Netanyahu and his cabinet are taking ‘Israel’ to Biblical Armageddon

2 Dec 2023 

Source: Al Mayadeen English

“Israel” is pushing for a Second Nakba (Illustrated by Al Mayadeen English)

Alastair Crooke

At its core, the cabinet judges that public anger and the call to “crush” Hamas will outlast the US estimation of a ‘few weeks’ war at most.

Biden and his team, who were angling for a full ceasefire, have been comprehensively rebuffed. The Cabinet and the Israeli military were chaffing under the constraints of a ceasefire. Once any military action is stopped, the longer the “time out”, the harder it is to begin again. As expected, the truce now has come to an end. American expectations were unrealistic, given the mood of the public and the unity within Netanyahu’s Cabinet.

Effectively, we are entering a new war — for it will be on a markedly different scale. For one, the Hamas leadership has said that in this next phase, the main fighting force (three-quarters of all its Gaza fighting men) will engage the Israeli soldiers; and secondly, because the war is likely to widen and take new and unexpected paths.

Not only did Netanyahu and his team snub Biden — Blinken said to Gallant, “You only have a few more weeks,” to which Gallant replied, It “will be months,” to which Blinken snapped back, “I don’t think you have months” — but significantly, Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers also knowingly – and deliberately — cut across the ‘red line’ enunciated by the united Resistance fronts: Stop the massacre in Gaza, or else!

Why knowingly and deliberately?

Because “Israel’s” Cabinet war aims are in a process of metamorphosis — partly to escape censure for the lapses that allowed October 7 to take “Israel” by surprise, Netanyahu the ‘master of image maker’ is shifting public attention away from the initial Hamas attack (which he blames on Military and Intelligence shortcomings) to paint a canvas of 7 October events in the dramatic brush-strokes as the opening round of a ‘Second War of Independence.’ In short, “Israel” is fighting a no-choice war. And “Israel’s” survival (and Netanyahu’s personal political survival) is possible only if the war is prolonged since it is a formative “national struggle”.

The cabinet strategy, therefore, rests on the bet that Israeli public opinion will hold (despite Netayahu’s personal disapproval ratings), due to the overwhelming public support at this point for the two declared objects set by the war cabinet: Destroying the ‘Hamas regime’ and its capabilities and the release of all Israeli captives in Gaza.   

At its core, the cabinet judges that public anger and the call to “crush” Hamas will outlast the US estimation of a ‘few weeks’ war at most. On this, Netanyahu and his cabinet seem to be on firm ground. A poll published last Friday by the Israeli Democratic Institute reported that 90% of the public fully support the “annihilation of Hamas.” IDI’s Director commented that the poll underscored that nothing had changed in terms of Israeli attitudes: There is no basis, the director noted, in his sounding of opinion, to support either a ceasefire or a political solution. For the Israeli public, there can be no stability until “Hamas is eradicated.”

The second step taken by “Israel’s” cabinet is to support Netanyahu’s artistry of a “heroic, no-choice struggle” by coloring the coming ‘War of Independence’ in absolute Manichean terms: light versus the dark; civilization versus barbarism. This is intended to kindle a wave of support for the key step of taking the “fiction” of a political agreement with the Palestinians off the table — “once and for all.”

The ‘table’ is being set for a long Israeli war against ‘cosmic evil’.

“Only I [Netanyahu] can prevent a Palestinian State ever coming into being in Gaza, Judea or Samaria”: “I will not allow it”. “There will never be” [a Palestinian state]”.  ‘Only I can manage relations with Biden (a 40 year friendship). Only I know how to manage the US psyche’.  

“I am leading”… ‘not only on behalf of Jewish history but also Western civilization’.

It is a typical narcissistic Netanyahu bluster. Agreed. But it is also an all too common mistake in the West to underestimate one’s adversaries. Netanyahu’s bluster may work. It seems from the polling that it will. (Netanyahu is a fox).

Haaretz military affairs correspondent Amos Harel writes:

“The anger in Israel over these events (surrounding 7th October), is mounting continuously … the emotional considerations come on top of the prevailing notion among the public that without the total defeat of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there is no prospect of reducing the damage wrought by the surprise attack. Moreover, that without a military victory on this scale, it will be impossible to deter Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon from attempting similar actions in the future”.

It cannot be spelled out more clearly than from these statements by Netanyahu (“no Palestinian State”) that “Israel” is pushing for a Second Nakba. Netanyahu is building — with his florid Manichaeanism popular domestic support — toward a silent new ultimatum for Gaza: “Emigration or annihilation”. And later, in the West Bank, too. 

So, here comes the ‘new war’: A Hebraic civilizational war to establish a ‘new’ “Israel” on the “Land Of Israel” versus the emerging Islamic nationalism undergirded by civilizational (non-institutional) Islam.

Hamas — indeed — has shattered the paradigm. The “two-states notion” has slipped under the waves.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

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Operation Al Aq

‘Israel’ Anticipates “Black Days”: It’s About a Multi-Front War

 April 28, 2023

Illustrative photo displaying flags of movements within the Axis of Resistance.

Ali Haidar – Al-Akhbar Newspaper (April 21, 2023)

Translated by Al-Manar English Website staff

Day after another, the Israeli army becomes convinced by an old hypothesis that the Zionist entity will engage in a multi-front confrontation. The recent resistance operations extending from the north to the south, all the way to occupied Palestine interior- the latest of which could have rolled into a wide round of fighting- only weighed this hypothesis as well.

Meanwhile, the recent operations imposed a pressure on both the political and security institutions in the occupation regime, as it deepened the state of confusion within the Israeli leadership.

However, such Israeli estimations not only did begin with the outbreak of the last “rocketry round” in the third week of the holy month of Ramadan, but rather that the latter represented a modest translation of a scenario present by the occupation leadership years ago.

Perhaps the “Chariots of Fire” military exercise, which was scheduled for 2021 and was postponed till 2022 due to the “Seif Al-Quds” battle, indicated that this scenario had been on the table since before.

According to Israeli estimates, Iran has made significant strides in its plan to deploy missiles, drones and advanced weapons around the Zionist entity, turning the occupied territories from the north to the south into a real battlefield.

As a result, the enemy lives with an obsession that it will face a harsh confrontation that simultaneously includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, all the way to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, especially since it is expected, in this case, to be subjected to destruction on scales that it has not witnessed throughout its history.

These estimates raised the level of concerns in the Israeli regime living with a permanent state of fear over any conflict in the region.

And what makes the picture more bleak for ‘Israel’ is that the multi-front war scenario, with its military and strategic risks, comes at a time when the Zionist entity finds itself “drowned in the most serious internal crisis in its history, while its prime minister is Benjamin Netanyahu, who promised to put Iran at the top of his priorities, is busy trying to save himself from the court’s ruling, as the people are divided,” said Chuck Freilich, former deputy national security adviser, as reported by Yedioth Ahronoth (April 19,2023).

