine” in the pacific.

The RAND study points precisely to this “priority”. One more that will lead to actions whose prerequisites are not verified and, therefore, doomed to failure. But as someone, from the US, said some time ago: “there are no more good options”. Only the desperate ones. It reminds one of the last days of the Reich with its search for the “wonder weapons”.

But if the rest of the world has already seen the scenes of the next chapters, here in NATO territory, the corporate media is still in delusional mode, according to which, the world is a US backyard and the collective West is the civilizational reference… It’s like the cliché “Ukraine is winning the war”.

It will be my pleasure to watch a whole crowd of newsmen, analysts, politologists, and other charlatans doing the pin-up… and saying “no one saw this coming”!

Isn’t that what they always do? In a sign of desperation?

And some people still believe in them!

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Biden says ‘no’ to US sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine

31 Jan 2023

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

Amid Kiev’s calls for the West to provide it with fighter jets, the US President says he is not in favor of the decision.

US President Joe Biden speaking at the Steamfitters Local 602 in Springfield (AP)

United States President Joe Biden claimed on Monday that he will not be sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

“No,” Biden said when asked by reporters at the White House if he was in favor of sending the jets, which Ukraine’s leaders have said are at the top of their latest weapons wish list.

This comes despite a group of US military officials quietly lobbying for sending F-16s to Ukraine, Politico reported, citing three anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

According to the newspaper, the campaign for F-16s to Ukraine is gaining momentum in the Pentagon, while Kiev is bracing for a planned offensive this spring.

A senior Pentagon official told Politico he did not think the US Department of Defense (DoD) was opposed to the idea, noting that there was no final decision on the possible supplies yet.

However, there is no appetite in the Pentagon for this proposal, US officials revealed, according to Politico.

Elsewhere, the US President also said he will be visiting Poland. “I’m going to be going to Poland. I don’t know when, though,” he told reporters when asked about a visit.

Earlier, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pointed out that Poland can hand over its F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine only in coordination with other NATO partners.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week however that he wants the West to send long-range missiles and jets.

Last Monday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Kiev expects to receive fighter jets from the West in the near future and it would take Ukrainian pilots at least six months to learn how to operate them.

A couple of days ago, Colonel Yurii Ihnat, the spokesperson for the Air Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Kiev intends to obtain 24 F-16 fighter jets from its international allies.

Read more: US complicit in Kiev shelling of Lugansk hospital: Russia UN envoy

Macron does not exclude France providing Ukraine with fighter jets

In this context, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would not rule out France delivering fighter jets to Ukraine but warned against the risk of escalation in the conflict.

“Nothing is excluded in principle,” Macron said after talks with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte when asked about the possibility of sending jets to Kiev.

However, the French President set out a series of “criteria” before making any decision, as Ukraine steps up calls for more advanced weapons from the West just days after its allies pledged to deliver tanks.

These included that Ukraine must first make the request, that any arms would “not be escalatory,” and that they would “not be likely to hit Russian soil but purely to aid the resistance effort.”

Macron stressed that any arms delivery “must not weaken the capacity of the French armed forces.”

He noted that the Ukrainians “are not making this request at the moment for fighter jets.”

Dutch politicians have recently suggested the idea of sending F-16 jets to Ukraine, but Rutte echoed Macron’s cautious comments.

“There is no taboo but it would be a big step,” the Dutch Premier indicated.

“It is not at all a question of F-16s, there has been no demand (from Ukraine),” he added.

The French and Dutch leaders made their comments a day after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he would not send fighter jets to Ukraine.

Scholz only just agreed on Wednesday to send 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and to allow other European countries to send theirs, after weeks of intense debate and mounting pressure from allies.

Scholz’s decision to green-light the tanks was accompanied by a US announcement that it would send 31 of its Abrams tanks.

It is noteworthy that even though the West has not yet decided on the deliveries of fighter jets, Ukraine has already compiled a list of some 50 pilots, who are ready to start training on F-16s, speak English, and have a track record of “thousands of combat missions,” Politico revealed, citing a Pentagon official and a Ukrainian official, as well as three other people familiar with the matter.

Read more: Germany reiterates stance not to send warplanes to Ukraine

Related Stories

• Macron does not exclude France providing fighter jets for Ukraine
• Poland sets condition to supply F-16s to Kiev: Coordination with NATO
• Germany reiterates stance not to send warplanes to Ukraine

Douglas Macgregor – We are co Belligerents

January 28, 2023

US to Send Abrams Tanks to Ukraine: Will it make any Difference?

January 29, 2023 

(Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook) –

The recent announcement that the United States will be sending at least 31 M1 Abrams tanks along with a growing number of German Leopard 2 main battle tanks comes as Ukrainian forces find themselves losing ground across much of the line of contact.

Articles like the Guardian’s, “US joins Germany in sending tanks to Ukraine as Biden hails ‘united’ effort,” claim:

Joe Biden has approved sending 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, a significant escalation in the US effort to counter Russian aggression as international reluctance to send tanks to the battlefront falls away.

The reversal of the US’s previous position came after Germany confirmed it will make 14 of its Leopard 2A6 tanks available for Ukraine’s war effort, and give partner countries its permission to re-export other battle tanks to aid Kyiv.

It also says:

“Putin expected Europe and the United States to weaken our resolve,” Biden said in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. “He expected our support for Ukraine to crumble with time. He was wrong. He was wrong. He was wrong from the beginning and he continues to be wrong.”

Yet despite the apparent uptick in support, upon closer analysis it appears practical support for Ukraine has long-since been exhausted and the West has now resorted to “wonder weapons” that will have even less impact on the battlefield than previous aid packages.

Not the “Game Changer” Many Think 

The idea that the West transferring their main battle tanks to Ukraine will be a “game changer” is rooted in the myth of Western main battle tanks being “superior” to their Russian counterparts. In turn, this myth is owed to their performance in Iraq in 1991 and again during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 where modern US and British main battle tanks went up against Soviet-era export versions of the T-72.

Not only do several experienced US military officers warn against this misconception, the performance of Western main battle tanks in recent conflicts tells a much different story.

Former US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis in a recent article published by 1945 helps dispel the myths surrounding Western tank performance in Iraq and asked the question whether or not these high-tech tanks will make a difference – allowing Ukrainian forces to drive Russian forces from territory Kiev claims is Ukrainian.

He points out the critical factors that actually lead to a US victory in Iraq. He explains:

In Desert Storm, U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks wiped out Saddam Hussein’s fleets of Soviet-made T-72s, and again the American Abrams-led invasion in 2003 revealed the T-72 was no match for U.S. tanks. And truly the American tanks were witheringly successful. During Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. and its coalition partners destroyed more than 3,000 Iraqi tanks. Saddam’s armored force, however, did not destroy even a single Abrams tank. It’s understandable, then, why anyone would want to have an Abrams or equivalent tank, especially when it has proven so effective against exactly the type of tanks Russia has.

Lt. Col. Davis omits, however, that the tanks used by Iraqi forces during Desert Storm are not comparable to the type of tanks Russia has today.

The T-72s operated by Iraqi forces during Desert Storm were protected only by the steel armor they were originally manufactured with. They lacked night vision and thermal imaging sights, as well as computerized fire control systems that automatically calculate firing solutions for tank gunners taking in account a number of factors including temperature, munition type, wind speed and direction as well as barometric pressure.

Also not mentioned in Lt. Col. Davis’ article is the fact that the US deployed upward to 1,900 Abrams to fight against these far inferior Iraqi tanks and that this immense tank force was supported by an equally massive amount of supporting air power, artillery, and mechanized infantry which when combined is referred to as combined arms warfare.

Lt. Col. Davis does, however, mention a very important factor that worked almost entirely in America’s favor, training.

Training is Key and Training Takes Years

Lt. Col Davis in his article explains:

First, the U.S. crewmen were highly trained as individuals. In my unit, tank drivers, loaders, gunners, and vehicle commanders had all mastered their individual jobs, then for more than a year before battle, had conducted considerable time training as platoons, then at company-level, and later we trained in squadron and eventually regimental levels. No one could have been more ready to fight than we were. 

Conversely, Iraqi forces had none of this training. Lt. Col. Davis explains that many Iraqi tankers had little if any practice firing their main guns, little if any unit-level training, and maintenance programs required to keep heavy weapons like a main battle tank operational on the battlefield were “virtually nonexistent.”

The disparity in training was so extreme that Lt. Col. Davis concluded that even if US tankers were operating Iraq’s T-72s and the Iraqis were given American M1 Abrams, the United States still would have won.

He then explains:

In tank fights, the side that accurately fires first almost always wins. In Desert Storm, we almost always fired first, and because of our training, almost never missed. But even when the Iraqi gunners got off a shot, it was rarely on target. The results were fatal for them.

Russian tanks today have computerized fire control systems, night and thermal sights, as well as sophisticated explosive reactive armor (ERA). They will be at least as capable as Western main battle tanks transferred to Ukraine. Russian tanks will also be many times more numerous. Training aside, if tank battles in Ukraine become a matter of who sees who first and delivers the first accurate shot, there will be many more capable Russian tanks looking for and firing at Western tanks.

It takes nearly half a year to train an entry-level tanker to operate a modern Western main battle tank (22 weeks according to the US Army’s website). Western tank crews consist of a driver, a gunner, a loader, and a tank commander. The tank commander will often have years of experience operating the specific tank in question, meaning that there are no Western tank crews composed of just entry-level tankers.

This is an insurmountable problem for Ukraine. While the Western media even admits that it will take months for Ukrainians to learn how to operate and then deploy Western tanks, this is only if crews are given crash courses on how to operate their own individual tanks, omitting any training on how to use tanks together as units.

Many argue that training can be abbreviated and that Ukrainian forces are “highly motivated” and thus somehow capable of compressing years of necessary training and experience into a few weeks. This is simply not true.

US Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling (retired) in a recent thread on Twitter agrees.

He warned that training can’t be “hand-waved.” If it is, crews will be ineffective on the battlefield while actually causing damage to the tank itself.

The M1 Abrams is propelled by a multi-fuel turbine engine that requires a significant amount of careful driver training to avoid damaging it. A damaged engine needs to be replaced – a non-trivial task on the front line in Ukraine. The engine cannot be maintained by a general mechanic but requires a technician trained and certified to work on it specifically.

Lt. General Hertling points out that virtually everything that breaks on an M1 Abrams will need to be replaced, requiring an 800 km-long logistical line to be established as Ukrainians themselves will not be able to perform the repairs inside Ukraine.

He also points out that other nations using the M1 Abrams including Iraq and Saudi Arabia required a 5 and 7 year training program respectively before standing up their fleets. Both nations still depend on General Dynamics (the tank’s manufacturer) to perform maintenance since technicians in either country have yet to acquire training and equipment to do it themselves.

It is easy then to imagine the complications that will arise attempting to deploy such weapon systems on such short notice in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Western Tanks Will Fight Alone 

Lt. Col. Davis in his article also pointed out that “tanks cannot fight alone or they die.” 

He is referring to combined arms warfare – the air, artillery, and mechanized infantry support the US had in abundance when advancing into Iraq – support Ukraine doesn’t and will not have throughout this current conflict.

The example of Ukraine’s offensive toward Kherson was mentioned, pointing out that Ukrainian tanks rushing forward were targeted and destroyed mostly by artillery shells, rockets, and anti-tank missiles. Very few if any tank-on-tank engagements ever took place. Russia eliminated brigades worth of Ukrainian soldiers and equipment during the multiple offensive waves Ukraine launched at Russian positions. Lt. Col. Davis surmises the same outcome would have resulted even if Ukrainians were operating M1 Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks instead of T-72s.

This is because in addition to tanks, Russia has air power and significantly larger amounts of artillery than Ukraine does on the battlefield. Russia has also developed and possesses large numbers of a variety of anti-tank weapons from anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) launched by armored vehicles, helicopters, and warplanes, to ATGMs and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) operated by infantry.

These ATGMs and RPGs have proven effective in recent conflicts around the globe specifically against Western main battle tanks like the British Challenger 2, the American M1 Abrams, the Israeli Merkava, and the German Leopard 2. Often these losses were suffered at the hands of irregular forces armed with older Russian anti-tank weapons and without the benefit of combined arms support like air power and artillery or their own tanks.

Dragging Out a Lost Conflict 

At the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in February 2022, Ukraine had large numbers of modernized Soviet-era tanks, artillery, warplanes, and mechanized infantry.

Russia systematically destroyed it prompting a deluge of equipment from NATO’s Eastern European members still in possession of Soviet-era equipment. This “second” army was likewise destroyed during Ukraine’s Kharkov and Kherson offensives.

Now NATO is building Ukraine a “third” army consisting of equipment Ukrainian forces have no experience using or sustaining on the battlefield. It is also equipment that offers no substantial advantage over Russian equipment even if training and sustainment issues did not exist. Worse still, Russia has a much large amount of any given type of equipment on the battlefield including main battle tanks and an industrial capacity to replace tank losses at rates the collective West are not capable of.

The transfer of Western armor to Ukraine will certainly draw out this conflict longer, lead to more casualties on both sides, and more thoroughly destroy Ukraine itself, but it will not alter the outcome of the fighting.

Western tanks without the benefit of artillery and air support, crewed by inexperienced Ukrainian tankers will fare worse than Ukrainian forces did operating equipment they had years of experience operating. Suspicions that Western tank operators will crew these weapon systems are well-founded. However, even if Western operators crewed these tanks, they would still be going into battle outnumbered and without the type of combined arms support the US required to prevail in Iraq.

At the end of it, Ukraine will find itself back to where it started, in need of another army’s worth of equipment to replace their substantial losses and a shrinking pool of trained manpower to operate it.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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The Next Stage in Western Escalation

January 27, 2023

Source

by Batiushka

Introduction: The Story So Far

So far the US has carried out regime changes and created military conflicts in countries friendly to or important to Russia: Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Georgia, Syria, Libya. All this was to make Russia lose important interests or deploy its own forces. It has also staged PR events such as Litvinenko, Pussy Riot, MH17, Skripals, Navalny, Bucha, the destruction of Nordstream – in order to try and blame Russia and make it into a pariah state.

In particular, in 2014 in the Ukraine it carried out a $5 billion coup with the murder of and terror against Russian-speakers. It then installed a puppet government, promoted Nazism through racist indoctrination, besmirched the historic legacy through rewriting history and toppling memorials, terrorised and banned all opposition, set up US military biolabs, supplied and trained an army, made military threats against Russia, threatened the Crimea, and promised that the Ukraine could soon join the US-puppet NATO and install nuclear weapons.

A Message from Boris: Deaths and Sackings

When Boris Johnson turned up in Kiev a few days ago, you knew events would follow. He is after all the office boy for Biden. So last week came the resignation of Zelensky’s spinmaster, Alexey Arestovich, for telling the truth about the Ukrainian military – that it had killed civilians by destroying an apartment block in Dnepro in a military accident and could not win the war. The next day the interior minister Monastyrsky, a longtime aide of Zelensky, and his first deputy died in a helicopter crash in Kiev a week ago (‘caused by flying low in fog’). Strange, since the neo-Nazi militias operate through his ministry.

Then there was the murder of Denis Kireev, who was an important participant in the March peace talks with Russia. It is rumoured that he was too keen on peace – which the US and the UK are totally opposed to. He had to go, so the CIA/SBU (same thing) did the job. Next came a major purge on 24 January following corruption claims, involved a deputy prosecutor general, the deputy head of the president’s office, the deputy defence minister and five regional governors.

Interestingly, Poroshenko, last seen in a luxury hotel in London, living off his now very active cremation business in the Ukraine, promised peace with Russia in one week. Once in power he did not bring peace and lost the next election. He was replaced by Zelensky, who also promised a peace settlement with Russia in the Donbass, but instead prepared war and even sought nuclear weapons. The Ukrainian people are promised peace, but are not given it. Zelensky’s support base is small and there is a majority that wants peace. Is Zelensky the next to be purged?

Escalation: Germany Declares War on Russia Again

Germany is going to send Leopard tanks to the Kiev regime. For the third time since 1914 Germany is now, on paper at least, at war with Russia. The Russians have a choice: they can intervene in the Ukraine from the north-west (Belarus) and the south-west (the sea) and cut off the whole of the Ukraine from all its arms supplies, including several dozen German, American, British and other tanks – and it will take months for the promised tanks to arrive across the Polish border. Or else Russia can bomb anything that comes across the Polish border. It has already warned that anything coming across that border into the Ukraine will be destroyed. Thus, in any case, a barrier will be created. Western Europe must be cut off, for it has become the source of the evil, providing weapons to Neo-Nazis.

