China Will Burst NATO’s Inflated Delusions

May 26, 2023

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Natasha Wright is а linguist and translator by profession and an aspiring political analyst. As is often the case, life takes us along its meandering pathways (her name and surname is a pen name thanks to her personal life history). Hopefully, she will go the same route as Noam Chomsky did, from the most profound linguistics to thought-provoking political writing.

Natasha Wright

The situation will in all likelihood turn sour even more because NATO cannot stop its woeful warmongering and waging endless wars.

We are living in turbulent times indeed. Vital volumes of history are being written right before our very eyes.

You may have noticed that “Dr Doom” is sending out doom-and-gloom messages yet again. Fortune reported back in April that Nouriel Roubini (aka Dr Doom) is warning of painful stagflation caused by a new Cold War with China and the balkanization of the global economy.

Al Jazeera also reported on Roubini’s downcast views, saying, “the world is headed for dark times in the next 20 years.”

No wonder Dr Doom, who leapt to financial stardom by predicting an economic catastrophe in 2008, is now warning the world that the conflict between the United States and China is simmering – and surely not only in the area of economics.

However, the global situation is so frighteningly serious that it will most surely crescendo into a double-dip recession for a plethora of other factors as well as from the prevailing sentiments in the Pentagon predicting a forthcoming war with China.

We are living through truly turbulent times. There are countless politically crucial things happening globally that boggle the mind. If one remembers the events only this January when Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, visited Japan and Korea, one can sense, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “something rotten in the state of NATOstan”.

During the course of both fleeting visits, Stoltenberg pledged to foster bilateral relations due to the historic challenges that NATO is dealing with, such as the war in Ukraine. He went on to brag that NATO already has established liaison offices globally, the main ones in New York and Vienna, and particularly indicative is the one in Ukraine. At its foundation at the inception of the Cold War in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization comprised 12 nations set up at the behest of the U.S. The military bloc now comprises 31 members and is increasingly appointing itself with a global role.

As a reminder, NATO already has permanent liaison offices in the following countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. A proposed Japan office caused considerable commotion.

NATO claims to be based on the right of states to determine their own foreign policy and to exercise collective self-defense. Despite lofty claims of upholding “democratic values”, the U.S.-dominated military alliance has been strong-arming a number of countries to join without their populations exercising a democratic mandate by holding referenda.

NATO likes turning its alleged allies into geopolitical dwarves held at gunpoint, regardless of their size or geography. Claims by the military bloc – that opening a regional liaison office in East Asia is merely an indicator of changing global security environment – sound euphemistic.

Some political analysts have observed that if NATO meanders into Asian affairs it will likely bring Russia and China even closer together. Ironically, the expansionism of the U.S.-led military bloc brings with it self-fulfilling prophecies. The global insecurity it incessantly warns about is of its own perception and making.

Nevertheless, Beijing is fully aware that if NATO places its head in a crouching tiger’s mouth, then one day it might get bitten off.

NATO has already brutally provoked the war in Ukraine, yet now the U.S.-led military vehicle wants to expand to the Far East. Its solicitous focus on Japan is particularly alarming given the vile history of Japanese genocidal aggression toward China.

That is a toxic thorn for China stuck into Asia and it will be therefore pulled out, according to the Global Times. The news outlet can be seen as reflecting the thinking of the political leadership in Beijing. The Chinese are thus fully aware of NATO’s encroaching thorns and they will not be sleep walking into disaster.

The Global Times continued: “Japan should not forget that while the Meiji Restoration made it richer and stronger, it also brought about the Westernization of Japan and its policy of leaving Asia and entering Europe, which at one time made the desire for empire extremely strong. The madness of pursuing Asian hegemony and sphere of influence led it to become a militaristic war-mongering demon, which brought deep disaster to Asian countries.”

Moreover, the Global Times’ editorial warned: “Japan wants to introduce NATO into Asia for its security. However, Japan’s security can never be achieved by relying on the military support of the U.S. or NATO. In fact, the more closely Japan cooperates with the U.S. or NATO militarily, the less it will obtain the security it wants, and the less likely it will be able to change its image as a geo-strategic dwarf.”

Don’t you just love how Beijing is calling a NATO spade a spade? “The sewage of the Cold War,” is how the Global Times referred to the U.S.-led military bloc.

And all that comes in perfect unison with Moscow’s increasingly contemptuous views of NATO as a threat to world security.

Lest we forget, the United States has instigated the vast majority (80 per cent) of the 200 or so armed conflicts that are estimated to have occurred globally from the end of World War Two until 2001. If we include the post-9/11 decades up to the present, the American responsibility for global violence might be as high as 90-95 per cent. And this is for a nation whose population is only 4.25 per cent of the globe. How utterly nefarious and condemnable is that odious record?

Shall we now mention some significant military mathematics? The Economist reports on research comparing military power of the U.S. vs China. The U.S. military budget is four times bigger than that of China. But the Chinese Navy surpassed the U.S. Navy as the biggest in the world sometime around 2020. The Pentagon continues using euphemisms, such as it considers China a “pacing challenge”.

The dilemma that appears to exasperate Western military commanders is whether China can continue on the same path and expand its military capacity to challenge the U.S. hegemony, or whether China’s relative power might be reaching its peak. The shipbuilding industry requires exorbitant investment since it requires a booming industrial base. The dilemma for the U.S. is its economic stagnation and the number of its warships are declining, in contrast to a sharp increase in the number of Chinese ships.

As for the total number of military vessels from aircraft carriers to submarines, frigates and destroyers, China surpasses the U.S. by a ratio of 390:296. It is forecast that China will have 400 warships in the next two years whereas the number of American ones will decrease to around 290. The ones which have fallen into obsolescence are to be written off. The Chinese advantage stems from having the biggest shipbuilding industry in the world. Some 44 per cent of all the ships built worldwide in 2021 were from Chinese yards.

China and its military forces are currently fully focused on Taiwan whereas the U.S. forces are scattered around globally in over 800 bases owing to untenable hegemonic ambitions. China has pledged to reclaim Taiwan if necessary by force, so tensions are running high on both sides.

Time though works in Beijing’s favor.

In the long run, the situation will in all likelihood turn sour even more because NATO cannot stop its woeful warmongering and waging endless wars.

Also by this author

• Unipolar World in Retrospect and the Onset of Multipolarity
• Defeated NATO and Kiev Will Soon Say ‘A Frozen Conflict Anyone?’
• Something Is Rotten in Schmutzig Switzerland
• The Great Chinese Can-Can Twist and Turn for Emmanuel Macron
• The U.S. Political and Financial Frankenstein Is Well and Truly Out

G7 Desecrates Hiroshima A-Bomb Memory With Warmongering Summit

May 19, 2023

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The Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.

The United States-led “Group of Seven” cabal held one of their increasingly meaningless jamborees this weekend in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The posturing of solemnity by these warmongering elites in a place that represents the ultimate barbarity of American imperialism is not only sickening in its hypocrisy and profanity. The evident lack of awareness and shame of these charlatans is a sure sign that their privileged historical charade is coming to an end.

American President Joe Biden took time out from his nation’s collapsing economy and scandals over his rampant family corruption to attend the G7 summit in Japan. He was joined by so-called leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada as well as the premier of the host nation, Fumio Kishida. Joining the lackeys was the European Union’s chief ventriloquist doll, Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukrainian comedian-turned-arms-dealer, aka “president”, Vladimir Zelensky.

The proceedings began with a cynical and disingenuous “dedication” at the Hiroshima Peace Park whose centerpiece is the Genbaku Dome, the iconic spectral ruin caused by the U.S. atomic bombing in 1945. The very gathering of leaders at this sacred place is the same people who are criminally pushing the world toward another conflagration.

Biden and his cronies soon dispensed with hollow talk about “peace” and “nuclear disarmament” to make the G7 summit a rallying call for more hostility toward Russia and China. There were plans for more economic warfare (sanctions) against Moscow, which was vilified as usual for “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine. There were pledges of supplying more weapons to the powder keg that the U.S. and its NATO partners have created in Ukraine. There were high-handed dismissals of international diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, which have been proposed by China, and Latin American and African nations.

The U.S.-led G7 camarilla also made their hate fest a forum for drumming up more hostility toward China, accusing Beijing of building up nuclear arms and threatening the world.

In short, the Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.

Seventy-eight years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8.15 am, the US Air Force Enola Gay B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb on the city. The resulting death toll would be 140,000, mainly civilians, many of them instantly incinerated, others dying from horrendous burns and radiation poisoning. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

History has shown that there was no military need to use such weapons of mass destruction. Official American reasoning ostensibly about hastening the end of the Pacific War can now be seen as a flagrant lie. The bombs were deliberately used by the United States in a demonstration of state terrorism especially directed at its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Arguably, these grotesque genocidal crimes sealed the beginning of the Cold War. This horrific demarcation was how the U.S.-led Western imperialist system would try to control the postwar world.

The same deplorable and criminal Cold War mentality persists among the U.S. rulers and their Western minions. Washington needs wars and conflict to maintain its untenable hegemonic ambitions along with its Western satraps who are equally complicit. The barbarous power structure can only be sustained by “ideological projections” designating “enemies” and “threats” that, in turn, provide cover for the otherwise unacceptable barbarism and warmongering. The Soviet Union was the “enemy”, then it became “Islamic terrorists”, and now it’s Russia and China.

The ideological projection also casts a narcissistic image of America and its Western allies as benevolent, peace-loving, democratic, law-abiding, and so on. It’s an almost incredible feat of global gaslighting and inversion of reality; made possible largely by mass disinformation via the Western corporate media/propaganda system. Thankfully, that charade is becoming threadbare too.

One indicator this week was a study by the respected Brown University’s Cost of War project which estimated the number killed just over the past two decades from U.S.-led wars at 4.5 million. All told, since the end of World War Two estimates of deaths from American wars of aggression around the world are in the order of 20-30 million. No other nation in history comes close to the destructiveness of U.S. power, which laughably declares itself the “leader of the free world”, the “democratic upholder of rules-based order”.

The United States has devolved into a monstrous imperialist rogue state that is addicted to war, conflict, mass killing and even threats of annihilation in order to prop up its corporate capitalist economy. Its accumulated record $31 trillion of national debt speaks of the chronic disease and its moribund dollar lifeline.

Yet, Washington’s ideological pretensions – sustained and promulgated by a subservient corporate media/propaganda system – have the absurd audacity to paint Russia, China and other nations as “threats” to international peace.

The war in Ukraine has been at least nine years in the making. Even NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg brazenly admits the preparation for war against Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The war is playing out now in a way that vividly manifests the psychopathic logic of the U.S. rulers and their Western lackeys. Britain has emerged as Uncle Sam’s righthand henchman for provoking escalation, the latest provocation to Russia being the supply of long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles capable of striking Crimea. Already, Russian civilians have been casualties from these British munitions. This is like Part Two of the slaughter-fest madness of Britain’s Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea War (1853-56). Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is another contemptible diversity cut-out figure. Dweebs like him, Biden, Scholz, Trudeau, Macron, Meloni and Von der Leyen should be marched off to the dock for war crimes.

The relentless logic of war compelled by American hegemonic ambitions means that the world is being pushed to the brink of world war again. The same imperialist tendencies that created two previous world wars are reaching fever-pitch again.

Hiroshima is an obscene reminder of war and in particular U.S.-led war. It is truly disturbing that an American president and his Western elite flunkies were paying homage to victims of an atomic holocaust while at the same insanely making plans for intensifying aggression toward Russia and China.

The arrogant American rulers have never even offered an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, they persist in claiming righteousness. Biden over the weekend added insult to travesty when he declared that Japan would be offered “protection” from America’s “nuclear umbrella” against alleged Chinese expansionism. This was stated by the leader of a nation that is ringing China with military bases, missile systems, naval firepower and nuclear-capable bombers. Japan’s abject premier Fumio Kishida actually thanked Biden and declared that the U.S. was a force for peace in the world.

In any case, the G7 is becoming a global irrelevance. It is a relic of former American imperial might. The “rich club” used to command half of the world’s economy, it is now down to 30 per cent and falling. The emerging multipolar world led by China, Russia, the Global South and many others, the BRICS, ASEAN, ALBA, EEA, SCO, are all testimony to the waning American Empire and its rapidly declining dollar dominance. The G7 doesn’t even make any pretence about helping the global economy and development. It has become a bellicose vehicle emitting desperate warmongering by a crumbling hegemonic system.

Only in the fairytale realm of Western media/propaganda could such a vile charade at Hiroshima be projected. To the rest of the world, it is utterly sickening.

Sudan: The new geopolitical battlefield between east and west?

May 02 2023

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Photo Credit: The Cradle

The potential outbreak of a civil war sparked by a factional fight within Sudan’s military government poses a destabilization threat beyond the nation’s borders – into Africa, West Asia, and the emerging multipolar order. This suits the west just fine.

By Matthew Ehret

he story of Sudan is one of contrasts and contradictions. It is a country with tremendous potential and resources, yet it is plagued by poverty, conflict, and exploitation. The forces currently pulling Sudan apart are complex and multifaceted, but one thing is certain: the future of this nation is inextricably linked to the broader geopolitical landscape.

In order to fully comprehend the dynamics of this growing conflict, it is essential to look beyond Sudan’s borders. Attention must be paid to the broader geopolitical chemistry at play in the Horn of Africa, the Persian Gulf, the wider West Asian region, and even Ukraine.

Once the largest African nation with a population of 46 million and the third largest landmass, Sudan underwent a seismic shift in 2011 with a western-championed Balkanization, which divided the country into a “Muslim north” and a “Christian/Animist south.”

Extremes of wealth and poverty  

The country is blessed with one of the most water-rich zones of the earth. The White and Blue Niles combine to form the Nile River, which flows northward into Egypt. Sudan’s water abundance is complemented by fertile soil and immense deposits of gold and oil.

The majority of these resources are located in the south, creating a convenient geological divide that western strategists have exploited for over a century to promote secession.

Despite its abundance of resources, Sudan is also one of the poorest nations in the world. Thirty-five percent of its population lives in extreme poverty, and a staggering 20 million people – or 50 percent of the population – suffer from food insecurity.

Although Sudan achieved political independence in 1956, like many other former colonies, it was never truly economically independent. The British utilized a strategy they had previously employed before leaving India in 1946 – divide and conquer – carving out “northern” and “southern” tribes, which led to civil wars that began months before Sudan’s independence in 1956.

General against General

After achieving independence in 2011, South Sudan was plunged into a brutal civil war that lasted for seven years. In the meantime, the north was hit by two coups; the first in 2019, which ousted President Omar al-Bashir, and the second in 2021, resulting in the current power-sharing military-led transitional government led by the president of the Sovereign Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

It is these two former allies-turned-rivals who now find themselves at the center of the conflict pulling Sudan in two opposing directions against the backdrop of the rapidly developing multipolar order.

Following the 2021 coup in Sudan, the two rival generals, Dagalo and Burhan, continued the momentum toward building large-scale projects. China funded a program to rehabilitate 4725 km of defunct colonial-era railways connecting the port of Sudan to Darfur and Chad.

A recent report by The Cradle suggests that if peace is maintained in the Horn of Africa and the new Iran-Saudi Arabia entente results in a durable peace process in Yemen, then the revival of the Bridge of the Horn of Africa project, which was last proposed in 2010, could become a reality.

Global South benefits from China-Russia co-op

In the past decade, the strategic partnership between China and Russia has been rapidly gaining favor among countries in the Global South. With the five BRICS member states accounting for over 3.2 billion people and 31.5 percent of global GDP, China and Russia have been providing financial support for major infrastructure, water, and energy projects while also backing the military needs of nations facing destabilization.

This has set the stage for a new era of geo-economics based on mutually beneficial cooperation. The Horn of Africa, which includes North and South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya, has been drawn into this positive dynamic of peace and development.

Ethiopia was able to end its 20-year conflict with neighboring Eritrea in 2018 and put down a potential civil war in November 2022. Furthermore, China’s diplomatic efforts facilitated a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, while even Syria has seen a new hope emerge with the Arab League’s consensus that the US-led regime change doctrine against President Bashar al-Assad is over.

Sudan’s multipolar prospects

While the cause of the recent violence in Sudan remains uncertain, there are some things that are known. Prior to the recent outbreak of violence that claimed nearly 500 lives, Sudan was making significant strides toward consolidating its participation in the emerging multipolar alliance.

This included Sudan’s submission of a request to join the BRICS+ alliance along with 19 other nations, including resource-rich African states such as Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. Sudan’s decision to grant Russia full use of the Port of Sudan and engage in large-scale economic development with China, Russia, Egypt, and Kuwait was viewed as a positive development by many but drew threats of “consequences” from the US Ambassador John Godfrey.

In April 2021, agreements were signed to build a 900 km Egypt-Sudan railway connecting Aswan to Sudan’s Wadi Halfa and Khartoum. In June 2022, a Joint Ethiopia-Sudan government commissioned feasibility study was finished outlining a 1522 km standard gauge railway connecting Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa to Khartoum and the Port of Sudan.

In January 2022, China pledged financial and technical support to extend Kenya’s 578 km Mombasa-Nairobi railway to Uganda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as Ethiopia, where the Chinese-built Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway was completed in 2017. In this comprehensive project, extensions into Eritrea were included.

Railway lines in the African continent

The revival of the Jonglei Canal

Water and oil are both abundant resources in South Sudan, making the region’s security a top priority for Beijing’s African interests. Despite this abundance, the country’s infrastructure is poor, leaving it with no means to move these resources to market or use them for industrial purposes.