Freilich added, “Saudi Arabia and the UAE have restored their relations with Iran, and Egypt is on the way to do so, as the regional alliance that Israel sought to build is disintegrating, with Iran’s relations with China and Russia deepening, and the crisis in our relationship with the United States is deep,” to conclude that “all the strategy that Netanyahu built has collapsed.”

The battles on more than one front have ceased, but the messages behind Megiddo operation and the subsequent missile strikes from Lebanon, Syria and Gaza against ‘Israel’ are still echoed by assessment and decision-making bodies across the Zionist entity.

In depth, the enemy’s institutions view the security developments that have taken place in recent weeks as a new phase that is highly intertwined, complex, and completely different from what they are familiar with in the maneuvers that simulated such scenarios.

Perhaps what frightens ‘Israel’ in this stage is that if it decides to retaliate it will find itself engaged in a multi-front battle that it fears and has been trying to avoid, while if it refrains from doing so, it will have accepted the erosion of its deterrent power.

The Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, confirmed in a security assessment session (on April 20) that ‘Israel’ is “at the end of the era of limited confrontations,” and that it is thus entering “a new security era that poses a real threat in all arenas at the same time.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant

Gallant remarks reflect a shift in the conscious of the Israeli security institution and anticipate the Israeli decision makers’ cautious behavior towards its options in a bid to avoid a dangerous scenario that is seen by the Israelis as the “Day of Resurrection”.

The Israeli DM summed up this shift by the Israeli military establishment, and behind it the political establishment as well, by saying: “We have worked for years to assume that we can engage in limited conflicts, but this phenomenon is disappearing. Today there is a clear phenomenon, which is the united fronts.”

Gallant also expressed that Iran is the “driving force” for this phenomenon by providing “resources, ideology, knowledge and training for its proxies,” adding that the increasing dependence of all these powers on Iran prompts the Islamic Republic to “defy Israel.”

On the other hand, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah was clear in his recent speech on the occasion of “International Al-Quds Day” (April 14), where he warned the enemy against relying on a policy that aims at engaging in a single battle based on the assessment that the people of the region do not want a war.

“This is a dangerous game,” Sayyed Nasrallah said, warning that the occupation’s calculations may drag the region into an all-out war, which will necessarily be multi-fronts.

For its part, the Israeli cabinet held a session on the threat emanating from Lebanon and Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deliberately coincided the session with the “Holocaust” anniversary, and “in the presence of all the security leadership in ‘Israel’, with the aim of sending a message of strength”, according to the Hebrew “Kan” channel.

Other reports stated that the session discussed the scenario of escalation on the northern front, as a result of a possible escalation in Gaza, according to the estimates of the Israeli security and military establishments.

As a result, the Israeli stances, as well as the political performance, reveal that the Zionist regime deals with all seriousness with the fact that the region has entered a new phase, with which the hypothesis of the multi-front battle has become more present on the table, prompting ‘Israel’ to discuss its possible options regarding it, especially in light of doubts over Tel Aviv’s readiness to wage such a battle.

Hence, the occupation’s limited response during the latest round is understood, as well as its focus on neutralizing “Hezbollah”, in a bid to avoid acts of reprisals.

Nevertheless, the realization of the multi-front scenario depends on a number of factors, including the possibility of the Israeli miscalculations, which will make it as if it is treading a regional mine that will explode and topple its internal front and the interests of its American sponsor in the region.

Axis of Resistance Benjamin Netanyahu Hezbollah Iran Israel Lebanon Palestine Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah Yoav Gallant

The Next Stage in Western Escalation

January 27, 2023

Source

by Batiushka

Introduction: The Story So Far

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

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

A Message from Boris: Deaths and Sackings

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

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

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

Escalation: Germany Declares War on Russia Again

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

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

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

The War

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword: Another Future

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

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

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

27 January 2023

Notes:

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

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

Crushing NATO’s Nefarious Narratives

October 20, 2022

By Declan Hayes

Source

Let’s bring these over embroidered narratives down to kindergarten level so NATO’s huffers, puffers and bluffers can understand.

So here we are, forced to castigate all Russians, those far away people about whom NATO’s scribes know absolutely nothing. Why is that? Why must we waste yet more time debunking NATO’s stupid libels that delightful Russian children’s stories are undermining the fabric of French society? Why is The Economist insisting we burn the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without even reading, never mind musing on them? What is it about Russian Special Olympians that we must hate them as if they were invading Martians? Is it to make us more despicable Nazis than even the worst of Hitler’s henchmen ever were?

It certainly seems so. We must be outraged if General Armageddon’s troops launch missiles at Kiev that force its children to spend some hours in bunkers but we must not mention that the Kiev junta’s former dictator not only promised the Russian speakers of Donbas that their children would spend their entire lives cowering in such bunkers but that he unleashed his Nazi hordes on them to do just that. We must applaud NATO’s murder of non-combatant Darya Dugina and celebrate the terrorist attack on Crimea’s bridge but be outraged if General Armageddon’s forces respond. We are so brainwashed as to believe that Russians, Armenians and Palestinians must never bark back, that they must lie down like the proverbial Danes.

Speaking of the Danish obsession with being NATO’s door mat, whatever happened to those Nord Stream pipelines? Did U.S. terrorists blow them, like their previous terrorist attacks on Nicaragua’s pipeline infrastructure done, remember, at a time when the Americans were gang raping American nuns and flooding America’s own cities with crack cocaine?

NATO’s apologists insist (they cannot argue, and thus the blanket censorship) that America, the obvious Nord Stream culprit, is perennially innocent and that the fog of war dictates we must look elsewhere, to forever grope about in the dark and not pinpoint the United States and their European lackeys as the the obvious culprits. To demand a transparent investigation into this terrorist attack or into Israel’s murder of Palestinian Catholic Shireen Abu Akleh or into NATO’s chemical gas attacks in Donbas and Damascus would, NATO’s terrorist apologists tell us, play into Putin’s hands. And, thus we daren’t express our outrage, like all moral people must do and like so few people did under Hitler’s Reich, lest it helps Putin’s truthful narrative gain traction and NATO’s Willing Executioners might believe that Russians, Armenians, Vietnamese, Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians are as human as us.

For all those crude fibs comprise NATO’s fog of war, NATO’s sugar coated webs of deceit that downplay their Vietnamese genocide and their other unspeakable crimes “from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. Though NATO can green screen Zelensky all it likes, the unvarnished truth is plainer than the simplest of the fables of Masha and Mishka, the three little piggies or any other child’s story.