Otherwise, the Poles and their reservists too may intervene (in their Leopard tanks? Remember Tiger tanks?) to take over the west of the Ukraine. Is Russia really going to allow the division of the Ukraine into the Russian East and the Polish-led Western West, in other words, its Koreanisation or Vietnamisation? (And we know how those divisions ended). Otherwise, the Anti-Russia of the Ukraine will remain forever. Western Europe must be cut off. What began as a small operation to liberate the two Russian provinces of the Donbass, is now, as a result of Western (= US-led) escalation, an operation to liberate the whole of the Ukraine. Only total Russian victory can work. Only establishing a Russian-led Kiev Protectorate, like the situation in Belarus, can work. All those who disagree with that and have not yet fled for the West had better leave now.

Interestingly, we know that the Russian Black Sea Fleet with its landing craft left port last week. On 25 January Dmitry Medvedev wrote publicly that the Ukraine would have no need of submarines, as it would soon become landlocked. The day before, the President of Belarus, Lukashenko, rejected the offer of a Non-Aggression Pact from the Ukraine (= the US on behalf of Poland). Meanwhile, the somewhat senile Biden has blurted out that the US will support the Ukraine ‘for as long as it exists’. This is not what he used to say. Then it was ‘support to victory’. The only problem here is that the US never admits failure, it never admits that it backed the wrong horse at huge expense to the US taxpayer. How will it get out of this one?

The War

In the Ukraine the NATO war has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in just the last eleven months is continuing with hundreds more victims today, the same as yesterday, and the same as tomorrow. The doomsaying pessimists with their conspiracy theories of nuclear Armageddon foretell that this war will continue for years, ‘perhaps even a decade’. Others, the optimists, are thinking that the Kiev regime may collapse within weeks, or in three or four months at most, or there will be a coup in Kiev with Kiev forces either surrendering en masse or else turning around and marching on their murderous US puppet-commanders in Kiev. It does sound like wishful thinking. With yet more NATO weaponry and tanks to be destroyed, I think it will all take longer. Not years, as those happy souls, the doomsaying pessimists with their conspiracy theories of nuclear Armageddon foretell, but another 15 months. But I really hope that I am wrong and that the wishful thinkers are right and that it will all be over very soon.

As the Saker in his penetrating analysis has pointed out, if the US cannot prevent a Ukronazi/NATO defeat, it can at least make the war as costly as possible for Russia. Find another attacker. Poland will do. Promise them the five provinces in the far west of the Ukraine, Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, and the Poles will do anything you tell them to. After all, there are Poles, and most of them seem to be part of its current incredibly stupid government, who still have a messianic complex, who still dream of glory, of ‘saving Europe from the barbarian Russian hordes’, of a ‘Poland stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea’, and of becoming the most powerful country in Europe, dwarfing those nasty Germans ‘who are going to give us back trillions’. Well, there have always been fantasists. Hitler was one of them. And the American Empire has always known how to manipulate them for its own ends, whether in Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Baltics, the Ukraine or Poland.

The fact is that the American Empire knows that it cannot defeat Russia in a straightforward war, so it has always used proxies. In 2008, it took the absurd step of using Georgia. This was far too small, far too weak and irrationally nationalistic. As a Georgian told me quite seriously just a few years ago: ‘God only speaks Georgian and does not understand any other language’. I was surprised to learn that God has such limited linguistic abilities, however, there are plenty of Ukrainians who believe much the same today, not to mention Poles.

And both the Ukraine and Poland are a lot bigger than Georgia. Hence the American choice. Once they are both defeated, the US will be turning to Germany – as they almost did in Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable plan to attack the Red Army on 1 July 1945, using British, American, Polish and German forces to destroy Russia (1). Or why not use Sweden, Turkey, Japan? Why not China? Why not just overthrow Putin with the ‘masses’ of Russians who do not like him? Such today are also the fantasies of ‘the crazies in the basement’ at the Pentagon. No wonder they get on with the Polish government. And don’t forget the biggest crazy in the US basement was Polish: Zbigniew Brzezinski.

For Russians, 2022 was simply a repeat of 1812 and 1941. The Third Great Patriotic War. The West doing its barbaric thing, as usual. The fact is that, though some historians deny it, history does repeat itself, simply because human pride, arrogance and hubris repeat themselves. German tanks with their black crosses trying to destroy Russia on the Ukrainian steppes? We Russians shrug our shoulders. We have seen it all before. The Anti-Russia of the Ukraine will simply never happen. Zelensky is on drugs and so is the Ukraine, addicted to Western transfusions of blood, money, mercenaries and arms.

Afterword: Another Future

Famously, or rather infamously, the British Establishment figure who was the first NATO Secretary General boasted that the aim of NATO was ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ (2). As for us, we wish to see a renewal of Kennedy’s ‘Alliance for Progress’, a World Alliance of Sovereign Nations, a global version of the Gaullist spirit (though not the precise words) of ‘l’Europe des Patries’ (Europe of the Nations’). We wish to see a for now geriatric Europe reattached to its historic destiny with Russia and so with Eurasia, where it is all happening. Therefore, our aim is: ‘To keep Russia in, the Americans out and the Germans up’.

Some write that Russia can only win the war in the Ukraine as long as it can help the US to save face after its defeat and then the collapse of NATO and the EU. Remember Saigon? Remember Bush and his ‘Mission Accomplished’? (The world laughed at his farce, but plenty in the US were convinced by it). Remember Kabul? The US just left them and pretended to be in denial about them. Like the British at Dunkirk in 1940, who left their French allies in the lurch, they just ran away back to their island, declaring victory, though leaving lots of their equipment behind them. The Americans can also run away, saying: ‘Forget it. They are not worthy of us’.

Self-isolation would be such a good thing. Go back to the big island of Northern America. If you want, build Trump’s long-promised wall across the south to keep those nasty Latinos out. Lick your wounds and at last start trying to deal with the massive internal problems that you already have: great poverty, racial division, mass shootings, debt, social injustices, lack of healthcare, unemployment, exploitation, an education system that deliberately makes people stupid, drugs, crime and so mass imprisonment. Leave the Europeans to sort themselves out. No more Americans are going to die for or pay for those lazy Europeans. Just don’t tell the American people that this would make those same lazy Europeans only too happy. The only problem is that the US never admits failure, it never admits that it backed the wrong horse at huge expense to the US taxpayer. How will it get out of this one?

27 January 2023

Notes:

1. https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/operation-unthinkable-churchill-s-plans-to-invade-the-soviet-union/#:~:text=The%20plan%20called%20for%20a,his%20domination%20of%20East%20Europe

2. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_137930.htm

‘Doomsday clock’: 90 seconds to midnight

Thursday, 26 January 2023 11:08 AM  [ Last Update: Thursday, 26 January 2023 11:17 AM ]

By Pepe Escobar

The Doomsday Clock, set by the US-based magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been moved to 90 seconds to midnight.  

That’s the closest ever to total nuclear doom, the global catastrophe.

The Clock had been set at 100 seconds since 2020. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and a group of sponsors – which includes 10 Nobel laureates – have focused on “Russia’s war on Ukraine” (their terminology) as the main reason.

Yet they did not bother to explain non-stop American rhetoric (the US is the only nation that adopts “first strike” in a nuclear confrontation) and the fact that this is a US proxy war against Russia with Ukraine used as cannon fodder.

The Bulletin also attributes malignant designs to China, Iran and North Korea, while mentioning, only in passing, that “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy”.

“Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026.”

As it stands, the prospects of a US-Russia negotiation on New START are less than zero.

Now cue to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov making it very clear that war against Russia is not hybrid anymore, it’s “almost” real.

“Almost” in fact means “90 seconds.”

So why is this all happening?

The Mother of All Intel Failures

Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has concisely explained how Russian resilience – much in the spirit of Iranian resilience past four decades – completely smashed the assumptions of Anglo-American intelligence.

Talk about the Mother of All Intel Failures – in fact even more astonishing than the non-existent Iraqi WMDs (in the run-up to Shock and Awe in 2003, anyone with a brain knew Baghdad had discontinued its weapons program already in the 1990s.) 

Now the collective West “committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia (…) in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war, and with real military war as the follow-through.”

And yet Russia held its ground. And now reality-based developments prevail over fiction. The Global South “is peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs.”

And the accelerated collapse of the US dollar increasingly plunges the Empire into a real existential crisis.

All that hangs over a South Vietnam scenario evolving in Ukraine after a rash government-led political and military purge. The coke comedian – whose only role is to beg non-stop for bags of cash and loads of weapons – is being progressively sidelined by the Americans (beware of traveling CIA directors). 

The game in Kiev, according to Russian sources, seems to be that the Americans are taking over the Brits as handlers of the whole operation.

The coke comedian remains – for now – as a sock puppet while military control over what is left of Ukraine is entirely NATO’s.

Well, it already was – but now, formally, Ukraine is the world’s first de facto NATO member without being an actual member, enjoying less than zero national sovereignty, and complete with NATO-Nazi Storm troopers weaponized with American and German tanks in the name of “democracy”.

The meeting last week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – totally controlled by the US – at the US Air Force base in Ramstein solidified a sort of tawdry remix of Operation Barbarossa.

Here we go again, with German Panzers sent to Ukraine to fight Russia.

Yet the tank coalition seems to have tanked even before it starts.  Germany will send 14, Portugal 2, Belgium 0 (sorry, don’t have them). Then there’s Lithuania, whose Defense Minister observed, “Yes, we don’t have tanks, but we have an opinion about tanks.”

No one ever accused German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of being brighter than a light bulb. She finally gave the game away,  at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg:

“The crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe because we are fighting a war against Russia.”

So Baerbock agrees with Lavrov. Just don’t ask her what Doomsday Clock means. Or what happened after Operation Barbarossa failed. 

The NATO-EU “garden”

The EU-NATO combo takes matters to a whole new level. The EU essentially has been reduced to the status of P.R. arm of NATO.

It’s all spelled out in their January 10 joint declaration.

The NATO-EU joint mission consists in using all economic, political and military means to make sure the “jungle” always behaves according to the “rules-based international order” and accepts to be plundered ad infinitum by the “blooming garden”.

Looking at The Big Picture, absolutely nothing changed in the US military/intel apparatus since 9/11: it’s a bipartisan thing, and it means Full Spectrum Dominance of both the US and NATO. No dissent whatsoever is allowed. And no thinking outside the box.

Plan A is subdivided into two sections.

1. Military intervention in a hollowed-out proxy state shell (see Afghanistan and Ukraine).

2. Inevitable, humiliating military defeat (see Afghanistan and soon Ukraine). Variations include building a wasteland and calling it “peace” (Libya) and extended proxy war leading to future humiliating expulsion (Syria).

There’s no Plan B.

Or is there? 90 seconds to midnight?

Obsessed by Mackinder, the Empire fought for control of the Eurasian landmass in World War I and World War II because that represented control of the world.

Later, Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski had warned: “Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition between Russia, China and Iran.”

Jump cut to the Raging Twenties when the US forced the end of Russian natural gas exports to Germany (and the EU) via Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Once again, Mackinderian opposition to a grand alliance on the Eurasian landmass consisting of Germany, Russia and China.

The Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos in charge of US foreign policy could even absorb a strategic alliance between Russia and China – as painful as it may be. But never Russia, China and Germany.   

With the collapse of the JCPOA, Iran is now being re-targeted with maximum hostility. Yet were Tehran to play hardball, the US Navy or military could never keep the Strait of Hormuz open – by the admission of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.

This is arguably the foremost NATO Achilles Heel. Almost without firing a shot a Russia-Iran alliance could smash NATO to bits and bring down assorted EU governments as socio-economic chaos runs rampant across the collective West. 

Meanwhile, to quote Dylan, darkness keeps dawning at the break of noon. Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos will keep pushing the Doomsday Clock closer and closer to midnight.   

Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties.

(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)

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German cabinet confirms 14 Leopard 2 tanks to be delivered to Ukraine

January 25, 2023 

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

Chancellor Olaf Scholz announces that 14 Leopard 2 tanks will be delivered to Ukraine alongside a new supplies package.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, next to a Leopard 2 main battle tank, during a visit to the Bundeswehr army training centre, 17 October 2022 (AFP).

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to deliver 14 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine, government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit told reporters on Wednesday.
 
Hebestreit explained that “On Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in the cabinet that Germany would further increase its military support for Ukraine,” adding that “the federal government had decided to provide the Ukrainian armed forces with Leopard 2 main battle tanks.”

According to the spokesperson, the objective, now, is to ” quickly raise two tank battalions with Leopard 2 tanks for Ukraine.” This will happen over two stages. First, “Germany will provide a company of 14 Leopard 2 A6 tanks from the stocks of the Bundeswehr.”

Then, Germany’s European partners will deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine while Germany will offer a new package for the anti-Russia war. The package will include ammunition, system maintenance, and assistance in logistics, Hebestreit stated

German’s decision to send the Leapord tanks to Ukraine stems from talks with the country’s European and International partners, given that significant consequences will follow such a decision. 

In turn, the Russian Embassy in Germany cautioned that “this extremely dangerous decision shifts the Ukrainian conflict to a new level of standoff,” adding that “Berlin’s choice to supply tanks to Kiev means the final rejection of Germany’s historical responsibility to the Russian people.”

A full-fledged war on Russia?

Earlier in the morning, and following reports on the supply of Abrams tanks to Ukraine by Washington, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said on Tuesday that the delivery will become another “blatant provocation” against Russia and warned that the Russian military would destroy the equipment.

Earlier on Tuesday, US media reported that US President Joe Biden is set to announce the delivery of 30-50 Abrams tanks to Ukraine as soon as Wednesday. 

According to Antonov, a decision to transfer to Kiev M1 Abrams is made, and American tanks “without any doubt” will be destroyed along with “all other samples of NATO military equipment.” 

“If the United States decides to supply tanks, it will be impossible to justify such step using arguments about ‘defensive weapons.’ This would be another blatant provocation against the Russian Federation. No one should have illusions about who is the real aggressor in the current conflict,” he said in a statement.
 
The ambassador added that the US is trying to inflict strategic defeat on Russia and “gives ‘green light’ to use of American assistance for attacks on the Crimea.”

This reaffirmed Russia’s argument, according to the ambassador, that Ukraine and the West want neither peace nor diplomacy.

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أوروبا في مهبّ الرياح الأوكرانية وتململ فرنسي ألماني من التفرّد الأميركي

الإثنين 23 كانون الثاني 2023

محمد صادق الحسيني

بعد مرور نحو عام على اندلاع الحرب الأطلسية على روسيا، يمكننا القول بأنّ أوروبا سقطت بمثابة أول ضحايا هذه الحرب.

فأوروبا كما تظهر على المسرح الدولي اليوم لم تعُد أوروبا جاك شيراك (فضلاً عن غيرهارد شرودر) الذي ذهب يوماً الى روسيا واصطحبه بوتين آنذاك معه الى المركز الاستراتيجي للقيادة والسيطرة للرحلات الفضائية تيتوف، في رسالة يومها لواشنطن، بانّ روسيا يمكن أن تكون صديقة، بل وحتى مظلة نووية للدفاع عن القرار الأوروبي المستقلّ، وعضواً مستقبلياً في الاتحاد الأوروبي، كما صرّح بوتين نفسه يومها.

فأوروبا، ما بعد أوكرانيا لم تعُد أوروبا شيراك، ولا حتى ميركل، بل هي مجموعة تتخبّط، وتفتقر لاستراتيجية واضحة ناهيك عن رؤية مستقلة ومتوازنة في كلّ الملفات الحيوية العالمية.

وهي تخسر مع كلّ يوم يمرّ في الساحة الدولية من وزنها المعنوي الكثير، إضافة الى خسائرها المادية التي لا تعدّ ولا تحصى، من بينها فقط وعلى سبيل المثال لا الحصر عشرات الآلاف من الشركات الكبيرة والمتوسطة والصغيرة التي كانت تعمل في روسيا.

وعلى وقع هذا السقوط أمام العاصفة الأوكرانية اجتمع كلٌّ من المستشار الألماني والرئيس الفرنسي في الأليزيه في باريس، بمناسبة مرور ستين عاماً على توقيع اتفاقية الصداقة بين ألمانيا وفرنسا لإظهار تماسك قوتهما الأوروبية…

الاتفاق الذي نص يومها على إنهاء العداء المتوارث بين ألمانيا وفرنسا وبدء مرحلة بناء أوروبا الجديدة، وهو ما كان قد تعزز بالتجديد عليه بتاريخ ٢٢/١/٢٠١٩ بين الرئيس ماكرون والمستشارة ميركل، وصودق عليه من قبل برلماني البلدين آنذاك.
وقد علقت المستشارة ميركل يومها على ذلك التوقيع بالقول: «نريد إعطاء الوحده الأوروبية دفعاً جديداً .»
وقد سُمّي يومها باتفاق آخن نسبة الى المدينة الألمانية الواقعة على الحدود الهولندية التي وُقّع فيها.