Water is just as geopolitically important as oil, if not more so. Thus, nearly forty years ago, the Jonglei Canal project was launched, which aimed to connect the White and Blue Nile in South Sudan, creating a 360 km canal that would divert water runoff from the Upper White Nile.

The canal would result in 25 million cubic meters of water per day being directed north into Egypt, while 17,000 square kilometers of swamp land would be transformed into agricultural land. The project would make the desert land bloom in Egypt and northern Sudan, turning the Sahel into the breadbasket of Africa. However, the project was stopped after 250 km had been dug by a German-made Bucketwheel 2300-ton, laser-guided digging machine.

The secessionist southern Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), led by western-educated John Garang De Mabior, launched a civil war in 1983 and kidnapped the machine’s operators, effectively halting the project. Notably, De Mabior’s 1981 doctoral dissertation in the US focused on the environmental damage that the Jonglei Canal would cause if not managed correctly.

Muddying the waters

Despite former President Omar al-Bashir’s attempts to restart this project since 1989 – until the 2011 partition of Sudan – constant destabilizations never permitted this project’s revival.

Things began turning around when, on February 28, 2022, South Sudan’s Vice President for Infrastructure, General Taban Deng Gai, called for the resumption of the Jonglei Canal, saying:

“We, the people in Bentiu and Fangak, have no place to stay. We may migrate to Eastern Nuer [eastern bank of the White Nile] because we have lost our land to flooding … People are asking who opened this huge volume of water because we never experienced this for decades. Of course, Uganda and Kenya opened the water, because Kampala was almost submerged because of the rising level of water from Lake Victoria. The digging of the Jonglei Canal that was stopped needs to be revised … For our land not to be submerged by flood, let’s allow this water to flow to those who need it in Egypt.”

General Taban referenced a UN Report detailing the 380,000 civilians displaced due to recent Sudd Wetland flooding and stated: “The solution lies in opening the waterways and resuming the drilling of the Jonglei Canal, based on the conditions and interest of South Sudan in the first place.”

General Taban had worked closely with South Sudan’s Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Manawa Gatkouth, who had been the first to revive this project since the 2011 partition, submitting a proposal to the South Sudan Transitional Council in December 2021.

This proposal grew directly out of agreements to build cooperative water projects that Gatkouth reached with the Egyptian government in September 2020.

At the time, the Egyptian minister of water resources stated that “Egypt would increase the number of development projects for collecting and storing rainwater, with the aim of serving the South Sudanese people.”

Boots on the ground: The west returns

Expectedly, the Sudanese crisis has drawn attention due to the involvement of Anglo-American military forces. On 23 April, US President Joe Biden announced a War Powers Resolution to deploy troops in Sudan, Djibouti, and Ethiopia.

Where all other nations quickly moved to remove their citizens and diplomatic staff out of harm’s way, 16,000 US civilians have been left without support, providing a convenient excuse to insert US military forces into the picture to “restore order.”

US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland’s surprise appearance in the region on 9 March is also worth noting. One of the key architects of Ukraine’s transformation into a confrontational state against Russia, Nuland bragged during her visit that she discussed a “democratic transition in Sudan,” along with her humanitarian concerns for Somalia and Ethiopia.

Sudan, incidentally, is dependent on wheat imports, 85 percent of which originate from Ukraine and Russia.

To date, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds over 300 separate civil society organizations in Africa, and at least 13 in Sudan – all of which use the tried and tested tactic of weaponizing pro-west local liberals to destroy their own nations under the cover of “democracy building,” human rights, and “anti-corruption” actions.

Conversely, the Global South increasingly views the rising multipolar powers China, Russia, and their growing coterie of allies, as advancing a non-hypocritical approach to supporting vital infrastructure projects and genuine national interests.

These new actors on the international stage prioritize the completion of large-scale water, food, energy, and transportation networks, which not only benefit all the involved parties, but also positively impact regions beyond national borders.

These transformative projects, such as Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), promote unity and progress by overcoming the tribalism, bigotry, poverty, and scarcity that the west has historically relied on to sow conflict. By increasing education levels and providing quality jobs across tribal and national boundaries, economic development ignites dignity and innovation that poses a threat to oligarchs with imperialistic tendencies.

While the causes of the Sudan crisis are not fully understood, it is clear that there are powerful forces at work seeking to shape the outcome for their own benefit. However, the answer to Sudan’s problems lies in a different approach – one that prioritizes infrastructure development and nation-building rather than narrow geopolitical interests and regime change.

The U.S. Proxy War Against Russia & China Is Increasingly Seen Globally As A Disaster Made By American And NATO Lies

April 28, 2023

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The proxy war in Ukraine is an imperialist adventure that has been financially ruinous, has destroyed Ukraine, and is driving a dangerous all-out war with Russia and China that could turn into a nuclear armageddon.

It has become patently obvious to the world that the conflict in Ukraine is a dirty and desperate geopolitical confrontation, despite massive Western media efforts to portray it as something else more noble – the usual charade of chivalry and virtue to disguise naked Western imperialism.

The death and destruction in Ukraine is nothing but a proxy war by the United States and its NATO partners to defeat Russia in a strategic gambit. But the unspoken objective does not end with Russia. The U.S. and its Western imperialist lackeys are driven to push for confrontation with China too.

As if taking on Russia is not reckless enough! The Western powers want to double down on their warmongering with China. This is all because the underlying impetus is for Washington and its Western minions to promote U.S.-led dominance of the global order. Russia and China are the main obstacles to that path of would-be dominance, and hence we see this manic drive for aggression stemming from Washington, the executive power of the Western order.

It should be obvious that while the U.S.-led NATO axis has stoked the war in Ukraine to calamitous heights, this same axis is wantonly inciting tensions with China. This observation alone should be enough to condemn the criminality of Western powers.

This week saw the NATO powers deliver depleted uranium weapons to the Kiev regime, while the United States announced that it would be docking submarine nuclear warheads in South Korea, a move that infuriated China which pointed out that Washington was violating decades-old commitments to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. Of course, such perverse provocation is par for the course as far as Washington is concerned. It is done deliberately in a conscious effort to exacerbate tensions and escalate militarism. Peace and security are anathemas to the U.S. (and its minions) whose whole ideological raison d’être is to aggravate war to gratify corporate capitalist addiction – a system that is increasingly bankrupt and dysfunctional, and hence the insane desperation for craving “war-fixes”.

In a scathing speech to the United Nations Security Council this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserted that the conflict in Ukraine cannot be properly resolved without an understanding of the geopolitical context. In other words, the war in the former Soviet republic which erupted last February has bigger causes than what the Western powers and their compliant news media would try to pretend otherwise.

Defense of Ukraine? Defense of democracy? Defense of international law? Defense of national sovereignty? These are some of the laughable claims made by Washington and its allies. One only has to consider the decades of total trashing of the UN Charter and democratic principles by the United States and its rogue partners in their pursuit of criminal wars to realize that their virtue-signaling over Ukraine is a vile joke.

Lavrov’s address to the Security Council was a stunning rebuke of the hypocrisy and criminality of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other NATO powers, as well as the European Union. His speech was akin to the scene in the classic old movie The Wizard of Oz when the curtain was pulled back on the buffoonish villain for all to see. Any objective observer would agree with the Russian foreign minister’s excoriating survey of modern history and why the war in Ukraine has tragically manifested. Lamentably, if we fail to understand history and the real causes of conflicts, then we are condemned to repeat the horrors.

Ironically, Western leaders have at times revealed the bigger geopolitical agenda with their own misspoken arrogant words. U.S. President Joe Biden had previously blurted out a call for regime change in Moscow while his senior aides, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, have succumbed to the intoxication of their narcissism and hubris by saying that the purpose of the war in Ukraine is the “defeat of Russia”.

Other NATO senior figures, such as the stupid, conceited Polish leaders and their Baltic buddies, have also come out and stated that the war’s ulterior agenda is to vanquish Russia. The fascist skeletons of their Nazi-collusion past have resurrected their deathly rattles, uncontrollably.

As Lavrov’s address to the Security Council intimates, the systematic violation of the UN Charter by the United States and its Western partners is a deplorable continuation of the Nazi fascism and imperialist barbarism that was supposed to have been defeated in World War Two. The culmination of the constant, unbridled Western imperialist criminality and its state terrorism is the current war in Ukraine and the growing aggression toward China over Taiwan as a pretext.

In all of this, woefully, the Western public has been flagrantly lied to by their governments and media as to the real nature of the war in Ukraine. American and European citizens have been bilked for hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up a Nazi regime in Kiev whose function is to act as a NATO spear-tip against Russia, and ultimately China when the NATO powers feel they are done with Ukraine. (The latter is a futile ambition, as is becoming increasingly evident.)

Journalists and antiwar activists in the West who highlight the malfeasance over Ukraine are either sacked, vilified, censored, or sanctioned into poverty, or even imprisoned.

Nevertheless, the Western public and the rest of the world are increasingly becoming aware of the odious charade. By definition, charades are inevitably untenable.

The Global South – the majority of the 193 nations at the UN – has had it with Western capitalist hegemony and its outrageous neocolonialist privileges. The incremental dumping of the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency for trade is a testament to the historic shift towards a multipolar order in defiance of Western unipolar elitism. The nations of Africa, Latin America and Asia understand that the U.S.-led NATO war in Ukraine is a desperate last-ditch bid to preserve an imperialist global order which should have been eradicated after World War Two with the establishment of the United Nations, but which, regrettably, was not. Because the root cause of imperialism is the AngloAmerican-led Western capitalist order. The end of World War Two, as with World War One, was but a pause in the historical killing machine.

It is now increasingly evident in the light of leaked documents from the Pentagon that the war in Ukraine is a disaster. The Kiev regime is facing defeat at the hands of superior Russian forces even though that regime has been flooded with weapons by the United States and NATO. Great expectations of a Ukrainian victory that were widely predicted by Western leaders and media have been shown to be empty, contemptible lies.

The side-show of this war is a gargantuan racket. Western arms companies have raked in unprecedented profits, while the NATO-backed cabal in Kiev has skimmed off hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the same Kiev regime that is burning down Orthodox Christian churches, exterminating the Russian language, lionizing World War Two Nazi criminals, and locking up any critical opposition and media.

But the main takeaway is the lies that the United States and Western lackeys, including the entire media industry, have been telling about the proxy war in Ukraine. This war is an imperialist adventure that has been financially ruinous, has destroyed Ukraine, and is driving a dangerous all-out war with Russia and China that could turn into a nuclear armageddon.

We should not be surprised by such blatant lying and deception. President Joe Biden and his administration have been telling barefaced lies to conceal the corruption oozing out of Biden’s own family. Biden and his son Hunter have exploited Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 for personal enrichment. The president has even reportedly got his senior aides to do his bidding to censor intelligence agencies and media from revealing to the public the corruption at the heart of his family. (Risibly, the truth is smeared as Russian or Chinese disinformation!)

The lies that Biden and his administration tell about personal corruption are indelibly coupled with the lies told about the proxy war in Ukraine.

It is increasingly clear that the American public, the European public, and the rest of the world have been duped in multiple ways. The phony war in Ukraine is exposing the deep, stinking well of corruption in this White House. There will be hell to pay.

THE PRICE OF SOLIDARITY: PALESTINE, INDONESIA AND THE ENTITLEMENT OF WESTERN “HUMAN RIGHTS” ACTIVISM

APRIL 7TH, 2023

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By Ramzy Baroud

Some readers were unimpressed when I excitedly shared the news on social media that Indonesia had refused to host the Israeli team as part of the Under-20 World Cup,  scheduled from May 20 to June 11 in Indonesian cities.

Though any news related to Palestine and Israel often generates two sharply different kinds of responses, the latest act of Indonesian solidarity with the Palestinian people failed to impress even some pro-Palestine activists in the West. Their rationale had nothing to do with Palestine or Israel but the Indonesian government’s own human rights record.

This supposed dichotomy is as omnipresent as it is problematic. Some of the most genuine acts of solidarity with the Palestinians – or other oppressed nations in the Global South – tend to occur in other Southern nations and governments. But since the latter are frequently accused of poor human rights records by Western governments and West-based rights groups, these gestures of solidarity are often questioned as lacking substance.

Aside from the weaponization of human rights – and democracy – by Western governments, some of the concerns about human rights violations are worth a pause: can those who do not respect the rights of their own people be trusted to champion the rights of others?

THE LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS

Though intellectually intriguing, the argument, and the question, lack self-awareness, reek of entitlement, and reflect a poor understanding of history.

First, the lack of self-awareness. In the West, advocacy for Palestinian rights is predicated on reaching out, educating and lobbying some of the world’s most destructive colonial and neocolonial powers. This advocacy includes civil engagement with countries that have, for example, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, tormented Africa and continue to subjugate many nations in the Global South.

These Western governments were also the ones who either handed the deed of Palestine  – Britain – to the Zionist movement or sustained Israel militarily, financially and politically for generations – the US and others.

Even though little tangible progress has been recorded regarding substantive political shifts away from Israel, we continue to engage with these governments with the hope that a change will come.

Rarely do Western activists make arguments similar to those made against Indonesia – or other Asian, African, Arab or Muslim countries. Personally, never once have I been reminded of the moral conflict of pursuing solidarity from Western governments that have long invested in the oppression of the Palestinian people.

THE ENTITLEMENT

Second, the entitlement. For many years and, particularly since the end of World War II, western governments endeavored to serve the roles of judge, jury and executioner. They drafted international law yet selectively implemented it. They passed the Human Rights Declaration yet selfishly determined who deserves this humanity. They launched wars in the name of defending others, yet left in their wake more death and mayhem than existed prior to these ‘humanitarian interventions.’

Some human rights activists in the West rarely appreciate that their influence is primarily derived from their very geographic position and, more importantly, citizenship. This is why Hannah Arendt rightly argued that individuals could only enjoy human rights once they obtain the right to be citizens of a nation-state. “Human rights lose all their significance as soon as an individual loses her political context,” she wrote in her seminal book, The Right to Have Rights.

Though some activists have paid a heavy price for their genuine solidarity with the Palestinian people, others understand solidarity in purely conceptual terms, without considering the numerous political obstacles and, sometimes, compromises an occupied nation faces.

A protest in Jakarta against Israeli participation in the FIFA Under-20 World Cup in Indonesia, March 20, 2023. Achmad Ibrahim | AP

The fact that Palestinian civil societies launched the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement in 2005, in that particular order, reflects the awareness among Palestinians that it will take more than individual acts of solidarity to end the Israeli occupation and to dismantle Israeli apartheid. Divestment means that companies that benefit from the Israeli occupation must sever their ties with Israel – even if some of these companies may have questionable practices.

The same logic applies to sanctions, which require a strong political will by governments to ostracize Tel Aviv until it ends its occupation, respects international law and treats Palestinians as equal citizens.

If having a perfect human rights record is a prerequisite for government support, not many countries, if any, will qualify. Oppressed people simply cannot be so entitled, as they do not have the privilege or the leverage to shape a perfectly harmonious global solidarity.

A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORY

Finally, the need for a better understanding of history. Before the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Palestinian leadership and Israel in 1993, the term ‘human rights’ was an important component of the Palestinian struggle. But it was neither the only nor the main driving force behind the Palestinian quest for freedom. For Palestinians, all aspects of Palestinian resistance, including the pursuit of human rights, were parts of a larger liberation strategy.

Oslo changed all of that. It shunned such terms as resistance and redefined the Palestinian struggle from that of liberation to human rights. As a result, the Palestinian Authority respected its assigned task, and many Palestinians played along simply because they felt they had no other alternative.

Yet, by elevating the human rights discourse, Palestinians were entrapped in entirely Western priorities. Their language, which, in the past, was consistent with revolutionary lessons of anti-colonial movements in the Middle East, Africa and the rest of the Global South, was rejigged to appeal to Western expectations.

This should not suggest that anti-colonial movements did not champion human rights discourses. On the contrary, such lessons were at the core of millions of people’s valiant struggles and sacrifices worldwide. But for them, human rights was not an isolated moral position nor a political stance to be used or manipulated to highlight the moral superiority of the West over the rest or to sanction poor countries, often for the sake of exacting political or economic concessions.

Palestinians care deeply about the human rights of other nations. They ought to because they have experienced firsthand what it means to be stripped of their rights and humanity. But, also, they are in no position, nor should they seek one that would allow them to condition solidarity from others on the West’s politicized human rights agendas.

Iran Must Not Fall

February 11, 2023

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By Davor Slobodanvich Vuycachich

Nasser Kan’ani, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman, last month justifiably declared that the Western hybrid war, which has been continuously waged against Iran in military, economic, political and psychological campaigns, has suffered a complete failure. Precisely because of this, the USA is now rapidly preparing the military aggression of the unnatural coalition of Israel and regional Arab countries against Iran, which, along with Russia and China, is undoubtedly the biggest American enemy. The task of this military conglomerate would be to deal deadly blows to Iran that would lead to its disintegration and the establishment of a puppet regime on the remains of the country. There is no doubt that the USA could participate in the planned aggression. The recently held, largest in history, joint US-Israeli military exercises “Juniper Oak 23.2” clearly hint at such a possibility, although it is not impossible that the US’s European allies could also participate in this massive operation. Military analysts from the West estimate that a military intervention against Iran, a kind of repetition of what we have already seen in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, could begin this summer, but this publicly stated assessment is probably just an attempt at deliberate deception. There is evidence that the attack on Iran could happen much earlier.