Or, for that matter Mother Russia, which is not Churchill’s riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma. Russians are no different from anybody else on either the personal or geo political levels. General Armageddon, General Shoigu and the men and women who serve under them know that they must defend with their lives all that is good in their country, in their families and in their comrades, far too many of whom have already made the ultimate sacrifice only because the reality of this particular version of the three piggies fable is intellectually far above the intellectual capabilities of the enemies they face on their Western borders, as well as in the Caucasus where NATO is determined to once and forever exterminate the Armenians, whose sole hope is Russia and those like India who can see NATO’s much broader chess play with Armenia.

So, let’s bring these over embroidered narratives down to kindergarten level so NATO’s huffers, puffers and bluffers can understand. NATO is morally amiss in Ukraine. Zelensky, von der Leyen, Borrell, the White Helmets, the Azovs, and all their green screened heroes are nothing more than NATO’s bit players, paid to play their parts, recite their lines and do whatever crimes NATO requires of them. No matter how the BBC or any of their other outlets might embellish NATO’s narrative, the underlying motif that NATO is the civilized world’s most lethal enemy is simpler than a child’s first nursery rhyme.

Russia, like Palestine, Syria and Armenia, is much more than some childish Churchillian Matryoshka doll, or Chinese cracker where some puerile riddle is wrapped in a Harry Potter mystery inside a Pirates of the Caribbean enigma. And nor is it, at heart, a Flann O’Brien story or a surreal Kiss of the Spider Woman fairytale where, like the matryoshka dolls, one narrative is embedded inside another.

The core narrative is not only much simpler than any of that but would be instantly understood by all Russian speaking toddlers, both those whose childhoods were scarred by the crimes of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, the Zelenskys, Poroshenko, the BBC and their entire rotten crew of fellow travellers, and those further east who were spared those horrors. The people of Russia and Armenia have the right to live in peace and for their combined armies to defend that right and, if that is not expressed plainly enough, Generals Armageddon and Shoigu will increasingly spell it out in an even blunter language that NATO and their cokeheads in Kiev, Helsinki and New Zealand will understand.

The thin red line: NATO can’t afford to lose Kabul and Kiev

October 13, 2022

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

Let’s start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war.

Damascus had rejected the – American – plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed).

What followed was a vicious, concerted “Assad must go” campaign: proxy war as the road to regime change. The toxic dial went exponentially up with the instrumentalization of ISIS – yet another chapter of the war of terror (italics mine). Russia blocked ISIS, thus preventing regime change in Damascus. The Empire of Chaos-favored pipeline bit the dust.

Now the Empire finally exacted payback, blowing up existing pipelines – Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Steam 2 (NS2) – carrying or about to carry Russian gas to a key imperial economic competitor: the EU.

We all know by now that Line B of NS2 has not been bombed, or even punctured, and it’s ready to go. Repairing the other three – punctured – lines would not be a problem: a matter of two months, according to naval engineers. Steel on the Nord Streams is thicker than on modern ships. Gazprom has offered to repair them – as long as Europeans behave like grown-ups and accept strict security conditions.

We all know that’s not going to happen. None of the above is discussed across NATOsan media. That means that Plan A by the usual suspects remains in place: creating a contrived natural gas shortage, leading to the de-industrialization of Europe, all part of the Great Reset, rebranded “The Great Narrative”.

Meanwhile, the EU Muppet Show is discussing the ninth sanction package against Russia. Sweden refuses to share with Russia the results of the dodgy intra-NATO “investigation” of itself on who blew up the Nord Streams.

At Russian Energy Week, President Putin summarized the stark facts.

Europe blames Russia for the reliability of its energy supplies even though it was receiving the entire volume it bought under fixed contracts.

The “orchestrators of the Nord Stream terrorist attacks are those who profit from them”.

Repairing Nord Stream strings “would only make sense in the event of continued operation and security”.

Buying gas on the spot market will cause a €300 billion loss for Europe.

The rise in energy prices is not due to the Special Military Operation (SMO), but to the West’s own policies.

Yet the Dead Can Dance show must go on. As the EU forbids itself to buy Russian energy, the Brussels Eurocracy skyrockets their debt to the financial casino. The imperial masters laugh all the way to the bank with this form of collectivism – as they continue to profit from using financial markets to pillage and plunder whole nations.

Which bring us to the clincher: the Straussian/neo-con psychos controlling Washington’s foreign policy eventually might – and the operative word is “might” – stop weaponizing Kiev and start negotiations with Moscow only after their main industrial competitors in Europe go bankrupt.

But even that would not be enough – because one of NATO’s key “invisible” mandates is to capitalize, whatever means necessary, on food resources across the Pontic-Caspian steppe: we’re talking about 1 million km2 of food production from Bulgaria all the way to Russia.

Judo in Kharkov

The SMO has swiftly transitioned into a “soft” CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) even without an official announcement. The no-nonsense approach of the new overall commander with full carte blanche from the Kremlin, General Surovikin, a.k.a. “Armageddon”, speaks for itself.

There are absolutely no indicators whatsoever pointing to a Russian defeat anywhere along the over 1,000 km-long frontline. The spun-to-death withdrawal from Kharkov may have been a masterstroke: the first stage of a judo move that, cloaked in legality, fully developed after the terrorist bombing of Krymskiy Most – the Crimea Bridge.

Let’s look at the retreat from Kharkov as a trap – as in Moscow graphically demonstrating “weakness”. That led the Kiev forces – actually their NATO handlers – to gloat about Russia “fleeing”, abandon all caution, and go for broke, even embarking on a terror spiral, from the assassination of Darya Dugina to the attempted destruction of Krymskiy Most.

In terms of Global South public opinion, it’s already established that General Armageddon’s Daily Morning Missile Show is a legal (italics mine) response to a terrorist state. Putin may have sacrificed, for a while, a piece on the chessboard – Kharkov: after all, the SMO mandate is not to hold terrain, but to demilitarize Ukraine.

Moscow even won post-Kharkov: all the Ukrainian military equipment accumulated in the area was thrown into offensives, just for the Russian Army to merrily engage in non-stop target practice.

And then there’s the real clincher: Kharkov set in motion a series of moves that allowed Putin to eventually go for checkmate, via the missile-heavy “soft” CTO, reducing the collective West to a bunch of headless chickens.

In parallel, the usual suspects continue to relentlessly spin their new nuclear “narrative”. Foreign Minister Lavrov has been forced to repeat ad nauseam that according to Russian nuclear doctrine, a strike may only happen in response to an attack “which endangers the entire existence of the Russian Federation.”