بينما ركز الاجتماع الذي عقد يوم أول أمس، بين ماكرون وشولتس، على ضرورة تقوية أوروبا أيضاً:
«إنّ أوروبا ذات السياده القوية تؤمّن السلام والازدهار والحرية لسكان أوروبا» (هذا ما قالوه) .
ومن أجل أوروبا القوية غداً، يجب علينا اليوم أن نقوّي جيوشنا ونستثمر المزيد في صناعاتنا العسكرية.
اذ انّ هذا (تقوية الصناعة العسكرية والجيوش) يجعل أوروبا شريكاً أكثر (أقوى) للولايات المتحدة .»

لم يصدر هذا الكلام في بيان رسمي وإنما على شكل مقتطفات خصّ بها الرئيسان، صحيفة «فرانكفورتر الغماينه تسايتونغ» ونشرتها على موقعها الإلكتروني.

أوروبا هذه، الحالمة بالقوة، فقدت قبل أيام، حتى موقفها الوسيط مع دول صاعدة يفترض أنها ليست عدوة لها، لا بل قد تكون وسيلة لها لتقوية استقلالها بوجه واشنطن، لكنها سقطت مرة أخرى في الامتحان من خلال اتخاذها لمواقف متطرفة لا لزوم لها تجاه طهران كرمى عيون واشنطن، وثكنتها العسكرية المقامة على اليابسة الفلسطينية المسمّاة «إسرائيل».

فكان السقوط المدوّي بقرار البرلمان الأوروبي بتصنيف الحرس الثوري الإيراني منظمة ارهابية!

مصادر وثيقة الصلة بمطبخ صناعة القرار الأوروبي تؤكد، بأنّ القرار وانْ كان غير فعّال أصلاً ولن يلزم دول الاتحاد وهو لا يعدو عن كونه دعاية معادية لإيران، تماهياً مع سياسات واشنطن، المتعلقة بالحرب النفسية ضدّ طهران .

إلا أنه يشكل في الواقع، سقوطاً مدوياً للهيبة الأوروبية، والقوامة على قرارها المستقلّ في المعادلة الدولية، وهو ما تسعى إليه واشنطن بشدة، في كلّ الملفات المشتركة بين الطرفين، لا سيما بعد قرارها الأحمق في إعلان الحرب ضدّ روسيا.

بالفعل القرار البرلماني الأوروبي لا أفق له بالطبع على أرض الواقع… سوى كونه قرار ترضية للسيد الأميركي كما تؤكد المصادر المطلعة، مقابل امتناع الأوروبيين عن تزويد زيلينسكي بدبابات ليوبارد الألمانية ودبابات لوكلير الفرنسية …

ومن المعلوم انّ البرلمان الأوروبي في ستراسبورغ في الواقع ليس سوى واجهة فرنسية ألمانية، تعبّر عن رغبة مشتركة مكبوتة لدى باريس وبرلين، بأن تظهرا عالمياً بأنهما لاعبان مستقلان دولياً، وهي ما بدأت تترنح أمام الضربات الأميركية.

الخارجية الإيرانية في هذه الأثناء هدّدت بالانسحاب من معاهدة الحدّ من انتشار الأسلحة النووية إذا لم يصحّح الاتحاد الأوروبي موقفه.
فيما هدّد مجلس الشورى الإسلامي باستصدار قرار يعتبر الجيوش الأوروبية «منظمات إرهابية» ـ كما جاء على لسان رئيس مجلس الشورى الإسلامي، محمد باقر قاليباف.

والتصريحات الإيرانية هذه، حسب المصادر المطلعة، تصريحات فعّالة وقوية وواضحة جداً. فيما المصالح الأوروبية في منطقة غرب آسيا كبيرة ومتشعّبة ومن الصعب التضحية بها.

المصالح الاقتصادية وقبل كلّ شيء تمركز قوات مسلحة / وأفراد عسكريين / لكلّ الدول الأوروبية في الكثير من دول الإقليم، هذه القوات ستكون هدفاً لجميع الجهات الحليفة لإيران في المنطقة.

وهذا أمر لا تستطيع الدول الأوروبية تحمّله ولا مواجهته عسكرياً.

صحيح أنّ قرار ستراسبورغ، غير ملزم للدول الأعضاء البتة لكنه لو حصل فهو بمثابة إعلان حرب، سيطيح بما تبقى من مكانة وقوة أوروبا على يد الإيرانيين.

تقدير الموقف لدى المصادر يقول بأنّ دول الاتحاد لن تذهب الى تفعيل قرار برلمان ستراسبورغ، وإنها ستحاول التملص مما صدر في مقر البرلمان.
وهو البرلمان المعروف بأنه واقع تحت تأثير القوى الماسونيّة والصهيونية العالمية، لا سيما أنّ رئيسته المالطية متورّطة في فضائح قد تؤدّي الى محاكمتها وطردها من وظيفتها، ما قد يكون ساهم في اندفاعتها لصالح السيد الأميركي الصهيوني.

ختاماً يمكن القول بانّ أوروبا سقطت عملياً وأصبحت هشة كثيراً وأنها ستظلّ أسيرة تململ غير مجدٍ ما دامت عاجزة عن اتخاذ موقف مستقّل عن واشنطن، كما أنها ستتراجع أيضاً عن عنترياتها، تجاه إيران، ما يجعلها أشبه ما تكون بأعجاز نخل خاوية.

بعدنا طيبين قولوا الله…

US to allies: No more ‘free’ military support; terms, conditions apply

January 19, 2023 

Source: The National Interest

By Al Mayadeen English 

The National Interest report says that the war in Ukraine has turned the tables on the US foreign policy approach to its allies.

Illustration of a US tank emerging from behind the American flag (Rob Dobi)

Washington has a new message to its allies: Relying on American military leadership will have to come with terms and conditions, no more “free rides”, a report by The National Interest revealed on Thursday.

The media outlet said that the earlier discussions have addressed the “free riding” problem in general, especially when it comes to US foreign policy.

In short, free riding refers to American allies earning US military protection and privileges acquired through Washington’s global influence and hegemony, without providing anything – or barely anything –  in return.

US international allies, during the cold war era and what came after, were at the center of criticism by Washington for “relying on the United States to spend its national treasure in terms of higher military expenditures to provide them with global security,” the report continued.

“If anything, the message coming from Washington these days is that if the allies want to be able to continue to rely on U.S. military leadership, they are the ones who would have to accept the economic conditions set by the Americans,” the report said.

The conditions, according to the media outlet, are “ending their energy deals with Russia, sanctioning it, and joining the United States in a long and costly economic-technological war with the Chinese.”

US “subsidies” to its allies’ defense budgets have enabled them [allies] to spend less on their military industry and focus more of their revenue on their social and economic needs, “while fiscal tightening forces Americans to cut expenditures on education and health,” according to the news sites.

According to the report, this begs the question:

“Why should America continue bankrolling the defense budgets of countries like Japan, surplus economies whose companies compete with American businesses in the global arena?”

The dominating position of the US in the Middle East, which has been sustained through large military and financial expenses, allowed Washington’s allies that are dependent on foreign energy imports to have freedom of access to the energy resources in the Gulf region, the report noted.

In addition to all the abovementioned points, there is also the current world reality where the US is committed to deploying its nuclear arsenal to defend its NATO and Asian allies in the case that they [allies] come under threats from adversaries with nuclear arms.

“Hence, the Americans are supposedly ready to see New York and San Francisco being nuked in order to save Berlin and Tokyo from annihilation,” said the outlet.

Thus, pressing NATO states to raise their defense budgets and their military and economic contributions to the coalition has become a bipartisan ritual of sorts in Washington “until President Donald Trump’s behavior made it look faux pas,” the report said.

 Anti-globalization sentiments in the United States

Americans are expressing unwillingness to “continue supporting the liberal economic order while the allies were breaking free-trade principles,” the media outlet stated.

“But then that was the way the industrial miracles of Germany and Japan had happened, very much at the expense of American economic interests,” it continued.

The cost implications on the United States from the wars it fought in the “Greater Middle East” started to challenge the de facto rhetoric in Washington regarding the US role on the global stage.

According to the report, the US is “supposedly ready” to help out its allies who resort to it and protect their access to energy resources in the Gulf region, “while the allies pay very little in exchange, and even try to force the United States into costlier military interventions in the Middle East, as France did in the case of Libya.”

War in Ukraine; turning point

After the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and amid growing “Chinese threats to Taiwan,” the report said that – “according to the conventional wisdom” – US allies may have finally realized that “free riding” is not an option anymore when it comes to dealing with the United States.

“They need to start playing a more activist role in the protection of Western interests against the threat of powerful global disruptors” and now have to “contribute to the production of that international public good”.

Allies will have to step up their roles, “since alone the United States will not continue to provide it cost-free,” the report said.

‘American Hegemony Lite’

The media site pointed out Germany’s response to the Ukraine war and Japan’s reaction to growing tension with China as examples that allies are, indeed, making a shift in their role as US allies.

“These developments seemed to have changed the balance of power in Europe and Asia, where America can supposedly now count on its allies to play their roles as its deputies while the United States remains primus inter pares (first among equals), call it American Hegemony Lite,” the site said.

No more free pass for allies practicing protectionism

Toward the beginning of the Cold War, “liberalizing American trade policies while dealing with nations that practiced protectionism made some sense,” the report noted, arguing that some allied economies, such as Germany and Japan, were still in a state of recovery from the destructive outcomes of WWII, thus had to protect their local industries from outside competitors.

“But those who assumed that Trump’s economic nationalist policies would change under the more internationalist President Joe Biden are discovering now that that approach enjoys bipartisan support,” the report stressed.

The news site continued that the decision made by Biden not to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which would have required the US to cut tariffs on some Asian imports, and his administration insisting on providing subsidies to electric-vehicle despite outrage from European allies in particular, who accused the US of practicing unfair protection to US-made products, are signs that Washington has turned upside-down the Cold-War-era deal with the allies.

In its concluding statement, the report said that despite the conventional discussion that it is in the US interests to stop allies from establishing independent military powers, which could make the world a “more dangerous place,” the United States was one of the countries that launched a “series of wars in recent decades that have made the world more dangerous.”

“It was based on the expectations that the United States needed to win the geostrategic commitment of its allies through concessions in the geo-economic area,” the report said.

US allies developing nuclear programs could not have been a bad idea

“In retrospect, if Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Ukraine had nuclear weapons, the world would have probably been less dangerous today,” the news site claimed.

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• Germany: No Leopard tanks to Kiev unless US agrees to send its Abrams

‘Fragmented world’ sleepwalks into World War III

Wednesday, 18 January 2023 10:31 AM  [ Last Update: Saturday, 21 January 2023 4:22 PM ]

By Pepe Escobar

The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World.”

While his diagnosis of “the most critical fragmentation” the world is now mired in is predictably somber, Herr Schwab maintains that “the spirit of Davos is positive” and in the end we may all live happily in a “green sustainable economy.”

What Davos has been good at this week is showering public opinion with new mantras. There’s “The New System” which, considering the abject failure of the much ballyhooed Great Reset, now looks like a matter of hastily updating the current – rattled – operating system.

Davos needs new hardware, new programming skills, even a new virus. Yet for the moment all that’s available is a “polycrisis”: or, in Davos speak, a “cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.”

In plain English: a perfect storm.

Insufferable bores from that Divide and Rule island in northern Europe have just found out that “geopolitics”, alas, never really entered the tawdry “end of history” tunnel: much to their amazement it’s now centered – again – across the Heartland, as it’s been for most of recorded history.

They complain about “threatening” geopolitics, which is code for Russia-China, with Iran attached.

But the icing on the Alpine cake is arrogance/stupidity actually giving away the game: the City of London and its vassals are  livid because the “world Davos made” is fast collapsing.

Davos did not “make” any world apart from its own simulacrum.

Davos never got anything right, because these “elites” were always busy eulogizing the Empire of Chaos and its lethal “adventures” across the Global South.

Davos not only failed to foresee all recent, major economic crises but most of all the current “perfect storm,” linked to the neoliberalism-spawned deindustrialization of the Collective West.

And, of course, Davos is clueless about the real Reset taking place towards multipolarity.

Self-described opinion leaders are busy “re-discovering” that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was set in Davos – “against the backdrop of a deadly disease and an impending world war” – nearly a century ago.

Well, nowadays the “disease” – fully bioweaponized – is not exactly deadly per se. And the “impending World War” is in fact being actively encouraged by a cabal of US Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons: an unelected, unaccountable, bipartisan Deep State not even subject to ideology. Centennary war criminal Henry Kissinger still does not get it.

A Davos panel on de-globalization was rife on non-sequiturs, but at least a dose of reality was provided by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

As for China’s vice-premier Liu He, with his vast knowledge of finance, science and technology, at least he was very helpful to lay down Beijing’s five top guidelines for the foreseeable future – beyond the customary imperial Sinophobia.

China will focus on expanding domestic demand; keeping industrial and supply chains “smooth”; go for the “healthy development of the private sector”; deepen state enterprise reform; and aim for “attractive foreign investment.”

Russian resistance, American precipice

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.

Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.   

Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started.”

Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine.

The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).

So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

– A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.

– The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.

– Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended  war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”

– Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.

– Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.

– And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”

– On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”

– As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”

– And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.

– On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood  was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”

– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”

Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU/NATO “elites” – Davos included – that Russia is “isolated,” stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”

Between light and darkness

Could it be that Russia – alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?

The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a “fragmented world.”

Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi’ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).

This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.

Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – “what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history” – are we hopelessly doomed?

Pepe Escobar is a veteran journalist, author and independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia.

_{The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.}

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Painful Similarities Between the German and Aztec Collapses

January 18, 2023

Painful Similarities Between the German Collapse and the Aztec Empire – with Some Clarification On The Transformation Of Europe Against Mesoamerica

Source

By Thorsten J. Pattberg

JUST IN, so funny: ‘Shove Your Democracy Up Your Ass’ went viral in China and Taiwan. My sense of humor! If you can, grab five mint copies for your study group!

Part I. The Arrival

The Aztec Empire, also known as “the Triple Alliance” or “the Empire Mexica,” was one of the most powerful blocks in pre-Columbian America. At their peak, the Aztecs controlled much of present-day Mexico and parts of Central America. Then, at the dawn of the 16th Century, 11 shiploads of Europeans arrived.

Despite the Aztecs’ supreme confidence in their spiritual, technological, and economic lizardry, their Empire of 500 tribes —or 3.2 million people—ultimately collapsed due to political infighting, foreign interference, immigration of young men from Europe, and, above all, the ridiculous ‘Welcome Policy’ of the idiot Aztec ruler Moctezuma II.

IMAGE 0 Some Say, Woke King ‘Mocti’ Moctezuma II Single-Handely Dropped the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas

Contrary to common belief, the Aztecs were not an Ancient civilization on par with, say, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Xia Chinese, or the Hindu Guptas. The Aztecs under Moctezuma II were still a relatively young, recent “Empire” that lasted 170 years (about 1350 till 1521), comparable, perhaps, to the first unified German Empire under Wilhelm I, but which only lasted 47 years (1871-1918) [and could be #stillweeping from its shallow grave, not sure].

In most history books today, it is written that the Aztec Empire’s fate was sealed when the Spanish megalomaniac Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519. We read stories, always repeated by the same clique of Western scholars, about how the Aztecs initially “welcomed the Spanish as possible representatives of the god Quetzalcoatl”—as if the Mexica people were that illustrious and funny. Moctezuma’s ‘Welcome Policy’ and collaboration with the first batch of sextourists “led to a fatal misunderstanding,” we are told; the misunderstanding being that the foreign invaders probably did not want your land, your gold, and your ladies.  

IMAGE 1 Left Cortez Enters the Lizardman City Right Aztec Dictator – As Imagined in Tabletop Wargaming in the West

At last, “Conquistador Cortés” [literally: “Corti the Conqueror”] and his 500 men force-clarified the misunderstanding. He ultimately praised Moctezuma II for “his commitment to the Spanish ‘Inclusion, Diversity and Multiculturalism-Act’, as pronounced by the late Pope Clement the VII or whomever in Rome, Italy.” The Spanish occupiers used Mocti as a puppet governor, much like the American occupiers used Tirard to govern the German Rhineland in 1918.

Well, we all know that the Germans rose up against the foreign occupation. This ended badly for the Germans, leading to the greatest bloodshed the world had ever seen, World War 2 and Germany’s spectacular downfall.