The drone attacks on the Iranian city of Isfahan for which Israel is certainly responsible, either directly or through the use of Kurdish terrorists as its proxy military forces, was undoubtedly a deliberate provocation meant to force Iran into hasty and disproportionate retaliation. Such a reaction, no matter how justified it may be in fact, would be used by the US and Israel to portray Iran as an aggressor in front of the “international community”. The reporting of some Israeli media such as “The Times of Israel” in which they announced, or rather, wished for “Iranian retaliatory” attacks on Israeli civilian targets, clearly testifies to sinister intentions of Israel. Тhere is clearly an Israeli plan to provoke Iran as soon as possible. What we might soon expect are Israeli false flag operations that would be blamed on Iran. It is more likely that the territories of the Arab vassals of the US and Israel would be attacked, rather than Israel itself. In this way, Israel would also ensure the igniting of anti-Iranian hysteria among its Arab allies and at the same time ensure the earliest possible start of aggression against Iran, which is obviously very important to Israel. Namely, Iran should officially join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in April, which will bring it great international support. Israel is therefore in a hurry to start aggression before this happens because it mistakenly believes that in that case, it could avoid the wrath of Moscow and Beijing. Another reason for Israel’s haste is that in a little more than a month, Iran should receive at least 24 Su-35 multi-role fighters from Russia, for which it already has well-trained Iranian pilots. Finally, the US and Israel know that time will work against them if they allow the intensive military cooperation between Iran and Russia to continue and deepen, and the big question is how much concrete intelligence they have about its details. Therefore, the aggression against Iran could begin immediately before or exactly on the Iranian New Year in Farsi known as Nowruz, which this year is celebrated on March 20. This is also the date that was mentioned in connection with the delivery of Russian jet fighters.

Israel has been talking for a long time about the necessity for the US to provide it with full support because of the alleged threat that Iran represents to the region, but it will rather be that the US stands behind this entire project, because none of America’s vassals has the ability to conduct foreign policy independently. Admittedly, Israel is probably the most independent of all American allies, but it is still obliged to coordinate all its major decisions with Washington. As for threats to the region, Israel is a state that was created and is maintained on the basis of a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide and is the only regional power from the Middle East region that has undisguised imperialist ambitions and territorial claims towards its neighbors. The UN Human Rights Commission condemned Israel for violating almost all 149 articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention and this is the best illustration of Israel’s aggressive policy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as an exponent of such a policy, rushed to visit Paris recently, where he asked France for support for the planned aggression against Iran. After Netanyahu’s visit, Radio France reported that Israel really wants to attack Iran as soon as possible and has already identified around 3,000 possible targets. Nevertheless, Israel is afraid of an independent showdown with Iran and is trying to provide itself with as much concrete military support as possible. As for the American Arab satellites, in the planned attack on Iran, Israel will probably be able to count on the support of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Yemen, Sudan and Morocco. Azerbaijan is certainly being pressured to join the coalition, but the leadership in Baku probably sees how dangerous it could be if Russia were to get directly involved in the conflict on Iran’s side, which is more than possible.

Prior to Netanyahu’s visit to the Champs Elysées, the UK Government at the beginning of this year аlready called for the immediate creation of a Grand Military Coalition against Iran. The official pretext under which this shameless campaign against Iran is conducted is, first of all, its nuclear program. However, in these accusations against Iran, it is deliberately forgotten that two Iranian Ayatollahs, Khomeini and Khamenei, have publicly spoken out against the development of a nuclear arsenal in Iran. In September 2014, Mohsen Rafighdoost, minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the eight-year defensive war against Iraq, in an interview he gave to Gareth Porter, a journalist specializing in US national security policy, testified that he personally asked Khomeini to start developing nuclear and chemical weapons on two occasions, but was refused both times. The reason for Khomeini’s refusal was his claim that Islam forbids weapons of mass destruction. Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa in the mid-1990s against the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons, which was officially disclosed only in August 2005 in Vienna, at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Israel, on the other hand, possesses nuclear and certainly, chemical and biological weapons and unlike Iran, represents a real threat. As for nuclear weapons, Israel has Jericho II (YA-3) missiles with a range of 1,7700 km and Jericho III (YA-4) with a range of up to 11,500 km. Israel can also use its F-15 and F-16 fighters for tactical and strategic nuclear strikes. Even the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment estimated that Israel possessed undeclared offensive chemical and biological weapons. With such an arsenal, Israel could be considered a global threat, and Russia and China are certainly very aware of that.

Unlike Netanyahu and Israel’s political elite, Israeli military intelligence experts publicly state that they do not consider Iran a real threat to Israel. These weeks, mass protests against Netanyahu’s regime have been taking place across Israel, and the Israeli opposition has openly called his ultra-right government a far greater threat to Israel than Iran. Finally, we must also mention the assessment of Israel’s prestigious Institute for National Security Studies, according to which the greatest security threat to Israel is the deterioration of relations with the USA. Are internal political pressures, the struggle for power, and Netanyahu’s desire to please his American allies, in that case, the main reasons why the prime minister of Israel recklessly rushes into a very risky military conflict with Iran? Namely, the aggression against Iran could easily merge with the conflict in Ukraine and turn into a total world war. As the Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Vyacheslav Volodin, recently reminded, the entire foreign policy of the USA and its vassals is based solely on lies. Just as the pretext for the US-British invasion of Iraq was false accusations, the planned aggression against Iran has nothing to do with Iran’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

There are other accusations against Iran, but they are equally meaningless and just an excuse for planned aggression. Iran does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries in the region and is not a breeding ground and financier of terrorism. Admittedly, Iran as a country very often and with full rights condemns the persecution of Shias in the region, but no more than it condemns the persecution of Palestinians, for example, who are overwhelmingly Sunnis. Similarly, Iran condemned Azerbaijan’s aggressive policy towards Armenia, despite the fact that both Iran and Azerbaijan are predominantly Shia states while Armenia is an Oriental Orthodox Christian country. Iran simply leads a responsible and principled foreign policy. The frequent accusations of Iran’s alleged “sectarian” fanaticism are equally meaningless to genuine connoisseurs of the situation in the region. The USA, Israel, the UK, and other European former colonial powers, are the ones who are trying to spread hatred and fratricide among Muslims by financing and arming extremists in the region. Another strategy is to buy favors from existing regimes or, if that fails, to bring puppet regimes to power. It is a skill that Americans have brought to the level of art and perfection, and no other world power is more experienced and successful in this business than them. One of the strategies of the US and the collective West is to divide as much as possible the different schools and branches of Islam that they maliciously call “sects”, in order to then easily rule all the Muslim nations and their natural resources. Contrary to the attempts of the Western conglomerate to spread discord and hatred among Muslims, Ayatollah Khamenei in his speech on October 24, 2021 was very clear about Iran’s views on the necessity of unity, stating that “Islamic Unity is definitely a Koranic obligation”. Iran more than sincerely wants harmony among Muslims, which is not surprising at all, because it is one of its most vital security interests, as it is also the vital interest of all other Muslim nations in the region.

Iran has the second-largest natural gas reserves and the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world. Of course, as we all know very well, it is precisely in this fact that the real causes of the aggressive intentions of the USA, Israel, the UK, the EU and their Arab vassals, in relation to Iran, are hidden. However, on the other hand, for Iran, its natural wealth facilitates inclusion in the Eurasian economic space and leads to the intensification of all other Eurasian integrations. On the one hand, the export of Iranian energy products to Eurasian space really benefits China and not Russia, but on the other hand, Moscow and Tehran are rapidly developing an ever closer military and security cooperation. The frequent visits of Russian officials to Tehran, for example, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, are a good indicator of that process. There are many geopolitical moments that have brought Iran and Russia closer together. First of all, these are the two nations on which the West has imposed the most sanctions in the history of mankind. Second, and more importantly, both countries are in a deep and long-term political conflict with the US and its vassals. Finally, the Western conglomerate has been waging an intense hybrid and proxy war against both nations for a long time. The Russian-Iranian strategic alliance exists and has been developing for a long time, but it was only Russia’s military conflict with the de facto Nazi regime from Kiev that forced Moscow to recognize its reliable strategic ally in Iran. Admittedly, Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi once said that the trade and economic relations between the two countries are not satisfactory, but obviously, there is a desire of both countries to improve them and that is starting to happen. As for China, Iran signed a somewhat secretive 25-year deal with its powerful Eurasian partner on March 27, 2021, but its concrete results are still not visible. It is true that China has a strong economic interest in cooperating with the Arab states of the Middle East region, some of which have very bad relations with Iran. However, Western analysts make a big mistake by focusing on the economic aspect of the cooperation of Eurasian nations. It is American hegemony and imperialism that forces Iran, Russia, China and other Eurasian powers to put economic interests on the back burner and give priority to issues related to the development of strategic security alliances.

Iran has formidable military potential that should not be underestimated. No matter how zealous the US and Israeli intelligence services are, Iran is a regional power that could give Israel and its allies extremely unexpected and very unpleasant and painful blows in places where they are least expected. Iran would not passively suffer the blows but would seek the opportunity to immediately transfer the conflict to the aggressor’s territory and this is something Iranian generals can surely achieve. Another very important moment is that Russia and China simply must not allow an Israeli-American coalition attack on Iran to happen in the first place because the risks are too great to ignore, and it is likely that after certain intelligence, the two superpowers will strongly, timely and jointly react to protect their vital interests in the region. Iran’s downfall is simply out of the question for Russia and China because it would imply a deep penetration of the US into the belly of Eurasia, which would result in a dramatic weakening and possible disintegration of the two superpowers. The question remains: what specific steps will the two Eurasian giants take to protect their common ally from aggression? The freedom-loving Iran, a multiple world champion in the fight against American hegemony, simply must not fall!

NATO Ministers Gather for War Summits… Russia Should Call Their Bluff

January 20, 2023

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The United States and its imperial surrogates think they are putting a gun to Russia’s head. But non other than the NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.

NATO is at war against Russia. There can be no more pretense or illusions about NATO “not being a party to the conflict” in Ukraine, as Western leaders have been absurdly asserting for the past year. NATO missiles, drones and logistics have already been used to strike Russia. And by Russia, we don’t just mean the disputed territories of Crimea and Donbass, but the pre-war territory of the Russian Federation.

This week saw the NATO mania for war against Russia reach a fever pitch. NATO military leaders met in a series of well-publicized meetings in Europe that can only be described as war summits to plan the further escalation of conflict with Russia. The culmination was the gathering at the US Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany, on Friday, at which pressure is mounting on Berlin to give the go-ahead for the supply of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. The meeting was opened by Ukrainian leaders alongside American military commanders demanding tanks and more heavy weaponry.

Laughably, the Americans are prevaricating about sending their M1 Abrams tanks, preferring instead for Germany, Britain, France, Poland, Finland and others to send theirs. The farcical wrangling encapsulates the U.S. colonialist attitude towards European allies who are too supine or stupid to complain. “Go ahead punks, make my day,” as Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry might say.

The U.S. is quite content for Europe to be turned into ashes and rebuild the continental wreck for the purpose of reviving redundant American capitalism, as in the aftermath of previous world wars.

Earlier in the week, the U.S. top military commander General Mark Milley met with Ukrainian counterpart Valery Zaluzhny to oversee the setting up of new training grounds for troops in Poland and Germany. Zaluzhny is an acolyte of the Ukrainian World War Two Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera. The pairing between Milley and Zaluzhny can hardly be a better illustration of the nefarious nature of the U.S.-led axis pushing war against Russia. Western media don’t report this because its function is to hoodwink the Western public into cheerleading for war.

The relentless mobilization of the NATO bloc under U.S. leadership has finally reached a historic war footing against Russia. We can trace this ideology all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War following the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it certainly has accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by 9/11 and the U.S. imperial notion of full-spectrum dominance, and especially after the ignominious withdrawal of the NATO war machine from Afghanistan in August 2021.

All members of the 30-nation bloc are rushing weapons to the conflict in Ukraine. It is even reported that the United States is drawing down military stockpiles held in Israel and South Korea to augment firepower against Russia. Furthermore, Washington is now considering supporting strikes on Crimea which Moscow warned would be an extremely dangerous escalation towards all-out general war. Virtually all taboos have been shelved it seems, as the New York Times remarked this week.

The Western states appear to be driven by madmen who are willfully pushing the world to the brink of catastrophe. There are now open calls for the defeat of Russia and illogical demands for more weapons to Ukraine as a way of achieving peace. “Weapons are the way to peace,” declared Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s titular leader during the World Economic Forum for assorted global elites in Davos this week. “We have to prevent a stalemate,” intoned Washington’s top diplomat Antony Blinken and his British counterpart James Cleverly (how misnamed is the latter!).

Meanwhile, American, European and NATO leaders are calling for war crimes prosecutions against Russia.

There seems to be no room for any diplomacy or rationality. The NATO powers are doubling down on reckless demands that Russia is expelled from Crimea and the Donbass. What the NATO powers are really seeking is the defeat and conquest of Russia.

Russia was forced to intervene in Ukraine last February after all diplomatic efforts by Moscow were rejected. The NATO-backed covert war on the Russian people within the artificially created areas of Ukraine – a war that had been raging for eight years following the NATO-orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014 – had to be put to an end by force. Hence Russia’s military intervention on February 24, 2022.

There is no way that Russia is going to cede the territories that have now become part of the Russian Federation following legally constituted referenda. But the war has been dragged out by NATO’s demonic weaponization and callous exploitation of Ukraine as a bridgehead against Russia. NATO leaders talk about “preventing a stalemate” by sending more weapons to prop up the NeoNazi Kiev regime. It is the United States and European states along with other allies who have striven to create a bloody quagmire in Ukraine in which lives are callously being destroyed.

The stakes are being made incredibly high by the United States and its imperialist minions. Make no mistake. Washington and its NATO stooges have embarked on a war of choice. Russia has every right to take military action against NATO members. Train tracks in Poland delivering Leopard tanks to Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers are legitimate targets. As are British servicemen maintaining Challenger tanks or British ships transporting them. Up to now, NATO has aggressed Russia with impunity. It is time to end the impunity and give Western warmongers pause for thought about their criminal conduct as one of our commentators noted this week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin this week said that Russia will eventually win the war in Ukraine to vanquish the NATO-backed NeoNazi regime. He was speaking, appropriately, on the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the Nazi siege on Leningrad (St Petersburg).

Other independent international military analysts, including Colonel Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter, agree that Russia will prevail in its objectives to render Ukraine demilitarized and remove the NATO-NeoNazi surrogate posing as a national security threat to Russia. The Western media in lockstep with imperialist ideologues have created a propaganda illusion that the Kiev regime can win if only it is supplied with more tanks and missiles. This is fomenting a disaster for Ukraine and potentially for world peace. Russia will not be defeated but the madcap warmongers are raising the stakes to the level of an existential crisis by demanding that Ukraine be made into a “defense line for freedom”.

Moscow again this week warned that if the Western powers insist on pursuing a general war with Russia, then the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear destruction. This is not a threat. It is simply a statement of fact. Western leaders have become so deranged in their imperial arrogance, self-righteousness and Russophobia, they are beyond heeding sensible warnings. When they declare that war is being waged for the sake of peace and freedom and when diplomacy is vilified as a weakness then there is little hope for an imminent political solution.

The United States and its imperial surrogates have made war all but inevitable from their intransigence. They think they are putting a gun to Russia’s head.

Moscow needs to end this war in Ukraine decisively by eliminating the NATO-Kiev regime. The NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.

U.S. Jackals Smelling Blood i.e. a Prohibitively Huge Potential for Profit in the Russian Arctic

January 13, 2023

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Natasha Wright

The Russian military industry in 2022 switched to the unprecedented work pace to be able to deliver the needed weaponry for the special military operation. At the same time, the hard work on prospective patterns of armament, which is mercifully not used at present yet.

On 1 December 2022, the President of Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed the new law pertinent to the internal seas of the Russian Federation, which in practice limits the freedom of navigation and even forbids foreign military and civil ships from entering and seafaring in the Northern Sea route. We shall illustrate the reasons as to why action was put in place and what its consequences may be in the near future. In line with the new amendments to this law in the Northern Sea route, which is 5500 km in length, no foreign military or civil ship nor any other foreign country vessel will be allowed to be present without the prior special permission issued by the Russian Federation. In order that Russia issues an official permit, one needs to submit an official request but there is no guarantee that the permission will be issued within the 90 days. Even the permissions already issued can be revoked at any point. All the foreign ships must navigate in the Russian Arctic region under their own national flag and foreign submarines must navigate on the sea surface only. This literally means the embargo on foreign military presence in the Northern Sea route due to a huge number of military and civil facilities being built there. In introducing special seafaring and navigation supervision and controls, Russia will lessen the environmental risks as well. Yet, from the looks of things, the Americans do not seem to recognize these newly introduced bans. Kenneth Braithwaite, U.S. Secretary of the Navy stated that in accordance with the adopted doctrine, the Pentagon will shortly commence with the routine patrolling of the Arctic in close proximity to the Russian coastline in polar geographical widths so as to impede the Russian advance to the furthermost North or even make them impossible. Does that mean that the Russian American conflict is inevitable in the short run? And what can we expect in that case?

History repeats itself

Before passing these amendments to the law recently, the Russian Ministry of Defence and FSB had made a detailed plan to prevent the provocations in the Northern Sea Route. It is believed that the Americans will try to cause or provoke environmental catastrophes. Routine scouting and regular investigations will be increased so as to prevent these incidents or possible disasters. Weapons of destruction will be deployed and increased patrolling frequency will be in place if needs be and in case the territorial waters are endangered, practical actions will be put to good use for its utmost protection and defense. The incident in the Black Sea, normally referred to as the Black Sea Bumping Incident, which happened in 1988 can help us try to imagine what future incidents these might be like. The Americans at the time during the Cold War did not respect the sea borders of the then USSR even in 1986 near the Crimea when Gorbachev appears to have been there but back then the Soviets only warned that the next incursion would not go unpunished. Sadly, the USA would persistently carry out incursions and dangerously manuouver in the Soviet territorial waters in order to investigate the USSR military facilities but under the pretext of their right of innocent passage.