The aim of the D.C. psycho killers – in their wild wet dreams – is to provoke Moscow into using tactical nuclear weapons in the battlefield. That was another vector in rushing the timing of the Crimea Bridge terror attack: after all British intel plans had been swirling for months. That all came to nought.

The hysterical Straussian/neocon propaganda machine is frantically, pre-emptively, blaming Putin: he’s “cornered”, he’s “losing”, he’s “getting desperate” so he’ll launch a nuclear strike.

It’s no wonder the Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 is now placed at only 100 seconds from midnight. Right on “Doom’s doorstep”.

This is where a bunch of American psychos is leading us.

Life at Doom’s doorstep

As the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder is petrified by the startling Double Fail of a massive economic/military attack, Moscow is systematically preparing for the next military offensive. As it stands, it’s clear that the Anglo-American axis will not negotiate. It has not even tried for the past 8 years, and it’s not about to change course, even incited by an angelic chorus ranging from Elon Musk to Pope Francis.

Instead of going Full Timur, accumulating a pyramid of Ukrainian skulls, Putin has summoned eons of Taoist patience to avoid military solutions. Terror on the Crimea Bridge may have been a game-changer. But the velvet gloves are not totally off: General Armageddon’s daily aerial routine may still be seen as a – relatively polite – warning. Even in his latest landmark speech, which contained a savage indictment of the West, Putin made clear he’s always open for negotiations.

Yet by now, Putin and the Security Council know why the Americans simply can’t negotiate. Ukraine may be just a pawn in their game, but it’s still one of Eurasia’s key geopolitical nodes: whoever controls it, enjoys extra strategic depth.

The Russians are very much aware that the usual suspects are obsessed with blowing up the complex process of Eurasia integration – starting with China’s BRI. No wonder important instances of power in Beijing are “uneasy” with the war. Because that’s very bad for business between China and Europe via several trans-Eurasian corridors.

Putin and the Russian Security Council also know that NATO abandoned Afghanistan – an absolutely miserable failure – to place all their chips on Ukraine. So losing both Kabul and Kiev will be the ultimate mortal blow: that means abandoning the 21^st Eurasian Century to the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership.

Sabotage – from the Nord Streams to Krymskiy Most – gives away the desperation game. NATO’s arsenals are virtually empty. What’s left is a war of terror: the Syrianization, actually ISIS-zation of the battlefield. Managed by braindead NATO, acted on the terrain by a cannon fodder horde sprinkled with mercenaries from at least 34 nations.

So Moscow may be forced to go all the way – as the Totally Unplugged Dmitry Medvedev revealed: now this is about eliminating a terrorist regime, totally dismantle its politico-security apparatus and then facilitate the emergence of a different entity. And if NATO still blocks it, direct clash will be inevitable.

NATO’s thin red line is they can’t afford to lose both Kabul and Kiev. Yet it took two acts of terror – on Pipelineistan and on Crimea – to imprint a much starker, burning red line: Russia will not allow the Empire to control Ukraine, whatever it takes. That’s intrinsically linked to the future of the Greater Eurasia Partnership. Welcome to life at Doom’s doorstep.

Saving Private Ukraina: The End-Game on the Horizon?

October 11, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

Some commentators on this site have always been impatient for more dramatic Russian military action in the Ukraine, a Red Army Blitzkrieg involving the flattening of Kiev and many other cities. I suspect that, unlike military men, they have no idea of the horrors of real war. Unlike warmongering politicians, who do not do the fighting and do not face getting splattered by the brains and guts spilling out from inside other human-beings alive a few moments before, military men are essentially pacifists.

That does not mean that they are cowards, it means that, as professionals, they want to achieve their aims avoiding losses as far as possible. The aim is not to kill other human-beings. All the more so in the Ukraine, where those opposing you are the same race as yourself and with similar values. Kiev is not going to be flattened, it is a Russian City, indeed, it is called ‘The Mother of Russian Cities’. The SMO is to be implemented with as few losses as possible.

The Ukraine is to be freed, not destroyed. This war is against the USA and its blind but subservient vassals, not against the Ukraine and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian people are being held hostage. The aim of any liberation is to free and save the hostages, not to kill them. The hostages are not the enemy. The enemies are the hostage-takers, Zelensky and Company. This whole operation is about saving the Ukraine, not destroying it.

Another thing that some in Western countries forget is that Russians have Asian patience. This is quite unlike Western impatience. Russia has not forgotten the Teutonic Knights in 1242, the Poles in the Time of Troubles (1598-1613), the Swedes at Poltava in 1709, Napoleon in 1812, the Franco-British in 1854-56, the Kaiser in 1914, Hitler in 1941, or Clinton in the 1990s.

It is all listed and remembered, just as the Chinese have not forgotten the British-run genocide of the Chinese in the Opium Wars, just as the Indians have not forgotten British atrocities in the First Indian War of Independence (the British call it ‘The Indian Mutiny’) in 1857-8, just as the Iranians have not forgotten the overthrow of their democracy by the British in 1953 and then the torture-chambers of the Shah’s secret police.

The point is that you should not poke the bear. Like Asians, Eurasian Russians have huge patience, but they forget absolutely nothing. When Kiev started its massacres in the Ukraine in 2014, all was noted. After the Bridge, that patience came to an end. The Russians have now appointed as Commander in Chief of what is now an anti-terrorist operation General Surovikin, nicknamed ‘General Armageddon’. His name, which comes from the Russian word for ‘severe’, recalls to any Russian the great hero of 18^th century Russian military history, General Suvorov. My advice to Ukrainians after two days with 200 missiles? Either surrender asap or else get out now. Because, just from the news on 11 October:

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the USA and the UK of breaking off the March negotiations between Russia and Kiev in Istanbul, which came very near to peace and on terms fairly favourable to Kiev. Now, they were broken off, Kiev is not going to receive terms favourable to it in the slightest. All of this since March has cost Russia too much.

https://news.mail.ru/politics/53430648/?frommail=1

The head of Chechnia, Ramzan Kadyrov (and when he speaks, you had better listen) has said that the Ukraine has for ever lost any chance of an armistice with Russia because of the activities of Zelensky and his ‘satanised gang’. ‘What is happening today is retribution for the children, women and old men murdered and maimed in cold blood. The countries who today pose as pacifists and judge at the same time, and condemn the missile strikes on military, communications and energy-supply targets of the Ukraine, for eight long years could not have given a damn about the fates of those who lived in the Donbass’.

https://news.mail.ru/politics/53428975/?frommail=1

But, in a third story, the Chairman of the Belarussian Security Services, Ivan Tertel, has said in Minsk that he expects the turning-point of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine to take place between November and February. ‘If the Russian Federation carries out a mobilisation of quality and provides its groups with the technical means and advanced arms, then military operations will enter their key phase’. This follows the announcement on 10 October by President Lukashenko that ‘with the degeneration of the situation on the borders of Belarus and the Ukraine, he and President Putin have decided on a joint regional army, to be formed in the next two days’.

https://news.mail.ru/politics/53428353/?frommail=1

This follows the release of information that the Ukraine has grouped 15,000 soldiers on the border with Belarus, mining roads and blowing up bridges. Something is afoot. Is Russia about to cut off the NATO road and rail supply routes from Poland and stop the supply of the Kiev forces with Western military equipment? Is an invasion about to cut through the West of the Ukraine? This would explain the targeting of Lvov with Russian missiles in the last two days. Since 25 March, when the Ukraine was left defeated, it has been revived only by $1.5 billion a month and military supplies coming from NATO countries, nearly all through Poland, with Rzheszow in south-eastern Poland becoming an important supply hub. Since 25 March this has become a war between Russia and the USA, which is hiding behind its poodles in Kiev and Western and Eastern Europe.

