Q&A with North South University students

December 20, 2022

Andrei Raevsky

I was recently contacted by my friend Cynthia McKinney who told me that my article about what a Russian defeat would mean for the West was used as part of the course she teaches at North South University of Dhaka in Bangladesh.  I have to admit that I was very touched by the idea that students in faraway Dhaka were reading my article, and I offered to answer any follow-up questions the students might have.  So I recorded a hour long video in which I answered the follow-up questions from the students.  I just want to add here that since I did not have a clear idea of how much these students had already knew, and since I tried to keep the video about one hour long, I had to, at times, simplify some issues (as some of these questions would deserve a semester-long class).  Please don’t hold this against me.

I decided to repost this video on the blog (with Cynthia’s agreement) in the hope that at least some parts of this Q&A might be of interest to you.

Kind regards

Andrei

Do the Europeans deserve what is coming to them next?

December 15, 2022

Dear friends

I was born in Switzerland, arguably the heart of Europe, and as a European by birth, if not by culture, I feel that I should address the issue of the regular European’s responsibility for what is going on in both the Ukraine and Serbia.

I don’t believe in collective guilt, so the short answer is “no”.

But I do believe in consequences and I do believe in God’s justice (and love, of course!).  In other words, I don’t think you can commit evil deeds and get away with it: sooner or later you will have to pay, especially if you fail to repent for your evil actions.

Furthermore, I do realize that the EU is a US colony/protectorate, but so was much of the world.

Why can there be real resistance to the Empire in Latin America or Africa and none in the EU?  Should Cuba begin sending soldiers, doctors and engineers to the EU (just kidding!)?

[As a kid I remember all the various protest and resistance movements we had in Europe, they ranged from the (mostly) peaceful anti-nuclear ecologists, to striking unions, to the RAF in Germany, to the IRA in Ulster, ETA in Spain and even the various Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian and other ethnic groups engaging various degrees of violent resistance against the state.  Even in tiny Switzerland we had the Jura autonomists with some creative resistance methods!  That is not to say that I approve of all of these, only that I remember a time when there was real resistance in Europe.  Are modern Europeans capable of meaningfully resisting *anything* nowadays?  I very much doubt it]

I think that we can safely say that the EU is the most docile, cowardly and loyal colony to the Empire.  Why?  Probably because all the other colonies *knew* that their colonial status will never change under the AngloZionist rule, whereas the Europeans hoped to somehow “elevate” themselves by being Uncle Shmuel’s “poodles”.  And, after all, imperialism was born in Europe (the Crusades) and not in the New World.

You would think that by now, even the dumbest EU politician would realize that anti-Russians sanctions almost exclusively hurt Europe.  Yet, what do we see?  They are STILL at it and they are STILL doubling down, check out this headline: “EU set to freeze assets of RT’s parent company – media“.  Please read it, you will see that this is a direct and absolutely unapologetic crackdown on free speech.  And while doubleplusgoodthinking and politically correct Europeans love to (mis-)quote Voltaire and proudly proclaim that they too “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” in reality they absolutely don’t give a damn.

This is nothing new.

When the AngloZionist launched a TOTALLY ILLEGAL war of aggression against the Serbian nation and a country, Yugoslavia, which was a founding member of the Non Aligned movement the proud Europeans did this (see image).

At best!

Many actively participated in the martyrdom of the Serbian nation.  Again.  The same way the Europeans betrayed Serbians during WWII.  And now, they are STILL at it (see EU threats about Kosovo).

And, make no mistake, all these years KLA terrorism in Kosovo has been fully supported and even aided by KFOR and EULEX (that latter entity modestly called “European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo“(emphasis added).

And, now again, all we hear from the Old Continent is a deafening silence.  Either that, or threats.

Long forgotten is Yehuda Bauer’s wise admonition:

Thou shalt not be a victim.
Thou shalt not be a perpetrator.
And above all,
Thou shalt not be a bystander.

By making the EU the accomplice of the US aggression on Serbia, the US has basically secured the European’s loyalty forever, since now they are not only bound by cultural or colonial ties, they are also accomplices in the rape of Serbia, the Maghreb and Mashreq, Afghanistan and all the other countries which suffer(ed) under the Hegemony’s yoke.

The AngloZionist attack on Yugoslavia was the Kristallnacht of international law, it was the event from which all of the horrors we see today sprang.  And yet, far from understanding (and nevermind admitting!) the crime of aggression (the worst crime in international law, above even genocide or crimes against humanity!) and showing some remorse, the European leaders stayed the course while the “regular” people of Europe simply ignored it all like the good little poodles they became.

And please don’t give me the argument that “we faced too pwoerful an enemy” or “we could do nothing”.  At the very least, every single European could follow Solzhenitsyn’s appeal and “live not by the lie“.  But they could not even do that.  1000 years of anti-Christian propaganda and heresy has resulted in a society which does not even believe in the very notion of “truth”.  No wonder they can’t stop lying anymore…

I think that it is a truism that if you have no self-respect you will also get no respect from others.  I also think that it is fair to say that the EU has become the most despised society on the planet.  And it is not just Putin who calls the EU a “doormat for the US” – the same opinion is held in much of Zone B.

Here is, I think, the correct answer to the question I asked above: do the Europeans deserve what is coming to them next?  Considering that what is coming to them next is entirely self-inflicted, I think that irrefutable answer is a resounding “YES!”.

If not, then who is to blame?  Russia?  The USA?  Putin?  “The Jews”?  Immigration?  Muslims?

Speaking of the USA – at least the US Americans voted for Trump (twice).  The fact that this made (almost) no difference is irrelevant, at least the people of the USA tried to resist!  In fact, even under the current crackdown against dissent, I still think that there is a much higher proportion of US Americans capable and willing to resist than Europeans.

And so today I want to do something I never did before.  I will re-post once more something I have already posted once: the interview of Col. Douglas Macgregor by Dr Michael Vlahos.  I judge this conversation to be so important that it deserves a second posting.  Before I leave you with these two men, I want to just add the following:

These two man are from the generation which I had as professors during my years in US colleges (1986-1991) and for whom I still have the utmost respect.  That does not mean that I necessarily agree with everything they did, said or wrote, not at all.  But such men I can respect not only for their formidable intellect, but also for being men of honor and truth, and real (as opposed to flagwaving) patriots of their country.

This is the generation of men like David Glantz or Lester W. Grau – US officers who truly studied, carefully, Soviet military doctrine (authors like Reznichenko, Gareev or Ogarkov) and who, through their studies, did not come to hate Russia or Russians at all, but saw them as fellow professionals and patriots.   Having had the privilege to spent some time with the folks who taught at the Frunze Military Academy (I even ended up co-authoring a small book with one of them) I can attest that the Russian top strategists had a great deal of respect for their US colleagues too.

The contrast with the Neocon freaks “from the basement” could not be bigger.

I sincerely think that in the following conversation every topic and every sentence is important because it shows what that generation of competent and honorable US Americans think of the (many) abomination(s) which we are witnessing today.  I can sincerely say that I wish them, and their cause, full success.

As far as I am concerned, we have the same enemy.

May their example of resistance (because that is *exactly* what this is) inspire more (there are already a few) Europeans to follow their example.

Andrei

Finally, and in the spirit of my post today, I leave you with one superb music video from France: “Indignez-vous” by HK et les Saltimbanks (see translated lyrics below).

Who knows, maybe this video will wake-up a few more Europeans?