On 12 February 1988, U.S. cruise ship Yorktown and the destroyer Caron performed a gross violation of the then Soviet territorial waters by merely believing they had the right of exercising innocent passage. The Soviet Patrol ships Bezzavetnyy SKR 6 did not have the permission to open fire but they performed a so-called ‘deliberate crash’ with the uninvited guests regardless of them being of much smaller dimensions by displacement. After being shouldered by the Soviet Mirka frigate class frigate, Yorktown suffered huge damage and complete with the U.S. destroyer Caron left the troubled territorial waters in question. Both U.S. warships stayed on even course afterwards and left Soviet territorial waters for the international ones without further incidents. But anybody with longstanding military experience and expertise could confirm that it must have involved an elaborate chain of command and the decision to engage in this provocative mission was most probably taken at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

For those who tend to think that the Russian seamen are not willing nor ready to repeat this superb bravado, let us remind you that on 12th February 2022, exactly 34 years after the bumping incident in the Black Sea, U.S. nuclear submarine entered the Russian territorial waters in the region of the Kuril islands, in the Russian Sakhalin region, and after ignoring the Russian request to leave the area, Marshal Shaposhnikov Frigate resorted to a number of extreme means and measures, which got the Americans to run for the ‘hills’ in despair. Why were the U.S. ships engaged in a risky penetration of Soviet territorial waters at a particularly sensitive time in the Soviet U.S. relations and why again on the very same date after 34 years? Regrettably, this will most probably not be the last incident of this sort.

Fancy reading about these newest Russian beasts of warfare? 

The Russian military industry in 2022 switched to the unprecedented work pace to be able to deliver the needed weaponry for the special military operation. At the same time, the hard work on prospective patterns of armament, which is mercifully not used at present yet. The most impressive novelties in 2022 are as follows:

In April last year the trial on the newest intercontinental ballistic missile was carried out for the first time RS 28 Sarmat is the Russian strategic rocket system of the 5th generation based in the land silo. It is supposed to replace the obsolete Soviet missiles 36 M 2 Duke. While designing the new rocket, the Russian engineers did not place an emphasis on the maximum weight of its warheads but on the protection against the anti rocket defense devices

Sarmat 200 tonnes in weight equipped with hypersonic warheads, avangarde blocks, which cannot be intercepted by no existent anti air defense system and 18 000 km which makes the attacks on enemies possible from any direction, which complicates the odbijanje napada. It is a known fact that the Russians produce Sarmats in a serial production, which are already in place in the rocket divisions in the Siberian and the Ural regions. In 2022 the additional armament of two rocket divisions was completed with the mobile rocket systems YARS.

The Russian military Navy on 8th July 2022 got a nuclear submarine for special purposes by the name Belgorod. Its main assignment is to transfer nuclear unmanned torpedo Poseydon, which can have both conventional, non-conventional and nuclear charge. Poseydon is the continuation of the work of the academic Saharov from the Soviet hydrogen bomb who used to suggest that these torpedos should be permanently positioned on the bottom of the U.S. East Coast. In case of a war the explosion by way of new bombs a gigantic radioactive tsunami would rise who would literally wipe out the most heavily populated region of the USA off the face of the Earth. Poseydon has one great advantage. It is completely invisible and undetectable because it has an unlimited range of activity because of its nuclear fuel and high velocity of movement. This unmanned device is capable of lying down on the sea bottom and in being so invisible, waiting for the command for any further actions.

At the beginning of October 2022, Belgorod set off on a journey towards the Kara Sea when it vanished from NATO radars and thus caused great disturbance in the main stream media in the West. After two weeks, Belgorod returned to the base. It remains a mystery still where it was and what it did during that time.

Su – 57M

Modernized, multirole fighter Su – 57M performed its first flight on 21 October.

During that successful flight the new cabin equipment was checked and tested and its modernized version has a new engine with the stronger propulsion so as to achieve the desired height and velocity due to which it gained in its end flight range. Its engine has a low thermic perceptibilty, which significantly lowers the possibility of interception. The modernized Su – 57M testing will last for a few more years. In general, Russia is rapidly working on the newest types of weapons and in the given context of this new conflict with NATO the armament process will be at an accelerated speed.

The 2023 War – ‘Setting the Theatre’

January 13, 2023

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Alastair Crooke

The China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World. Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’

A top US Marine General, James Bierman, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, explained in a moment of candour how the US is “setting the theatre” for possible war with China, whilst casually admitting as an aside, how US defence planners had been busy inside Ukraine years ago, “earnestly preparing” for war with Russia — even down to the “pre-positioning of supplies”, identifying sites from which the US might operate support, and sustain operations. Simply put, they were there,readying the battle space for years.

No surprise really, as such military responses flow directly from the core US strategic decision to actuate the 1992 ‘WolfowitzDoctrine’ that the US must plan and preemptively act, to disable any potential Great Power — well before it reaches the point at which it can rival or impair US hegemony.

NATO today has progressed to war with Russia in a battlespace, which in 2023, may or may not stay limited to Ukraine. Simply put the point is that the shift to ‘War’ (whether incremental or not) marks a fundamental transition from which there is no going back to ab initio — ‘war economies’ in essence, are structurally different to the ‘normal’ from which the West began, and to which it has grown accustomed over recent decades. A war society — even if only partly mobilised — thinks and acts structurally differently from peacetime society.

War is not about gentlemanly conduct… either. Empathy for others is its first casualty — the latter being a requirement for sustaining a fighting spirit.

Yet, the carefully curated fiction in Europe and the US continues that nothing really has, or will ‘change’: we are in a temporary ‘blip’. That’s all.

Zoltan Pozsar, the influential finance ‘oracle’ at Credit Suisse, has already made the point in his latest War and Peace essay (subscription only) that War is well underway – by simply listing the events of 2022:

• The G7’s financial blockade of Russia (The West setting the battle space)
• Russia’s energy blockade of the EU (Russia begins setting its theatre)
• The U.S.’s technology blockade of China (America pre-positioning of sites to sustain operations)
• China’s naval blockade of Taiwan, (China demonstrating preparedness)
• The U.S.’s “blockade” of the EU’s EV sector with the Inflation Reduction Act. (The US defence planners preparing for future ‘supply-lines)
• China’s “pincer movement” around all of OPEC+ with the growing trend of invoicing oil and gas sales in renminbi. (The Russia-China ‘Commodity Battlespace’).

This list amounts to one major geo-political ‘upset’ occurring, on average, every two months — moving the world decisively away from the so-called ‘normal’ (for which so many in the Consuming Class ardently yearn) to an intermediate state of War.

Pozsar’s list shows that the tectonic plates of geo-politics are seriously ‘on the move’ — shifts, which are accelerating and becoming ever more intertwined, yet that still remain far from arriving at any settled place. ‘War’ will likely be a major disruptor (at the very least), until some equilibrium is established. And that may take some years.

Ultimately, ‘War’ does make its impact on the conventional public mindset — albeit slowly. It seems to be fear of the impact on an unprepared mindset that is behind the decision to prolong Ukraine’s suffering, and thus trigger the War of 2023: An admission of failure in Ukraine is seen to risk spooking volatile western markets (i.e. higher interest rates for longer). And frank-talking represents a hard option for a western world — used to ‘easy decisions’, and ‘can kicking’ — to take.

Pozsar, being a finance guru, understandably is focussed in his essay on finance. But conceivably, the reference to Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes is therefore not whimsical, but included as a hint to the possible ‘hit’ to the conventional psyche.

In any event, Pozsar leaves us four key economic takeaways (with brief comments added):

1. War is history’s principle driver of inflation, and the bankruptcy for states. (Comment: war-driven inflation and Quantitative Tightening (QT) enacted to fight inflation, are policies working in radical opposition to each other. Central Banks’ role attenuates to supporting war needs — at the expense of other variables – in wartime.
2. War implies an effective and expandable industrial capacity for producing weapons (rapidly), which, in itself, requires secure supply-lines to feed that capacity. (A quality which the West no longer possesses, and which is costly to recreate);
3. Commodities which often serve as collateral to loans become scarce – and with that scarcity, show up as commodity ‘inflation’;
4. And finally, War cuts new financial channels i.e. “the m-CBDC Bridge project” (see here).

The point needs underlining again: War creates different financial dynamics and shapes a different psyche. More importantly, ‘War’ is not a stable phenomenon. It can start with petty tit-for-tat strikes on a rival’s infrastructure and then — with every incremental ‘mission creep’ — slip along the curve towards full war. NATO is not just mission creeping in its war on Russia, it is mission jogging — fearing a Ukraine humiliation in the wake of the earlier Afghanistan débacle.

The EU hopes to halt that slide well short of full war. It is nonetheless a very slippery slope. The point of War is to inflict pain and attrit your enemy. To this extent it is open to mutation. Formal sanctions and caps on energy quickly metamorphose into the sabotage of pipelines or the seizure of tankers.

Russia and China however, are certainly not naïve, and have been busy setting their own theatre, ahead of a potential wider clash with NATO.

China and Russia can now claim to have built a strategic relationship, not only with OPEC+, but with Iran and key gas producers.

Russia, Iran, and Venezuela account for about 40% of the world’s proven oil reserves, and each of them are currently selling oil to China for renminbi at a steep discount. GCC countries account for another 40% of proven oil reserves — and are being courted by China to accept renminbi for their oil — in exchange for transformative investments.

This is a significant new battlespace being readied — ending Dollar hegemony through boiling the frog slowly.

The contesting party made the initial strike, sanctioning half of OPEC with those 40% of the world’s oil reserves. That thrust failed: the Russian economy survived — and unsurprisingly — the sanctions ‘lost’ those states to Europe, ‘handing them’ over instead to China.

China meanwhile is courting the other half of OPEC with an offer that is hard to refuse: “Over the next “three to five years”, China will not only pay for more oil in renminbi – but more significantly, ‘will pay’ with new investments in downstream petrochemical industries in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the GCC more broadly. It will, in other words, build out the successor generation economy” for these fossil fuel exporters whose energy sell-by date approaches.

The key point here is that in the future, much more ‘value-added’ (in the course of production) will be captured locally — at the expense of industries in the West. Pozsar cheekily calls this: “Our commodity, your problem… Our commodity, our emancipation”. Or, in other words, the China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World.

Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’ — not just that of the dollar hegemony, but also that of a now uncompetitive western economy.

Emancipation? Yes! Here is the crux: China is receiving Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan energy at a big 30% discount.Meanwhile, Europe still gets energy for its industry — but only at a big mark-up. In short, more, and occasionally all, product added-value will be captured by cheap-energy ‘friendly’ states, at the expense of the uncompetitive ‘unfriendlies’.

“China – the nemesis – paradoxically has been a big exporter of high mark-up Russian LNG to Europe, and India a big exporter of high mark-up Russian oil and refined products such as diesel – to Europe. We should expect more [of this in the future] across more products – and invoiced not just in euros and dollars, but also renminbi, dirhams, and rupees’ ‘, Poszar suggests.

It may not look so obvious, but it is a financial war. If the EU is content to take the ‘easy way’ out of its fall into uncompetitiveness (via subsidies to allow for high-mark-up imports), then as Napoleon once remarked when observing an enemy making a mistake: Observe silence!

For Europe, this means much less domestic production – and more inflation — as price inflating alternatives are imported from the East. The West taking the ‘easy decision’ (since its renewable strategy has not been well thought through), likely will find the arrangement to be at the expense of growth in the West — a course prefiguring a weaker West, in the near future.

The EU will be particularly hard-hit. It has elected to become dependent on US LNG, just at the moment that production from US shale fields has peaked, with what output there is likely ear-marked to the US domestic market.

Thus, as general Bierman outlined how the US prepared the battlespace in Ukraine, Russia and China and the BRICS planners have been busy setting their own ‘theater’.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like it ‘is’: Europe’s stumble towards calamity reflects an embedded psychology of the Western ruling élite. There is no strategic reasoning, nor ‘hard-decisions’ being taken in the West at all. It is all narcissistic Merkelism (hard decisions postponed, and then ‘fudged’ through subsidy handouts). Merkelism is so called after Angela Merkel’s reign at the EU, where fundamental reform was invariably postponed.

There is no need for thinking-things-through, or for hard decisions, when leaders are held by the unshakable conviction that the West IS the centre of the Universe. It is sufficient to postpone, awaiting the inexorable to unfold itself.

The recent history of US-led forever-wars is further evidence of this western lacuna: These zombie wars drag on for years with no plausible justification, only to be unceremoniously dropped. The strategic dynamics were easier suppressed and forgotten however, when fighting insurgency wars — as opposed to fighting two well-armed, peer competitor-states.

The same dysfunctionality has been apparent in many slow-rolling western crises: Nevertheless, we persist… because protecting the fragile psychology of our leaders — and an influential sector of the public — takes precedence. The inability to countenance losing drives our élites to prefer sacrifice by their own people, rather than see their delusions exposed.

Hence, reality has to be abjured. So, we live a nebulous between-times — so much happening, but so little movement. Only when the outbreak of crisis can no longer be ignored — by even the MSM and Tech censors — might some real effort be made to address root causes.

This conundrum however, places a huge burden on the shoulders of Moscow and Beijing to manage the War escalation in a careful fashion — in face of a West for whom losing is intolerable.

The Plan to Carve Up Russia

 JANUARY 5, 2023

Source

By Mike Whitney

For decades, the idea of dismantling the Soviet Union and Russia has been constantly cultivated in Western countries. Unfortunately, at some point, the idea of using Ukraine to achieve this goal was conceived. In fact, to prevent such a development, we launched the special military operation (SMO). This is precisely what some western countries –led by the United States– strive for; to create an anti-Russian enclave and then threaten us from this direction. Preventing this from happening is our primary goal. Vladimir Putin

Here’s your geopolitical quiz for the day: What did Angela Merkel mean when she said “that the Cold War never really ended, because ultimately Russia was never pacified”?

If you chose (5), then pat yourself on the back. That is the right answer.

1. Merkel was referring to the fact that Russia has never accepted its subordinate role in the “Rules-based Order.”
2. Merkel was referring to the fact that Russia’s economic collapse did not produce the ‘compliant state’ western elites had hoped for.
3. Merkel is suggesting that the Cold War was never really a struggle between democracy and communism, but a 45 year-long effort to “pacify” Russia.
4. What Merkel meant was that the western states –particularly the United States– do not want a strong, prosperous and independent Russia but a servile lackey that does as it is told.
5. All of the above.

Last week, Angela Merkel confirmed what many analysts have been saying for years, that Washington’s hostile relations with Russia –which date back more than a century– have nothing to do with ideology, ‘bad behavior’ or alleged “unprovoked aggression”. Russia’s primary offense is that it occupies a strategic area of the world that contains vast natural resources and which is critical to Washington’s “pivot to Asia” plan. Russia’s real crime is that its mere existence poses a threat to the globalist project to spread US military bases across Central Asia, encircle China, and become the regional hegemon in the world’s most prosperous and populous region.

So much attention has been focused on what Merkel said regarding the Minsk Treaty, that her more alarming remarks have been entirely ignored. Here is a short excerpt from a recent interview Merkel gave to an Italian magazine:

The 2014 Minsk Accords were an attempt to give Ukraine time. Ukraine used this period to become stronger, as seen today. The country of 2014/15 is not the country of today….

We all knew that it was a frozen conflict, that the problem was not solved, but this was precisely what gave Ukraine precious time.” (“Angela Merkel: Kohl took advantage of his voice and build”, Corrier Della Sera)

Merkel candidly admits that she participated in a 7 year-long fraud that was aimed at deceiving the Russian leadership into thinking that she genuinely wanted peace, but that proved not to be the case. In truth, the western powers deliberately sabotaged the treaty in order to buy-time to arm and train a Ukrainian army that would be used in a war against Russia.

But this is old news. What we find more interesting is what Merkel said following her comments on Minsk. Here’s the money-quote:

I want to talk to you about an aspect that makes me think. It’s the fact that the Cold War never really ended, because ultimately Russia was never pacified. When Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, he was excluded from the G8. In addition, NATO has deployed troops in the Baltic region, to demonstrate its readiness to intervene. And we too have decided to allocate 2% of GDP to military expenditure for defence. CDU and CSU were the only ones to have kept it in the government programme. But we too should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness. (“Angela Merkel: Kohl took advantage of his voice and build”, Corrier Della Sera)

This is an astonishing admission. What Merkel is saying is that ” the Cold War never ended” because the primary goal of weakening (“pacifying”) Russia –to the point that it could not defend its own vital interests or project power beyond its borders– was not achieved. Merkel is implying that the main objective of the Cold War was not to defeat communism (as we were told) but to create a compliant Russian colony that would allow the globalist project to go forward unimpeded. As we can see in Ukraine, that objective has not been achieved; and the reason it hasn’t been achieved is because Russia is powerful enough to block NATO’s eastward expansion. In short, Russia has become the greatest-single obstacle to the globalist strategy for world domination.

It’s worth noting, that Merkel never mentions Russia’s alleged “unprovoked aggression” in Ukraine as the main problem. In fact, she makes no attempt to defend that spurious claim. The real problem according to Merkel is that Russia has not been ‘pacified’. Think about that. This suggests that the justification for the war is different than the one that is promoted by the media. What it implies is that the conflict is driven by geopolitical objectives that have been concealed behind the “invasion” smokescreen. Merkel’s comments clear the air in that regard, by identifying the real goal; pacification.