The end-game seems to be on the horizon. The winter conditions of November are three weeks away: enough time to get everything in place. Until then Russia can soften up the Ukraine, sending missiles and destroying the buildings of the hated Ukrainian Secret Police (SBU) in Kiev and Lvov and all manner of military and logistical targets and power plants, without which the Ukraine cannot function. However, Russia will still do its best to save Private Ukraina because it wants to save the Ukraine, not destroy it.

And beyond this, there is another, ultimately far more important, issue. This is the world economic war. Only once the USA has started to see the dollar fall and fail and Western Europe has started to suffer from power failures will things move here. On 8 October, an amendment in the European Parliament calling for the exploration of all avenues for peace in the Ukraine was defeated by 436 to 118 votes. Thus, for the moment nearly 80% of the EU Parliament prefers War to Peace. Last March the numbers would probably have been 554 votes to 0. Things are already moving. Does this mean that 20% of the EU has already come to its senses? Public demonstrations against NATO in Germany, France, indeed all over Western Europe, are taking place. It is the beginning.

The end-game for the Ukraine is then on the horizon. However, beyond the struggle in the Slav province of the Ukraine, saving Private Ukraina, there is the question of saving Private Europe, even indeed saving Private Northern America. This is far more difficult. Ukrainians have been zombified for only 30 years (admittedly the Galician far west for 400 years), but Western Europe has suffered a full thousand years of zombification, first under the pyramid-scheme and racketeering of feudalism (‘give us your cattle, corn and coins, or else we’ll send in the knights from the castle’), today under neo-feudalism (’pay your taxes and shut your mouths, or else we’ll cut you off from your bank card and deprive you of everything that makes your life worth living’).

Dezombifying Western people? Well, if you can drive a wedge between the people and the elite, you have begun. But the whole problem of the Western mentality is one of the self-flattery of infallibility. It began 950 years ago, as the Western Pope was declared infallible (1), then it trickled down to all Catholic clergy, but since then the Reformation democratised infallibility to Western men, then in the last hundred years to Western women, and in the last fifty years to all who accept the Western mentality, regardless of their sex, race, creed and, as they say now, ‘sexual orientation’. This is the foundation of the totalitarian ‘liberalism’ of Secular Humanism: ‘The West is Best and therefore so am I’.

Flatter yourselves in your delusions, if you want. It won’t last. The end-game is on the horizon.

Note:

1. Article 1 of the 1075 Dictatus Papae (‘Dictated by the Pope’) reads: The Roman Church was founded solely by God. Article 2: Only the Pope can rightly be called ‘Universal’. Article 9: All princes shall kiss the feet of the Pope alone. Article 19: He himself may be judged by no one. And Article 22: The Roman Church has never erred. Nor will it err, to all eternity.

Substitute ‘The West’ for ‘The Roman Church’ and ‘The US President’ for ‘the Pope’, and there you have the whole descendance and origin of the UN, sanctions, the WEF and many other horrors you can name.

11 October 2022

Israel Bombs Aleppo Airport for the Second time in One Week

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

 ARABI SOURI 

Israel (read: the USA, rest of NATO, and the Gulfies) bombed Aleppo International Airport taking the airport out of service for the second time in one week.

A Syrian military source said in a statement conveyed by the Syrian news agency Sana:

“At approximately 8:16 p.m. this evening, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression with a number of missiles from the direction of the Mediterranean, west of Latakia, targeting Aleppo International Airport.”

The military sources added that the aggression led to material damage to the airport runway rendering it out of service.

Official and local sources have not reported any casualties from this Israeli war crime at the time of this report.

Reminder: bombing civilian facilities is a war crime defined by all conventions and international treaties, bombing an international airport during its operation is an Israeli level of war crime sanctioned by its sponsors in the so-called collective west and will not go unpunished.

Israel, the US’s advanced criminal tool in the region, is proving to those still hesitant that its very existence is an existential threat to the people of the region, a threat to the world’s peace order, and a threat to humanity as a whole.

Syrian Civil Aviation has suspended all arriving and departing flights to the airport, diverting them to Damascus International Airport as it assesses the damage to the airport’s infrastructure, mainly the runways, rendering it unsafe for commercial flights and the passengers on board such flights.

The Syrian Ministry of Transportation urged all passengers scheduled for departure from the airport to contact their air travel and booking agencies to reschedule their flights.

It took the Syrian civil aviation two days to repair the damages from the previous Israeli bombing of the Aleppo International Airport on the 31st of August, the technicians are still assessing the damages from this aggression at the time of this report.

Israel only exists with the massive funding it receives from US and EU taxpayers, the massive funding from most of the Gulfies, and the ‘ironclad‘ protection it receives from the collective west, their claims that they are protecting its ‘democracy’ is a farce in the face of their own citizens who they suck their blood dry to finance their antichrist project in Israel; if someone thinks otherwise, just watch Biden’s latest Satanic speech again.

Zionism is an anti-Jewish ideology built on the myth of creating a homeland for the Jewish in diaspora in contradiction to the teachings of the Torah that literally prevent the Jews from creating a country of their own as they are, as per their own books, punished by God to be dispersed amongst the nations for the mischief they have collectively committed when the Jews of the Levant had a Jewish state of their own.

Another myth is that the homeland of all the Jews in the diaspora is in Palestine, Judaism is a religion and not a race or ethnicity, Zionism is not a religion, it’s a political movement, and the early Zionists even considered Argentina and Crimea as potential places to build their state before they settled on Palestine with the help of the British. To put it into perspective think of what relates Christians in the Philippines or Africa, or Europe to Palestine. Or what relates a newly converted European Muslim to Mecca in Arabia?