Machine translated lyrics:

I got up one morning, dark day of existence
I raised my voice and my fist, when the rule was silence
I’ve seen some get on trains, leave in a huge fog

I could be neither accomplice nor witness, I entered into resistance
A voice paved with hope, populated by women and men from everywhere
A choice as a matter of course, between gallows and neck rope
I came back from so far away, I give thanks to my star
Death forgot me on the way, to Dora and Buchenwald
93 years old I can believe, that my end is not very far away
93 years old here is my memory, take the greatest care of it
Indignation stubbornly, in a world on guard of you
Be one of those who walk against the wind my friends, be indignant
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
This is an old gentleman talking to you
Brandishing his star, do you hear?
So do you think that today we are missing the reasons for the uprising
When our own lives are on credit, under the dictatorship of the banks
Money commands the shareholders, they themselves command the president
Who orders ordinary people to execute well kindly
All this unsold food, so throw it in the trash
And on top of the pile of junk, pour me 10 liters of bleach
This is the world that is ours, absurd, cruel and merciless
Until that damned poverty line comes through our door
Human rights set aside, sold in individual portions
When the food crisis lingers in front of the eternal
But miracles when billions are found in the second
To save the king dollars and all the bankers of this world
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
This is an old gentleman talking to you
Brandishing his star, do you hear?
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
This is an old gentleman talking to you
Brandishing his star, do you hear?
Our chains are certainly less visible, than in the dark days of slavery
But our minds are being targeted, what have they done with our heritage
Excessive competition, generalized amnesia
Mass consumption products for an anesthetized youth
It’s high time, my friends, to finally turn on the stars again
Who have guided his whole life, this old gentleman who speaks to you
Yes I was that Armenian, I am still that German Jew
I am the Palestinian people, justice is my only side
Be citizens without borders, of those peoples who rise up
Contaminate the whole earth, with your revolts and your dreams
Be indignant it is your right, and in memory of all those
Who are still dying not to have it, this right is in fact a duty
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
It’s an old man who’s talking to you
Brandishing his star, do you hear?
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
This is an old gentleman talking to you
Brandishing the starry sky, do you stand up?
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
This is an old gentleman talking to you
Brandishing his star, do you hear?
Be indignant!
Be indignant!
He is an old gentleman, a great gentleman
Who’s talking to you, who’s talking to you

Ending NATO and Correcting Stalin’s Mistake

November 24, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

‘To Hell with Washington’

Colonel Douglas Macgregor

Introduction: The Atlantic and Europe

Judging by its name, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was only ever about the USA and the UK, an agreement between Americans and the half-American Churchill. After all, what relevance does the ‘North Atlantic’ have to Baltic Germany or Mediterranean Italy, let alone to Aegean Greece and Black Sea Turkey? Even Spain and Portugal look towards the Caribbean and the South Atlantic, not to the North Atlantic. NATO is clearly an organisation that descended directly from the Atlantic Charter, made up by Roosevelt and Churchill in a bay off Newfoundland in 1941 (not even in the Atlantic), and then imposed on all the others.

The End of NATO

So, whatever was the North Atlantic doing in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Afghanistan? Apart from the fact that that was its greatest defeat (so far), just what was it doing there? And what is the North Atlantic, or at least parts of it, doing in the South China Sea? Surely there is a clue in the name – China? It belongs to China. Whatever are the US Navy and others doing there?

Surely, even the geographically-challenged Liz Truss, who wanted the whole world to be ruled by NATO, must have been thinking that it was time to rename NATO? Perhaps the Nazi American Tyranny Organisation? Like that you could keep the same initials. As the Saker has pointed out, the first NATO Secretary-General, the Indian-born colonial, General Hastings (1) Ismay, bluntly admitted that the purpose of NATO was ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ (2).

And as the Saker has explained: ‘Keep the Germans down’ means crush all Europeans who might be rivals to the Anglosphere’s control of Western Europe, and now control all of Europe, apart from the free Russian Lands. ‘Keep the Americans in’ means crush all European liberation movements, De Gaulle’s or any others. ‘Keep the Soviet Union out’ means destroy Russia, so that it does not liberate Europe from the tyranny of the Anglosphere. The latter is symbolised by the US and British flags that have been omnipresent, even on fashion items, T-shirts and jeans, ever since the 1960s. That is why true Europeans refuse to wear such items.

In reality, it is obvious that NATO should have been packed away on 1 July 1991, the day the Warsaw Pact was packed away. If it had been packed away in 1991, the NATO rout would have been avoided thirty years later in Afghanistan. Indeed, the fact that it was not packed away then is a tragedy which has cost millions of lives, especially all over the tragic Middle East, and today all over the tragic Ukraine.

Interestingly, the answer to the aggression and bullying of NATO (the American elite always bullies), the Warsaw Pact was named after the Capital of Poland. Ironically – and there is nothing so ironic as history – today it is in the Warsaws of the ‘New Europe’, far from the North Atlantic, that you will find the most fanatical latecomer-devotees of NATO. What is the significance of NATO?

The American Republic of Poland

The name ‘Poland’ is cognate with the English word ‘plain’, so ‘Poland’ literally means ‘fields’. In other words, there is no geographical barrier between the German Lands and the Russian Lands, which begin with today’s Belarus and the Ukraine. In other words, there is no geographical barrier between Berlin and Moscow. There is only a purely artificial political barrier. The two peoples, Poles and Russians, are genetic brothers and sisters. Theirs, like the confrontation between the genetic brothers, the Croats and Serbs, is a purely manmade one.

It is part of the Poles’ gigantic inferiority complex (imagine living among a lot of fields between Germany and Russia) to imagine that Russia is interested in conquering Poland. Russia is really not interested in Poland. So, I hear you say, why did Imperial Russia participate in the three late 18th century Prussian and Austrian partitions of Poland? Why did Molotov and Ribbentrop partition it? Why did Stalin occupy it?

The answer is always the same. When you have been invaded by Western Europe as often as Russia has, you need to create a buffer-zone to protect yourself. As geography does not change, the Tsars and the Bolsheviks were forced by the same Western aggression and jealousy into doing the same thing – protecting themselves and that meant Eastern or all of Poland. In this, Tsar Nicholas II was a lot more successful than the Bolsheviks. Thus, in World War I, the Germans and Austrians never got into Russia at all, getting stuck mainly in eastern Poland and Lithuania and causing fewer than 670,000 Russian victims in two and a half years of war. It was a different story in World War II, with the Germans reaching the Volga and forty times more victims, 27 million of them.

This is an explanation, not a justification. Some of my best friends are Polish: though they belong to the small minority of Poles who know all the above and know that Poland today is merely an American vassal. I think they probably also know that if ever a Pole were to win the Nobel Peace Prize, it would be for one who had led Poland into making peace with Russia, rather than making war. That would be a Pole who pulled the plug on the Americans, chased them out of Poland and declared independence. And he would do the same with the US-run EU, the United States of Europe. Now that is the sort of Polish patriotism (utterly different from Polish nationalism), of which I approve, as it is concerned with asserting Polish national identity, not destroying it.

Sadly, there are those in today’s Polish political elite and military who dream of wiping Russia off the map, like medieval Catholic crusaders. They are just as delusional as those crusaders were. The Poles do not realise that the Americans (and the British) will drop them (and the Ukrainians) like hot bricks, when it comes to crunch. Just as they did in 1945, even though the British claimed that they had gone to war in 1939 only for the sake of defending Poland. That too had been a lie. When will the Poles ever learn who their real friends are? As the Saker has said: ‘The US/NATO do not have the manpower or firepower needed to take on Russia in a conventional combined arms war. Any use of nuclear weapons will result in immediate retaliation’. Today at least 1 in 33 people in Poland are Ukrainian ‘refugees’. A lot of Poles are fed up with that invasion. It is putting a great strain on the country.

The Future

At this very moment NATO is being demilitarised in the Ukraine. Ironically, the Ukraine is officially a Non-NATO country and one that contains some of the most Polish-hating people in the world. The Ukrainians who live on the Polish border (Galicians) even invented a new religion so that they would not be Catholics like the Poles (or Orthodox like the Russians). It is called ‘Greek Catholicism’. A weirder and more artificial mixture than that you will not find. As the Russians say: ‘Neither fish, nor meat’. So what happens when NATO collapses? Let us go back into the history of the last century, so much of which involved Poland, from Nazi-devastated Warsaw to Soviet-liberated Auschwitz, from Wroclaw (Breslau) to Gdansk (Danzig).

By the start of 1917, World War I had lasted for two and a half years and Russia was only a few months away from total victory and liberating Vienna, Berlin and Istanbul. However, the British-organised February Revolution (the then British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, was the Victoria Nuland of a century later) put paid to it. And the utterly incompetent but Anglophile aristocrats the British had chosen to run Russia opened the floodgates to the October Revolution. Without British meddling, there would have been no Poland which between 1919 and 1920 occupied most of Belarus and Western Ukraine and stayed there until 1939. And if Russian troops had entered Vienna, Berlin and Istanbul, there would have been no Austrian corporal who in 1939 created the second part of World War I. And so no US invasion of Western Europe in 1944. And so no Soviet troops entering Vienna and Berlin in 1945 with violence. And so no war for the liberation of the Ukraine today.