In a minute we will show that the war was triggered by “geopolitical objectives” and not Russia’s alleged “aggression”, but first we need to review the ideas that are fueling the drive to war. The main body of principles upon which America’s foreign policy rests, is the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the first draft of which was presented in the Defense Planning Guidance in 1992. Here’s a short excerpt:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.

There it is in black and white: The top priority of US foreign policy “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” This shows the importance that Washington and its allies place on the territory occupied by the Russian Federation. It also shows the determination of western leaders to prevent any sovereign state from controlling the area the US needs to implement its grand strategy.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Russia’s transformation into a strong and independent state has not only put it squarely in Washington’s crosshairs, but also greatly increased the chances of a direct confrontation. Simply put, Russia’s return to the ranks of the great powers has placed it on Washington’s ‘enemies list’ and a logical target for US aggression.

So, what does this have to do with Merkel?

Implicit in Merkel’s comments is the fact that the dissolution of the communist state and the collapse of the Russian economy was not sufficient to leave Russia “pacified”. She is, in fact, voicing her support for more extreme measures. And she knows what those measures will be; regime change followed by a violent splintering of the country.

Putin is well-aware of this malignant plan and has discussed it openly on many occasions. Take a look at this 2-minute video of a meeting Putin headed just weeks ago:

“The goal of our enemies is to weaken and break up our country. This has been the case for centuries.. They believe our country is too big and poses a threat (to them), which is why it must be weakened and divided. For our part, we always pursued a different approach; we always wanted to be a part of the so-called ‘civilized (western) world.’ And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we thought we would finally become a part of that ‘world’. But, as it turned out, we weren’t welcome despite all our efforts. Our attempts to become a part of that world were rejected. Instead, they did everything they could– including assisting terrorists in the Caucasus– to finish off Russia and break-up the Russian Federation.” Vladimir Putin

The point we’re making is that Merkel’s views align seamlessly with those of the neocons. They also align with the those of the entire western political establishment that has unanimously thrown its support behind a confrontation with Russia. Additionally, the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Congressional Research Service’s latest report, have all shifted their focus from the war against international terrorism to a “great power competition” with Russia and China. Not surprisingly, the documents have little to do with ‘competition’, rather, they provide an ideological justification for hostilities with Russia. In other words, the United States has laid the groundwork for a direct confrontation with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower.

Check out this brief clip from the Congressional Research Service Report titled Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress:

The U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia... is a policy choice reflecting two judgments: (1) that given the amount of people, resources, and economic activity in Eurasia, a regional hegemon in Eurasia would represent a concentration of power large enough to be able to threaten vital U.S. interests; and (2) that Eurasia is not dependably self-regulating in terms of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons, meaning that the countries of Eurasia cannot be counted on to be able to prevent, though their own actions, the emergence of regional hegemons, and may need assistance from one or more countries outside Eurasia to be able to do this dependably.”….

From a U.S. perspective on grand strategy and geopolitics, it can be noted that most of the world’s people, resources, and
economic activity are located not in the Western Hemisphere, but in the other hemisphere, particularly Eurasia. In response to this basic feature of world geography, U.S. policymakers for the last several decades have chosen to pursue, as a key element of U.S. national strategy, a goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia. Although U.S. policymakers do not often state explicitly in public the goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia, U.S. military operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—appear to have been carried out in no small part in support of this goal.” (“Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress”, US Congress)

It sounds a lot like the Wolfowitz Doctrine, doesn’t it? (Which suggests that Congress has moved into the neocon camp.

There are a few things worth considering in this short excerpt:

1. That “the U.S. goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia” has nothing to do with national defense. It is a straightforward declaration of war on any nation that successfully uses the free market to grow its economy. It is particularly unsettling that China on Washington’s target-list when US corporate outsourcing and offshoring have factored so large in China’s success. US industries moved their businesses to China to avoid paying anything above a slave wage. Is China to be blamed for that?
2. The fact that Eurasia has more “people, resources, and economic activity” than America, does not constitute a “threat” to US national security. It only represents a threat to the ambitions of western elites who want to use the US Military to pursue their own geopolitical agenda.
3. Finally: Notice how the author acknowledges that the government deliberately misleads the public about its real objectives in Central Asia. He says: “U.S. policymakers do not often state explicitly in public the goal of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in Eurasia, U.S. military operations in recent decades—both wartime operations and day-to-day operations—appear to have been carried out in no small part in support of this goal.” In other words, all the claptrap about “freedom and democracy” is just pablum for the masses. The real goals are “resources, economic activity” and power.

The National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy are equally explicit in identifying Russia as a de facto enemy of the United States. This is from the NSS:

Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and it is a source of disruption and instability globally…

Russia now poses an immediate and persistent threat to international peace and stability….

Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order … This decade will be decisive, in setting the terms of …managing the acute threat posed by Russia.. (“The 2022 National Security Strategy”, White House)

And lastly, The 2022 National Defense Strategy reiterates the same themes as the others; Russia and China pose an unprecedented threat to the “rules-based order”. Here’s short summary from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

The 2022 National Defense Strategy… makes clear that the United States …. sees the subjugation of Russia as a critical stepping stone toward the conflict with China.… The eruption of American imperialism… is more and more directly targeting Russia and China, which the United States sees as the principal obstacles to the untrammeled domination of the world. US strategists have long regarded the domination of the Eurasian landmass, with its vast natural resources, as the key to global domination.” (“Pentagon national strategy document targets China”, Andres Damon, World Socialist Web Site)

What these three strategic documents show is that the Washington BrainTrust had been preparing the ideological foundation for a war with Russia long before the first shot was ever fired in Ukraine. That war is now underway although the outcome is far from certain.

The strategy going forward appears to be a version of the Cheney Plan which recommended a break up of Russia itself, “so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.” Here’s more from an article by Ben Norton:

“Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, a lead architect of the Iraq War, not only wanted to dismantle the Soviet Union; he also wanted to break up Russia itself, to prevent it from rising again as a significant political power…The fact that a figure at the helm of the US government not-so-secretly sought the permanent dissolution of Russia as a country, and straightforwardly communicated this to colleagues like Robert Gates, partially explains the aggressive posturing Washington has taken toward the Russian Federation since the overthrow of the USSR.

The reality is that the US empire will simply never allow Russia to challenge its unilateral domination of Eurasia, despite the fact that the government in Moscow restored capitalism. This is why it is not surprising that Washington has utterly ignored Russia’s security concerns, breaking its promise not to expand NATO “once inch eastward” after German reunification, surrounding Moscow with militarized adversaries hell bent on destabilizing it.” (“Ex VP Dick Cheney confirmed US goal is to break up Russia, not just USSR”, Ben Norton, Multipolarista)

The carving up of Russia into several smaller statelets, has long been the dream of the neoconservatives. The difference now, is that that same dream is shared by political leaders across the West. Recent comments by Angela Merkel underscore the fact that western leaders are now committed to achieving the unrealized goals of the Cold War. They intend to use military confrontation to affect the political outcome they seek which is a significantly weakened Russia incapable of blocking Washington’s projection of power across Central Asia. A more dangerous strategy would be hard to imagine.

The US Captagon Act: Tightening Syria’s siege under new pretext

December 21 2022

Source

Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Firas Al-Shoufi

Potential new US legislation aimed at curbing Syria’s illicit drug trade is being weaponized to strike at the state and starve its people.

On 15 December, a bill introduced by US lawmakers into the 2023 Department of Defense budget to “Combat the Syrian Regime’s Drug Trade,” passed the Senate, with the support of 83 senators and the opposition of 11.

The Countering Assad’s Proliferation Trafficking And Garnering Of Narcotics Act or the CAPTAGON Act, which passed in the joint congressional committees between the House of Representatives and the Senate, is supposed to become law after US President Joe Biden soon signs the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023.

The bipartisan bill inaugurates a new phase of US pressure on Syria, and is another pretext to increase the siege on the Syrian people, who suffer from extremely difficult economic conditions similar to those they suffered during the famine that the region witnessed during the First World War.

Severe US-imposed sanctions under the “Caesar Act” have contributed to the tragedy of the Syrians, at a time when the country is in the midst of an economic crisis, with the US occupation and the Kurdish Autonomous Administration controlling vast areas of lands rich in oil, gas, and agricultural crops in the east of the country, in addition to the Turkish occupation of other regions.

Further sanctions

Nevertheless, Washington is preparing to impose more sanctions, this time under the pretext of combating narcotics networks manufacturing and smuggling Captagon from Syria across West Asia and perhaps to the US.

Republican Representative French Hill, who first introduced the bill last year, considers the matter a threat to international security and has branded Syria as a “narco-state.” However an anonymous Syrian government source, who spoke to The Cradle believes otherwise:

“The CAPTAGON Act is an American way to impose additional sanctions on the Syrian government and to penetrate more into neighboring countries. The Americans make up many excuses, but the goal is one: to starve Syrian people and bring down the state. This looks like a revenge operation and a way to dominate Syria.”

“They know that when the state weakens, terrorist and criminal groups advance, but instead of helping the Syrian state, they increase its siege,” he added.

The CAPTAGON Act considers “the Captagon trade linked to the (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad regime a transnational security threat, requiring a strategy by the United States Government to disrupt and dismantle the Captagon trade and narcotics networks of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.”

Disrupting the drugs trade network

The bill demands presenting the required strategy to Congress for review within a period not exceeding 180 days of its approval, provided that the method includes providing support to partner countries of the region that receive large quantities of smuggled Captagon, such as Saudi Arabia.

The lawmakers urge the Biden administration to employ the sanctions effectively, including the Caesar Act, to target drug networks said to be affiliated with the state.

The strategy includes a public communication campaign to increase awareness of the extent of the connection of Damascus to the illicit narcotics trade, a description of the countries receiving or transiting large shipments of Captagon, and an assessment of the counter-narcotics capacity of such countries to interdict or disrupt the smuggling of the highly-addictive amphetamine.

Lawmakers have also called for the strategy to include a plan for leveraging multilateral institutions and cooperation with international partners to disrupt the narcotics infrastructure in the country.

War by other means

Practically, “this strategy constitutes an integrated plan, security, political and economic, to penetrate more into the vicinity of Syria and encircle it and prevent access to raw materials,” according to Syrian researcher Bassam Abdullah:

“The terminologies contained in the law are broad, and lead to American-style solutions: providing security and diplomatic support and cooperation to countries to spy on Syria, targeting individuals and entities with sanctions, exerting economic pressure on Damascus in cooperation with international partners, and launching media campaigns against the Syrian government.”

Abdullah believes that “the aim of this law is to demonize Syria, not to solve the Captagon crisis in which the Americans claim Syria’s involvement, and it is a continuation of the war in other forms.”

The aforementioned Syrian government source pointed out that Washington, “Under the pretext of suspected drug transportation, may use such a strategy to stop shipments of food, oil and raw materials, and to cause more damage to the import and export chains, which are suffering from a significant decline.”

Indeed, other Arab security sources, who have asked to remain anonymous, have revealed to The Cradle that the information circulating between agencies cooperating with the US Drug Enforcement Administration indicates that “the raw materials used in the Captagon industry come from China and India, and it is involved in many other industries.”

The issue isn’t Syria’s alone

One Syrian security source informed The Cradle that: “Syria has historically been a transit country. But terrorist and criminal gangs took advantage of the conditions of war for industrialization, promotion, and smuggling. Some of these gangs receive western support and are active in areas under American control.”

He confirms that the government, which is regaining its strength, “is working to strike these gangs, and the Syrian apparatus is making every effort to combat drugs. What we need is help, not more blockades.”

For Abdullah, “Damascus has reactivated its membership in Interpol. If the Americans or others have information, Syria is ready to cooperate. Americans always want to play the role of the world’s policeman who decides and punishes. This is how the unilateral mind thinks.”

He asks: “Does anyone really believe that America wants to combat drugs and not tighten the blockade?”

“Afghanistan is the best model. During the twenty years of the American occupation, what witnessed an increase: wheat cultivation or the cultivation and manufacture of narcotic plants?”

Cooperation, not conflict with Damascus

In March 2021, the Syrian delegate to the UN and other international organizations in Vienna, Hassan Khaddour, declared before the UN Drugs Committee that the illicit narcotics problem in Syria had worsened due to the control of terrorist organizations supported by several countries over some border areas.

He pointed out that this created a suitable environment for the smuggling and trade of drugs, and provided huge financial revenues for financing terrorist groups. The Syrian ambassador asked for international cooperation with Syria, a permanent exchange of information, and providing the Syrian government with technical capabilities, laboratory equipment, and detection devices at the border crossings.

Although the implementation strategy of the latest hostile US legislation against Syria is not yet clear – and whether they include military strikes or security sabotage under the pretext of combating drugs – sources close to the Americans in Beirut say that there are intentions to launch unidentified attacks against drug production sites in Syria.

However, the Syrian security source comments by saying, “This is pure fabrication, because the hostile strikes target the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its sites. The Americans always fabricate lies to justify their aggression, as the Israelis do.”

HOW EUROPE IS DESTROYING ITS OWN ‘GARDEN’

NOVEMBER 9TH, 2022

Source

By Ramzy Baroud

The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one.

Borrell’s recent comments that “Europe is a garden” and that “the rest of the world is a jungle” were duly condemned as ‘racist’ by many politicians around the world, but mostly in the Global South. Borrell’s remarks, however, must also be viewed as an expression of superiority, not only of Borell personally, but of Europe’s ruling classes as a whole.

Particularly interesting about the EU top diplomat’s words are these inaccurate depictions of Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world: “We have built a garden”, “everything works” and “the jungle could invade the garden”.

Without delving too deep into what is obviously an entrenched superiority complex, Borell speaks as if an advocate of the so-called ‘Replacement Theory’, a racist notion advocated by the West’s – Europe especially – rightwing intellectuals, which sees refugees, migrants and non-Europeans as parasites aiming to destroy the continent’s supposedly perfect demographic, religious and social harmony.

If stretched further into a historical dimension, one also feels compelled to remind the EU leadership of the central role that European colonialism, economical exploitation, political meddling and outright military intervention have played in turning much of the world into a supposed ‘jungle’. Would Libya, for example, have been reduced to the status of a failed state if the West did not wage a major war starting in March 2011?

The imagined ‘jungle’ aside, Europe’s past and present reality strongly negates Borell’s ethnocentric view. Sadly, Europe is the birthplace of the most horrible pages of history, from colonialism and slavery to the nationalistic, fascist and nihilistic movements that defined most of the last three centuries.

Despite the desperate attempt to rewrite or ignore history in favor of a more amiable narrative focused on great splendors, technological advancement and civilizational triumph, Europe’s true nature continues to smolder underneath the ashes, ready to resurface whenever the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors take a wrong turn. The Syrian and Libyan refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic and, more recently, the Russia-Ukraine war are all examples of the proverbial wrong turn.

In fact, Borrell’s words, aimed to reassure Europe of its moral superiority are but a foolhardy effort meant to conceal one of the most dramatic crises that Europe has experienced in nearly a century. The impact of this crisis on every aspect of European life cannot be overstated.

In an editorial published last September on the European Environment Agency (EEA) website, Hans Bruyninckx described the “state of multiple crises” that characterizes the European continent at the moment. “It seems as if we have been living through one crisis after another — a pandemic, extreme heatwaves and drought due to climate change, inflation, war and an energy crisis,” he wrote.

Instead of taking responsibility for this impending catastrophe, Europe’s ruling elites choose a different, though predictable route: blame others, especially the inhabitants of the non-European ‘jungle’.

Naturally, ordinary people throughout Europe who are already experiencing this harrowing reality hardly feel reassured by Borrell’s proclamation that “everything works”.

The risk of the resurgence of the far-right movements in Europe is now a real possibility. This danger was relatively mitigated by the setback of the extremist ‘Alternative for Germany’ and the victory of the Social Democrats in last year’s elections. Germany, however, is not the exception, as the European far-right is now back, virtually everywhere, and with a vengeance.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party gained a record 41% of the total vote (over 13 million) in April. True, Emmanuel Macron managed to hold off the advance of Le Pen’s National Rally, but his coalition has lost its parliamentary majority, and his leadership has been significantly weakened. Currently, the country is rocked by massive rallies and strikes, all protesting the soaring prices and deepening inflation.

Sweden is another example of the determined rise of the far-right. A right-wing coalition, which won the general elections last September now dominates the country’s parliament. On October 17, it elected a new prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, whose government was made possible because of the support of the Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a harsh anti-immigration agenda. SD was crucial in determining the victory of the coalition and it is now suited to play the role of the kingmaker in critical decisions.

In Italy, too, the situation is dire. A future government is expected to bring together Giorgia Meloni – the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) – former right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and the extremist Matteo Salvini’s La Lega. Meloni’s party is rooted in the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement, which was formed in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians after their party was officially outlawed by the country’s progressive 1948 Constitution.

The shifting political grounds in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden have little to do with the ‘jungle’, and everything with the illusory European ‘garden.’ Europe’s extremism is a by-product of exclusively European historical experiences, ideologies and class struggles. Blaming Asians, Arabs or Africans for Europe’s “state of multiple crises” is not only self-deluding, indeed spiritless, but also obstructive to any healthy process of change.

Europe cannot fix its problems by blaming others, and the European ‘garden’, if it ever existed, is actually being ravaged by Europe’s own ruling elites – rich, detached and utterly dishonest.