The history of the creation of Israel, the current day state not Israel the nickname of Prophet Jacob son of Isaac son of Ibrahim (Abram), and all the massacres, crimes against humanity, and war crimes it committed and is committing against the real Semite people of the Levant is evidence that this Zionist movement is an antichrist movement sponsored by very influential western bankers and mega-churches like the Evangelical Church in the USA, in order to ‘unleash the beast’, the signs are all on the walls and only fools will not see them, the same fools who will worship the antichrist instead of God.

Syria, the last secular country in the region, is engaged in a war of terror and war of attrition waged against its people by the world’s super-rich and superpower countries for the past 11.5 years, this came after decades of isolation and sanctions imposed on the country not to force export western ‘values’ to its conservative people, it’s because of its refusal to recognize the so-called ‘state of Israel’, the Syrians know much better than everybody else that the return of Jesus Christ will be in Damascus, in particular, he will descend from Heavens onto the white eastern minaret of the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus and will lead the believers in the final battle of Armageddon. If you consider all of these biblical details as myths, you better read the Talmud and the Tanakh, the Zionists’ books they wrote to misinterpret the Ten Commandments, and the Torah, the two books that base the constitution of the so-called state of Israel.

Syria might or not respond in kind in a tit for tat for these repeatitive Israeli war crime bombing of Aleppo International Airport, Syria has a priority duty now to enhance its defenses and help the world rid of the kingdom foothold of the antichrist, and it’s advancing rapidly in this process despite the US-sponsored and protected war crimes committed against it and against its people by Israel, ISIS, Al Qaeda variants, and NATO armies, the US army and the Turkish army, and the host of ‘intelligence’ agencies of the west and Gulfies.

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Defining Fascism: Dimitrov versus Eco

March 19, 2022

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By James Tweedie

What is fascism? With the Russian ‘de-Nazification operation’ in the Ukraine entering its fourth week and “Black Lives Matter” replaced with “I Stand With Ukraine” as the virtue-signal de jour, now seems like a good time to define it.

While I’m a big fan of the Iranian journalist Ramin Mazaheri, I have to disagree with his latest article on The Vineyard of the Saker. Mazaheri says Russia misinterprets Nazism as simply Russophobia. I fear he underestimates the intellect of the nation which did three-quarters of the fighting and dying to defeat fascism 77 years ago.

Rather than trying to suck the meaning of the word ‘fascism’ out of our thumbs, let us instead compare two well-known definitions by Georgi Dimitrov and Umberto Eco, a Marxist and a Liberal.

Eco, the Italian author of the historical whodunnit The Name Of the Rose, listed 14 different features in his 1995 essay Eternal Fascism. The problem is, none of them individually are proof that we’re living in a fascist state.

Eco admits at the start: “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.”

But he claims: “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

The first item on Eco’s list, ‘the cult of tradition’, is common to most ‘small-c’ social conservatives. The syncretism that Eco speaks of here is found in his own eclectic list.

Points three to five, ‘action for action’s sake’, ‘disagreement is treason’ and ‘fear of difference’ are true of the dozens of Trotskyite and anarchist sects jumping on the Ukraine bandwagon.

Points six to eight, ‘appeal to a frustrated middle class’, an ‘obsession with a plot’ and the belief that their ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’ describe the US ‘Never Trumpers’ and British liberals still desperate to rejoin the European Union (EU).

Nine and 11, ‘ life is lived for struggle’ and ‘everybody is educated to become a hero’ apply to the ‘woke’ millennials obsessed with their own perceived victimhood.

Dimitrov, the Bulgarian general secretary of the Communist (Third) International, characterised fascism in a speech to the 7^th Comintern congress in 1935 as: “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

“Fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital,” he elaborated.

“Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.”

Thus, fascism is the form of government which the capitalist class resorts to when revolt by the toiling classes means it can no longer rule by consent under democracy, as it prefers to.

“The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries,” Dimitrov stressed. His clear implication is that fascism could take a new form without the open racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia of the German Nazi regime. Fascism could come waving the rainbow flag and preaching “human rights”. I think it already has.

And Dimitrov highlights the fascists’ imperative for violent and oppressive anti-communism, something which Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, fails to mention at all in his glib listicle.

My mother was born a year before the Second World War. Her parents were communists. At a very young age she was aware that a Nazi invasion would mean she and her family would be murdered, just as communists in the fascist-ruled and occupied countries had already been.

Eco has no excuse for ignoring or forgetting this, just as Western pseudo-leftists have no excuse for overlooking how the regime that took over in Kiev after the 2014 Maidan Square coup banned the Communist Party of Ukraine and others, or how its thugs burnt down the Odessa Trade Union House while the police looked on, murdering some 50 working people.

Modern Russia is not the USSR, but it never ceased to be the target of imperialism despite embracing the so-called ‘free market’. Ordinary Russians know that, and their leaders have in the past few weeks denounced the “Empire of Lies” with a clarity that Lenin — who literally wrote the book on it — would applaud.

To answer those who equate fascism with nationalism: If Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo had been nationalists, their armies would never have set foot outside their countries’ borders and 50 million lives would not have been needlessly lost. Fascism is imperialist, and imperialism is the antithesis of nationalism.

It’s easy to see why some prefer Eco’s definition to Dimitrov’s. Dimitrov avoids the easy path of condemning historical fascism for its bigotry and para-militarism, but instead marks out the common ground between Nazis and liberals: anti-communism. Eco explicitly panders to those who think the holocaust was what happens when we stray from the modern liberal path.

But if one believes, as a majority of British voters did in 2016, that the EU is an undemocratic, corporatist supra-national state which rules the continent on behalf of finance capital, It follows that the burnished liberal utopia is fascism here and now.

The stated goal of the US antifa rioters in 2020 was to bring down President Donald Trump and ensure victory for Joe Biden, who helped bring the genuine fascist government to power in Kiev in 2014. Biden has now prodded the Ukraine into a disastrous showdown with Russia that threatens to escalate to nuclear Armageddon.

There was no revolution in the US in 2020, just as there was none in Ukraine in 2014. The Never-Trumpers posed no alternative but business as usual under the Democratic Party, which came bundled with a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt. That has torn down the façade of liberal democracy and left only the naked tyranny of big business, pushing the world inexorably towards war. Nice work, anarchists.

Russia is taking a stand against fascism, and imperialism. What are you going to do about it?

• The Russian ‘denazification’ PR disaster: How, why and what to do

Chris Hedges: Waltzing Toward Armageddon with the Merchants of Death

March 14, 2022

“Raft of Doom” / Illustration by Mr. Fish

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated show On Contact.  AUTHOR LINK

By Chris Hedges

Source

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chessboard, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20^th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance. This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of US troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying.

Peace has been sacrificed for US global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen.