The Austrian intrigues which helped lead to World War I played into the hands of the French and the British and destroyed the Saint Petersburg-Berlin axis. This was tragic because Berlin is the real centre of Western and Central Europe and everything else falls into place behind it, including Paris. (All Germans have to do to ensure their de facto leadership is to flatter the vanity of the French elite and tell them how important they are, that is enough). For harmony between Berlin and Saint Petersburg means harmony all over Western, Central and the northern part of Eastern Europe. Leaving aside Western Europe, there are also whole parts of Eastern and Central Europe which Russia is not interested in, because those Eastern and Central European cultures are alien to the Russian mentality and closer to German history and culture. These include, obviously, ex-Protestant Eastern Germany, as well as ex-Catholic Poland (including a slither of what is for the moment the far western Ukraine), Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as atheist Czechia.

Once you remove those countries from the equation, you come to those parts of Eastern Europe which Russia is interested in and feels closer to. These are: Belarus, the (Russian) Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Cyprus. You will be able to see why they belong to the Russian cultural world if you have a look at Samuel Huntingdon’s map of ‘The Eastern Boundary of Western Civilization’ (sic) (3). As the ethnocentric Professor says: ‘Europe ends where Western Christianity ends’. Here Russia will not need to build a wall, put up barbed wire and cement tank traps. It has friends on the other side of the border.

This was Stalin’s mistake – to create a Russian buffer zone which included countries whose majority culture was alien to the Russian, as listed above, instead of only those countries towards the south and east, as listed above. As an atheist Stalin had no more time or understanding for religious and cultural distinctions than modern Americans. A pity. South-eastern Europe, the above list of countries, will once more enter into the Russian sphere of influence, but those to the north and west belong elsewhere, the German and so Western European sphere.

Conclusion: After NATO

As NATO continues its collapse, which began in Kabul in August 2021, it will be clear that the US cannot hold on to Europe, just as it cannot hold on to Asia. The NATO wars will soon be over. NATO is being demilitarised and denazified now. In fact, it is being abolished now. Once the Berlin-Moscow axis has been re-established, the rest of Europe will follow, not into a Russian sphere of influence, but into an area which will want to form good relations with Russia, even the ex-American Republics of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and American Britain. This is because behind Moscow, lies Beijing and indeed the whole of Eurasia. And all of Europe needs both Beijing and Moscow, Beijing for manufactured goods, Moscow for energy. Europe is to return to its roots, turning its back on transatlantic irrelevance and meddling. That is soon to be its past. As the good Colonel said: ‘To hell with Washington’.

24 November 2022

Notes:

1. Naturally, Ismay was named after the greatest defeat in the history of the English people, Hastings. That is, after the greatest victory in the history of the Norman/British Establishment. And naturally, in 1947, General Ismay was given the Norman title of Baron for his service to the same Norman Establishment.

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

3. The first map in Chapter 7 of his book ‘The Clash of Civilizations’.

Clash of Christianities: Why Europe cannot understand Russia


April 29 2022

Source

By Pepe Escobar

Under an ubiquitous, toxic atmosphere of cognitive dissonance drenched in Russophobia, it’s absolutely impossible to have a meaningful discussion on finer points of Russian history and culture across the NATO space – a phenomenon I’m experiencing back in Paris right now, fresh from a long stint in Istanbul.

At best, in a semblance of civilized dialogue, Russia is pigeonholed in the reductionist view of a threatening, irrational, ever-expanding empire – a way more wicked version of Ancient Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India.

The fall of the USSR a little over three decades ago did hurl Russia back three centuries – to its borders in the 17th century. Russia, historically, had been interpreted as a secular empire – immense, multiple and multinational. This is all informed by history, very much alive even today in the Russian collective unconscious.

When Operation Z started I was in Istanbul – the Second Rome. I spent a considerable time of my late night walks around Hagia Sophia reflecting on the historical correlations of the Second Rome with the Third Rome – which happens to be Moscow, since the concept was first enounced at the start of the 16th century.

Later, back in Paris, banishment to soliloquy territory seemed inevitable until an academic pointed me to some substance, although heavily distorted by political correctness, available in the French magazine Historia.

There’s at least an attempt to discuss the Third Rome. The significance of the concept was initially religious before becoming political – encapsulating the Russian drive to become the leader of the Orthodox world in contrast with Catholicism. This has to be understood also in the context of pan-Slavic theories springing up under the first Romanov and then reaching their apogee in the 19th century.

Eurasianism – and its several declinations – treats the complex Russian identity as double-faced, between east and west. Western liberal democracies simply can’t understand that these ideas – infusing varied brands of Russian nationalism – do not imply hostility to “enlightened” Europe, but an affirmation of Difference (they could learn a bit from reading more Gilles Deleuze for that matter). Eurasianism also weighs on closer relations with Central Asia and necessary alliances, in various degrees, with China and Turkey.

A perplexed liberal west remains hostage to a vortex of Russian images which it can’t properly decode – from the two-headed eagle, which is the symbol of the Russian state since Peter the Great, to the Kremlin cathedrals, the St. Petersburg citadel, the Red Army entering Berlin in 1945, the May 9 parades (the next one will be particularly meaningful), and historical figures from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great. At best – and we’re talking academic level ‘experts’ – they identify all of the above as “flamboyant and confused” imagery.

The Christian/Orthodox divide

The apparently monolithic liberal west itself also cannot be understood if we forget how, historically, Europe is also a two-headed beast: one head may be tracked from Charlemagne all the way to the awful Brussels Eurocrat machine; and the other one comes from Athens and Rome, and via Byzantium/Constantinople (the Second Rome) reaches all the way to Moscow (the Third Rome).

Latin Europe, for the Orthodox, is seen as a hybrid usurper, preaching a distorted Christianity which only refers to St. Augustine, practicing absurd rites and neglecting the very important Holy Ghost. The Europe of Christian Popes invented what is considered a historical hydra – Byzantium – where Byzantines were actually Greeks living under the Roman Empire.

Western Europeans for their part see the Orthodox and the Christians from the East (see how they were abandoned by the west in Syria under ISIS and Al Qaeda) as satraps and a bunch of smugglers – while the Orthodox regard the Crusaders, the Teutonic chevaliers and the Jesuits – correctly, we must say – as barbarian usurpers bent on world conquest.

In the Orthodox canon, a major trauma is the fourth Crusade in 1204 which utterly destroyed Constantinople. The Frankish chevaliers happened to eviscerate the most dazzling metropolis in the world, which congregated at the time all the riches from Asia.

That was the definition of cultural genocide. The Frankish also happened to be aligned with some notorious serial plunderers: the Venetians. No wonder, from that historical juncture onwards, a slogan was born: “Better the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s tiara.”

So since the 8th century, Carolingian and Byzantine Europe were de facto at war across an Iron Curtain from the Baltics to the Mediterranean (compare it with the emerging New Iron Curtain of Cold War 2.0). After the barbarian invasions, they neither spoke the same language nor practiced the same writing, rites or theology.

This fracture, significantly, also trespassed Kiev. The west was Catholic – 15% of Greek catholics and 3% of Latins – and in the center and the east, 70% Orthodox, who became hegemonic in the 20th century after the elimination of Jewish minorities by mainly the Waffen-SS of the Galicia division, the precursors of Ukraine’s Azov batallion.

Constantinople, even in decline, managed to pull off a sophisticated geo-strategic game to seduce the Slavs, betting on Muscovy against the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian combo. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 allowed Muscovy to denounce the treason of Greeks and Byzantine Armenians who rallied around the Roman Pope, who badly wanted a reunified Christianity.

Afterward, Russia ends up constituting itself as the only Orthodox nation that did not fall under Ottoman domination. Moscow regards itself – as Byzantium – as a unique symphony between spiritual and temporal powers.

Third Rome becomes a political concept only in the 19th century – after Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had vastly expanded Russian power. The key concepts of Russia, Empire and Orthodoxy are fused. That always implies Russia needs a ‘near abroad’ – and that bears similarities with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision (which, significantly, is not imperial, but cultural).