On Trussification: From Decolonisation to Desperation to Hopelessness to Farce

October 16, 2022

By Batiushka

Source

Decolonisation: The Western Withdrawal from Asia, Africa and Europe

The Western European Empires have gone. The bankrupt Spanish Empire went first, in the century before last, the Germans lost their colonies in 1919 (at the same time as the Austro-Hungarians lost their European colonies), then the Italians lost their fantasies in Africa during the Second World War, the Germans got kicked out of their colonies in Eastern Europe in 1945, but the Portuguese much later, only getting kicked out of Africa in the 1970s. By that time the Dutch, the British, the Belgians and the French had also been kicked out of their colonies. Only the NATO Danes still hold on to Greenland, which is a lot of ice and snow and all of 56,000 people, though both Eisenhower and Trump wanted to buy it. However, since the US has its base at Thule, it effectively controls the country anyhow.

Since 1947 the UK has been kicked out of almost everywhere, infamously from the Indian Subcontinent in 1947, from Palestine in 1948 and humiliatingly, by their Americans ‘allies’, from Suez in 1956. All that remains is, for the moment, a small group of tiny enclaves and islands like Bermuda, the Caymans, Gibraltar, St Helena, the Falklands etc, about 18,000 square kilometres and fewer than 300,000 people in all, plus a lot of ice in the ‘British Antarctic Territory’.

As for France, after its humiliation in South-East Asia in 1954, it has gradually been kicked out of Africa (1946-2022) (Suez in 1956, Algeria in 1962 etc) and soon, even after its decades of assassinating independentist African politicians and military interventions, it will have nothing left there, though it still has a few islands in various oceans here and there.

As for the short-lived US Empire, over the last fifty years it has largely been kicked out of several Asian countries (Vietnam (1975), Iran (1979), Iraq (2011-2021) Afghanistan (2021), now out of Russia (2022), and soon out of China, India and Saudi Arabia. True, it still hangs on in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, but not for much longer. Eurasia is to be US-free.

As regards the Western withdrawal from Europe, the UK left Europe in 2020. It still hangs on to Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and above all to England, but it will not last. Now it is the turn of the US to be kicked out of Europe. It is happening in the Ukraine at this very moment, but this rejection will later spread to Western Europe. Then it will be the turn of the EU to be kicked out of Europe and ultimately the US will be kicked out of the Americas, especially out of the US.

Do not be surprised by the words ‘the Western withdrawal from Europe’ or ‘the UK being kicked out of the UK, the EU out of the EU and the US out of the US’. This is not gibberish. I am talking about the removal of the three parasitic Establishment elites in all those three manmade unions. Once those elites have gone, those purely manmade unions will fall and the newly sovereign peoples of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the peoples of Continental Western Europe and all those in Northern America can be liberated from their zombification and so will be able to retrieve their roots, their identity, their sovereignty and their selves again.

Desperation

When the USA gets desperate, it always turns to terrorism, much as gunboat Britain did and still, very weakly, attempts to do. Without mentioning the CIA-created quagmires in Latin America or in Asia or mentioning the details of the Gulf of Tonkin (1), we recall its quagmires just in Europe: the installation of the Greek junta in 1967, the CIA overthrow of De Gaulle in France in 1968, the assassination of Aldo Moro in Italy in 1978, the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986, and much more recently MH17, its terrorist attacks on the Nordstream pipelines and the Crimea Bridge, and now its attempt to force Russia to use nuclear weapons, so that the Zionist neocons in Washington can at last find an excuse to use their nuclear toys.

Those who want modern Russia to behave like Stalin’s Soviet Union and blast their brother-people of the Ukraine off the map, as the USSR did in Berlin in 1945 (though in truth most of the damage had already been done by Anglo-American terrorist bombing) need a gentle reminder. Despite US fantasies and intimidation, I have news – the Soviet Union is dead and President Putin definitely does not want it back. He, after all, lived through its end when he was in East Germany and remembers just how awful it was. Russia’s aim has never been either the occupation of the Ukraine (unlike the Soviet aim in Eastern Europe in 1945, which was to create a buffer zone for self-protection from the aggressive West), or the destruction of the Ukraine, or the massacre of its Ukrainian brothers. Let us remind ourselves yet again of Russia’s three aims in this conflict against the US puppet regime in Kiev, that is, of the aims of the Russian campaign for the liberation of Russia’s brothers and sisters in the Ukraine from the Fascist junta. These three aims were, and are, and will be:

1. The Liberation of the Donbass

This has been 75% achieved, indeed, since the liberation has turned out to be not just that of Lugansk (99% achieved) and Donetsk (75% achieved), but also of 99% of Kherson and 75% of Zaporozhie, we could say that it has been 85% achieved. Why has the liberation turned into Donbass x 2, of four provinces instead of two? Simply because the Kiev junta continually threatened the Crimea and the Donbass and they had to be protected. And if Kiev continues to shell Donbass x 2 and occupy its empty fields, the Russian campaign will have to be the liberation of Donbass x 3 or even Donbass x 4.

2. The Demilitarisation of the Ukraine

This is well on its way, at least 50% completed already. In fact, it was completed as regards the NATO-fortified Kiev military by 25 March. However, since, as Russia expected, NATO decided to resupply Kiev with their own military stocks, now already much depleted, demilitarisation is still under way. But it is only a question of time.

3. Denazification

There is some confusion here. What does this term mean? Does it mean Russia sending out teachers to instruct Ukrainians in the difference between Nazi racism and the normal human acceptance of people from other countries and their cultures? No, it does not. Denazification in today’s Western context is different from that. It is the process by which the infantile Westernised child learns to stop putting its fingers into the flame. In other words, the West has to teach itself and learn from bitter experience. This is how Denazification (and from there regime-change) will be implemented throughout today’s Western world.

For example, over the last three months the yen, the euro and the pound sterling have all been reaching historic lows against the US dollar. This is because US interest rates are higher than elsewhere and so its financial markets are attracting international investment capital. After all, why invest in European countries, which are energy-dependent but forced to boycott their main source of energy? You do not want to invest in self-bankrupting countries, which are set on a suicidal course. The USA is not as yet perceived to be self-bankrupting (though its turn will come). What is the denazifying result of all this? Let us look at the ‘case’ – and it is a ‘case’, in the medical and pathological sense – of the UK.

Hopelessness

Having ditched its drunken loser Johnson, over the summer the UK Establishment wasted two months in the middle of a huge political and economic crisis allowing 80,000 mainly elderly and wealthy people to select an incompetent Prime Minister for 68.7 million people – such is UK democracy, which apparently the rest of the world, especially ‘autocrats’ in Russia and China, urgently need to learn from. Thus, as soon as Truss, the worst possible candidate for Prime Minister, had been carefully selected over the two summer months, many commentators, including myself, doubted that she could last until Christmas. It now seems that that pessimism may have been very optimistic. Some latest estimates reckon that at best she may not last until 1 November.

Truss’ decision to increase government spending – not least to double the UK ‘Defence’ (who is attacking the UK anyway?) budget to £50 billion by 2030 – to send over £3 billion of military supplies to Kiev so far this year, to subsidise 100,000 Ukrainian ‘refugees’, and at the same time to make tax cuts for the rich (what else would you expect the Conservative Party to do?) has not been accepted by Biden, the IMF and, above all, by the markets.

Therefore, on 14 October Truss ditched her own Minister of Finance of 38 days for his decision to carry out her own illiterate economic policy – illiterate, as precisely and prophetically described last July by Truss’ rival as Conservative Prime Minister, the former Finance Minister, Sunak. So, on 14 October, Truss appointed a new British Finance Minister, the fourth in four months, a man notorious for contributing to the destruction the UK’s abysmal Health ‘Service’ (2). He will now do exactly the opposite of everything she had promised just three weeks before and on which impossible promises the intellectually challenged elected her.

Naturally, the hopeless Truss blames all her problems on ‘global factors’ and especially on ‘Putin’s appalling invasion of the Ukraine’. No mention of voluntary and suicidal Western sanctions at all. After all, would she want to admit to her own colossal stupidity? Here we see how Denazification and, as a result regime change, are already happening in the UK, all by themselves, just as they will in the EU and in the USA. All Russia has to do is to sit back and watch Western leaders destroying themselves and dragging down their countries with them, until their peoples rise up in revolt, as is beginning to happen all over Western Europe, and as will happen in the US (we had a presage of this at the Capitol last year) and in its other colonies. This is Denazification, though perhaps more precisely it should be called ‘Auto-Denazification’. Or perhaps it could just be called ‘Hopelessness’? Or maybe just ‘Trussification’?

16 October 2022

Note:

1. A quick read of William Blum’s Killing Hope, US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II or Stephen Kinzler’s Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq should be enlightening here.

2. A young friend in the UK phoned me on 14 October. He told me how after weeks and weeks of chronic pain, he was eventually diagnosed by a UK hospital doctor as having cancer. He was then told that he had six months to live, but that surgeons would not have enough time to operate, as ‘the waiting list is too long’, and was then given ‘pain-killers’ that did not work as consolation for his death-sentence. The next day, through a friend, he booked a flight to Romania. There, arriving from the airport, he was seen in a clinic at once and given an MRI scan. He was immediately informed that he had a hernia. The surgeon apologised to him that he could not operate on him the next day, but that he would have to wait until the day after. Just another example of the UK’s ‘world class’ health system….Trussification indeed.

Pyongyang passes legislation that declares the country a nuclear-weapon state, giving its leader, Kim Jong-un, sole authority over nuclear decisions.

September 9, 2022 

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

Flag of the DPRK (Reuters)

DPRK passed legislation that declares the country a nuclear-weapon state, giving its leader, Kim Jong-un, sole authority over nuclear decisions, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap, citing Pyongyang’s state media.

The 7th Session of the DPRK’s 14th Supreme People’s Assembly approved a decree titled Nuclear Weapons Policy on Wednesday, as per the Korean Central News Agency.

The law, which included 11 paragraphs, governs the use of nuclear weapons.

The new law stipulated that North Korea could use nuclear weapons under these conditions: the imminent threat of an attack on North Korea by an enemy country using nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, an attack on the leadership and command of North Korea’s nuclear forces, and an attack on the country’s strategically vital facilities.

The third paragraph, titled “command and control of nuclear weapons,” states that Kim Jong-un has the sole authority to dispose of nuclear arsenals and “makes all nuclear weapons decisions.”

In the event that North Korea’s nuclear command and control system is threatened by a hostile attack, KCNA stated that a nuclear strike would be launched immediately to destroy the hostile forces and their command.

In the same context, the DPRK’s leader Kim Jong Un said Friday that his country will never abandon nuclear weapons needed to counter the United States, which he accused of trying to weaken Pyongyang’s defenses and eventually bring his government down.

“The aim of the US is not only to eliminate our nuclear weapons but to completely destroy our nuclear power to force us to give up the right of self-defense, to weaken us to overthrow our regime at any time,” Kim Jong-un told the 7th Session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly, as quoted by the Yonhap news agency.

During a speech at Supreme People’s Assembly, the Korean leader said that ” “the purpose of the United States is not only to remove our nuclear might itself but eventually forcing us to surrender or weaken our rights to self-defense through giving up our nukes so that they could collapse our government at any time.”

No sanctions, he added, will force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

“This is the [US] misjudgment and miscalculation… You can impose sanctions for a hundred days, a thousand days, ten years, a hundred years. We are not going to give up the right to survival and the right to self-defense, on which the country’s security and its people depend. And no matter how difficult a situation we find ourselves in, we, who have to deter an even bigger nuclear power, the United States that has created this political and military situation on the Korean Peninsula, can never give up nuclear weapons.”

N Korea Passes Law Allowing It to Conduct Preventive Nuke Strikes

September 9, 2022 

By Staff, Agencies

North Korea has passed a law, declaring itself a nuclear weapons state and enshrining the right to use preemptive nuclear strikes to protect itself.

The Supreme People’s Assembly, the North’s legislature, lent its blessing to the law on Thursday, legislating the country’s status as a nuclear weapons state, the official news agency KCNA reported on Friday.

The law determines the occasions on which the country is supposed to deploy its nuclear weapons, including when attacked and also in order to protect its strategic assets.

“If the command and control system of the national nuclear force is in danger of an attack by hostile forces, a nuclear strike is automatically carried out immediately,” the law says.

Experts say the country is to resume testing nuclear weapons, noting that the legislation paves the way for the prospect.

Ruler Kim Jong-un said the legislation made the country’s status as a nuclear weapon state “irreversible.”

“The utmost significance of legislating nuclear weapons policy is to draw an irretrievable line so that there can be no bargaining over our nuclear weapons,” Kim said in a speech to the parliament.

The legislation, therefore, bars any talks on its denuclearization.

Kim said the US and its allies maintain “hostile policies” such as sanctions and military exercises that undercut their messages of peace.

“As long as nuclear weapons remain on earth and imperialism remains and maneuvers of the United States and its followers against our republic are not terminated, our work to strengthen nuclear force will not cease,” Kim said.

US President Joe Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump took unprecedented steps towards apparently fraternizing the North by initiating several rounds of dialog with it, and even walking a number of steps into the country alongside Kim.

However, Washington blew, what Pyongyang called, a “golden opportunity” at mending the situation by insisting too much on denuclearization.

The Futility of Dialogue with Idiots and Liars

August 26, 2022

Source

The entire crisis could have been avoided with much less loss of life if the NATO powers had responded to Russia’s long-held security concerns.

Two weeks ago, the Strategic Culture Foundation proposed an urgent, simple test: stop the artillery shelling on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. The ZNPP – Europe’s largest nuclear power station – continues to come under military attack thereby risking a nuclear catastrophe.

It is an incredible siege situation. And one that illustrates – for anyone willing to see it, that is – the profound criminality of the NATO-backed war in Ukraine against Russia. There is nothing that the NATO powers and their lying media will stoop to. In a related illustration, the British would-be next Prime Minister Liz Truss this week said she was willing to use nuclear weapons even if it caused global annihilation. This is the same psychopathic mentality that the world has to endure from such Western regimes.

This week, Russia’s envoy to the United Nations presented photographic evidence to the Security Council that showed irrefutably that the ZNPP is being shelled by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. The trajectory of fire is from the territory held by the Ukrainian military and the weaponry includes M777 howitzers supplied by the United States.

The Kiev regime’s claims are patently absurd. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claims that Russian forces are attacking the ZNPP despite the obvious fact that the Russian military took over the station in early March, days after it launched its security operation on February 24 to neutralize mounting NATO threats from Ukraine. The Western governments and news media continue to indulge Zelensky’s blatant lie by amplifying the perverse accusations of “self-sabotage” by Russia. The United Nations’ chief António Guterres has also shamefully indulged the nonsense by pretending to “not know the truth” about “conflicting claims”.

There are no “conflicting claims”. It is starkly evident that the NATO-backed Kiev regime is engaging in nuclear terrorism by willfully attacking the ZNPP. NATO and its Ukrainian proxy are using the threat of nuclear catastrophe to demand that Russian forces withdraw from the ZNPP. It is entirely fortunate that Russia’s military secured the ZNPP at an early stage. Otherwise, the Kiev regime and its NATO handlers would have had a free hand to use nuclear blackmail.

Not for the first time, this week the Western powers abused the Security Council by allowing the Ukrainian leader to address the forum. The Council’s rules stipulate that addresses can only be made by in-person attendees. Yet, for the second time, Zelensky was permitted to speak to the Council via video link. His speech was a travesty of lies, accusing Russia of nuclear terrorism among other hysterical claims of causing world hunger and global inflation.

When Russia’s ambassador Vassily Nebenzia took his turn to set the record straight at the Security Council hearing, the Ukrainian leader refused to listen, his video link conveniently cut off.

Nevertheless, the Russian envoy presented the evidence of NATO-backed military strikes on the ZNPP and went on to cogently state that the crisis in Ukraine has been systematically instigated by the NATO powers and its Kiev proxy over the past eight years since the CIA-backed coup in 2014. Nebenzia remarked on how Western powers and the Kiev regime are living in a “parallel reality”.

It is common to hear these days how the world is subjected to a post-truth condition. In plainer language that means a world of lies, falsehoods, distortions, misinformation and disinformation. The crisis in Ukraine, the NATO powers and the Kiev regime are an embodiment of this fiendish reality.

Western regimes accuse Russia of unprovoked aggression in Ukraine. (The same regimes that have slaughtered their way through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and continue to illegally bomb Syria, to name but a few victim nations.) They declare they are defending sovereignty and democracy. This is a preposterous charade that flies in the face of facts that the Western powers weaponized a Nazi regime in Ukraine to destabilize Russia. (An echo of how they weaponized Hitler’s Third Reich for the same purpose more than eight decades ago.) The Kiev regime has been killing its own people for eight years and committed countless war crimes. The relentless attacks on the ZNPP are totally consistent with the depraved conduct. Elsewhere, the NATO-backed regime has shelled chemical and oil plants in the Donbass territory. The Western media decline to report on these violations because that would reveal the criminal mentality and practice of the Kiev regime and its NATO sponsors.

Russia’s military operation to neutralize the growing NATO threat in Ukraine has been effective. The poisonous boil has been lanced and NATO’s decades-long aggressive expansionism against Russia has been checked. Yet Western media – the propaganda ministry that it is – claim that Russia’s intervention has been a failure. The United States and its NATO allies continue to flood Ukraine with offensive weapons even while the Kiev regime is using nuclear terrorism with these weapons and while Russian forces are destroying the Ukrainian military. That’s not a contradiction; it is a green light for more war and profits for the American military-industrial complex that underpins U.S. capitalism.