Believe it or not, the Aztecs did the exact same thing, just 400 years earlier, which led to their own unique, spectacular demise. It so happened that a dictator rose against the Spanish occupation. He was Moctezuma’s own brother, Cuitlahuac—someone we today would call Un fascista—who declared himself the Leader and said he “would drain the swamp” and “make Aztecs great again.” He expelled the foreign money lenders, geared up the Aztec war economy, and declared a brand-new 1000-Years-“AztecReich”. Symbols matter big time. He didn‘t consider the rolling Swastika, though, because Buddha wasn’t a thing yet in the drenches. Thus, he picked the moving Ollin, basically an eye of cunning Toad-God Xolotl.

IMAGE 2 The Ollin Eye of Toad Xolotl (Way Cooler Than The Buddha Wheel)

Sadly, the 30,000 men strong Aztec army was too blase, too friendly, and no real match for the Spanish refugees who by now had European-sponsored 30 horses, 100 guns, and 3 advanced cannons. Worse, the Spanish were no longer just Spanish, but also Portuguese, Italian, slave Negroes, other European mercenaries, and allied Mexica turncoats.

The Aztec Empire’s fall was impressive. If you trust the history books (don’t!), an estimated 95% of all Aztecs “disappeared.” The Europeans, to this day, insist that they did NOT mass-murder, starve, or brainwash the Mexica into infertility in any way, shape, or form. Rather, just like with all the other Mesoamerican civilizations conquered, the Europeans claimed that the Aztechnicians simply “had zero immunity to the diseases brought to you by our modern sailors,” sorry! [We come back to that in a minute.]

Part II. The Clean Sweep

In modern times, Aztec parallels can be drawn with the situation in Europe. Of course, the European Union did not start as a “Triple Alliance,” but as a “Sextuple Alliance” between Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome, Luxembourg, and The Hague. Under US occupation and US-NATO expansion, the Alliance grew eastwards and to an impressive 27 members. But those new members are not at all native Germanic tribes, and not at all loyal. It is a bit as if we added to the Aztecs also the Olmec, the Incas, the Mayas, and —while we are at it— the Apache, Comanche, Cherokee, Seminoles, and all those other “Native American tribes,” collectively known as “the missing Indians.”

Europe is of course politically unified; I am not denying that. However, Europe is also being militarily, culturally, and economically occupied by the US Empire of Sanctions [and Lies], partly since 1918, totally so since 1945. The United States made sure to reward pro-American traitors, install pro-American puppet regimes in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome, Luxembourg, and The Hague, and to punish any nationalist uprising (Nazis! Communists! Terrorists! Racists!…)

The modern times “Moctezuma” in Europe was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor from 2005 to 2021. She collaborated with the US foreign occupiers, the international money lenders, and various other foreign interest groups and, finally, in 2015, she initiated the “Open Borders” policy for Germany and all of Central and Northern Europe. Syria alone sent 1.5 million “conquistadors”—men of military age. Once the foreign men arrived, they were instructed to ask their siblings, parents, uncles, and even multiple wives to join them. Germany steadily grew by 1 million Muslims and/or Arabs and Africans each year, while 500,000 native Germans a year left for better shores. If today you visit the city centers of Berlin, Duisburg, Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Bochum and hundreds more, they clearly look decapitated and Oriental.

IMAGE 3 Germany‘s Insane Welcome Refugees Mass Hypnosis and Open Borders Madness

The 2015 invaders were euphemistically called “poor refugees” and the next round of settlers in 2018 were tarnished as “cultural enrichment.” They quickly subjugated the locals and dominated schoolyards, shopping malls, swimming pools, and New Year parties. The next five million foreign invaders, from 2020 onwards —were called Facharbeiter, figuratively: “trained experts.” And while in any other country in the world, work permits for foreigners are often extremely hard to get by, Germany actually pays 5,000 euros a month [$5k] to the invaders for not working. After a while, the bred-and-fed migrant forces also demanded more land, better housing, easy women, positions of power, and, always always, privileged treatment.

Just as the deluded Aztec leadership “welcomed the Spanish as possible representatives of their gods,” the retarded German leadership welcomed the poor refugees with open arms as if they were sent by Jesus the Christ. The Germans even gave away their apartments, schools, gym halls, free transport, free medicare, and expenses accounts to these poor, strong foreign men. It felt so good to “share wealth” and to “give back” to complete strangers. In return, those strangers looked so pretty with their dark hair and caramel-chocolate skin, and everything German they touched they made “a better person” indeed. Said the Aztec Social Democrat Martin Schulz from the European El Dorado, in 2016: “What the migrants bring us is more valuable than gold!”

The parallels are hilarious. The indigenous Germans pay for their leaders’ betrayal just like the indigenous Aztecs did. They already live a slave-like existence and must part 50% of their incomes to the rulers. With the rest, they pay rent, charges, fees, arbitrary fines, transport to work. They pay income tax, property tax, consumer tax, solidarity tax, inheritance tax, tax on tax. And the rulers take all that unearned money, send most of it to America and the money lenders, and the rest they trickle into the pockets of the “New Germans.”

In effect, the classical Germanic tribes, the “Old Germans,” the Teutons, the Franks, the Saxons, the Goths, the Norse, and so on, are now economically drained, dispossessed, and spit on their racist graves. And, would you believe it, many Germans now apparently die “suddenly and unexpectedly,” due to “the lack of immunity from some foreign-born virus,” you’ve heard that scholarship before.

With new masters in town, you cannot simply arrest the new masters, right? Police, courts, and political parties were ordered to tiptoe around them and turn a blind eye on the crimes and misbehaves of the new settlers, and prosecute the indigenous people more for being “a witness and a nuisance to the alienation and Great Replacement.”

The official German narrative is that of the invaders being just innocent, traumatized victims, having found their deserved Eden Europe, “where everyone wants to live,” we are told, because “we Europeans are so nice and tolerant to everyone.” [Interestingly, the King of Spain, Charles I, back then in 1521 said the same about “the nicest and most tolerant Mexica people.”]

And just as Moctezuma collaborated with hostile outsiders, so did Angela Merkel collaborate with the historic adversaries of the Germans, which led to a number of irreversible consequences, including the rise of right-wing populists (the resistance movement) and, increasingly, anti-immigrant sentiments. These, of course, would be crushed ruthlessly. This “torture” of the indigenous Germans had commenced much earlier, in the 1960s, with birth control, the destruction of the family, and miscegenation policies [interbreeding]. However, 2015 was the critical tipping point, when the center of gravity passed outside of what the few remaining Germans could support as “Vaterland”—land of thy fathers. Between 1977 and 2015, the number of German babies born had halved. For every two comrades I had in my childhood, one is not born today. The Germans born in 2022 have no comrades. They sit opposite one Oriental and another Asian usurper, who turn increasingly antagonistic.

IMAGE 4 Germans, Know, When It Is Time To Give Up

Example 1. The Turkish diaspora in Germany’s industrial belt of North-Rhine Westphalia alone now numbers in the 4.5 million. Those “German-Turks” still have their motherland, Turkiye, which has 85 million inhabitants, more than Germany. Do not fall for the “official” German regime statistics, they are totally fake and manipulated. For example, one year they just list 1.2 million Turkish nationals, while in reality, another 3.3 million Turks in North-Rhine Westphalia are “sleeper Turks” with German passports.

If the US Empire of Sanctions [and Lies] one day so decided to punish Berlin for disobedience, like not joining the war against Iraq, Russia, or China, far away Ankara, also a US-NATO satellite, could be asked to mobilize the 4.5 million Turks in Germany and break up most of the Ruhr region, and turn cities like Hagen, Wuppertal, and Hamm complete hostile. You don’t believe it? A ‘color revolution’ is easily provoked. For instance, “German authorities are desperately suppressing Turkish language and culture!” You didn’t know that? This message could make global headlines tomorrow morning. This is totally out of control from the German leadership. The German US-puppet regime wants to keep the German-Turks largely out of power, understandably, but how long, you think, this can last, once the Zionist sow first discontent? The Turks want what is theirs, now, in 10 years, or in 30 years. Doesn’t matter when, but it will matter if—blackmail! Already Berlin reckons another 2,200 mosques will have to be built in West Germany by 2040. Islam is now everywhere. So, just wait and see.

Example 2. Over 60% of children born in 2020 in major German cities like Berlin or Frankfurt now have a so-called migration background. They are non-white. Naturally, the non-whites call the remaining white Germans “racists” and “anti-foreign,” and demand so-called “people of color” to replace the hateful German natives in public offices, in the police force, in hospitals, in nurseries, in schools, on company boards, but also on TV and in advertising and film. The German rulers must persecute the Germans to get favors from the invaders… until the invaders will usurp the rulers. It is that simple. Ask Moctezuma II. He gave his last shirt and favorite daughter to Cortés.

In two or three generations, most remaining German women will either choose a dominant migrant man with so-and-so-many privileges and god-like status to procreate with… OR she will have no children at all with defeated, emasculated, and disenfranchised native men. Ask Hernán Cortés. He took 20 more Aztec spouses and forced thousands of childless indigenous men to slave on his brand-new foreign plantation.

Part III. The Turnover

“Not too fast,” objects the German regime. “There is one big difference between the two situations,” so the defenders of inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism exult: “The Aztecs,” they say, “were overwhelmed by a technologically superior military force!” And, this: “The European Union is a developed and affluent continent!” So, they claim, in essence, that the millions of migrants from Africa, South-East Asia, and the Middle East are unfit and below Europe.

That is a rather risky position for any government to take worldwide, though, because it rates the ambitions, intelligence, and creative prowess of half-whites, non-ideal whites, and associate-whites as subpar too. Weren’t the Irish to America once pisspoor and considered mental gretchins? Even if the Ghanaian, Afghans, or Iraqis really were mentally inferior and without guns, all it takes is one intelligent leader, right? As to the guns, Germans bear no weapons either. The United States disarmed the Germans, starting in 1948. Besides, didn’t the American history books just tell us that 95% of the Aztecs did not die from gunfire but from diarrhea and Spanish measles?

The defenders of total subjugation further argue that present-day European countries are more equipped to handle and integrate our immigrants than the Aztecs were capable of appeasing their immigrants. But that argument is prejudiced, too. It says, in so-and-so-many other words, that if it’s a monkey, we have European rules for monkeys to follow. The “monkey’s now boxed, Madam Merkel!”

And isn’t this “boxing” of all creatures, stuff, and thinking the very imperialistic quintessence of European control —that dehumanizing bureaucracy! Even without saying “foreigners” or “monkeys,” most of us know exactly what a ‘migrant economy’ entails. The ‘migrant economy’ in Germany is worth 100 billion euros, more than the war in Ukraine costs [which, by the way, brought us another 2 million refugees, this time Slavs]. It entails soulless human farming. The regime just promoted slave laborers to laboring expert Facharbeiter slaves or whatnot. The basis of such downplaying of [the trope of] ‘helpless victim migrants’ is that the Europeans somehow believe that other races cannot conquer them, at all, because Europeans are so well organized, technologically advanced, and intellectually superior. Tell this to the organized, advanced, and very superior rulers of Athens in Greece who were run over by dilapidated barefoot Spartans on Persian subsidies. Hence the Greeks transpired the important lesson of ὕβρις ‘hubris’—Latinized, this: @#$%&! Outrage”!

This @#$%&! probably was the last Mesoamerican cry of defiance, too; and that of the superior Sinitic and Hindu and Roman civilizations before them: “We can handle any foreign barbarians,” Empress Dowager Cixi once boasted. “We are so brilliant! We are the El Kitai for gold-diggers! See, they come to us, because we are the richest and bestest! It is evident!” she bragged. Then, three summer solstices later, Qing China broke to pieces… @#$%&! Outrage.

So what?—better domesticate your people: No pride, No patriotism, No Honor! This is really happening in Germany, since I was born and can remember. They have been telling us since childhood that bloodline, hereditary, and history are but grotesque “Hitlerian” ideas and concepts— and very antisemitic and undemocratic! “You must unlearn them!” As to the motive of (childless) tyrant Merkel, her case is proven clear: Forget about the horrible ideas of homeland and ancestry. “Everyone who lives here,” she told the leaders of the world, “is the People.” Which is exactly what Moctezuma also said, back then. He said: “Aztecia is a land of immigrants!” That’s what he said, yes! [He couldn’t write, though.]

IMAGE 5 German Merkel Gave Total Control To Washington and the Iews Then Finished The Germans

With a backstabbing leader like this, who needs foreign invaders with primitive bullet dispensers? Modern migrants are handed advanced weapons such as US smartphones, foreign interest groups cheering you on, your family networks, US intelligence support systems, massive globalist propaganda media, and US-NATO military to protect your migrant human rights interests. What can ordinary Germans do against this, nothing! It is over.

The Merkel retired in 2021, but the Germans are so finished. She is respected by all foreign powers in the world, just like Moctezuma was hailed ‘the God of Rainbows’ and ‘Him who held us all together’, just not his own people whom he sold down the river. Merkel even prognosticated that all 10 million aliens in Germany would be handed German passports soon, probably by 2024! And isn‘t that exactly what Mocti did in Tenochtitlan? When his councilors said, “Look, the Spaniards raped chief Xhotl’s daughter, and gave her the flu, too,” the Emperor smacked them over their heads and cried: “You fools, there are no Spaniards here, we are all Tenochtitlans!”

Diversity is our strength, Inshallah! If I were to draw an unfair comparison, I would say that the 900,000 Muslim “experts and skilled workers” being cheap-bussed, container-shipped, and air-trafficked into Bonn, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg every year since 2018 are far more effective and better equipped for total take-over than the illiterate 30 or so Spanish conquistadors back then in Inner Aztec City. People without a university degree just read too many textbooks. They have no clear idea about how many people are required to do what exactly? Example: 9 people left in charge by Cortés made speech laws for 140,000 Tenochtitlans. Another example. Cortés was never just once assaulted by his unhappy 3,000 workers slaves. It just takes one to rule many, in all situations, each and every time.

If you are still unsure about the severity of the German transformation, because Washington, Brussels, Berlin, and the US-NATO media propaganda machine are lying to you non-stop and saying you’ve got nothing to fear from the 60 million migrants from Ham and Eden ready to march into EU-Idiotistan, consider this: They are telling you “The 60 million refugees have nowhere else to go because of climate change.” Just how naïve you have to be…, for there are 1.4 billion of Ham and Eden people who stayed home… also because of climate change!

There is one time-proven, sure-fire test to find out how “outraged the Greeks truly are”: If in “the most tolerant and diverse Europe of all time,” you cannot criticize US endless wars, regime changes, and the deliberate attack on our civilization, and if that would make you instantly a right-wing extremist Aztec conspiracy theorist, that means that 95% of you will probably die in the next 100 years. Just saying.

Which brings me to my final issue with history textbooks for today. Think! If 95% of the Mexica people REALLY disappeared, how come they grew from 3 million in 1519 to @#$%&! 132,354,424 in 2023? It’s a hoax, that’s what it is.

Let me explain this phenomenon about those allegedly missing people in world history: What the 95%-propaganda historian really wanted to disguise was ‘the turnover’. A former Aztec people in (almost) its entirety was simply turned over to a new, Spanish historian. It’s a metaphor.

So, this new historian, figuratively speaking, erases 95% of the Aztec Empire’s stock there, and adds them to his Spanish Empire here. And every corrupt scholar hence simply repeated this outrageous numbers hoax. European History, which is World History really, is actually a set of heterogeneous [varying] data with vast amounts of legacy source [say, Christianity] still using the LATIN alphabet on pressed cellulose fibre (books). Aztec history, on the other hand, was conspicuously burnt absent or never found. What you think you’ve read about pre-European Mesoamerican history is actually postconquest rewrite. You don’t believe that court historians are bullshitting us, and all the time? Here’s just twelve academic textbooks purporting to the 95% Aztec/Mesoamerican “extinction hoax” (see image):

IMAGE 7 The Fake 95 Percent Extinction Myth Perpetuated By Court Historians

Likewise, it is perfectly “scholarly” to say that “the Germans as a civilization are finished,” with 95% of them likely to go extinct (as did Professor Sieferle alluded to in his Finis Germania), while the next ‘EU reset-historian’ is pining for a whopping 100-million-people-strong Centerland. No contradiction here, just a new, “trusted” court historian at the black board. Who was the first person a few thousand years ago who added or subtracted negative numbers; was it a Greek, or a Brahmin, or a Mandarin?  Well, let me tell you this… a “little secret,” if you will… about our bought-and-paid-for ‘textbook academicians’: Those manipulators regularly add or subtract negative people. [You didn’t know this, did you?] It is perfectly academic to write that 3,000,000 Mesoamericans were massacred there, and show up again here.

IMAGE 8 Systematic Demolition of Reich (Realm), Germanness, Christianity, and Historic Persons

Any cry from the negative natives for help, any lament from the negative native women, any fight of resistance against the positive dark hordes from the East, is now persecuted as “unforgivable racism and despicable hate crime.” Our new court historians will make them the Process.