So what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse. So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted. So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth. In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The Butcher’s Cut | Illustration by Mr. Fish

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the US will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays us, if we don’t first immolate ourselves in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood. The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler. The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing on Saturday an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet Bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked. Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third-, behind China and the United States. NATO battlegroups are being doubled in size in the Baltic states to more than 6,000 troops. Battlegroups will be sent to Romania and Slovakia. Washington will double the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland to 9,000. Sweden and Finland are considering dropping their neutral status to integrate with NATO.

This is a recipe for global war. History, as well as all the conflicts I covered as a war correspondent, have demonstrated that when military posturing begins, it often takes little to set the funeral pyre alight. One mistake. One overreach. One military gamble too many. One too many provocations. One act of desperation.

Russia’s threat to attack weapons convoys to Ukraine from the West; its airstrike on a military base in western Ukraine, 12 miles from the Polish border, which is a staging area for foreign mercenaries; the statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda that the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons, by Russia against Ukraine, would be a “game-changer” that could force NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from direct military intervention — all are ominous developments pushing the alliance closer to open warfare with Russia.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when USAmbassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the US military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliot Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the US-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.

“There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow: “It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP will need to be spent on defense. We will need more conventional strength in ships and planes. We will need to match the Chinese in advanced military technology, but at the other end of the spectrum, we may need many more tanks if we have to station thousands in Europe, as we did during the Cold War. (The total number of American tanks permanently stationed in Europe today is zero.) Persistent efforts to diminish even further the size of our nuclear arsenal or prevent its modernization were always bad ideas, but now, as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weaponry and appear to have no interest in negotiating new limits, such restraints should be completely abandoned. Our nuclear arsenal will need to be modernized and expanded so that we will never face the kinds of threats Putin is now making from a position of real nuclear inferiority.”

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate. China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor, and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die. The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods.  And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.

Fake Has Become Realer Than Real And The Dogs Of War Are There To Keep It That Way

May 17, 2019

by Denis A. Conroy for the Saker Blog

America’s self-imagined custodianship of human rights and freedom epitomize problems associated with fake prophesies. That Americans now rally behind the latest battle-cry of the Republic, ‘Make America Great Again’, indicate that they are indifferent to the fact that their country has been barnstorming across the globe these past six decades killing vast numbers of innocent people with the objective of creating a pre-eminently militaristic empire to strategically control the skies, oceans, their market-share plus control of space. In implementing these belligerent objectives, the US has repeatedly unleashed auto-da fes to destroy many countries across the globe who failed to fall in line.

Foremostly, America’s firebrand passage through Muslim countries clearly illustrate how a neophyte culture with racist baggage can implode the nation’s reputation, leaving it bereft of respect and credibility. This now appears to be what is happening in America. The two-tiered (or three) aspect of this enterprise requires closer examination.

It would appear that ‘greatness’ in the American context amounts to nothing more than upholding vulgar white-middle-class racist values as the measure of excellence, with fake ‘principled’ notions of cultural superiority leading the chase. When the dogs-of-war were unleashed to wreak havoc, pillage and plunder on the habitats of millions of hapless people across the globe, the silence of so-called conscionable America was deafening.

Violence had become an American staple and the voice of the Peace Movement is all but mute. It’s now impossible to ignore the fact that the three tiers of state, the top tier, the middle tier and the lower tier…the three classes…collude in a program whose singular use of power expresses an unwavering desire to ride the gravy train to the hilt and devil take the hindmost.

These three classes, battle hardened and indifferent to the chaos caused by their bloodthirsty military have been blindsided by their own government. There is the sense that the flag… the stars-and-strips…has become the nation’s birth certificate and each person’s birth certificate a little bit of a collective ‘stars and stripes’ denouement that entitles them to extrajudicial considerations and the right to be proud of their dubious record. However, finding one’s niche in this hierarchal edifice is another matter altogether.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are missives of choice for the middle class in matters relating to America’s monopolistic capitalist system. Predatory incursions into foreign countries resulting in bloodshed are routinely explained away in false-flag gibberish or in some other fashion to justify the actions of the government. This business of doing business attitude exists to negate everything else and the middle-class appear to have no qualms with this scenario. The sub-text here being, as God’s own people they believe that they have the right to expect ‘mana-from-heaven’ to rain down upon them from all quarters of the globe.

For the working class however, tweeting along with the paymaster appears to be an act of convenience. But when the music stops, as it most certainly will, the birthright question (all men are equal) will inevitable come into contention again when the issue of inequality needs to be confronted. However, the next generation may be more strident should they once again find themselves being herded back into a holding-pen position to await casino-capitalism’s next ‘flurry’ at the roulette table.

But irony of ironies, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal etc. are merely institutions that employ smoke and mirror tactics to conceal the nastiness of a two-tiered (or three) system that entails subjecting the public to a game of musical chairs, whose prime objective is to unseat a competitor each time Wall Street chooses to play its favourite game of ‘pass-the-stock-market-parcel’…the one designed to consolidate wealth in fewer hands each time it is played.

Musical chairs, also known as Trip to Jerusalem, is a game of elimination involving players, chairs, and music, with one fewer chair than players. When the music stops whichever player fails to sit on a chair is eliminated, with a chair then being removed and the process repeated until only one player remains. Alas! The origins of the game are unknown. On the other hand, we may safely assume that Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci are not its authors.

So, the questions we need to ask here are, have Americans taken to wearing masks to hide their lack of conscience, like their President wears his hairpiece… do their masks, like Donald’s hairpiece, only make an appearance when orchestrating auto-da fes, or when administering sanctions designed to economically incinerate…or starve… apostates?

Or should we defer to another Donald…Donald Rumsfeld…for insights into America’s moral stature. “We don’t know what we don’t know. There are too many unknowns too many factors that we may not have yet considered,” said he. Which, when translated might mean, ‘Life is like a game of musical chairs and America has the right to take occupancy of the limited number of chairs available or our armed forces will be forced to use terror to procure knowable ends that are ultimately unknowable but desirable because they make us feel great.’

Narratives fed to the public by special interest groups come as hybridised versions of Hollywood cypher-speak-gibberish and are passed off as truths to the public for the purpose of indoctrinating them. A continuous repetition of false declamatory statements praising American exceptionality pour from the media to reinforce fake news. If there were a Noble Peace prize for hypocrisy, it would surely go to America.

America, the so-called leader of the so-called free world is awash with fallacious narratives that are put in place by corporate entities to implement a two-tiered (or three) system that strives to gain support in the public domain by using fearmongering tactics to implement its propaganda in every way possible. Fake narratives ceaselessly eat into public consciousness while cleverly concealing their real purpose, which is full spectrum Mafioso dominance. Think of the numerous corporate ploughshares that have insidiously penetrated a country near you!