The entire crisis could have been avoided with much less loss of life if the NATO powers had responded to Russia’s long-held security concerns. But that assumes the NATO powers would have been interested in avoiding war. The damning conclusion is that the United States and its imperialist allies have always wanted the present war in order to pursue a geopolitical ambition of confronting Russia. In the same way that the U.S.-led axis wants to precipitate a war with China over Taiwan and other bogus issues.

American-led Western capitalism is addicted to war for its own ghoulish survival. A world of peaceful relations is fundamentally anathema to Washington and its vassals. But the ruling regimes can’t very well admit that pernicious motive, so they have to cover up their criminal agenda with deceptions about democracy, rules-based order, human rights and other laughable pretensions. Western media provide the necessary cosmetics for the ghoulish reality. The fact is wars and destruction are the oxygen for U.S. global power and its imperial lackeys. Dozens of wars since World War II waged by the U.S. and its international crime syndicate of NATO accomplices, especially its British henchman, attest to that naked, ugly truth.

The Ukrainian comedian-turned-president Zelensky is a liar and idiot. But he is only a bit-player in a bigger circus of imperial kabuki. His regime has used human shields and civilian centers as cover for its despicable ends. It has committed false-flag massacres in a vile attempt to blame Russia. It has diverted Russian gas from European markets while refusing to pay its energy debts. And it continues to extort Western taxpayers to foot the bill for its depredations – all too willingly obliged by Western regimes. To pay for the global-scale extortion racket, the Western public is being told to take cold showers and get used to “the end of abundance”, as France’s President (and former bankster) Emmanuel Macron haughtily advised this week.

The farce this week at the UN Security Council in which Western powers brazenly snubbed the evidence of their own criminality while giving a platform to Zelensky to peddle his ridiculous lies demonstrates a profound dilemma. Any attempt to engage idiots and liars through reasoned dialogue is doomed to fail. When dialogue and diplomacy are made futile then conflict is made all but inevitable. That dilemma has been a constant hallmark of relations with Western powers for many years. The present crisis in Ukraine is the tragic outcome. Lamentably, more such crises can be expected because the idiots and liars never stop.

Western regimes are collapsing from their own inherent loss of legitimacy. That loss is entirely due to their lies becoming more manifest despite their servile media facade. Collapse can be good. It is incontestably good in the case of ending endemic corruption. The ineffable danger, however, is what Western elites will do to avoid historic collapse. As the NATO-backed Kiev regime is demonstrating through its nuclear terrorism and as Britain’s idiotic politician Liz Truss revealed by her demonic embrace of global annihilation.

A Tale of Two Cities

August 13, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

(With Apologies to Charles Dickens)

Moscow and Washington

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

The opening words of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

It is the best of times. That which some in Moscow and in the Orthodox Christian world in general have been awaiting for a thousand years is coming to pass. Just as it has been prophesied again and again down the centuries: the West and its ruthless Imperialism are collapsing in the face of the resistance of the long-suffering and long-exploited Rest. This struggle is being led by Russia. What a time to be alive. We did not think we would live to see it. After the disaster of the Western and Russophobic ideology of Parliamentary Democracy, which was imposed by Great Britain and others on the old Russian Empire in February 1917, and then, as a prime example to the West of blowback, those incompetents passed power into the hands of the equally Western and Russophobic ideology of Marxism, which began genociding its subject peoples in October 1917.

It is the worst of times. Nobody likes this Washington-imposed war. People are dying, people are being mutilated both in their bodies and in their souls, people are being exploited and manipulated. Still worse is our pain for the Western peoples, on whom their wealthy elites are about to threaten with death by hunger and death by freezing, with all the civil strife that is hanging over them like black Doomsday.

It is the age of wisdom. Some in Moscow and elsewhere know that this is an existential war not just for the Russian Federation, but for the whole world. Either we will have a One World Dictatorship imposed on us by the Western elites, or else we will have Freedom and Peace, Justice and Prosperity.

It is the age of foolishness. The gerontocracy in Washington has imposed a choice. From 330 million Americans, all they could find as candidates to be US President, him who has charge of the nuclear button, is two very elderly men, an ill-reputed, viagra-charged businessman-clown and an ill-reputed double-dealer of dubious personal morality, clearly suffering from the onset of dementia.

It is the epoch of belief. There are those in Moscow and elsewhere who believe that the values of traditional faiths can vanquish the great Satan and his depravity.

It is the epoch of incredulity. There are those in Washington and elsewhere who are unwilling or unable to believe that the Western world is utterly corrupted and are so deluded that they are convinced of their own lies.

It is the season of Light. At last in Moscow and elsewhere the possibility of freedom and new life for the peoples of the once-enslaved world dawns.

It is the season of Darkness. The CIA-controlled Western media, fed from the judases in Washington, is striving to spread the darkness of its tentacular lies all over the world.

It is the spring of hope. On 24 February 2022 (new style), 105 years to the day after it was enslaved by the West (old style), Moscow proclaimed the springtime of liberation for the Ukraine, physical liberation for Russian-speakers, and spiritual liberation of the whole country from the twin yoke of Militarism and Nazism.

It is the winter of despair. Only a few weeks away from the first cold nights, nobody in Washington or in the Western European world with a mind that still works is looking forward to this winter. Hunger and cold, bankruptcy and unemployment, with ensuing mass civil disobedience, beckon to the Western peoples. Can you hear the demons laughing? They are laughing at you, the naïve, gullible, hoodwinked, zombified Western masses, gaslit by your narcissistic, egomaniac elite.

Hope

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…

From the closing paragraph of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

If we can win against the Mordor of the Collective West and its weapons of destruction, sanction and propagandisation, all three of which the Allies are wearing down in the Ukraine, then nothing from the above prophecy is beyond us.

There are those who can see the struggles to be truly free, triumphs and defeats, through long years to come. There are those who can see the evil of this time of 2022, and of the previous time, the thousand years which preceded it, of which the present is only the logical result. There are those who can see that here at last is the chance for the Western elites to make amends for their millennial crimes towards the rest of the world, first of all to their own peoples, then to the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia, of the Middle East, and North Africa, of Central and South America, of North America, of Central and Southern Africa, of Asia and Oceania. This repentance, in mind and heart and deed, would indeed be a far, far better thing that the Western world could do than anything it has ever done before.

12 August 2022

On the Future of Europe: A Proposition from 1 January 2023

July 24, 2022

By Batiushka for the Saker Blog

Almost one thousand years of Western Imperialism are coming to a shameful and self-inflicted death, one way or another

As schoolchildren will tell you, the names of the continents begin and end with the same letter, A: Asia, Africa, America, Australia, Antarctica. There is one exception: Europe, which though still beginning and ending with the same letter, the letter is not A, but E. Why the difference? Is it perhaps because Europe is not really a Continent? After all, it is not a vast landmass surrounded by an ocean (if it were a small one, it would be called an island). Its borders are arbitrary, having frequently changed, were only relatively recently pushed to the Urals, and are still much disputed. In reality, surely Europe is the artificially isolated north-western peninsula of Asia? It is not a geographical Continent at all, it is an ideological construct. That is why the slogan of so many EU-fanatics, like the former French President Chirac, was: ‘Faisons l’Europe’ – ‘Let’s Create Europe’.

We ask the above question because in this winter of 2022-2023 the old EU and Non-EU Europe has had to face a new reality following the war that the US/NATO lost in the ‘Ukraine’, as it used to be called. Europe-wide, indeed worldwide, food riots with looting of supermarkets and ‘bill boycotts’ (the wave of civil disobedience with the refusal/inability to pay soaring fuel bills) made this clear. Obviously, a worldwide reconfiguration is coming. Already the new world is becoming multipolar, with several main centres within the old BRICS, Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and now more to come, perhaps Iran, Türkiye, Argentina, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Lebanon and Indonesia. In general, all Asia, Africa and Latin America now at last have their own future.

Not only are the old, thoroughly corrupted international organisations like the UN, WTO, WEF or IMF rightly disappearing into the sewers of history along with their discredited puppet-master, the US elite, but so too are pro-US regional groupings, like its European political and economic arm the EU and its European military arm, NATO. And here precisely, we ask where does the US/NATO defeat in the Ukraine leave the European peninsula, both the EU part of it and the rest of it, outside the EU? After World War I Europe had to be reconfigured, and again after World War II. Now, after whatever you call the 2022 Western rout in the Ukraine (World War III, or World War I, Part III), what is its destiny?

Surely the greatest revelation of the US proxy war in the Ukraine is Europe’s dependence on Russia. Without Russia, it simply cannot survive – though Russia can survive without it. The fact is that for the last few centuries, the largest European country has been Russia for surface area and, over the last century and a half, for population. The most common European language in Europe is Russian, the second German, the third French, the fourth English, the fifth Italian. As regards natural resources, whether agricultural or mineral, and as regards military power, the most important country, once again, is Russia.

Having said that, it must be admitted that part of Russia’s might, on which Europe depends, comes from Asia, which forms the majority of Russia’s territory. Thus, Russia is also Asia, specifically the northernmost third of the Asian landmass, whereas Europe is just the tiny north-western tip of that same landmass. As for Europe’s peoples, they too came from Asia, and mostly speak ‘Indo-European’, that is, Northern Indian, languages. As for Europe’s traditional religion, it too is Asian, for Christ, who appeared on earth as a coffee-coloured man who certainly never wore trousers, lived in Asia, specifically in the Middle East. It seems obvious to anyone with even the most basic geographical and historical knowledge that the destiny of Europe, now divorced from its former landgrab colonies in Africa, America and Australia, is with Russia, which is its link to Asia.

The territory of the four largely East Slav Union States, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Malorossiya and Carpatho-Russia (the last two formed from the old, ill-fated US vassal, the ‘Ukraine’), dwarves the rest of Europe. Similarly, with a population of 200 million, the Four Union States are far larger than any of the European Regions in population. The future European Regions are still independent, if integral, parts of Eurasia, within the Russian resource and security umbrella, on which they depend. Non-Russian Europe has its own personality and culture, which varies amongst its members. Geographically, historically and linguistically, the 450 million people of the old EU and non-EU Europe can be divided into eight European Regions. What are they, in order of population?

1. Germania (122 million):

Germany, Austria, the South Tyrol, the Netherlands, Flanders (Northern ‘Belgium’), German-speaking East ‘Belgium’, Luxembourg, German-speaking Switzerland and Liechtenstein. These countries, with about twice as many people as most of the other European Regions, have all been influenced by the same culture of Germanic organisation, order and productivity. This could provide direction to the way out of their present black hole.

2. Francia (74 million):

France, Wallonia and Brussels, French-speaking Switzerland and Monaco. All share in the same Catholic and post-Catholic French-speaking culture. A return to ancient roots and historic cultural heritage could give direction to this Region in the future.

3. The Anglo-Celtic Confederation (73 million):

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Though geographically clearly one, these thousand islands and their four nations have in history been much perturbed by the centralising, unionist spirit imposed by force from alien ‘British’ London. (Between the Imperialist Romans and equally Imperialist Normans, the English Capital had been Winchester). If some equitable, confederal settlement can be reached between all four by the rejection of everything Britain and British, there is a future here. Could the acronym, IONA (Isles of the North Atlantic) provide clues to that future?

4. The Visegrad Group (66 million):

Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech Lands, Slovakia. Lithuania is not usually included in the ‘Visegrad Group’, but it has so much in common with Poland and national Catholicism, that it must belong to this group. All share in a common West Slav/Central and Eastern European, largely Catholic nationalist, culture.

5. South Eastern Europe (65 million):

Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus. Although very varied in culture, mainly Orthodox, but also Catholic and Muslim, and spreading as far as the Romanian Carpathians as well as the Greek Islands and the island of Cyprus, the centre of this group is a common, though often so far tragic, South-East European history.

6. Italia (62 million):

Italy, San Marino, Ticino and Malta. All have a common Italian culture, which can provide the strength for political, economic, cultural and social renewal.

7. Iberia (57 million):

Spain, the Canaries, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Gibraltar, Andorra, Portugal, the Azores, Madeira. All share in a common Iberian culture. With decentralisation, they could work together to find a way out of the present crisis.

8. Nordica (30 million):

Iceland, Norway, Denmark, the Faeroes, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Latvia. With a largely Lutheran and post-Lutheran common cultural heritage, these countries, with only about half the population of most of the other European regional groups, could work together to provide a direction away from the suicide to which they have come so perilously close in recent decades.

Many are at present profoundly pessimistic about the future of the European Peninsula. The EU is collapsing and has for some time been collapsing for all to see. However, we see no long-term reason for such pessimism. Once ‘Europe’ has reconnected with its geographical and historical roots in Asia, it will have a future again. In time, we are convinced that history will come to see Europe’s previous thousand years as in many ways a deviation from and a distortion of its historic destiny, which is as an integral, if idiosyncatic, part of the Asian landmass.

The Western Infowar On Mali Rebrands Terrorists As Simply Being “Extremist/Jihadi Rebels”

July 23, 2022 

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By Andrew Korybko

The stage seems set for a French-Russian proxy war in Mali in the event that the Associated Press’ rebranding of genuine terrorists there as simply being so-called “extremist/jihadi rebels” is indeed intended to precondition the public for a Syrian redux in West Africa as was argued in this analysis.

The Associated Press, one of the leading US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets in the world, is leading the way in that bloc’s ongoing infowar on Mali. Its military junta has become an African pioneer by showing that it’s indeed possible for the same forces tasked with enforcing the West’s neo-colonial regimes to Africa to secretly be anti-imperialist freedom fighters plotting to liberating their lands from foreign yoke once the chance presents itself, hence why that West African country’s being targeted. It’s also located in the same part of the continent that’s expected to become a major proxy war battlefield in the New Cold War between the US-led Golden Billion and the BRICS-led Global South.

In their article about the unprecedented attack against the country’s largest military base near the capital of Bamako by a group that the Associated Press itself even acknowledges is linked to Al Qaeda and ISIS, the outlet conspicuously avoids describing the culprits as terrorists, instead referring to them simply as “extremist/jihadi rebels”. This is a far cry from when the MSM rightly referred to such organizations as terrorists when France was still leading its self-proclaimed but immensely unsuccessfully anti-terrorist operation there that many locals suspected was driven by ulterior motives such as corralling such groups in the direction of shared interests instead of exterminating them.

The Malian junta’s decision in early May to break their country’s defense agreements with France in response to Paris exploiting such pacts to erode its host’s national sovereignty can be seen in hindsight as marking the moment when the MSM began to rebrand genuine terrorists there as “extremist/jihadi rebels”. The purpose in doing so is to grant a degree of tacit “legitimacy” to their cause due to what the term “rebel” supposedly implies in the popular imagination. It’s part of a larger infowar campaign aimed at preconditioning the public to accept what appears to be inevitable foreign patronage of these same terrorist groups along the lines of the Syrian model from the past decade.

Back then, the West openly supported terrorists on the supposed grounds that they were so-called “moderate rebels”, with the “moderate” qualifier being in comparison to the most backwards and barbaric terrorist groups in history even though these same “rebels” were literally indistinguishable from them and oftentimes literally members of Al Qaeda and/or ISIS. The same pattern is now being applied against Mali because employing terrorists is a Machiavellian means towards the end of regime change, which aims to remove its patriotic junta from power before it can influence those of its West African peers who still do the West’s bidding to carry out their own patriotic coups to save their states.

The Hybrid War of Terror on Syria was largely orchestrated out of that targeted country’s Turkish neighbor, while the Hybrid War of Terror on Mali will likely be orchestrated out of its Nigerien one, which will host those French forces that are being expelled by Bamako and has consistently been Paris’ bastion of regional influence alongside Chad over the decades. Just like that beleaguered Arab Republic counted on its Russian strategic partner for assistance during its darkest days, so too can the beleaguered West African republic as well, albeit probably not in any conventional form such as anti-terrorist airstrikes owing to obvious logistical reasons.

This isn’t groundless speculation either but is very strongly suggested by Foreign Minister Lavrov’s declaration on Friday that Russia will help Africa complete its decolonization process, to which end he intriguingly referenced Moscow’s historical support of building up its partners’ defense capabilities across the continent, among other means. It’s unclear exactly what military form this could take in the Malian context, but nobody should doubt Russia’s commitment to its West African partner, which has proven itself to be an African pioneer as was earlier explained and is thus of immensely strategic value for Moscow with respect to helping liberate the rest of the continent from Western neo-imperialism.

The stage therefore seems set for a French-Russian proxy war in Mali in the event that the Associated Press’ rebranding of genuine terrorists there as simply being so-called “extremist/jihadi rebels” is indeed intended to precondition the public for a Syrian redux in West Africa as was argued in this analysis. That certainly seems to be the case since there’s no other reason why that influential MSM outlet would change the way in which it describes the same groups that it used to rightly condemn as terrorists, especially considering that this coincides with the departure of French troops from the country. It’ll be regrettable if such a conflict occurs, but if it does, then Mali will fight to the end to defend its freedom.

Prepare to Freeze… EU’s Elitist Rulers Give Grim New Meaning to Cold War

July 22, 2022

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Russia has made every effort to keep Europe supplied. European governments in hock to U.S. imperial policy have made effort to wreak havoc on their own people.

Freezing households, crippling energy costs and associated soaring food bills are the outcome of the United States and NATO’s war agenda toward Russia. The summer season has brought sweltering heatwaves across Europe (and elsewhere) but in a few months, up to 500 million citizens of the European Union are going to face record levels of deprivation as gas shortages from Russia become fully manifest.

Russia has made every effort to keep Europe supplied. European governments in hock to U.S. imperial policy have made effort to wreak havoc on their own people.