As the vast Russian space has been in constant flow for centuries, that also implies the central role of the concept of encirclement. Every Russian is very much aware of territorial vulnerability (remember, for starters, Napoleon and Hitler). Once the western borderland is trespassed, it’s an easy ride all the way to Moscow. Thus, this very unstable line must be protected; the current correlation is the real threat of Ukraine made to host NATO bases.

Onward to Odessa

With the fall of the USSR, Russia found itself in a geopolitical situation last encountered in the 17th century. The slow and painful reconstruction was spearheaded from two fronts: the KGB – later FSB – and the Orthodox church. The highest-level interaction between the Orthodox clergy and the Kremlin was conducted by Patriarch Kirill – who later became Putin’s minister of religious affairs.

Ukraine for its part had become a de facto Moscow protectorate way back in 1654 under the Treaty of Pereyaslav: much more than a strategic alliance, it was a natural fusion, in progress for ages by two Orthodox Slav nations.

Ukraine then falls under the Russian orbit. Russian domination expands until 1764, when the last Ukrainian hetman (commander-in-chief) is officially deposed by Catherine the Great: that’s when Ukraine becomes a province of the Russian empire.

As Putin made it quite clear this week: “Russia cannot allow the creation of anti-Russian territories around the country.” Operation Z will inevitably encompass Odessa, founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great.

The Russians at the time had just expelled the Ottomans from the northwest of the Black Sea, which had been successively run by Goths, Bulgars, Hungarians and then Turkish peoples – all the way to the Tatars. Odessa at the start was peopled, believe it or not, by Romanians who were encouraged to settle there after the 16th century by the Ottoman sultans.

Catherine chose a Greek name for the city – which at the start was not Slav at all. And very much like St. Petersburg, founded a century earlier by Peter the Great, Odessa never stopped flirting with the west.

Tsar Alexander I, in the early 19th century, decides to turn Odessa into a great trading port – developed by a Frenchman, the Duke of Richelieu. It was from the port of Odessa that Ukrainian wheat started to reach Europe. By the turn of the 20th century, Odessa is truly multinational – after having attracted, among others, the genius of Pushkin.

Odessa is not Ukrainian: it’s an intrinsic part of the Russian soul. And soon the trials and tribulations of history will make it so again: as an independent republic; as part of a Novorossiya confederation; or attached to the Russian Federation. The people of Odessa will decide.

Meaning and Validity of Bilad al-Sham

Nov, 26, 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

Pablo Sapag

After a long decade of an imposed, cruel and bloody winter, the political recovery of the Arab block as an international actor is taking shape precisely around Bilad al-Sham.

Bilad al-Sham is much more than a mere geographic reference, as western outsiders seem to believe every time they equal what is an ancient rich and comprehensive social, cultural, and political reality with that of the Levant. The latter is indeed a purely physical tag. This misunderstanding is at the core of those western catastrophic cyclic policies towards Bilad al-Sham and beyond. It’s also the cause of the systematic failure of their interventionist schemes in what by far transcends a landscape.

Since the time of the crusaders, one after the other, all and each of western attempts to divide and conquer has ended up with the invaders expelled, puzzled and for a long time searching for the causes of their recurrent defeats. An example of this is what happened during the 20th century’s first half, when the French and British plot to dismember Bilad al-Sham according to the Sykes-Picot secret terms ended up shamefully on April 17th, 1946. On that date, the last of the defeated French soldiers evacuated off the core of Bilad al-Sham, nowadays the Syrian Arab Republic. In parallel, the other member of the aspiring terminator duo struggled to impose to the region a Zionist entity that 73 years later is still psychologically insecure and desperately trying to make true the impossible dream of its British putative father. Palestine, the Syrian Golan, and Lebanon are the mirror that every single day reflects a fiasco that cannot be overcome through a wishful thinking so-called “normalization”.

More recently, the war imposed on Syria with the declared aim to quarter it into confessional and ethnic cantons, or mini-states depending on outside powers, has failed once again. Now as then the reason is the same. Bilad al-Sham’s main strength is the will of its diverse people to live together, regardless of their ethnic and religious different affiliations. In short, they just keep adhering to what has been there the natural state of things for several millennia, a social way of life which defines a culture. In case of necessity, such a rich legacy gives a formidable impulse to resistance and becomes an unbeatable defense shield vis-à-vis any invader.

Ten years after the beginning of the conspiracy against the Syrian Arab Republic, and by extension against the whole Bilad al-Sham, this solid ancient reality that westerners don’t identify because they simply don’t understand it, is showing all its economic and political possibilities, not to mention its social and cultural ones. Umm Kulthum, Fairouz, Sabah Fakhri, Nizar Qabbani, Mahmoud Darwish, George Wassouf, or Edward Said –just to remind some- are the cultural voices that trespass the imposed borders to Bilad al-Sham, exposing in every concert, book, reading, or listening session the futility of the dismembering endeavor.  

The energy crisis imposed on several Middle Eastern countries is being solved in a natural – let’s say Shami, successful way that challenges those borders imposed one century ago by the infamous Sykes-Picot treaty. Lebanon is already receiving Iranian petrol transported through the Syrian Sea to the Syrian Arab Republic port of Banias and from there to Lebanon. The latter will also increase very soon its gas and electricity supplies thanks to the agreement that will facilitate Lebanon to receive from the Egyptian Sinai gas or gas transformed into electricity through Jordan and Syria. All the countries involved have in one way or the other been historically core components of Bilad al-Sham.  

After a long decade of an imposed, cruel and bloody winter, the political recovery of the Arab block as an international actor is taking shape precisely around Bilad al-Sham. Trust and bonds among Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon have resettled. Some non-Bilad al-Sham countries have understood it and are rushing to reconcile with Syria. The UAE’s constructive policy shows that Abu Dhabi understood that any Arab attempt to counterbalance the western diktat to the Arab region and especially the pernicious Turkish aggressive policies must be built around Bilad al-Sham in both, geographically and cultural terms. From the Gulf, however, others insist to establish a new Arabness based on the radical interpretation of a religion that they believe is the only one possible. One spiritual current among many others that they feverishly pretend has to shape everything, from the government to the rule of law and even personal behavior. An extremist and short-minded ideology exported to the rest of the world from the desert south of Jordan and from the lands north of the Taurus Mountains.

Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar’s Pan-Arabism is linked to a collective Arab identity developed around political struggles for independence and the use of Arabic as a language of understanding. As a means of communication, Arabic was embraced long before by the people of Bilad al-Sham, a useful and valuable tool to express its culture, thoughts, and social unity. In that sense, the UAE is siding with those like Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, or Algeria. The latter has always realized that the political unity of Arab states is based on a common language and a pragmatic approach to counterbalance an unfair world order. That unity can only be possible if social and cultural differences are respected. Above all, the Emiratis have understood that without Bilad al-Sham other schemes of convergence are simply not possible. That’s the meaning and validity of Bilad al-Sham. No more, no less.    

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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Cui bono from the situation in France

Cui bono from the situation in France

October 29, 2020

I won’t even bother repeating it all here, those who are interested in my views of this entire Charlie Hebdo canard can read my article “I am NOT Charlie” here: https://thesaker.is/i-am-not-charlie/

No, what I want to do is to ask a simple question: do you think the French leaders are simply stupid, suicidal or naive?  I submit that they neither stupid, nor suicidal nor naive.  In fact, they are using a well practiced technique which goes with some variation of this:

  • Infiltrate some pseudo-Islamic gang of cutthroats (literally!)
  • Keep them under close scrutiny ostensibly for counter-terrorism purposes
  • Inside the group, try to promote your confidential informers
  • Have your analysts work on the following question: “how could we best provoke these nutcases into a bloody terrorist act?
  • Once the plan is decided, simply execute it, say by organizing the posting fantastically offensive caricatures
  • Once the cutthroats strike, blame Islam and double down
  • By then, you have infuriated most of the immense Muslim world out there and you can rest assured that the process is launched and will continue on its own.  You can now relax and get the pop-corn
  • Have your propaganda machine declare that Islam is incompatible with western civilization (whatever that means in 2020, both Descartes and Conchita Wurst I suppose…)
  • Shed some crocodile tears when the cutthroats murder some completely innocent Christian bystander
  • And announce a new crusade against “Islamism” (also a vague and, frankly, meaningless term!) and crack down on true Muslim communities and ideas while continuing to lovingly arm, train, finance and direct the “good terrorists” who have now become your own, personal, cutthroats.