Conclusion

The public discourse is thus closed on this matter. The old historians who protected you died. The two truly evil psychopaths, Moctezuma and Merkel, who destroyed their countries and their people without remorse, so much alike in bringing forth the downfall of their wonderful civilizations, simply declared that “the migration crisis and the policies to deal with it are too complex and too multifaceted to discuss, and […] with no clear resolution anyway, and so it would not be right to draw a direct parallel between the collapse of the Aztec empire and the current collapse of Europe.” And that’s that. The court gets a new court historian. Yuval Noah Harari, perhaps?

IMAGE 9 Crackdown and Persecution The Victims Of Conquest Will Be Called The Racists

The very name “Deutschland” (land of the Germans) is non-inclusive, discriminatory, and outright offensive to the 25 million non-German people who now live here. Away with “Deutschland”! And so is the distinction “das Volk” (the People), because it is former Nazi-speak and evokes strong nationalism. Away with “das deutsche Volk”!

The Spanish conquistadors never recognized any Aztec realm. It had to be dismantled. An Aztec nation would really be racist and offensive. Similarly, American conquerors couldn’t allow a sovereign German realm to exist. I‘m not saying what follows will not be important. Just saying there’s a turnover, and things will first get a lot more messier. The Germans, as well as the Europeans, already possess neither Germany nor Europe.

Just go there and look for yourself. It is scary.

END.

The author is a German writer and cultural critic. BULK ORDERS, PLEASE!

IMAGE 10 Leaders Whose WELCOME Policy Collapsed Their Civilizations – Merkel (2015), Dowager Cixi (1908), Moctezuma II (1519)

Germany: No Leopard tanks to Kiev unless US agrees to send its Abrams

January 18, 2023

Source: Wall Street Journal

By Al Mayadeen English 

WSJ reports that Berlin will not allow sending German-made tanks from allied countries to Ukraine until Washington approves sending US-made Abrams main battle tanks.

German army soldiers load a Leopard 2 tank onto a truck at the Sestokai railway station some 175 km west of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania, Friday, Feb. 24, 2017 (AP/Mindaugas Kulbis)

Berlin will not allow allies to send German-made tanks to Kiev unless Washington agrees to ship to Ukraine US-made tanks, a German senior official stated on Wednesday according to The Wall Street Journal.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies reported that NATO countries have more than 2,000 German-made Leopard tanks, which are considered to be one of the most advanced battle tanks currently in the world.

Earlier, several European countries announced readiness to provide Ukraine with German-made battle tanks if Berlin approves it.

Among these countries are Finland, Denmark, and Poland, while the UK said it would ship some 14 Challenger 2 battle tanks and an older version of the advanced Leopard.

Read more: Western armored vehicles to Ukraine: breakthrough or stepback?

The UK became the first country to announce plans for the delivery of heavy battle tanks to Kiev. The supply of the Challenger 2 tanks and additional artillery systems are intended to assist Ukrainian forces “push back the Russian troops,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

“One can’t differentiate between direct exports (of German-made tanks) and exports by third countries,” a German official said on Wednesday, the media outlet reported.

Sending advanced, complex military equipment to Ukraine would be considered as a major escalation by the West in its arming of Kiev, which Germany has repeatedly warned against due to the increased risk of causing a direct clash between NATO and Russia, noted the news site.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced earlier today that Berlin is “strategically interlocked” with its allies and partners regarding the decisions on how to provide support to Ukraine, which also includes tanks.

Read more: Poll shows half of Germans against sending tanks to Ukraine

According to the WSJ, a meeting between representatives of 50 countries supporting Ukraine, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, is planned to take place on Friday at the American Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they will discuss a new batch of military aid to Ukraine.

According to informed diplomats from several NATO states, the approval to send German-made Leopard tanks from third countries will be one of the main topics of the meeting.

Despite all public discussions regarding sending German tanks to Ukraine, officials from Berlin said no official requests have been submitted so far, noting that when such requests come through, the government would respond quickly, adding that the approval period might span between a few days and a few weeks.

A senior European official, however, stated that it is unlikely that Germany will make a decision in the upcoming meeting on Friday to allow sending the Leopard tanks to Kiev.

US refusal to send its own main battle tanks making Scholz reluctant

Berlin’s government is currently divided on the matter, the news site added.

Parties in the Chancellor’s coalition, including the Free Democrats and the Green Party, are in favor of sending the tanks to Kiev, while his left-leaning party, the Social Democrats, have been hesitant on the decision, especially since Washington is rejecting to send its Abrams main battle tanks.

In April last year, Scholz suggested that sending any Western tanks to Ukraine would increase the risk of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia.

Read more: MWM: Why won’t Germany, US send Leopard 2, Abrams tanks to Ukraine?

However, according to two of his aides, as per the WSJ, his concerns have calmed as a group of global powers, including close allies to Moscow, such as China’s President Xi Jinping, have denounced threats of using nuclear arms in Ukraine.

Yet, the German Chancellor remains wary, the news site added.

Scholz responded to a question addressed to him during the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier today regarding his reluctance to send Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine, stressing that he was worried that the war in Ukraine could become a global conflict.

Read more: Scholz’s popularity down 24% in a year: Poll

“The Ukrainians can rely on our support in their courageous fight but it is also clear that we want to avoid this becoming a war between Russia and NATO,” he said.

Earlier today, citing industry sources, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported that there is a possibility that Germany may ship 10-15 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine this year.

This comes after the chief executive of German defense group Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag that even though his firm houses 22 Leopard 2 tanks, and 88 Leopard 1 tanks, it would still take about a year to ship them to Ukraine.

The German army has already given up most of its Leopard tanks of older designs and exported them to Turkey, Greece, and Denmark, among other clients. The army still possesses around 300 modern versions, but they have no plans of selling them. The army reportedly refused to provide additional details on the strengths, and equipment of associations, or units.

Related Stories

• US to retain Abrams tanks in 1st delivery of armored vehicles to Kiev
• Germany may supply 10-15 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine this year
• MWM: Why won’t Germany, US send Leopard 2, Abrams tanks to Ukraine?

‘Fragmented world’ sleepwalks into World War III

Wednesday, 18 January 2023 10:31 AM  [ Last Update: Wednesday, 18 January 2023 10:31 AM ]

By Pepe Escobar

The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”.

While his diagnosis of “the most critical fragmentation” the world is now mired in is predictably somber, Herr Schwab maintains that “the spirit of Davos is positive” and in the end we may all live happily in a “green sustainable economy.”

What Davos has been good at this week is showering public opinion with new mantras. There’s “The New System” which, considering the abject failure of the much ballyhooed Great Reset, now looks like a matter of hastily updating the current – rattled – operating system.

Davos needs new hardware, new programming skills, even a new virus. Yet for the moment all that’s available is a “polycrisis”: or, in Davos speak, a “cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.”

In plain English: a perfect storm.

Insufferable bores from that Divide and Rule island in northern Europe have just found out that “geopolitics”, alas, never really entered the tawdry “end of history” tunnel: much to their amazement it’s now centered – again – across the Heartland, as it’s been for most of recorded history.

They complain about “threatening” geopolitics, which is code for Russia-China, with Iran attached.

But the icing on the Alpine cake is arrogance/stupidity actually giving away the game: the City of London and its vassals are  livid because the “world Davos made” is fast collapsing.

Davos did not “make” any world apart from its own simulacrum.

Davos never got anything right, because these “elites” were always busy eulogizing the Empire of Chaos and its lethal “adventures” across the Global South.

Davos not only failed to foresee all recent, major economic crises but most of all the current “perfect storm”, linked to the neoliberalism-spawned deindustrialization of the Collective West.

And, of course, Davos is clueless about the real Reset taking place towards multipolarity.

Self-described opinion leaders are busy “re-discovering” that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was set in Davos – “against the backdrop of a deadly disease and an impeding world war” – nearly a century ago.

Well, nowadays the “disease” – fully bioweaponized – is not exactly deadly per se. And the “impending World War” is in fact being actively encouraged by a cabal of US Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons: an unelected, unaccountable, bipartisan Deep State not even subject to ideology. Centennary war criminal Henry Kissinger still does not get it.

A Davos panel on de-globalization was rife on non-sequiturs, but at least a dose of reality was provided by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.

As for China’s vice-premier Liu He, with his vast knowledge of finance, science and technology, at least he was very helpful to lay down Beijing’s five top guidelines for the foreseeable future – beyond the customary imperial Sinophobia.

China will focus on expanding domestic demand; keeping industrial and supply chains “smooth”; go for the “healthy development of the private sector”; deepen state enterprise reform; and aim for “attractive foreign investment.”

Russian resistance, American precipice

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.

Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.   

Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started”.

Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine.

The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).

So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

– A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.

– The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.

– Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended  war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”

– Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.

– Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.

– And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”

– On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”

– As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”

– And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.

– On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood  was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”

– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”

Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU/NATO “elites” – Davos included – that Russia is “isolated”, stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”      

Between light and darkness

Could it be that Russia – alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?  

The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a “fragmented world”.

Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi’ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).

This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.

Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – “what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history” – are we hopelessly doomed?

Pepe Escobar is a veteran journalist, author and independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia.

(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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Tanks for Nothing: NATO Keeps On Demilitarising Itself in Ukraine

January 17, 2023

Source

by James Tweedie

It has been said often over the past year, most recently by Emmanuel Todd, that the conflict in Ukraine is “existential” for Russia.

Certainly, the Great Bear cannot abide a NATO ballistic missile launchpad just 300 miles from Moscow in a country run my rabidly-Russophobic Nazis — not neo-Nazi skinhead cosplayers but the literal descendants of the real deal.

But others have argued that the Special Military Operation (SMO) is also a make-or-break roll of the dice for NATO and the US which dominates it. How else can we explain the latest mania for arming the regime in Kiev just as its ‘Siegfried Line’ in the Donbass starts to crumble?

How else can one explain cry-bully US National Security Spokesman John Kirby’s response to news that Russian Wagner ‘private military company’ had liberated the town of Soledar, a keystone of the Ukrainian defences? He simultaneously tried to cast doubt on the facts while claiming the town’s capture was strategically insignificant.

“We don’t know his it’s gonna go, so I’m not going to predict failure or success here,” Kirby said as Wagner were mopping up stranded Ukrainian conscripts. “But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself, and it certainly isn’t going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory.”

To the contrary, reports indicate that several Ukrainian brigades being concentrated for a southward push on Melitopol, near the narrow isthmus to the Crimea, were redeployed to Donbass in a vain attempt to hold Soledar and Bakhmut, where they suffered huge casualties. Taking Bakhmut could allow the Russian forces to ‘roll up’ the Ukrainian line to the north and south and advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities Ukraine holds in Donetsk.

Moscow has repeatedly said there can be no peace while the West keeps pumping arms into Ukraine. The most obvious interpretation of those statements is that NATO is only prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian and Donbass peoples with its cornucopia of death. But another is, as blogger Andrei Martyanov said recently, that the ultimate end of the SMO is not just to de-militarise (and de-Nazify) the Ukraine, but all of NATO too.

Indeed, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a January 6 TV interview that his country was already a “de facto” member of NATO, and that he had been thanked by unnamed Western politicians for fighting Russia on their behalf to defend their imperialist idea of exclusive “civilisation”.

I wrote last August that only NATO could de-militarise itself, and then asked in September if the Ukraine was doing the same. Now seems a good time to take stock of that.

A Farewell to (NATO) Arms

Western aid to the Ukraine since the start of the SMO — arms supplies and payments for fighting the war on NATO’s behalf — has long since exceeded Russia’s 2022 defence budget of around $75 billion, and even its projected 2023 spend of $84 billion. It’s widely recognised that the Russian arms industry gives you more ‘bang for your buck’, but the disparity has become stark.

On December 22, 2022, Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov said: “Since the beginning of the special military operation, the West has delivered to Kiev a total of four aircraft, more than 30 helicopters, over 350 tanks, about 1,000 armoured combat vehicles, at least 800 armoured vehicles, up to 700 artillery systems, 100 MLRS [multiple-launch rocket systems], 130,000 anti-tank weapons, more than 5,300 MANPADs, and at least 5,000 UAVs for various purposes.”

Russia’s initial estimate of Ukrainian military strength included 2,416 armoured fighting vehicles — probably about 800 main battle tanks (MBTs) along with 1,600 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) — 152 fixed-wing combat aircraft and 149 helicopters, 180 medium- and long-rang surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, 1,509 artillery guns and 535 MLRS.

Various Western ‘military analysis’ sources say Ukraine had a lot more tanks and artillery to begin with, although those figures includes mothballed vehicles and guns that would have to be overhauled — while Russia continues to hit repair workshops with its long-range missiles.

In mid-June 2022, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Denys Sharapov admitted that his army had lost around half its heavy equipment: 400 tanks, 1,300 IFVs and 700 artillery.

At the end of August, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive in the Kherson region. Just three weeks in, on September 21, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said his forces on that front had destroyed “208 tanks and 245 infantry fighting vehicles, 186 other armoured vehicles, 15 aircraft and 4 helicopters.” Those losses continued to mount until Russia pulled back across the Dnieper river from the city of Kherson in November 2022. The final tally was around 1,200 armoured vehicles of all types, 40 artillery pieces, 38 aeroplanes and a dozen helicopters.

As of January 14 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims to have destroyed more than 7,500 armoured fighting vehicles of all types, 372 planes and 200 helicopters, 400 SAM systems, 982 MLRS, more than 3,800 self-propelled and towed artillery and 8,000 soft-skinned military vehicles, which include civilian-model trucks and cars.

More specifically, Russia says it has hit at least 31 of the 38 M142 HIMARS MLRS launchers pledged by the US, plus six of the 13 M270 tracked MLRS, of the same nine-inch calibre, donated by the UK, Norway, Germany and France. Also on the clobber list are 122 of the 152 US-made M777 howitzers supplied — 80 per cent of them.

The MoD claims may be exaggerated. But, as The Saker blog points out, even if you halve those numbers then the Ukrainian armed forces are still on the verge of being completely ‘de-militarised’.

The arsenals of NATO’s eastern and southern European members have been scoured for Soviet-made arms and vehicles that the Ukrainian forces already operate and for which they have ammunition and spare parts.

As it turns out, Poland has one of the biggest armies in Europe. It has already supplied, among other things, at least 230 MBTs to Kiev, all variants of the T-72. Warsaw has also sent about 40 IFVs, 72 self-propelled 155mm howitzers, 20 122mm SP howitzers and 20 MLRS.

If, as some suspect, the defence ministry in Warsaw actively encouraged the thousands of serving soldiers to have gone to fight in the Ukrainian ‘Foreign Legion’, Poland has lent its very flesh and blood to the Kiev government.

But the cherry on the cake, announced by Polish President Andrzej Duda on a visit to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Lvov, the western Ukrainian city Warsaw still covets, was “a company of Leopard tanks” — 10 to 14 in layman’s terms — which he hoped would be just the start of a new wave of largesse from the “international coalition.”

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed on Monday January 16 that the UK was adding a squadron (company) of 14 Challenger 2 MBTs, 24 AS90 155mm SP guns plus an unspecified number of Bulldog APCs and “proected” (i.e. not really armoured) vehicles to the pile of chips on the Ukraine-shaped card table. Rumours of four AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships to follow had been swiftly denied over the weekend.

These tanks have been out of production since 2002 and the British army has just 227 of them. 148 of those are earmarked to be upgraded to the proposed ‘Challenger 3’ standard, although Wallace said that number could be increased — with the implication that there would be fewer to spare. The UK only had 117 AS90s in service as of 2015 and its replacement is still in development, so that pledge represents a fifth of the army’s tracked artillery.

In a leaked internal memo, British Chief of General Staff Sir Patrick Sanders admitted that “giving away these capabilities will leave us temporarily weaker as an army, there is no denying it.”

France has volunteered an unclear number (reportedly 30) of its AMX 10 RC wheeled, turreted vehicles. These have been variously described as “light tanks”, “tank destroyers” or “armoured recce vehicles”, he last reflecting how the French army actually use them. They’re certainly no match for a real MBT.

Marder, She Wrote

The Polish, British and French pledges of token numbers of tanks are explicitly a political move to pressure other countries, especially Germany, to hand over some — or many — of their own. US President Joe Biden already managed to twist German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ arm in the first week of January to give up 40 Marder IFVs by pledging 50 US M2 Bradley IFVs as well.

The ultimate humiliation for Berlin was that the White House announced the move before the German government did. Meanwhile, the new Puma IFV (named after a WWII Nazi armoured car) that is meant to replace the Marder has turned out to be a complete disaster that constantly breaks down. The German defence minister Christine Lambrecht resigned on January 16 — ostensibly for failing to fix the equipment shortage, but also, paradoxically, amid criticism that she has not handed over enough arms to Kiev.