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto while on a visit to Moscow sounded a rare note of sanity when he stated that Europe simply cannot survive without Russian energy supply. Other European leaders, however, are blinded by irrational Russophobia and subservience to American dictate. A day of reckoning is due if, that is, doomsday can be avoided.

This self-inflicted suicide of European nations has been mandated by governments that have prostrated themselves to Washington’s imperial agenda of confrontation with Russia. The war in Ukraine is the tragic outcome of a years-long US-led NATO belligerence towards Russia. Anyone who dares state that objective truth is vilified as a Kremlin propagandist. Western public discussion and critical thinking have been all but obliterated. Massive censorship of the internet has augmented that obliteration. This online journal, for example, has been blacklisted and blocked for readers in the U.S. and Europe by governments that profess to uphold free speech and independent thinking.

NATO’s relentless eastwards expansion and weaponizing of a Nazi-infested Ukrainian regime has created the current conflict and destructive consequences, including energy and food supply problems.

So obsessed are they with Russophobia and servility to Washington’s aggressive imperialism, the European elite is forcing their populations into an unprecedented Cold War that risks turning into a catastrophic world war. A war that would inevitably lead to a nuclear conflagration.

Rather than backing away from the abyss, the unelected European Commission – the executive power of the European Union – this week ordered all 27 member states to make massive cuts in gas consumption. The cuts amount to 15 percent. The measures are but a futile attempt to cover the inevitable calamity of massive energy shortages that will hit the EU this winter because of a drastic reduction in imports of Russian fuel. What the EU’s so-called political leadership is showing is a callous disregard for the living conditions of its citizens.

We are seeing the modern-day equivalent of dispatching millions of people into the muddy, bloody trenches of World War One. We may look back and wonder at that barbarity and how millions went along with it. What difference is there with today’s callousness and barbarity?

EU leaders like Ursula von der Leyen accuse Russia of “energy blackmail” and “weaponization of gas”. But such scapegoating is contemptible. The crisis situation has been engendered by the EU blindly following Washington’s agenda of sabotaging decades of reliable and affordable energy supply from Russia. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was technically complete last year to deliver some 55 billion cubic meters of gas – or about one-third of Russia’s former total supply to the EU. Germany has chosen to suspend that pipeline at Washington’s beckoning and bullying. Even the already functioning Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been disrupted because of Western economic sanctions imposed on Russia. Scheduled maintenance of turbines was held up and nearly threatened a complete shutdown until Russia’s Gazprom managed to reconnect on Thursday despite Western obstacles.

Poland and Ukraine have also cut the overland pipeline supplies of Russian gas that were serving the EU.

Because of unilateral Western sanctions on Russian banks, Moscow was compelled to request payment for gas exports in rubles. Some European countries have refused to comply with that new reasonable payment arrangement and thus have opted to forfeit the purchase of Russian gas.

For decades, Russia has proven to be a reliable partner in providing affordable and abundant gas as well as oil to the European Union. That strategic partnership for energy supply was the cornerstone of European economies. Germany’s industries and export-led economy that drives the rest of the EU thrived on Russian energy. Perversely, the European political elite has abased itself to consort with American imperial interests, rather than protecting the interests of European populations. So much for representative democracy!

The naked self-interest of the U.S. in selling Europe its own more expensive gas is blatant. Only a fool, or a tool, could pretend otherwise.

As noted already in previous SCF editorials, Washington’s hegemonic ambitions of global dominance and of salvaging its failing capitalist power depend crucially on pursuing a new Cold War against Russia and China. The world is being thrown into perilous turmoil because of this criminal ambition. Laughably, the European leaders hold pretensions of independence and global influence. They are nothing but pathetic lackeys to American power who are willingly sacrificing their populations in the process.

The desperation of the U.S. regime and its European minions is such that their societies are teetering on the brink of collapse from economic meltdown. Their reckless warmongering towards Russia (and China) is exacerbating and accelerating their own collapse. The real danger is that the U.S. and its NATO accomplices are now betting on escalating the war in Ukraine as a way to avert the demise of their own nations – a demise that they have induced.

At a security conference this week in Aspen, Colorado, Britain’s MI6 chief warned that “winter is coming” and Western resolve will be severely tested because of cascading societal deprivation over energy blackouts. Richard Moore urged for even more weapons supply to the Kiev regime – on top of the already tinderbox situation. His reasoning, like others in the NATO axis, is to double down on a proxy war with Russia in order to avert domestic repercussions and the implosion of the Western front under Washington’s command. The very future of the U.S.-led NATO axis is at stake.

That means that as European and American citizens suffer more hardships from their leaders’ wanton warmongering towards Russia, these same Western despots are going to gamble it all on a last-ditch offensive against Russia via Ukraine. Politics and diplomacy have been abandoned. War in Ukraine is set to get worse precisely because Western elites are losing an existential conflict. Ultimately, their conflict is an internal one to do with shoring up their own crumbling inherent power to rule over their masses. That, in turn, is a concomitant of the historic failing of their capitalist economies. Militarism and war, as in past times of failure, are once again being dredged up as a desperate “solution” for their failure.

Western citizens are finding out – and paying dearly for – the grim reality of Cold War. Rather than being held accountable for reckless, criminal machinations, the insane misleaders are now trying to turn it into a Hot War.

Disaster is not inevitable. It is certainly being courted. But people can avoid the abyss by taking control out of the hands of their criminal rulers. A historic choice in direction is looming. The Western mis-rulers are trying to prevent a correct choice from being taken by ginning up war.

Postscript: Looking back and looking forward with the Yellow Vests

July 12, 2022

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by Ramin Mazaheri

(Now available! This book has just been published in paperback and E-book form, and in French too!)

Western culture has been so prevalent for two centuries that I think much of the world assumes that they already intimately know a major European country like France. Many outside of the West may be saying, “We know the West, but the West doesn’t know us!”

It’s just not that simple.

(This is the nineteenth and final chapter in a new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. Please click here for the article which announces this book and explains its goals.)

A contemporary progressive demand correctly says that local histories must be prioritised and no longer imposed from the outside – stereotypes must be broken. The end of feudalism finally allowed the average person to say the truth in public – there is a class struggle – and using this most high-powered lens we realise: the people of France deserve this right as much as any other people because the history of their working poor masses, too, has been repressed, ignored and slandered.

That didn’t all start with the Yellow Vests.

Yellow Vest: “It’s not only in Paris, or in France – discontent is international. The poor, the young, the old – so many sectors of society are doing poorly because of a lack of humanity in our social and economic policies. The beauty of the Yellow Vests is that we gather together every weekend to communicate with each other – otherwise, people are just home alone with their misery.”

By far the best part of this book, in my opinion, is their words. I hope you have been as delighted as I have been to read their analyses right alongside the deeds of Napoleon, the revolutionaries of 1848, Communards, true Trotskyists, etc. Not only do their words tie this humble book together, but they tie together over 200 years of French history. France has this tremendously exciting history of political resistance, but it gets buried, distorted and untaught by the Liberalist elite – the Yellow Vests exhumed it and brought it back to living reality.

After more than a dozen years living in France I must admit that I, too, didn’t know France and Europe anywhere as well as I assumed I did before I moved here. What an enormous mistake I made – assuming that I “knew” France even though I knew hardly any French people!

One doesn’t have to be on the world’s bottom socioeconomic rung to have their culture and history falsely portrayed – every nation without a Socialist-inspired revolution to protect them has their own bottom rung which is silenced, crippled, massacred, etc. This book has been an effort to view modern French history from their ground up and not in the Liberalist fashion – their top down.

Yellow Vest: “Macron has ended so much social assistance to poor people. He tells lies about the poor, and also about his own policies. We are sick of his policies! We must finish the Macron era! We demand more aid for poor people, such as myself!”

Ah, still more progressive Yellow Vest thoughts! Yes, more, because this book is not my book but theirs. This book is not an attempt to give my version of French history, but the version from the average French person.

The average French person has much to learn from this book, I humbly insist, because the history of their working-poor has been so suppressed domestically, and also because the truth of the new pan-European project has been so suppressed.

Admit the truth: the euro has totally failed in its promise to bring about prosperity and economic security. The European Union has totally failed to act in a democratic manner. The pan-European project has not waged bilateral war (perhaps “yet”) but it has waged social war on its own citizens across the continent. Many permanently disfigured Yellow Vests would say I am even being too lenient here.

Yellow Vest: “By denying that there was any police brutality the government legitimised it. How we can have confidence in a government which cripples its own citizens, or in institutions which do not intervene to stop that? It is truly barbaric violence, which mutilated people because they believe in a better future.” 

The immediate, perpetual and ongoing failure of Liberalism; the notion that Western political culture has actually been excised of the influence of immoral, arrogant and unjust monarchism – a misconception which rather turns Iranians apoplectic; the clear goal of modern politics to move from absolutism towards citizen involvement and empowerment; the obvious historical trajectory of Western political structures from absolute monarchy, to aristocratic oligarchy, to a bankocracy which inflicts neo-imperialism on anyone it can reach – I hope this book has clarified these realities. Admit the truth.

I am convinced that what Europeans definitely agree on is that they all want an end to the wars which have gutted their lower classes for so long, to easily move around within Europe and the basic advances of mere Social Democracy. The working classes want peace, ease of movement and a decent social safety net. The pan-European project has manipulated these desires – the 1% has teased with the carrot but just given the stick. The only real success of the pan-European project has been the flexibility of the EU passport – Europeans are quite relieved to be able to move around the continent without the previous hassles.

Europeans, in my experience and according to polls, mostly want a united Europe – it’s unfortunate that they are misled into believing that there is no alternative to this thus-far woefully unsuccessful version of it.

Yellow Vest: “I can’t tell people how to vote, but I certainly advise them to not vote for Macron. He hasn’t done anything for the French people, but has instead worked for the rich bankers, corporations and Brussels.”

Even though his autocratic repression of the Yellow Vests should have disqualified him from ever holding public office again, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected, incredibly. The false branding of the Yellow Vests as mere “hooligans” has largely stuck in France, stunningly. There is a dysfunction, a Marxist “barrenness”, an autocratic schizophrenia which Western Liberal Democracy is forcing the average Frenchman to endure – this book shows how long this sickness has been imposed on the French poor, working poor and working classes.

Without the courage to call things by their rightful names – Western Liberal Democracy means failure for the 99%; Socialist Democracy justly puts the 99% at the forefront of government policy – France as a whole will never heal. How very few political analysts say this!

This postscript was finished the day after France’s 2nd-round legislative elections. Macron has not been handed another absolute majority by a slim margin – it’s another Yellow Vest victory, but not one which was resounding enough. It’s certain that Macron was never a “centrist” but a mainstream conservative, merely with a new logo and of his younger generation. Thus, his coalition will continue to unite with the mainstream conservative les Républicains party (and also many fake-leftist Socialists and Greens) for an absolute majority on all issues involving far-right economics, the re-imposition of Liberalism and the pan-European project. French parliament will now be less stable and more combative, but in appearances only – in reality French parliament remains only for appearances on the major questions of economic and political power distribution. It’s certain that the reason an absolute democratic majority of France (54%) didn’t even bother to vote is because they implicitly know that modern autocracy – rule by the 49-3 executive decree and the overruling of national sovereignty by Brussels – rules, thus rendering Europe’s national parliaments a waste of time, their breath and our attention. I would conclude that Liberalism in France is on the verge of becoming so preposterously dysfunctional that it’s surely about to be consigned to the dustbin of history but, alas, I recall that Marx and Trotsky wrote the same thing.

It’s certain that these analyses will not be popular among my journalist colleagues.

What is so unfortunate is that as early as the summer of 2019 people kept asking me: “You’re going to report on a Yellow Vest demonstration? But I thought they had stopped marching?” The media blackout on the group extends beyond the common excuse of the corporate domination of Western media: it doesn’t explain the refusal of France’s state-owned media to cover the group. French taxpayers deserve better. Capitalism is an issue, but the larger issue is obviously political and cultural – it’s elite-driven Liberalism.

Yellow Vest: “We marched as Yellow Vests for two years, and we are still Yellow Vests today, but we all saw that nothing changed! The cost of living is too expensive – we can’t pay our bills at the end of the month! We don’t want this government – and their violence – any more.”

The fact that the Yellow Vests have marched every Saturday for over three and half years (not including the coronavirus pause) is actually more important than how they have been wilfully ignored:

As the West comes out of the coronavirus era, during which they actually employed some Social Democratic-inspired economic measures, they are immediately reverting to extremist Liberalist economic solutions: forced recession, in order to perpetuate the elite’s dominance over the working poor. The first half of 2022 was supposed to be a time when France’s elections were going to garner great interest, at least in France, but the vote was overshadowed everywhere by total economic disaster – much of it self-inflicted in the West. Betting on a period of economic disaster – always a constant in Liberalist capitalism – seems like a gamble that will pay off quite big, and quite soon, in the world’s weakest and least-sovereign macroeconomic bloc.

Yellow Vest: “Things really could explode because prices keep going up but wages do not. If Emmanuel Macron somehow wins re-election then social unrest will go sky-high. The Yellow Vests will really take to the streets then, and it will be much worse than in 2019.”

For those who marvel at the insight of these Yellow Vest quotations – they truly are just that politically intelligent and aware! Give them all the credit. The idea that they are just rioting berserkers is… well, this book has already disproven that completely.

The perspective of the daily hard-news reporter is, I think, a unique and useful one. There is an urgency to this particular area of journalism caused by the reality that (after starting from the ideal of objectivity) serious conclusions must be drawn immediately and presented – they cannot be drawn-out, postponed, frittered away by mealy-mouthed relativism. Additionally, I interview and learn the opinion on the day’s most vital events from everyone, from hedge fund mangers to think-tank analysts to pensioners to protesters to Yellow Vests and to – most often – the everyday Frenchman and Frenchwoman on the street. That’s not something which can be easily replicated. Personally, my favorite chapters may be Chapters 9 through 11 – covering 2009-2022 – which condensed over 1,500 2-3 minute television hard news reports for PressTV (which equates to more than 3,000 soundbites from French people) and hundreds of columns. That can’t be easily replicated, either, nor can my honest claim to have reported on more Yellow Vest demonstrations than any other journalist in any language.

At the next Liberalist-provoked disaster the Yellow Vests will be there – they have never left. That should give France great hope. This book has aimed to share their fundamental message of hope and civic-mindedness.

Yellow Vest: “What voters should do is to not be scared, and to rejoin the Yellow Vests. We have lost our purchasing power, our social services, our individual freedoms – stop crying about these two candidates from behind your television or computer and come join us!”

The ideas of the Yellow Vests are not new – this book examined many different modern French eras to show precisely that. There is obviously a human unity across spaces, and there is also a political unity across time. The interspersed quotes of the Yellow Vests should have given you the clear understanding of: it’s been the same political and economic struggle for the past 233 years. It’s not complicated: just examine how and why they repressed the Yellow Vests so brutally, and why that failed to stop them.

Yellow Vest: “The government doesn’t know what to do because they see that the movement continues despite so much repression. We will not stop until we get the right to citizen-initiated referendums, the end to corporate tax evasion and a rule of social justice so that people can live decently.”

That’s perhaps the most simple encapsulation of the primary demands of the Yellow Vests. Mine might be a bit different, but I was honoured to be alongside the Yellow Vests to insist on our right to live decently.

The West’s best values are not imperialism, elitist Liberalism, oligarchical parliamentarianism, free market chaos, suppressive austerity and a rat race to “become bourgeois”. Look at the Yellow Vests for the West’s true virtues, and then join them wherever you can.

Ramin Mazaheri

Paris

June 20, 2022

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Now available for purchase: English paperback and e-book – French paperback and e-book.

Complete chapter list of France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values

• New book announcement – ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s best values’ – March 15, 2022
• Introduction: A Yellow Vests’ history must rewrite both recent & past French history – March 20, 2022
• The UK’s endless reaction: 1789 & feudalism’s end creates modern conservatism – March 25, 2022
• Glorious Revolution of 1688: England declares ‘death to all other revolutions’ – March 29, 2022
• Modern political history makes no sense if Napoleon is not a leftist revolutionary – April 2, 2022
• The ‘Counter-Revolutions of 1848’ stillborn child: Western Liberal Democracy – April 7, 2022
• Louis-Napoleon: The revolutionary differences between Bonapartism & Western Liberal Democracy – April 11, 2022
• The Paris Commune: The true birth of neoliberalism and EU neo-imperialism – April 17, 2022
• Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s – April 23, 2022
• On ‘Leon Trotsky on France’ in order to reclaim Trotsky from Trotskyists – May 2, 2022
• Growing up Yellow Vest: Seeing French elites, not French people, conquered by neoliberalism – May 8, 2022
• The pan-European project wanted a Great Recession, winds up with Yellow Vests May 13, 2022
• To Yellow Vests he’s the radical: Macron imposes ‘radical centrism’ for Brussels – May 19, 2022
• Yellow Vests: At worst, the most important French movement for a century – May 24, 2022
• Who are they, really? Ask a reporter whose seen a million Yellow Vest faces – May 31, 2022
• Yellow Vest Win: Ending the West’s slandering of all popular movements as far-right xenophobes – June 9, 2022
• Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western parliamentarianism as the most progressive government June 14, 2022
• Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western unions as leftism’s hereditary kings – June 20, 2022
• Yellow Vest Win: Proving that Western Liberal Democracy is the same old autocracy – June 27, 2022
• What the Yellow Vests can be: a group which can protect Liberalism’s rights, at least July 4, 2022
• Postscript: Looking back and looking forward with the Yellow Vests

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.