Cui bono?

Anybody who knows anything about the political realities in France will immediately know in whose interests this all is and who is behind that: the Zionist power structure in France (CRIF, UEJF, etc. and the Israelis).  They have a total control over Macron and over the entire political class, very much including Marine LePen.

Who else could have concocted the “beautiful” term “Islamo-Fascisme“?!

This is a new phenomenon, a new ideology and a new strategy, which Alain Soral calls “National Zionism” which I discussed in some details here: https://thesaker.is/the-great-fraud-of-national-zionism/.

In its inception (from Ahad Ha’am, Theodor Herzl,  Ze’ev Jabotinsky, etc) Zionism used to be a largely secular and nationalistic, then, later, after WWII, it became very leftist and still secular ( Ben-Gurion, Shlomo Lavi, Golda Meir).  Modern Zionism, however, is both rabidly racist and religious – the perfect example would be US neocons.  It is also a ruthless and genocidal ideology which has created something truly original: God-mandated racism, something which, as far as I know, no other religion professes (so much for the ignorant and, frankly, plain stupid notions of “Abrahamic religions” or, even worse, “Judeo-Christian values”!).  National Zionism is the next phase of Zionism – it is rabidly “conservative” (in a Neocon sense only, of course!) and it parasitically feeds on whatever nationalist ideology the local patriotic goyim are inclined towards (the best example of that being the so-called “Christian Zionists” in the USA).

But here is the demonic “beauty” of it all: in a society like the French one, the Zionists don’t even need to micromanage their false flags: given enough uneducated and murderous pseudo-Muslim cutthroats and enough rabid secularists wanted to offend the faithful – some kind of violent explosion will *inevitably* happen!

Right now, between the embarrassing Yellow Vests movement, the crumbling economy, the massive influx, wave after wave, of unwanted and un-adaptable immigrants and the resulting social tensions, the French regime is in deep trouble.  Add to this the COVID pandemic which just added to the chaos and anger and finish with a total lack of foreign policy successes and you will immediately see why this regime badly needed what could be called a “patriotic reaction”.

Finally, there is the time-proven method of scaring your own population into a state of catatonic acceptance of everything and anything in the name of “security”.

We see it all in France today, we saw it in the UK before, and also in Belgium.  And, rest assured,  we will see much more such massacres in the future.  The only way to really stop these “terrorist” attacks is to show their sponsors that we know who they are and we understand what they are doing.  Short of this, these attacks will continue.

The Saker

صراع مُستعرٌ بين الفرنجة والعثمانيين على التهام العرب؟

د. وفيق إبراهيم

هذه معادلة تعيد الى المشهد السياسي للمنطقة العربية الصراع العثماني، الاوروبي الذي يعمل على السيطرة على المنطقة العربية منذ ستة قرون متواصلة وسط «غربة» كاملة من اهل المنطقة.

فما الفارق بين سليم الاول ووريثه المعاصر الرئيس التركي رجب طيب أردوغان على مستوى المشروع السياسي؟ وهل هناك من تغيير جذري في السياسات الاميركية – الاوروبية المعاصرة عن الاحتلال البريطاني الفرنسي منذ القرن التاسع؟ وهل هو مختلف عن حروب الفرنجة التي احتلت الشرق العربي 192 عاماً ولم تتركه إلا بعد هزيمة تلقتها من المماليك، على الرغم من أن صلاح الدين سبقهم في ضربها في معركة حطين، لكن أولاده أعادوا تسليم المنطقة الى الفرنجة.

بذلك ينتقل هذا الشرق من احتلال عسكري الى سيطرة اقتصادية ملتزماً صمت الضعفاء والمساكين في إطار معادلة قوامها تحالف الخارج الغربي او التركي مع أنظمة الداخل لقهر شعوب هذه المنطقة. والهيمنة عليها اقتصادياً فتصبح جزءاً من النفوذ الجيوبوليتيكي الخاص بأي منتصر.

التاريخ هنا مستمر بأسماء جديدة وبالمعادلات القديمة نفسها، سليم الاول يعود متسللاً من مرج دابق نموذج 1516 الى سورية عبر إرهابيي الاخوان المسلمين وسراج ليبيا واخوان العراق واليمن ومصر متسربلاً بقناع الرئيس التركي أردوغان انما مع المشروع التاريخي نفسه.

وها هو الرئيس الفرنسي ماكرون يستعمل حادثة قتل مروّعة قتل فيها اسلاموي شيشاني مدرساً فرنسياً، ليؤسس فرصة تاريخية لإعادة تنظيم الفرنجة الجدد، هؤلاء بحاجة الى ايديولوجيا تختبئ المصالح الاقتصادية في زواياها؛ الامر الذي دفع بماكرون الى توجيه اتهامات الى الاسلام باعتبار انه يجتاز ازمة تاريخية على حد قوله وكانت كافية لتحريض الشارع الفرنسي أولاً والأوروبي ثانياً والغربي عموماً في دفاع عنيف عن طروحات ماكرون بدت وكأنها مشابهة للتحريض الذي أطلقته المراكز الدينية في الغرب لاستيلاد فكرة «الفرنجة» الأوروبيين الذاهبين الى الشرق لتحرير «الصليب» كما كانوا يزعمون.

بدورهم رفع العثمانيون شعار الخلافة الإسلامية كتبرير لاحتلالهم للشرق وشمال افريقيا مهددين اوروبا بإدراكهم أسوار فيينا العاصمة النمساوية.

هذا الصراع انحسم لمصلحة الغرب في القرن التاسع عشر بعد هيمنة تركية دامت أربعة قرون ونيف.

لكنه يعود في هذه المرحلة عبر الصراع على البحر المتوسط وسواحل بلدانه المليئة بالغاز، فكان لا بد من شعارات تبريرية وجدها أردوغان التركي في الدفاع عن هجمات غربية مفترضة على الإسلام. ودخل فيها ماكرون الفرنسي فريقاً أوروبياً يرى أن الإسلام اصبح يشكل ازمة عالمية.

اما أصحاب المنطقة وهم الغرب فيلوذون في صمت المذعورين، موجهين رفضاً ضعيفاً لهجوم ماكرون على الإسلام ومنتقدين الأداء التركي لمحاولاته احتلال مناطق عربية.

على المستوى العملي، لا يساوي موقف الدول العربية شيئاً، لأن الطرفين المتقاتلين يعبثان بأمن العالم العربي لأسباب تتعلق بنهجيهما الاستعماريين، فلا ماكرون عائد لاستعادة الصليب ولا أردوغان يريد حماية ديار الاسلام.

هناك اذاً إصرار من الطرفين على التهام العرب بالتبريرات التاريخية وما يؤكد ذلك هي تلك الاندفاعة الهجومية من مستشارة المانيا ورؤساء النمسا وفنلندا ورئيس وزراء بريطانيا باتجاه تأييد موقف ماكرون وكأن المرحلة مماثلة لمراحل تشكيل الفرنجة قبل تسوية قرون تقريباً.

ان ما يشجع هذه الدول على التستر بغطاء ديني، هي تلك الدول العربية التي لا تعمل إلا لحماية عائلاتها المالكة ورؤساء جمهورياتها على حساب المصالح الفعلية للدول.

وسد النهضة مثال على الانكسار العربي الراهن، لأنه يحتجز 74 مليار متر مكعب من مياه النيل في هذا السد الاثيوبي متسبباً بقطع اكثر من ثلاثين مليار متر من حصة مصر من هذا النهر البالغة 55 مليار متر مكعب تشكل 90 في المئة من المياه في مصر، وتهددها بضرب 70 في المئة من قطاعها الزراعي.

للتوضيح فإن اثيوبيا ابتدأت ببناء السد منذ تسعة عشر عاماً وخاض معها عهد الرئيس السيسي مفاوضات عميقة، تبين فيها أن إثيوبيا كانت تستعمل لعبة تقطيع الوقت لاستكمال السد، وهذا ما حدث على حساب الأمن الوطني المصري المهدد بشكل فعلي وسط لامبالاة عهد السيسي.