Germany is the biggest European importer of Russian gas and has been reticent to antagonise Moscow too much. It is not lost on the Germans that the last time their tanks were in Ukraine was when the Wehrmacht was perpetrating the genocide of 21 million Soviets.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was in Berlin on Monday in a bid to unlock that Pandora’s box, arguing NATO should not let tanks “rust away in the warehouses.” Of course, Russia’s approach since WWII of stockpiling old equipment, rather than scrapping or selling it, has been key to its ability to sustain high-intensity combat operations this long.

London also pressed Berlin to grant other countries permission to re-export the tanks it has sold them in the past.

“It is hoped that the example set by the French and us will allow those countries holding Leopard tanks to donate as well. I would urge my German colleagues to do that,” Wallace said, then claimed: “These tanks are not offensive when they are used for defensive methods.”

The Leopard 2 also massively out-sells the much-vaunted US M1 Abrams and the Challenger 2 on the export market. 21 countries have bought the German tank, compared to just eight for the Abrams and only one, Oman, for the Challenger 2. Social media videos of burnt-out and turret-less Leopards strewn across the Ukrainian steppes will really mess up German heavy industry’s bottom line. After the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the US ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, this would be the third time Berlin has been screwed by its so-called allies.

German tank-maker Rheinmetall’s CEO Armin Papperger tried to head off that outcome on Sunday. He told reporters that Germany could only spare 22 Leopard 2s for Ukraine, and no earlier than 2024. “The vehicles must be completely dismantled and rebuilt,” Papperger stated. The fighting could very well be over by the time they’re fixed.

Scholtz tried to put the ball back in Washington’s court on January 17. “We are never going alone, because this is necessary in a very difficult situation like this,” he said, reiterating that he was anxious to avoid “escalating” the conflict to “a war between Russia and NATO.” Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck more explicit, telling a journalist at the World Economic Forum in Davos the same day: “If America will decide that they will bring battle tanks to Ukraine, that will make it easier for Germany.”

The Pentagon’s excuse for not giving some of its stock of more than 6,000 M1 tanks (compared to Germany’s 300-odd Leopards) to the Ukraine is that they are high-maintenance, voracious gas-guzzlers, even by tank standards, and are fitted with technology that they can’t afford to let fall into Russian hands. But the US has previously exported ‘Nerfed’ versions of the Abrams to several Middle-Eastern countries without the depleted uranium armour inserts and other top-tier systems. The problem is that they turned out to be quite vulnerable.

Many announcements of arms deliveries to the Kiev regime so far have been short on specific numbers. One might speculate that is either because they are embarrassingly small, or because they mean disarming the donor country. Both can be true at once.

For example, Italy’s latest mooted donation is a SAMP-T surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery. Given that the Ukraine started the conflict with 250 long-range S-300 SAMs systems and hundreds of other types, one more is not going to make any difference to the outcome — nor the two Patriot SAM batteries prmised by the US and Germany. But the Italian army only has five SAMP-T systems, and two of those have already been deployed abroad in Kuwait and Slovakia.

Sweden and Finland are not even in NATO yet, and may never be while they both continue to harbour hundreds of Kurdish separatist terrorists wanted in Turkey, which as an existing member has a veto on their entry. But Stockholm may send up to 12 of its 48 Archer self-propelled howitzers to the Ukraine, while Helsinki has already supplied ‘classified’ numbers of APCs, heavy mortars and anti-aircraft guns.

Little Slovakia made headlines last summer when promised Kiev 11 MiG-29 fighters, its entire combat jet fleet. It turns out they still haven’t been delivered, however, and in the meantime Russia has claimed far more aircraft shot down leaving the Ukrainian Air Force at a net loss.

Slovakia’s neighbour the Czech Republic has supplied up to 40 T-72 tanks, 60 IFVs, 50 to 70 SP guns, 20 to 30 MLRS and at least 10 Mi-24 attack helicopters — which have been replaced by either gifts or sales of old AH-1 Cobra choppers from the US.

Latvia donated four helicopters — half its fleet — and six M109 155mm tracked howitzers, which was one in nine of its stocks. Lithuania sent 52 M113 APCs, which is a quarter of its armoured infantry transports, and 10 of its 32 120mm self-propelled mortars based in the same vehicle. Estonia gave nine of its 42 122mm howitzers and what appears to be all seven of its Alvis Mamba light armoured cars. It is these three Baltic micro-states, along with their neighbour Poland, who shout the loudest about the threat of ‘Russian aggression’, yet they are disarming themselves for the sake of the lost cause in the Ukraine.

Logistics? Fiddlesticks!

Mark F. Cancian of the Centre for Strategic and international Studies (a Washington think-tank) has been warning those who will listen about the US military’s logistics problems almost since the start of the SMO.

His latest article, published on January 9, contains a helpful infographic of how many years it will take to replace the arms sent to Ukraine.

Even at the “surge rate” of accelerated production, it will take five years for the US to replenish its stocks of 155mm artillery shells after sending more than 1 million to the Maidan regime. Replacing the 38 HIMARS MLRS launchers sent will take two-and-a-half to three years, while for the Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger shoulder-launched SAMs the time frame could be as long as eight and 18 years respectively.

US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro appears to agree. Asked this week if the US Navy had reached the point of having to choose between arming itself and Ukraine, he said it was not their yet, but “if the conflict does go on for another six months, for another year, it certainly continues to stress the supply chain in ways that are challenging.”

This betrays a criminally-negligent lack of planning by NATO military staff. Why did the collective west start a fight it couldn’t finish? Did they really think they could bluff Russia into backing down with a few M777s and HIMARS launchers?

Too Little, Too Late

Retired German brigadier general Erich Vad warned last week that the latest round of arms was a “military escalation” even if the 40-plus-year-old Marders were “not a silver bullet.”

“We’re going down a slide. This could develop a momentum of its own that we can no longer control,” Vad said, questioning whether the NATO had a strategy at all. “Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbass or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism.”

Brian Berletic of The New Atlas has broken down the latest headline-grabbing pledges of heavy armour to Ukraine. He has explained cogently that nothing is indestructible, and most of the immensely-heavy Western MBTs have proven vulnerable in recent years by man-portable weapons.

Islamic State/DAESH wiped out about 10 Turkish army Leopard 2s when Ankara sent troops into northern Syrian four years ago, and destroyed or captured around Iraqi army 100 M1 Abrams during its sudden seizure of northern Iraq in 2014.

The US Bradley and German Marder IFVs are far more vulnerable. Both are about a third taller and half as heavy again as the Russian equivalent BMP series of vehicles, making them fat targets with the bonus of huge propaganda value when they are destroyed. Armour-wise, the Bradley is only fully protected against Russian 14.5mm heavy machine guns and the Marder against 20mm and 25 mm automatic cannon. The Russian BMPs and the newer wheeled BTRs carry a 30mm cannon, but more importantly anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), both quite capable of destroying any other IFV in service.

Berletic also puts the numbers to be supplied in context. Along with the 90 refurbished Czech T-72 tanks paid for by the US and Netherlands in the autumn, the new deliveries will only be enough to equip one armoured brigade with its attached mechanised infantry battalions.

Ukraine is now claiming that it will form up three whole new army corps of troops this year, each numbering 75,000 men, for a total of 225,000. That’s as large as the standing army Kiev commanded on February 24 last year. What will they be armed with and transported on, slingshots and bicycles?

Martyanov simply points to the commonly-used algebraic equations for force requirements and battle outcomes as proof that the latest ‘packages’ will make no difference.

General Lord Richard Dannatt agrees with Martyanov and Berletic that a dozen or so tanks is not going to be enough. While still claiming the Challenger is a wonder-weapon, he wrote for the Daily Mail that 50 would be needed to make a difference.

Kiev’s ambassador to the UK, Vadym Prystaiko, combines NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s killer android stare with Zelensky’s shameless passive-aggressive panhandling.

He took the whole argument to its logical conclusion by demanding “hundreds” of tanks in an interview with LBC radio, then upped the stakes to “thousands” when he went on Sky News — in the process admitting that Russia was able to field that many itself despite Western claims it is running out of everything.

Prystaiko probably realises that he is talking about the entire arsenals of the European NATO members, and probably a large part of US military stocks.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said simply: “These tanks will burn like the rest. The goals of the special operation will be achieved.”

The whole world has been on tenterhooks for almost a year now, wondering whether the conflict between NATO’s proxy Ukraine and Russia will escalate into full-blown World War Three or just end up as World War Two-and-a-Half: the sequel only the psycho fans wanted.

But instead of weakening Russia militarily and economically, as US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has stated is Washington’s goal, the conflict is destroying NATO’s ability to fight and only making Russia richer and stronger. Moscow may in no hurry to finish it.

In the mean time, let’s hope the West doesn’t throw a tantrum when Russia breaks its best war toys and drop the big one.

Europe’s gas emergency: A continent hostage to seller prices

January 16 2023

Source

Europe’s reliance on Russian gas imports has been upended by sanctions against Moscow. With few options for practical alternatives, the continent will remain energy-dependent and financially-vulnerable regardless of who it imports from.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Mohammad Hasan Sweidan

The 2022 outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine revealed the importance of energy security in bolstering Moscow’s geopolitical power in Europe. The continent, which imported about 46 percent of its gas needs from Russia in 2021, found itself in a vulnerable position as it sought alternative sources.

This presented an opportunity for the US to replace Russia and become the primary supplier of natural gas to Europe at significantly higher prices, resulting in large profits at the expense of its European allies. According France-based data and analytics firm, Kpler, in 2022 the EU imported 140 billion cubic meters (BCM) of liquefied natural gas (LNG), an increase of 55 BCM from the previous year.

Around 57.4 BCM of this amount (41 percent) now comes from the US, an increase of 31.8 BCM, 29 BCM from Africa (20.7 percent) – mainly from Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria and Angola – 22.3 BCM from Russia (16 percent), 19.8 BCM from Qatar (14 percent), 4.1 BCM from Latin America (2.92 percent) – mainly from Trinidad and Tobago – and 3.37 BCM from Norway (2.4 percent).

In 2022, France was the leading importer of LNG in Europe, accounting for 26.23 percent of total imports. Other significant importers included Spain (22.3 percent), the Netherlands (12.65 percent), Italy (11 percent), and Belgium (10.42 percent).

These countries, along with Poland (4.7 percent), Greece (2.9 percent), and Lithuania (2.31 percent), imported over 90 percent of LNG exported to Europe at prices higher than Russian pipeline gas. It is worth noting that upon arrival, LNG is converted back to its gaseous state at receiving stations in Europe before being distributed to countries without such infrastructure, such as Germany.

Switching dependencies

Europe was able to reduce its reliance on Russian pipeline gas from 46 percent to 10 percent last year. This decrease, however, came at a high cost to the economy, as the price of gas rose to $70 per million British thermal units (Btu), up from $27 before the Ukraine war. By the end of the year, the price had fallen to $36, compared to $7.03 in the US.

This price disparity has been hard to stomach. French President Emmanuel Macron went public with his annoyance: “American gas is 3-4 times cheaper on the domestic market than the price at which they offer it to Europeans,” criticizing what he called “American double standards.”

High gas prices have made Europe an appealing destination for gas exporters from around the world, with increased interest from countries such as Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Iran, Libya, Algeria, and those bordering the Mediterranean basin, as they either export gas, or possess gas but lack infrastructure.

To replace the cheaper Russian pipeline gas, European countries are being forced to seek out the more expensive LNG. The EU and Britain are working to increase LNG import capacity by 5.3 billion cubic feet (BCF) per day by the end of 2023, and by 34 percent, or 6.8 BCF per day, by 2024.

Can West Asia, North Africa meet Europe’s gas needs?

The West Asia and North Africa region has the potential to partially meet Europe’s gas needs due to its geographic proximity and the presence of countries with large gas reserves and export infrastructure, such as Palestine/Israel, Algeria, and Egypt. However, there are several obstacles that must be considered.

For example, Egypt’s high production costs and increasing domestic consumption limit its export capacity. Additionally, Europe would need to be willing to pay a higher price than the Asian market for Egyptian gas.

Israel, on the other hand, has seen an increase in gas exports to Europe in the first half of 2022 after the pipeline to Egypt via Jordan was restored in March, but it is unlikely to significantly increase exports in 2023 due to factors such as limited export capacity and high domestic consumption. Experts predict that Israel may export around 10 BCM of gas to Europe this year, similar to the amount exported in 2022.

Qatar is the only Persian Gulf emirate that has increased its gas exports to Europe for 2022. This is largely because Persian Gulf countries prefer to sell their gas to Asian markets, where they can garner higher profits due to lower shipping costs and longer-term contracts.

Last year, Qatar took advantage of the significant increase in gas prices to sell part of its shipments on the European spot market. According to the Qatari Minister of Energy, between 10 percent and 15 percent of Qatar’s production can be diverted to this market.

However, it may be difficult for Europe to attract Qatari gas away from the Asian market, especially as China is expected to recover its demand for gas in 2023. In a policy home-goal, western sanctions on Iran, which has the second-largest natural gas reserves in the world, impede the investment needed to increase Iranian production.

No real alternatives

Iran’s lack of infrastructure connecting it to Europe and high domestic consumption also affect its export capacity. According to a report by BP, Iran produced 257 BCM of gas in 2021, of which 241.1 BCM were consumed domestically.

With regards to Algeria, the main obstacle in increasing its gas exports to Europe is political tension with Morocco and Spain that led to the suspension of the Moroccan-European gas pipeline project, which can export 10.3 billion cubic meters of Algerian gas.

In the case of the UAE, despite having the seventh-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, its production is not sufficient to meet the demands of the local market and it imports a third of its gas consumption from Qatar through an undersea pipeline. European countries are currently in talks with Abu Dhabi to accelerate work on gas projects and increase production.

As for Saudi Arabia, it consumes all of its gas production domestically and does not export any, with a total production of 117.3 BCM in 2021. There are also expectations for a significant increase in the demand for oil and coal in 2023. The World Bank reports that this is due to an increase in European countries’ reliance on these fossil fuels instead of natural gas. This increase in demand will keep oil prices high, allowing Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ members to make large profits.

The dilemma of growing demand

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global demand for natural gas will increase to 394 BCM this year, driven in part by Europe’s need to diversify its sources of gas away from Russia. And West Asia, with its significant reserves, remains a key region for Europe to tap into for this purpose.

The challenge remains in finding cost-effective ways to transport the gas from the region to Europe, which will necessitate building a pipeline connecting the Mediterranean Basin to the Old Continent.

Failure to do so will result in Europe continuing to pay a high premium for its energy security without achieving true independence. The alternative for Europe is to rely on LNG from the US. This gives Europe almost complete independence from Russian gas, but keeps it weak, obedient, and dependent on American energy supplies.

A Tale of Two Cultures (America and Russia)

January 12, 2023

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by Jimmie Moglia

When events do not make sense or are such as sense cannot untie, an option is to forget all about them – the head-in-the-sand solution. Another is to remember that man is but a quintessence of dust and often, therefore, not even worth the dust that the rude wind blows in his face.

Yet another option is an attempt at interpretation, with emphasis on ‘attempt’ and limits on ‘interpretation.” In the instance, the events in question are: one, the claim – by the Western signatories of the so-called “Minsk Agreements” on Ukraine in 2014 – that they did not intend to respect them. And two, that the commitment by the USA to Gorbachev in 1989 not to expand NATO Eastward was invalid for not having been set in writing.

But how can we interpret shamelessness? For to define true shamelessness, what is it but to be nothing else but shameless? At least Shakespeareanly speaking.

In past similar historical occasions, perjurers usually found some fancy or preposterous reasons to justify their behavior. Often those affected by the perjury sought redress through vengeance, leading to bitter wars and to the execution of the perjurers. During the 100-year war (1337-1453), King Henry V, uncovered and executed three English traitors, the Earl of Cambridge, Lord Scroop and Sir Thomas Grey, who were working for the French king.

In other cases, such as the momentous event when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement of 1939 and invaded the USSR in 1941, Germany’s official reason had some pretense of authenticity, however false or questionable. Namely the alleged violations of German air space by some Soviet planes.

Yet history abounds with enigmas. In that instance, some sources have claimed that Stalin was himself planning an attack on Germany. But as of today, available evidence doesn’t support the claim, and suggests that Stalin ignored or pretended to ignore the reported and warnings of a pending, massive German invasion.

Though even Count Schulenburg, the German ambassador to Moscow, only learned about the invasion at the last moment. And having developed strong friendships during his stay, Schulenburg was reported to be crying when he took the last train from Moscow to Berlin. For the record, he died in a German concentration camp in 1944.

Given this and other precedents, the current belligerent stance of US-NATO versus Russia is astonishing. For the Western Juntas and their puppets find no shame in hiding their bad faith.