As we now live in a technological age that has provided humans with the ability to engage in nuclear Armageddon, we can’t help but notice how worse-case scenarios abound. Some even suggest that evolution has run out of steam. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine (MAD) is a minefield without canaries and we, in the lower tiers, are left painfully aware of our impotence on discovering that we are without a voice in the decision- making process. We are required to seal our lips and accept the reality that nuclear buttons now hang over our heads like the sword of Damocles.

We are constantly reminded that states exist, super and otherwise, their nuclear dogs-of-war straining on the leash in readiness should lines be crossed. We are repeatedly reminded of the fact that it is now possible to cause enormous casualties and destruction to civilian populations anywhere in the world by simply pressing a button from thousands of miles away.

We can no longer feel free because we can no longer free ourselves from the shadow of Dr. Strangelove. The more bloated the military budget becomes, the deeper we sink into gloom upon realizing how our anxiety increases exponentially with increases to the military budget.

Knowing that unknown knowns have consigned us to carceral spaces where modern-day Caesars busy themselves toying with their nuclear buttons, suggests that the middle and working classes have become prisoners in an ill-defined reality. The knowledge that capitalism engenders fear through its ‘security’ narrative has now become the problem. The ideology that keeps capitalism frothing at the mouth has produced its own evil doppelganger…a pedagogic Promethean pariah responsible for global degradation, its power ever more lethal in a world that has learned to fear its score card.

Four in ten Americans sometimes face what economists call “material hardship,” struggling to pay for basic needs such as food and housing, according to a new study from the Urban Institute. Even middle-class families routinely struggle financially and are occasionally unable to pay their bills and more and more ordinary citizen are beginning to feel that they no longer have a part to play in a secular agenda that has become the property of the military establishment.

So, the problem now is that civilians seem unable to deal with facts. A shut-the-fuck-up mentality now exists to banish issues that relate to questions relating to social criteria and the people who write and whistle-blow the inequities of their government. People are relentlessly exposed to facts, but as civilians, are incapable of dealing with them. Facts appear on electronic screens ad nauseam to reveal how citizens have become captive to a static reality that uses fearmongering as a way of castrating public dissent. Facts that indicate that only the elite have skin in the game are everywhere in evidence.

At the Colosseum level…the elite level…the grand referee in the orange hairpiece keeps tweeting dealership gibberish while the classes in the lower tiers are expected to remain on standby to applaud this kind of hubris. Many are amused but few are chosen…unless you are an exponent of the rules of Republican Likud or are Likud Democrats building separation walls to keep Zion in and Allah out, per medium of a nasty game of musical chairs…a la currency wars!

Secondary development is fine, but at what cost to that primary narrative within us that depends on freedom of expression? It is ironic that many of the ‘learned’ amongst us strategically position themselves between the people and the elites, thereby limiting the potential for development within the masses. Traditionally, the policy of our rulers…shepherds… was to herd the ‘sheeple’ into the shepherd’s fold, lest he or she escape the soporific effects of propaganda or holy writ. To our great dismay, most of our teachers to this day do little other that look in the rear-view mirror for inspiration.

Justifications for releasing the ‘Dogs of War’ on civilians who can’t defend themselves are inevitable meaningless. For example, the American-Zionist agenda which manufactures fear for the purpose of manufacturing enemies for the purpose of manufacturing wars, has of itself become a war on truth. Sadly, the reason why investigative reporting became so highly selective is that in the US, truth had lost its place in the established media. The fact of the matter is, white-middle-class Americans respond with pique when confronted with criticism of their values. Sadly, exposing the injustices perpetrated on Muslims, Palestinians or Black People is a matter of little concern…a poignant example of what happens to complacent people when they turn away from the truth.

What William Kristol and Robert Kagan proposed when helping to draft the ‘Project for the New American Century’, was a manufactured narrative that led the average citizen to believe that their security depended on elites who could explain the threats they were exposed to…a win-win solution designed to keep them believing that they needed the protection of elites. And what the elites were telling them was that the military establishment was a bulwark against chaos, and the destruction of their state and the possibility that they might become subservient to non-white people.

The West, having created a bifurcated paradigm called democracy sold it to the public as a vector capable of promoting the verity of good governance. But unfortunately, as all paradigms contain bias, the model in question went to great lengths to conceal the presence of the schism within. An upper tier and a lower tier came into existence, whereby the resolution of conflicts was subject to the veto powers of the upper tier. Soon the upper tier set about training minds in the lower-tier to shepherd the resources of the state in ways that benefited the upper-tier. Sadly, over time, the upper tier became more interested in the subject of fiscal welfare (for themselves) rather than pursuing outcomes that could serve the interests of the entire polity.

The bifurcated concept of democracy as propounded by our learned founding-fathers was from the beginning a sleight of hand operating in deference to proprietorial principles enabling the architects of the system to retain control of their plan by fostering the notion that their vector of choice, democracy, could deliver justice for all.

In the US, a tiny number of people cream off virtually all the wealth. Ever since the first Cold War, the ‘sheeple’ have been led to believe that an external threat to their security existed and that it could only be managed by the ruling elite. Spending money to secure the two-tiered realm would require the creation of a global military force capable of warding off threats to American hegemony.

In recent times, emotions pertaining to loss of kudos led to acrimonious debate within the US. Insisting that the Western alliance would work better if individual members paid a bigger share of the costs involved in maintaining NATO came to the fore. This policing agency, the tip of the economic iceberg that was put in place to secure right-of-passage for US hegemony in the first instance, was now upping the ante…the cost of missiles had increased. To date, the dust may have settled, but the opprobrium (phlegm) released by Emperor continues to rile the ruled.

In middle America…the beltway…the media, academia and the entertainment industry share a quasi-moral narrative which floats like an iceberg in an inland sea. This inland sea has a mirror-like surface which reflects the vanity of its citizenry who need to bathe in the unholy waters of hubris. For the upper and middle classes, focusing on America’s military might enables them to revel in unadulterated vainglory. Hubris within the upper class had reached a point where debasement of human values became the norm. Celebrations of inhouse grandiosity suggesting that inverted middle-class American perspectives had passed their use-by-date.

And as the wealth of the nation continued its rise upwards, the lower tier showed signs that something had become unsustainable. The top-heaviness of the unequal economic order had begun to impact unfavourably on the lower tier. From the anonymity of the sheep-pen, the so-called sheeple people had discovered a flaw in that aphorism which stated, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. They discovered that these perspectives were held by pedagogic Prometheans peering into histories rear-view mirrors. They were teachers who would never experience the thrill that came with grassroot activity or feel passions that could change the course of history.

Denis A. Conroy
Freelance Writer
Australia