هناك اذاً معوقات امام العرب، تحتل فلسطين رأس لائحتها الى جانب الصراعات الدولية والإقليمية الأميركية والاوروبية والتركية والاسرائيلية على مواردها والتخلف الاقتصادي العميق، والديكتاتوريات والخلافات الداخلية، هذه عوامل تؤسس لأكثر من عثماني جديد وآخر من الفرنجة مع استمرار التموضع الاستراتيجي الاميركي في عشرات القواعد على اراضي العرب.

لا بد أيضاً من لفت النظر الى أن التذرع الغربي بالإرهاب الإسلاموي هو ذريعة لتبرير الاستعمار الغربي لأن هذا النوع من الاسلام هو غربي التأسيس يرقى الى الدعم البريطاني للوهابية في مطلع القرن العشرين، والاستثمار الاميركي في منظمة القاعدة في سبعينيات القرن الماضي بالاشتراك مع المخابرات السعودية.

كما يعود الى الاستثمار الاميركي – الاوروبي التركي في منظمات داعش وأشباهها في افغانستان والعراق وسورية وليبيا ومصر.

فهل يمكن للعرب مجابهة هذه المشاريع؟

وحدها سورية القادرة على تشكيل جبهة قوية في وجه الإرهاب الذي هزمته في ميادينها اكثر من مرة ولم يعد موجوداً إلا في مناطق السيطرة التركية والأميركية.

هي اذاً سورية التي يستطيع العرب دعمها لتواصل حملة التصدي للإرهاب الذي يكمن خلفه الاميركيون والاتراك المسنودون حالياً من الفرنجة الجدد.

وكما رحلوا بالقوة قبل ثمانية قرون، فلا بد أنهم راحلون مع مشاريعهم بقوة التضامن السوري بين الدولة والجيش والشعب.

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The Netherlands Doubling Down on Harming the Syrian People, for Trump

September 22, 2020 Arabi Souri

The Netherlands wants to prolong and increase the Syrian people suffering
Syrian Refugees in Jordan – The Netherlands wants to prolong and increase the Syrian people’s suffering

The Netherlands, like other NATO member states, is involved in the role-play model passing different tasks among themselves that all result in punishing the Syrian people for resisting to fall prey for the US hegemony through terrorist groups, Syria.

One of the roles assigned to the Netherlands is being activated now, however, it’s either the short memory of NATO officials or simple-brained techniques they expose their moves for its sheer criminality without needing to sugarcoat it anymore, they might be very much depending on the Sheeple nature they turned their people into.

The Netherlands, being the house country for the International Criminal Court was assigned by its higher command in the USA to call for an investigation in crimes against humanity carried out in Syria, and no, not to punish terrorist groups that were assembled from all sides of the planet by the world’s superpowers and super-rich countries and dumped as the human garbage they are onto Syria, nor calling for the investigation and prosecuting of those involved in facilitating the terror acts by these human garbage; the Netherlands wants the ICC to prosecute the Syrian people for defending their homes from the NATO-sponsored terrorists. Goebbels would be so proud of the Netherlands and its officials.

image- Displaced Syrians Refugees in Lebanon - Horrible Conditions
Syrian Refugees in Lebanon – Horrible Conditions

The Netherlands mission at the United Nations informed, as it seems, their colleagues in the Syrian mission at the international body, about their intentions to file a case against Syrian officials involved in the crime of defending their country, they claim that the rights of terrorists killing and maiming Syrian women and children were violated by Syrian officials. Europe cut its ties with the Syrian state and recognized cannibal terrorists as representatives of the Syrian people, hence they have to go through different measures to contact the Syrian state.

The minister of foreign affairs in the Netherlands Stef Blok wrote in a letter to his country’s parliament his government’s intention to hold Syrians accountable for what he alleged are ‘crimes against humanity committed by Syrian officials’, he included ‘torture’ as one of them.

The Netherlands is obviously taking advantage of being the host country of the International Criminal Court, the ICC, Syrian official source slammed the latest step by the European monarchy.

In an almost instant response, a Syrian state official condemned the notion by the Netherlands and reminded the Netherlands officials of Syria’s right to prosecute in all legal methods every individual and party, state and non-state actors who facilitated terror in Syria on the Syrian people. The Syrian state official reminded the Netherlands of its destructive and criminal role by directly funding an assorted number of armed groups with up to 28 million Euros of the Netherland taxpayers money paid to groups designated as terrorist groups by the Netherlands own public prosecution.

Syria is not a signatory to the ICC’s ‘Rome Statute’, hence the Netherlands needs the approval of the United Nations Security Council to refer Syrian officials to the ICC, we can say it’s an impossible task, a futile effort with the certain objection of at least Russia and China at the UNSC, each of which has the Veto power, but this stunt could be used as an additional media campaign against the Syrian people, in addition to everything else they’re facing.

The irony is that the United States of America itself has not only rejected to sign the Rome Statue, it went to the extent of imposing sanctions against the ICC’s prosecutor and still wants to use the ICC through its minions to gain politically in Syria what it couldn’t achieve by creating and sponsoring literally hundreds of terrorist groups in the country throughout the past 9.5 years.

Maybe, the Netherlands, like its other EU accomplices, didn’t have enough Syrian refugees migrating to their country and forcing those who couldn’t make it to Europe into becoming refugees, it’s the western European mentality never changed since the Crusades.

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The Goods, the Bad and the Ugly

August 08, 2019

by Jimmie Moglia (and Patrizia Cecconi) for The Saker Blog

The Goods, the Bad and the Ugly

In the instance, the goods are those boycotted by the BDS measure (Boycott-Divest-Sanctions), proposed in the American Congress .

The bad are the US congressmen and politicians who sold their soul to the Jews for thirty pieces of silver, and rejected even the symbolic and extremely platonic ‘non-binding’ initiative of boycotting goods tainted by crime, theft, barbarities of all sorts, and by the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Actually, there is a better word for ‘soul’ as in ‘politicians who sold their soul’, but I will forbear to mention it out of my inviolable respect for the ladies. Even Tulsie Gabbard, who has made a name for herself as an enemy of the status-quo, chose to oppose the measure, demonstrating the type of caution that cowards borrow from fear and attribute to policy.

Finally, the ugly are the criminals who killed and stole – and continue to kill, maim, imprison, humiliate and steal from the dispossessed Palestinians and rightful owners of Palestine.

If we were not living in a world upside down, the considerations that follow would be unnecessary.

The term ‘Jews’ excludes those (few or many, it is difficult to say), who reject the ‘chosen people’ philosophy of their sect – a philosophy known to many, but not many enough – for its meaning, history and implications.

For the voice of their dissenters is irrelevant, considering that the Jews, as a political-social entity, are a monolith, practicing a cultural-political hegemony that only blindness can deny. Hence, to edulcorate the truth by a quasi-synonym (Zionists) will not, in my view, do justice to the real dissenters.

In fact, many suspect, with cause, that some fake ‘dissenters’ are planted in the right places to ‘cover all bases’ – the metaphor of ‘gate-keepers’ being most appropriate. For hegemony to appear not overly conspicuous it must simulate some kind of antithesis or opposition. Why? So that hegemony may seem a choice and not an imposition.

Quoting from a Jewish writer about Jews in the Middle Ages.

“Without in any way minimizing the force of these factors (earlier referred to by the author as “a sense of frustration and exasperation aroused by Jews at large”), we believe nevertheless that they do not tell the whole story or even the essential part of the story. The most vivid impression to be gained from a reading of medieval allusions to the Jew is of hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense, that it leaves one gasping for comprehension. The unending piling up of violent epithets and accusations and curses, the consistent representation of the Jew as the epitome of everything evil and abominable, for whom in particular the unbounded scorn and contumely of the Christian world are reserved, must convince the most casual student that we are dealing here with a fanaticism altogether subjective and irrational.” (Joshua Trachtenberg, “The Devil and the Jews”)

Yes, it is irrational, but the position regarding the issue was clearly first stated by Pope Callistus II in 1120 AD, with his Bull “Sicut Judaeis Non.” And I quote from the Encyclopedia Judaica,

“It was a general Bull of Protection for the Jews, who had suffered at the hands of participants in the First Crusade (1095–96) and were being maltreated by their Christian neighbors. It forbade killing them, using force to convert them, and otherwise molesting them, their synagogues and cemeteries.”