And yet an avowed impostor usually still triggers more dislike than admiration – for the difference between an impostor and a traitor is one of degree, not substance. And breach of trust, at least at large, is still rated more negatively than positively. For example, it is not something that a job applicant (as yet), would claim in his resume as a ‘strength’– e.g. “I am particularly skilled at breaching the trust placed on me by whomsoever.”

But the American and Western European actors involved in the current breaches of trust do not seemingly care. Therefore the tragic, absurd and Orwellian posture of political and Zionist America (with Europe in tow), towards the Ukrainian business and war should give us pause. Considering that history is concerned with the relation between the unique and the general. And that a historian can no more separate them, or give precedence to one over the other, than he can separate fact from interpretation. Further realizing that there are as many interpretations as there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.

In this writing I will deal separately with the two main parties involved, Russia and the USA. For puppets nominally rule the European Union and their media is historically irrelevant.

As for the USA, the inaudible and noiseless foot of time, along with forgetfulness and dark oblivion, have erased from the collective memory the purportedly original reason that triggered the Vietnam war – and the consequent millions killed, the many maimed and the countless wounded on both sides. Namely the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident. When, allegedly, North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on a US destroyer that was in international water according to the US, and in domestic waters according to the Vietnamese. Nevertheless those involved on the US side still found it then necessary to invent a plausible cause.

But not now. What changed or what happened then between 1965 and the present? And what identifiable original or ideological cause can be found for the Western so-called ‘rulers’ to disregard the Minks agreements and the agreement about the non-expansion of NATO? Even the often quoted notion of so-called ‘plausible deniability’ has seemingly gone the way of all flesh.

One socio-political interpretation may be perhaps found well over 20 years ago. That is, a related pattern-setting event can be traced back to the Clinton-Lewinsky business. When the president of the Unites States had the gall to tell the nation, in prime time, that ‘I did not have sex with that woman’ notwithstanding ample, legal and irrefutable evidence.

That the president of the ‘exceptional nation’ would allow himself to be entrapped into an obvious and decidedly bawdy situation, while simultaneously showing himself as the lyingest knave in Christendom, should at least have raised some doubts about his qualifications for the position.

But it didn’t, and at the time various qualified voices expressed concern about the implications of the resolution. For when a preposterous lie to the public and parliament (by the highest representative of the state) is essentially endorsed by allowing the perjurer (for he was under oath) to remain in office, a pattern and precedent is established for others to follow suit in times to come.

One obvious, recent and worthy fellow and follower is Giuseppe Biden along with his remarkable family. And we can see clearly an evolution. For what with Clinton was a matter of lying to save his bottom, with Biden lying seems actually a matter of pride. (E.G. “18 FBI agents have verified that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation!”)

Yet already after the Lewinsky business, the list of patent, unrestrained and preposterous lies excreted by subsequent US state department administrations would fill a long row of portable toilets and stink to high heaven. Beginning with Yugoslavia, followed by the very murky 9/11 affair, Saddam’s weapons of mass distraction, Gadhafi’s breach of human rights, Assad’s ‘chemical poisons’ in Syria, bringing democracy to Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine, and the Middle Eastern terrorist groups that are enemies one day and freedom fighters the next, financed and supplied in either case by the exceptional nation.

Giving the proverbial seal of approval and certificate of authenticity to much of the above was, among others, the ex-CIA director, plump and pompous Pompeo. Who, in a relatively recent conference declared, in a vein of satisfied and entertaining pride, that (at the CIA), “we lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire related training (how to) courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” With the audience erupting in spontaneous applause.

Yet, it is possible to detect another ideological connection among these past events and the present – namely a clear pride in disregarding the truth. Or rather, in a brave new world and new world order, verification of truth is no longer necessary. Truth is what is declared to be by questionable academia, by imposed ideology and by the interests that push forward academia, academics and ideology.

Donald Rumsfeld, departed and un-missed secretary of defence, said it best, “We create our own reality.” In the circumstances, it is already extraordinary that – seemingly – a majority of the American people have not followed suit. Otherwise most of us would be forced to walk around town with a loaded AK-47, and each state would be transformed into a myriad of mini-Ukraines at war with each other.

A thornier yarn to unravel or issue to interpret, in the limited confines of an essay, is the political-ideological relationship between the US and the Russian Federation.

As far as the US, my perceptions, for what is worth, are a possibly unwarranted extrapolation of impressions gained over the years by observing behavior, reactions, and points of view among people whom I either know personally at work, or socially, or whose manners and expressions I had occasion to follow on various media channels.

To begin with – and however obvious – it is unfair and useless to tag or label the actions of one or more US governments, politicians, questionable bigwigs or equally questionable oligarchs as representing “the Americans.”

Further considering that, historically and commercially, the evil and turbid sell more than the good and limpid. And since “to things of sale a seller’s praise belongs” the relentless media-driven emphasis on prurient narratives of evil ends up popularizing it. Considering that notoriety contains in itself an undeclared or hidden element of quasi-praise. Praise not for the evil act but for the profit produced by the sale of evil. Therefore, in the end, the evil, the turbid and the prurient join together to maximize returns. A proposition beautifully condensed in the expression, ‘anything for a buck’.

I will not pursue further this line, other than with a few remarks on what I think remains of the collective American psyche, until (if the trend continues), it will be overrun by the “new world order”, transgenderism, fluid sexuality, male maternity, wokism, cancel culture and various other Gomorrish items of insanity. Leading, finally, to the satanic substitution or replacement of the Western European population, or population of that extraction, as promoted by various notorious and vocal so-called ‘intellectuals’.

At the root of the historical American psyche, it could be said that there are two prevailing world-views, quite different from each other, and yet both deriving from events associated with the birth of the nation and the so-called conquest of the American West.

According to one view, man has to do with the practical, the risky, the impending and the inevitable. He must assert himself whatever the circumstances and the consequences. He is the macho man, the winner who takes all. Culture is essentially a feminine thing, as women are exempted from the masculine duties and have time to spare. A man (or a nation for that matter) who presents a posture of respect, regard, conformity to good form, aperture to disinterested friendship, interest, maybe with a view to learn the good points of the other, is essentially weak.

This version of the American man may admire Lincoln for having crushed the South, but especially for having succeeded in ignoring the statutes of the Confederation, which included the option for the single states to leave the Union. And perhaps, above all, for having been so smart as to sell the idea that the war was declared to free the slaves, rather than to patently ignore the covenant of the Union. Can one be smarter than that?

A more modern version of the ‘macho man’ is captured or described by the famous sentence, ‘Speak softly but carry a big stick’ – a philosophy applicable to reluctant regimes, especially in South and Central America. The assumption being that genuine kindness is a sign of weakness and he who wastes his time in ‘culture’ is equally weak and un-suited to lead armies into battle or economists into plunder.

I am broadly simplifying and generalizing, but I have personally watched one such man (and his entourage) drive to the ground a successful and innovative Fortune 500 corporation – eventually sold to the proverbial highest bidder – and I know of other cases.

These traits describe in their entirety the class ‘A’ Americans, (‘A’ for ‘arrogant’ and for simplification). They are not the majority by any means and yet, by default, design, or through the inscrutable paths of fate, end up projecting abroad the cartoon-image of the ‘typical’ American.

‘Security’ is the nominal, illogical reason why this class imposes criminal measures on behalf of the rest of the nation, claiming to act for the nation’s interest. Unable or unwilling to realize that the most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security – rather the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

Counteracting the ‘macho’ view there is (luckily), the great majority of the ‘other’ Americans, who are helpful, independent, practical, kind, considerate, genuinely interested in others, generous and helpful to their neighbors as a matter of course. These traits were equally necessary and indispensable during the ‘so-called’ conquest of the West. And they equally and globally describe the class ‘H’ Americans (‘H’ for ‘Humanity’).

It is an extremely simplified and maybe questionable view, but I think it goes beyond the mere generalization captured by the sentence, ‘there are good and bad people everywhere’ or similar. In fact, I do not think it is far fetched to detect, in the proliferation and almost exaltation of transgenderism, ‘fluid sexuality,’ etc. a kind of psychological reaction to the cult of the macho man of the American sort.

Moving now to Russia, the prevailing and official US ‘macho man’ attitude is reflected in and enhanced by the current posture of the US Administration on the Ukraine business. We should also include the non-American elephant-in-the-room affecting the whole thing. But it would un-necessarily complicate the historical perspective.

I will attempt – however cursorily – to observe Russia’s current posture on Ukraine and the world at large, in the context of Russian history and of the present historical moment.

Some may recall proverbial statements by notable personalities about the mystery and the ‘difficulty’ of understanding Russia. Notorious is Churchill’s saying about Russia being a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Actually, in the past, even notable Russians were not shy about the issue, admitting not to understand their own nation. So much so that Dostoyevsky, in his ‘Diary of a Writer’, pokes fun at this doubting class of Russians.

“In days gone by – he says – the words “I understand nothing” meant merely ignorance on the part of him who uttered them; yet, at present they bring great honor. One has only to declare with an open air and snobbishly: “I do not understand religion; I understand nothing in Russia; I understand nothing in art” – and at once he is lifted to lofty heights. And this is all the more advantageous if one, in fact, understands nothing. However, this simplified device proves nothing…”

It is possible to follow some of the speculations that may explain the effect of such national self-questioning. Of course in this field no theory is perfect but any is better than none.

Reasons for the air of mystery surrounding Russia, as per Churchill’s quote, or for the lack of national self-understanding, as noted by Dostoyevsky, would be but speculative. Dostoyevsky himself does not pursue this line of inquiry, other than hinting that it may be a self-satisfying form of eccentricity. There remains the fact, however, that the Russian culture and language have given the world some of the most extraordinary and unique literary masterpieces.

Language being the scaffold of civilization, we can more fruitfully read the history of a nation once that nation has a language for writing it. In this respect Russian culture is the tale of three cities, Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Kiev was founded around the 8^th century, Moscow in the 12^th and St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 18^th. For traditional chroniclers and historians, Kiev has remained the “mother of Russian cities”, and memories of its accomplishments gave to the Orthodox Eastern Russians an enduring sense of unity. Especially in the midst of religious turmoil, when the confrontation between Poland’s Catholicism and Ukraine’s Orthodox Christianity led eventually to the treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654 and the formal annexation of Ukraine to Russia. Thanks to which the Cossack ruler Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who was confronting the attacks and belligerence of Poland-Lithuania, sought to join Russia and pledged the allegiance (of Ukraine) to the Tsar.

According to one school of thought, the year 1252 marks the beginning of the historical-cultural split between Russia and the rest of Europe. When Alexander Nevsky – a most beloved protagonist in the history of Russia – struck an agreement with Khan Bayi of the Mongol Golden Horde, whereby Nevsky could reign as Sovereign of Kiev and of all Russia.

This was a situation quite different from than in the West, where Western kings or emperors needed the benediction of the Pope and the Church to be able to reign – or, if not, suffer excommunication. And this on the ground that the Pope was the prime minister of God. And God, via the Pope, conferred on the kings the authority to reign.

One historically famous consequence of this arrangement took place when the German Henry IV was Emperor of the Western Roman Empire and Gregory VII the Pope. Henry nominated as Bishop of Milan a prelate not approved by the Pope. Whereupon Gregory VII excommunicated the Emperor, and the Emperor the Pope. In the instance Henry IV – in 1077 – had to yield and do penance by waiting in the winter snow for 3 days and nights outside the castle of Countess Matilde of Canossa (heir to a feudal domain that comprised most of Northern and a good part of Central Italy), until being received and pardoned by the Pope.

The feud became symbolic of the “Fight for the Investitures.” Meaning the fight for ‘who really called the shots’, when electing high-rank church officials, the pope or the emperor. And until about the time of the discovery of America, and sometimes even later, it was difficult for a king to reign by antagonizing (or without the approval of) the Pope. For it made it easier for rebellious princes to disregard the authority of the king.

That German emperor’s distressful pilgrimage gave rise to the saying “going to Canossa” indicating an act of repentance. Even in the late 1800 Bismarck, the unifier of Germany used the sentence, “We will not go to Canossa, neither in body nor in spirit” (Nach Canossa gehen wir nicht, weder körperlich noch geistig) to signal his steadfastness on a certain decision.

But the last dispute on whether it should be the church or the king to have the final say in appointing bishops or cardinals occurred during the time of another Henry IV, this time a king of France (1553-1610). Who, when essentially forced to ban the Huguenots (protestants) from France, pronounced the famous sentence, “Paris is well worth a mass” (Paris vaut bien une messe).

None of this occurred in Russia. Nevsky (with much questionable simplification) not having to fight in the East, was able to pursue a ‘nation consolidating policy’ on the Western Front. He fought victorious and legendary battles against German and Swedish invaders. And he served as Prince of Novgorod, Grand Prince of Kiev and Grand Prince of Vladimir during some of the most difficult times of Kievan Rus’ history.

The difference with the West is that there were bitter and sometimes deadly religious disputes inside the Orthodox church and factions, but they did not affect (on the whole) the integrity of the state. All the while Russia could pursue her Eastern expansion mostly with agreements and treaties with various Eastern potentates.

It may be instructive to compare significant historical events during the same timeframe in Eastern and Western Europe and their respective impact.

Nevsky’s agreement with the Mongols took place in 1252, two years after the death in the West of Frederick II of Svevia, Holy Roman Emperor, who had a German father, a Norman mother and a Sicilian upbringing.

At the time of the Crusades, Frederick II (whom later historians named “the wonder of the world” due to his personality defined as ‘polyhedric’), rather than fighting the Arabs and the Turks found an agreement with them – whereupon the pope excommunicated him. With his actions Frederick II wanted to restore the glories of Charlemagne’s original Western Roman Empire, established in 800 AD and later plagued by internal disputes, splits and wars.

Frederick II did not seem interested in Northern and Eastern Europe. He did not succeed in revitalizing the Western Roman empire, whereas Nevsky succeeded in building the base of the Russian state and eventually empire. To the success of one and failure of the other, historians have attributed the beginning of the difference between the developments of Russia and of the rest of Europe as well as the notably different and respective ‘weltanschauung’.

Though even before Nevsky, Pope Honorius III promoted the wars between Finland and the Republic of Novgorod, one of the important Russian medieval states, eventually incorporated into the Grand duchy of Moscow.

The pope authorized the bishop of Finland to establish a commercial embargo against the ‘barbarians’ (Eastern-Orthodox) who threatened Catholic Christendom in Finland. A measure echoing today’s US sanctions and embargos on Russia, due to Russia contesting Western ‘exceptionality’ and its related pretended rights to a planetary empire.

Pope Gregory IX supported or encouraged the efforts at destroying the Orthodox Church, which culminated in a famous battle between the Western coalition (Poles, Danes, Swedes, Baltic elements and German forces) against Alexander Nevsky, whose army, complemented by Mongol archers on horse – won the battle on the frozen lake Peipus (1242), now the border between Estonia and Russia. In that battle the Mongols, allied with Nevsky, forced the antagonist cavalry to retreat to the part of the lake where the ice was thinner and broke under the weight of the heavy medieval armory of the enemy.

There was a schism in the Russian Orthodox church, about 150 years after the Catholic-Protestant Western schism, triggered by Luther in 1520. But the outward items of the Russian dispute had to do with disputes that (I assume), even to a Western mind of the time may have appeared odd. Such as the advocates of unison versus harmony in singing, the use of two fingers instead of three in making the sign of the cross and similar others. Whereas the Western Schism had to do with the sought-for independence, by Luther and the Protestants, from Catholic Rome.

According to many, the most emblematic character, in the clash between Eastern and Western cultures, was Peter the Great (1672-1725). As described by an eminent Russian historian, his Russian traits were simplicity, coarseness, dislike of ceremony, conventions and etiquette, a curious sort of democracy, a love of truth and equity, a love of Russia, and at the same time “the elemental nature of a wild beast was awake in him”. And there were traits, in Peter, that may be compared with the Bolsheviks. Some historians have defined the Peter the Great as the first Bolshevik.

In the wake of Peter the Great’s era both French enlightenment and German Romanticism were imported into Russia. Emblematic of the influence that French ‘philosophes’ had on Russian culture was the era of the reforming despots, in turn exemplified by Catherine the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire. In recent years, 26 letters of her correspondence with Voltaire were returned to Russia.

In the wake of these new links and connections a wave of admiration for France and French culture spread among the Russian nobility and intellectuals at large. It became fashionable to speak French alongside Russian at home and on social occasions. A curiosity reflected in a number of Russian novels. By the way, this is one more point that throws into ridicule the current subservience of the French government to the dictates of the EU and US, as recently also commented on, in an interview, by the grandson of Charles DeGaulle on a French YT channel. Who – De Gaulle – kept France out of NATO and maintained cordial, peaceful and economically beneficial relations with the USSR even at the peak of the Cold War.