And it is a position – we may all agree – that all rational people continue to maintain 900 years later. But it was expected from the Jews, at the time and in return, that they would not corrupt the Christian world.

The idea of corruption arose clearly when Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud into Latin in the twelfth century. Here I quote from Wikipedia,

“Donin translated statements by Talmudic sages and pressed various charges against the Talmud by quoting a series of ‘allegedly blasphemous’ passages about Christianity. He also selected what he claimed were injunctions of Talmudic sages permitting Jews to kill non-Jews, to deceive Christians, and to break promises made to them without scruples.”

Note the inverted commas I added around ‘allegedly blasphemous,’ in view of what comes next.

The Catholic Church had shown little interest in the Talmud until Donin presented his translation. The Pope (now Gregory II) was surprised that the Jews relied on texts other than the Torah; texts that contained alleged blasphemies against Christianity. Equally surprised, we may add, are or would be many Americans today.

This lack of interest also affected, until then, the French monarchy that profited by the Jews’ money-making skills.

Given the astonishment generated by the translated Talmud, a debate was organized in Paris – it began on June 12, 1240. Donin represented the Christians. Four distinguished Rabbis represented the Jews, namely Yechiel of Paris, Moses of Coucy, Judah of Melun, and Samuel ben Solomon of Château-Thierry.

The four rabbis’ objective was to defend the Talmud against Donin’s accusations that it contained obscenities and blasphemies against the Christian religion and God. In one Talmudic passage, for example, reference is made to someone named Jesus, dispatched to hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. The Rabbis denied that this is the Jesus of the New Testament, stating as a kind of proof that “not every Louis born in France is king.”

Interesting argument, contradicted by another contemporary Jewish scholar– more on this later.

Among the obscene folklore, there is a story that Adam copulated with each of the animals before finding Eve. And Noah, according to the Talmudic script, was castrated by his son Ham. Furthermore, by now and thanks to the diffusion of knowledge via the web, most readers are aware of what the Talmud considers ‘acceptable’ sex, for example, lowering the age of consent to a 3-year old girl.

I don’t know why, but the recent resurrection of the already well-known criminal porno-ring of underage girls in Epstein’s ‘Lolita Island’, comes to mind.

Until the debate of 1240, Christians associated the Jewish religion with the Mosaic faith of the Old Testament. Hence the Church, suddenly and officially, realized that the Talmud was the Jews’ equivalent of the New Testament.

It is usually believed that the crucifixion of Christ is the historical trigger of the inherent conflict between Jews and everyone else. Some prominent Catholic thinkers have advanced the thesis that by rejecting Christ, the Jews have rejected Reason, (also referred to as Logos), as the underlying principle on which Greek-inspired Western civilization was built. Lack of Reason leads to continual upheaval, as in Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.”

Maybe, but the issue precedes the birth of Christ. For example, in 59 BC Lelius, a Pompey’s lieutenant, brought a suit against Flacco, a pro-consul in Asia Minor. The suit had to do with the transport (or lack thereof) of Jewish gold to Jerusalem. Flacco chose Cicero as his defender.

Here are Cicero’s words in his related writing, “Pro Flacco.”

“Now as to the accusation regarding the Jewish gold – which is why this trial is held not very far from the Aurelian square (the Jewish quarter). Yes, for this accusation you (Lelius), have chosen this place and this assembly of people, because you know how great is their number, how great their unanimity of purpose and how much is their power in the assemblies. I will speak softly so as to be heard only by the judges. For individuals are not wanting, ready to incite these people (the Jews) against me and against any other respectable citizen. I don’t want to give them reason to facilitate their attacks.”

Advance the clock by 2060 years, and Cicero’s words could be applied almost verbatim to the US Congress, to the neo-cons, and to the objectively unbelievable proposition that any criticism of Jews amounts to ‘hate-crime,’ as does any reference to their history, or confutation of their documentably fantastic inventions of inexistent or unproven facts.

History is silent as to which seed was sowed, and to where, how, why and what created certain destructive characteristics of Jewish ideology. For all seed-sowings a mysterious thing, whether the seeds fall into the earth or into souls.

Maybe it was a little thing. For what we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, they are the embryos. It is the point of departure that may decide the whole future of an existence of a race or ethnic group. One single black speck may be the beginning of a decomposition, of a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant misunderstanding hatred and separation may finally issue. An enormous avalanche begins by the displacement of one snow-crystal, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing. For accident plays a vast part in human affairs. Calculation has its uses but chance mocks it, and the result of a planned calculation is in no wise proportional to its merit.

It is a mystery. For it is in the origin of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless sequence of after-events has often many surprises for us all. So that at first sight history seems to us accident and confusion; looked at for the second time, it seems to us logical and necessary; looked at for the third time, it appears to us a mixture of necessity and liberty; on the fourth examination we scarcely know what to think of it. For if force is the source of right, and chance the origin of the force, we come back to the first explanation, only with a heavier heart than when we began.

And equally, with a heavy heart, we observe that any effort at understanding the inner mechanisms of time and mind, whereby the US has become the secular arm of Israel, taints the researchers with anti-Semitism.

If the patient reader who read so far will catch his breath, I will now introduce Ms. Patrizia Cecconi, an Italian writer, a botanist and a strenuous defender of the cause of Gaza’s citizens and of Palestine at large.

In what amounts to a guerrilla of tactics, Patrizia has managed so far to reach Gaza and provide what help and support her organization makes possible. Among other things, she has published a very interesting and very well-written book titled “Vagando di erba in erba” (Roaming from herb to herb). In which Patrizia details an extended visit to the West Bank, using as a conductive theme, the description of Palestine’s natural flora, and the characteristic and beneficial uses of various wild plants. While, simultaneously, telling the reader of the life of the Palestinians she met, spoke with or was the guest of. I hope that the book may be available in English in the near future.

I will now translate the text of one of her recent articles published in Italy. The reported event – the destruction of Palestinian houses and apartment buildings in East Jerusalem, accompanied by the laughter of Israeli troops – almost coincided in time with the rejection by the US Congress of the BDS non-binding proposal.

The witness-reported Israeli laughter is not the first example of the lawless confidence of successful robbers. Some readers may remember the picnic tables and picnic chairs positioned above the wall dividing Gaza from the rest of Palestine. From where Israeli onlookers and tourists could watch Israeli soldiers gun down unarmed Palestinians, including women and children, as if they were pins in a bowling alley at a recreation center.

A Specter roams around… but it is not Communism

A specter roams around the Middle East, and from there, crossing seas and mountains, reaches everywhere, demonstrating the absolute inanity of the Universal Humanitarian Law and nullifying every rule of international legality, starting from the Geneva Conventions.

A specter that, with actual incontrovertible facts under our eyes, shows the useless foolishness of the United Nations Organization itself – reduced to be but a glass-palace shown to visiting school-children. Explaining to them how the dream of a “magnificent and progressive future” envisaged in those proud halls, was broken after three short years, thanks to self-declared birth of the Israeli State. A structure that, since its foundation, would ignore, dismiss, discard, disregard and trample-on all the United Nations’ principles and resolutions.

It would be reductive and factious to classify this statement as anti–Semitic. While not realizing, instead, the weight and danger – for the world at large – of Zionism’s long tentacles, obliterating universal humanitarian principles and every rule of international law. Any honest thinker, even minimally aware of reality, cannot but bitterly agree on the consequences of continuing to shelter Israel from the legal sanctions deserved by its criminal actions. Sanctions equally necessary to make that entity comply with the accepted standards of humanity, and to limit the horrendous damage, human and political it has produced for over a century.

For about 80 years, what occurred and occurs in 2000-year old Palestine, is an unrestrained use of power, applied in the name of Zionism. An ideology developed at the end of the 19th century by Austrian-born Theodor Herzl and later implemented in the establishment of the Israeli state, not respecting the UN Resolution 181, but through self-proclamation by Ben Gurion. This occurred shortly before the expiration of the British mandate, therefore outside the terms of the UN Resolution. Showing and declaring to the world that Israel stands above and beyond any human law, international or super-national. And making the only basis for the state’s existence a biblical tale that would entail or allow a “return to the Promised Land.”