Anyway, following, or out of the wave of thought inspired by Peter’s reforms, and the strong connection with European Illuminist thinking, came that stream of Russian literature that has ennobled mankind in a unique and inimitable way. And that has enabled Russia – even allowing for the distortions, the folly and the absurdities of Bolshevism – to still remain, so far, a bastion of resistance against the plague of cancel culture, wokism and the like.

In fact, in my view, even in Gorbachev (whose life I have described in a video – link at the end) it is possible to find traits of two of the three brother Karamazov of Dostoyevsky, the adventurous Dmitry (reflected in Gorbachev’s daring opening towards the West) and the sincere and spiritual Alexei (reflected in Gorbachev’s belief that his Western counterparts spoke and acted in good faith).

Often, and perhaps inevitably, the persona portrayed by the corporate media is a caricature, and many, including him who writes here, are prone to be tricked or misled.

Finally and for what is worth, this write-up in no way can be considered adequate, let alone sufficient, for drawing a comparison between two states, two peoples, two histories and two cultures. In partial disculpation, I can only repeat to my twenty-five readers what Dr. Johnson said of dictionaries, “No dictionary is perfect, but any is better than none.”

Video “Goodbye Gorbachev” — https://youtu.be/Zei7elnxJ0s

Bye bye 1991-2022

January 10, 2023

by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted

2023 starts with collective NATO in Absolutely Freak Out Mode as Russian Defense Minister Shoigu announces that Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov is now on tour – complete with a set of Mr. Zircon’s hypersonic business cards.

The business tour will encompass the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and of course include the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire’s former Mare Nostrum. Mr. Zircon on the prowl has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine: it’s a sign of what happens next when it comes to frying much bigger fishes than a bunch of Kiev psychos.

The end of 2022 did seal the frying of the Big Ukraine Negotiation Fish. It has now been served on a hot plate – and fully digested. Moscow has made it painfully clear there’s no reason whatsoever to trust the “non-agreement capable” declining superpower.

So even taxi drivers in Dacca are now betting on when the much- vaunted “winter offensive” starts, and how far will it go. General Armageddon’s path ahead is clear: all-out demilitarization and de-electrification on steroids, complete with grinding up masses of Ukrainians at the lowest possible cost to the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass until Kiev psychos beg for mercy. Or not.

Another big fried fish on a hot plate at the end of 2022 was the 2014 Minsk Agreement. The cook was no other than former chancellor Merkel (“an attempt to buy time for Ukraine”). Implied is the not exactly smokin’ gun: the strategy of the Straussian/neo-con and neoliberal-con combo in charge of US foreign policy, from the beginning, was to unleash a Forever War, by proxy, against Russia.

Merkel may have been up to something telling the Russians, in their face, that she lied like crypto-Soprano Mike Pompeo, then she lied again and again, for years. That’s not embarrassing for Moscow, but for Berlin: yet another graphic demonstration of total vassalage to the Empire.

The response by the contemporary embodiment of Mercury, Russian Foreign Ministry’s Maria Zakharova, was equally intriguing: Merkel’s confession could be used as a specific reason – and evidence – for a tribunal judging Western politicians responsible for provoking the Russia-Ukraine proxy war.

No one will obviously confirm it on the record. But all this could be part of an evolving, secret Russia-Germany deal in the making, leading to Germany restoring at least some of its sovereignty.

Time to fry NATO fish

Meanwhile, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, visibly relishing his totally unplugged incarnation, expanded on the Fried Negotiation Fish saga. “Last warning to all nations”, as he framed it: “there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world [because] it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything….From now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power… There is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason.”

Medvedev, significantly, recited more or less the same script, in person, to Xi Jinping in Beijing, days before the zoom to end all zooms – between Xi and Putin – that worked as a sort of informal closure of 2022, with the Russia-China strategic partnership perfectly in synch.

On the war front, General Armageddon’s new – offensive – groove is bound to lead in the next few months to an undisputable fact on the ground: a partition between a dysfunctional black hole or rump Ukraine on the west, and Novorossiya in the east.

Even the IMF is now reluctant to throw extra funds into the black hole. Kiev’s 2023 budget has an – unrealistic – $36 billion deficit. Half of the budget is military-related. The real deficit in 2022 was running at about $5 billion a month – and will inevitably balloon.

Tymofiy Mylovanov, a professor at the Kiev School of Economics, came up with a howler: the IMF is worried about Ukraine’s “debt sustainability”. He added, “if even the IMF is worried, imagine what private investors are thinking”. There will be no “investment” in rump Ukraine. Multinational vultures will grab land for nothing and whatever puny productive assets may remain.

Arguably the biggest fish to be fried in 2023 is the myth of NATO. Every serious military analyst, few Americans included, knows that the Russian Army and military industrial complex represents a superior system than what existed at the end of the USSR, and far superior to that of the US and the rest of NATO today.

The Mackinder-style final blow to a possible alliance between Germany (EU), Russia and China – which is what is really behind the US proxy war in Ukraine – is not proceeding according to the Straussian wet dream.

Saddam Hussein, former imperial vassal, was regime-changed because he wanted to bypass the petrodollar. Now we have the inevitable rise of the petroyuan – “in three to five years”, as Xi Jinping announced in Riyadh: you just can’t prevent it with Shock’n Awe on Beijing.

In 2008, Russia embarked on a massive rebuilding of missile forces and a 14-year plan to modernize land-based armed forces. Mr. Zircon presenting his hypersonic business card across the Mare Nostrum is just a small part of the Big Picture.

The myth of US power

The CIA abandoned Afghanistan in a humiliating retreat – even ditching the heroin ratline – just to relocate to Ukraine and continue playing the same old broken records. The CIA is behind the ongoing sabotage of Russian infrastructure – in tandem with MI6 and others. Sooner or later there will be blowback.

Few people – including CIA operatives – may know that New York City, for instance, may be destroyed with a single move: blowing up the George Washington bridge. The city can’t be supplied with food and most of its requirements without the bridge. The New York City electrical grid can be destroyed by knocking out the central controls; putting it back together could take a year.

Even trespassed by infinite layers of fog of war, the current situation in Ukraine is still a skirmish. The real war has not even started yet. It might – soon.

Apart from Ukraine and Poland there is no NATO force worth mentioning. Germany has a risible two-day supply of ammunition. Turkey will not send a single soldier to fight Russians in Ukraine.

Out of 80,000 US troops stationed in Europe, only 10% are weaponized. Recently 20,000 were added, not a big deal. If the Americans activated their troops in Europe – something rather ridiculous in itself – they would not have any place to land supplies or reinforcements. All airports and seaports would be destroyed by Russian hypersonic missiles in a matter of minutes – in continental Europe as well as the UK.

In addition, all fuel centers such as Rotterdam for oil and natural gas would be destroyed, as well as all military installations, including top American bases in Europe: Grafenwoehr, Hohenfels, Ramstein, Baumholder, Vilseck, Spangdahlem, and Wiesbaden in Germany (for the Army and Air Force); Aviano Air Base in Italy; Lajes Air Base in Portugal’s Azores islands; Naval Station Rota in Spain; Incirlik Air Base in Turkey; and Royal Air Force stations Lakenheath and Mildenhall in the UK.

All fighter jets and bombers would be destroyed – after they land or while landed: there would be no place to land except on the autobahn, where they would be sitting ducks.

Patriot missiles are worthless – as the whole Global South saw in Saudi Arabia when they tried to knock out Houthi missiles coming from Yemen. Israel’s Iron Dome can’t even knock out all primitive missiles coming from Gaza.

US military power is the supreme myth of the fish to be fried variety. Essentially they hide behind proxies – as the Ukraine Armed Forces. US forces are worthless except in turkey shoots as in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, against a disabled opponent in the middle of the desert with no air cover. And never forget how NATO was completely humiliated by the Taliban.

The final breaking point

2022 ended an era: the final breaking point of the “rules-based international order” established after the fall of the USSR.

The Empire entered Desperation Row, throwing everything and the kitchen sink – proxy war on Ukraine, AUKUS, Taiwan hysteria – to dismantle the set-up they created way back in 1991.

Globalization’s rollback is being implemented by the Empire itself. That ranges from stealing the EU energy market from Russia so the hapless vassals buy ultra-expensive US energy to smashing the entire semiconductor supply chain, forcibly rebuilding it around itself to “isolate” China.

The NATO vs. Russia war in Ukraine is just a cog in the wheel of the New Great Game. For the Global South, what really matters is how Eurasia – and beyond – are coordinating their integration process, from BRI to the BRICS+ expansion, from the SCO to the INSTC, from Opec+ to the Greater Eurasia Partnership.

We’re back to what the world looked like in 1914, or before 1939, only in a limited sense. There’s a plethora of nations struggling to expand their influence, but all of them are betting on multipolarity, or “peaceful modernization”, as Xi Jinping coined it, and not Forever Wars: China, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia and others.

So bye bye 1991-2022. The hard work starts now. Welcome to the New Great Game on crack.

A Rift in the Lute?

January 10, 2023

By Batiushka

A U.S. 51-star flag has already been created just in case there ever is a 51st state.

Foreword

Joke of the Decade from the quisling Stoltenberg: ‘NATO is united’. (Amazing what a few million dollars deposited into their bank accounts will do to some people’s sense of truth-telling. Ask the President of the Ukraine, if you do not believe me). Apparently, Stoltenberg has not heard of Greece and Türkiye (whose President the NATO US tried to assassinate). Or Romania and Hungary. Or try Germany and Poland. Many Non-Norwegians, for example all Germans and Poles, are aware that Germany and Poland are not on good terms. The current Polish government wants even more money back from Germany in war reparations – yes, for that war which ended 78 years ago.

Meanwhile the Germans continue to use the expression ‘polnische Wirtschaft’, literally ‘Polish economy’, meaning total chaos. And then there are Germans who would like Silesia back, those cities like Breslau and after all, why not Danzig? As for the provincial Polish obsession with recovering their ‘greatness’, a Polish Empire from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, by taking over and perhaps ethnically cleansing the western Ukraine (remember Akcija Visla in 1947; the parents of some of my best friends lived through it), Germans shake their heads in despair. However, there is also another international ‘rift in the lute’, or crack in the violin creating disharmony. It could be fatal. Read on.

London and Washington

Nationalism is always inherently narcissistic because it is all about imagined self-preening superiority. Once upon a time this was an imagined racial superiority, also known as racism. Thus, the British novelist Delderfield wrote a series of novels about the Victorians (1) called ‘God is an Englishman’. ‘Send them gunboats and missionaries’ (in that order), proclaimed the Victorians with their patronising ‘civilising’ mission. Their imperialist poet Kipling spoke of the Maxim gun and the Bible. Same thing. ‘Wogs begin at Calais’, proclaimed the splendid isolationists, right up until the 1950s. I remember a conversation a few years ago with an Indian, who told me that very, very few Indians had accepted Protestantism in India because, as he said, apart from anything else, Protestant English ‘missionaries’ had told Indians that if they wanted to become Protestants (or ‘Christians’, as the Victorians miscalled it), they would first have to agree to wearing trousers. In other words, it was never an issue of faith or the spiritual, but of becoming second-class Englishmen.

A century later the same mentality came to rule over the USA, where it was called ‘White Supremacism’ and the people who accepted it were called WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. However, that is now all taboo. There is no such thing as racial superiority among modern woke Americans, only of moral superiority. This is in fact even more insulting and condescending nonsense, which means the acceptance of ‘our’ values, i.e. ‘freedom and democracy’. Thus, Victorian London imposed the Puritan Englishman as the model for salvation (‘wash more often and your skin will become as white as ours’), whereas ‘liberal’ Washington says ‘wear jeans and trainers, eat at MacDonalds, drink coca cola and watch Disney, and you too will be saved, even though you are the wrong skin colour’. Same old, same old.

Greatness and Decline

Among the Victorians there were politicians with personalities: Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone, the only one adored by Bulgarians. Of course, the first two were obnoxious imperialists – but they did have personalities. Among them we can also include the Kurd-gassing Churchill and the Pinochet-loving Thatcher. They were Victorians in their mentality. Racist to the core. But they did have personalities. It seems now that they were the last of the line.

After Thatcher came a series of nonentities, the believing in his own delusions Blair and then in 2022 the three geniuses: Johnson, whose name is now a synonym for a buffoon; Truss, who gave the world a new word, a ‘Trussism’, e.g. ‘Peru is the capital of Africa’ or ‘Inflation is overcome by printing more money’; and then there is the Indian banker, sunny Sunak, not quite a billionaire, but well on his way:

Say no more.

Such British geniuses should recall that the neocons who run NATO and then think that if they extend their war in the Ukraine and hope to drag it out for a decade or so, that will destroy Russia. Clearly, they live not in the real world, but in a virtual world. The longer it lasts, the greater the damage to the West. This is what they will create: Civil war in the USA. Bankruptcy in the UK. Collapse in Germany. Revolt in France and Southern Europe. Chaos in Eastern Europe. The end of NATO. The trouble is that, as Col. Douglas MacGregor always quotes his Spanish NATO friend as saying: ‘The USA is not another country, it is another planet’. Having been to different parts of the USA four times, visiting from the Old World, I can confirm the words of the Spanish officer.

Continents and Islands

The point is that those who live on Continents are always pragmatists. They have to be. They have to live alongside those who have different religions and therefore different cultures, speak different languages and eat different food. No American-style ‘one size fits all’ here. However, the UK is an island. When you live on an island, you can run away to Dunkirk and go home for cups of tea in Brexitland, as the Germans call it. Britain can be to the USA what New Zealand is to Australia, i. e. a bit of a joke, as Texans say, ‘that iddy-biddy liddle island off the coast of Europe’.

So, before you make the choice, just remember that the USA is also an island. Or more precisely Northern America (the USA and the Frozen North, also called Canada, is an island. (Mexico is neither South, nor Central, America, but it still belongs to Latin America, not Northern America; remember Trump’s promised wall?). And since Northern America is thousands of kilometres away from any Continent, it is not like Britain, thirty kilometres from a Continent, but a very insular island.

And just remember that if you want to be taken over by Washington and become the 51^st State, the Americans are really bad losers. Bad losers are those who if they can’t have what they want, throw their toys out of the pram and destroy everything. They would sooner choose self-destruction, as they cannot destroy others. Coming second is not an option for bad losers. And when their toys are nuclear, be careful. The British, say what you will, are not like that. (Probably because they have been coming second for a whole century now, so they have an awful lot of experience).

Bad Losers

I can think of half a dozen examples, but the most ‘actuel’, as the French say, is Meghan Markle. Here we are, the American actress who wanted to become a Princess, so then she could be ‘the Queen of England’. They would not let her, as she came too late and snatched the wrong baby, the ‘Spare’ (Harry) and not the Heir (William). In any case, William sems to have some backbone, whereas the depraved, drug-taking, Afghan-murdering Harry appears to be the classic weak-willed man, who will do anything, including maligning his own family, for the sake of going to bed with an American actress. (Remember his great-great uncle, the Hitler-saluting Edward VIII?) Another case of Hugh Grant and the strong American woman. And Meghan Markle has simply thrown her toys out of her pram, because she could not get her way, using Harry as her ventriloquist’s dummy. The classic American bad loser. It is a bit like homosexuals who are in denial: ‘I hate you and I am jealous of you because you are normal and therefore I am going to destroy you’. And that is what necons, Victoria Nuland a prime example, do.

Now this family argument between Harry and the Family Business in itself is not about the big political questions, but it is symptomatic of the ‘special relationship’ (i.e. London licking the boots of Washington every time Washington has walked on some turd). The fact is that the German House of Windsor is on its way out, Harry, Duke of California, or not. The fact is that there is no war between the Ukraine and Russia. The war is between Washington and Moscow, and quite a few British people are starting to cotton on to this fact. The Ukrainians, like most Western Europeans, including the British, are just naïve pawns in the Great American Game in their struggle to maintain their world domination. And therefore Britain is going to have a choice to make quite soon. Neither the dying and obsolete gerontocracy of the grandchildren of Nazis, known as the EU, nor insular English nationalist Brexit, but Eurasia or the 51^st State. Choose wisely. You might get a better deal from those who are 21 miles away than from those who are 3,000 miles away.

Johnson, who was born in New York and Sunak who studied at Stanford, be careful of bad losers. They can get you into big trouble, especially if they decide to throw their nuclear toys out of their pram on top of you. As the Victorian poet Lord Tennyson wrote in 1859:

It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute.

9 January 2023

Note:

1. Just for the sake of historical accuracy, let it be said that the whole 19^th century period is miscalled ‘Victorian’. It should have been called Alexandrinian, as Queen Victoria’s real first name was Alexandrina, held in honour of her godfather, Tsar Alexander I.