What said above is not intended as a historical summary, but the not-to-be-forgotten basis for understanding Israel’s latest violation of international law and of the rights of the Palestinian people. Namely the recent demolition of large apartment blocks in Jerusalem, as part of the continuous, illegal and brutal confiscations of Palestinian property.

The Jewish state is carrying out the project of the “greater Israel,” envisaged prior to the establishment of the state and consisting in the step-by-step annexation of all historic Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, on the ground that God had decreed and promised to Jewish men and women the right to occupy this land. [My note, as clearly stated in the 1982 Odet-Yinon Plan, Israel is supposed to extend from the Nile to the Euphrates. When, thanks to the efforts of President Jimmy Carter, Israel had to give up the illegally occupied Sinai, a day of mourning was declared in Israel. Israeli president Rabin paid with his life for that ‘mistake.’]

In Israel, religion and politics blend as required, ever since 1897, when Theodor Herzl, though an atheist, found the biblical narrative useful for the establishment of a racist state, so that the religious aura would become the trump card, having the force of all founding myths.

Of course, without the interest of the then great powers of having a ‘Western reference point’ at the gates of the Middle East, no Sykes-Picot agreement (1916), nor the Balfour declaration (1917) would have been possible. And without the Shoa of WW2 perhaps we would not witness the Shoa of the Palestinians.

We use the term shoah, meaning a “devastating storm,” leading to the elimination of a population. With Nazism, the population was defined by race and was identified with its religion. The intention was to physically remove every individual associated with the race. In Israel and with the ongoing massacres of Palestinians the intent is not based on race or religion, but rather on the goal of driving them out, and to fully occupy the ground on which they have lived for centuries, even before the emergence of Islam.

Some call it the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” tracing it back to the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. Others call it the ‘shoa,’ a Hebrew term, to make better understand the similarity between the Nazi-led and the Israeli-led ‘shoas’.

Yet all this does not disturb states that do business with Israel, even though they call themselves democratic, nor international and supranational organizations, even though their institutional representatives replenish their speeches with concepts such as ‘human rights,’ ‘justice’ and ‘peace.’

Israel benefits from a halo of false legality that, along with the tragedy of the (1972-born) Holocaust narrative, protects it as an unassailable armor. This is the will of the Israeli government, well supported by almost the entire population of approximately 9 million inhabitants. With the exception of twenty or so young activists plus a few journalists such as Gideon Levy or Amira Hass, who denounced the Israeli decision to destroy a dozen Palestinians apartment buildings, thus proceeding further on the path of destruction that has already affected tens of thousands of Palestinian buildings and homes.

It was an escalation beyond any possible justification, for the demolition affected even apartment buildings located in zone A – an area that, even according the Oslo agreements of 1993 (actually a trap to advance Jewish interests), should be under total Palestinian jurisdiction.

By so doing Israel, through Netanyahu, delivered a further kick to the law and to the already frayed Palestinian National Authority. Demonstrating once more, in the style of the “Iron Chancellor”, that agreements are but pieces of paper.

Israeli bulldozers and some 700 star-of-David-attired soldiers were ready to carry out the crime immediately after the Israeli Supreme Court, in total mockery of international legality, issued the predicted sentence of demolition. For in an act of foolish confidence the Palestinians had appealed to the (mock) Supreme Court.

In sum, like the Italian Jews, expelled from schools and jobs after November 1938, the Palestinians – in a tragic mockery that amuses the Israelis and is justified by sundry lackeys – saw their homes ‘legally’ demolished. This heinous abuse is repeated and recurrent. Between 1967 and 1973 Israel destroyed 9,000 homes, leaving thousands of Palestinian homeless, as documented by Jewish writer Felicia Langer in her book, “With My Eyes.” Then she left Israel because her action rarely had an effect on the rigged Israeli courts, though she unwillingly helped, by her legal attempts, to give a coat of legality to plain illegality, as the most recent case shows, with the Supreme Court deciding that it was legal to destroy the homes in East Jerusalem.

Did the (Italian) mass media adequately cover this umpteenth violation practiced on the Palestinians? – Did it note that by ridiculing international institutions, Israel removes from all citizens of the world the right to be protected by a Universal Law made mockery of? No the mass media was silent but for one ‘niche’ newspaper, “Il Manifesto,” that dedicated its first page to the event.

Therefore ‘mass-opinion,’ driven by the usual suspects concludes that the Palestinians built illegally, and that Israel, through its Supreme Court, has righted an illegality. We may wonder as to how many (Italians) may have thought that if we had an (Italian) Netaniahu there would not be so many building abuses (a plague in Italy).

While Israel will continue to do business with Italy and with other democratic Countries, the UN will issue a lamentation – it has already done so – and the European Union will issue their concern. In the end, the Palestinians will grow more desperate and understandably hateful of an entity that, for more than 70 years, humiliates them, stops them, injures them, kills them, expels them, and is even called democratic.

We saw the soldiers of the occupying army taking selfies and videos as they blew up the buildings, laughing and complimenting themselves. The Palestinians saw them too and we can imagine their feelings.

No one calls those soldiers terrorists, but according to Israel, terrorist is he who will rebel, perhaps with a stone or a kitchen knife, to this destruction of lives and rights.

Felicia Langer, the Israeli lawyer who left Israel shortly before she died, wrote, “The day will come when Israel will be forced to change its policy.” Perhaps it was an affirmation of faith, perhaps the desire to see justice triumph. But what we can see is only the multiplication of Israeli power and the contamination – as if it were a bacterium without an antibody– of every aspect of cultural, scientific, agricultural and industrial life everywhere in the world. With all this creating a kind of awe and discomfort that muzzles and prevents criticism. The fear refers to the anathema that condemns to isolation, anti-Semitism!

I wrote this before. Only independent newspapers can run the risk of an anathema without renouncing their function of making the truth known.

Here the truth is clear. Israel knows only abuse, and out of systematic abuse, only two results are possible, either resignation and flight, or resistance by all possible means, however right or wrong they may appear to our eyes as Western observers.

Meanwhile, while we write, the ten-story buildings with apartments adorned with velvet cushions, with curtains often bought in installments, with the tea glasses, the small cups for the ever-hot coffee, the dishes for the maqluba and the mussaqan, the rooms for the children , their games, their books, their clothes… all is now a pile of rubble. This is what the chosen people’s government wanted … except for twenty generous but impotent dissenters.

As for the rabbis of 13th century Paris, according to whom the Talmudic Jesus boiling in eternity in excrement is not the Christian Jesus, here are the thoughts of a Jewish scholar, Israel Shahak, a survivor of a WW2 concentration camp, who settled in Israel after WW2.

“Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity, combined with ignorance about it. This attitude was clearly related to the Christian persecution of Jews, but is largely independent of them.

The deeply negative attitude is based on two main elements. First, on hatred and malicious slanders against Jesus. … The notion of collective and inherited guilt is both wicked and absurd. However, what is at issue here is not the actual fact about the Jesus, but the inaccurate and even slanderous reports in the Talmud and post Talmudic literature – which is what Jews believed until the 19th century and many, especially in Israel, still believe.

According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt for rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources that mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the Talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.

… In addition to the above crimes they accuse him of witchcraft. The very name ‘Jesus’ was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted (let alone taught) even in modern Israeli Jewish schools.”

But even before Christ – we may add – some historians interpret the celebration of Hanukah, for example, as a reminder of the rejection by the Jews of any Greek influence (and therefore Greek thought and values) into their midst – that is the rejection of Reason. It is the same Greek influence that, along with Christianity, molded Western thought and civilization at large – now under attack.

Israel Shahak titled his book, “Jewish History, Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years.” I doubt whether any of the US politicians who voted down the non-binding BDS proposal knows that the book exists.

Though even if they did, gold trumps justice, especially among the rich. For many, a Congressional seat, with all its emoluments, benefits, guaranteed luxurious life and dream-like pension, is well worth the sale of their soul. As Romeo said to the struggling pharmacist who sold him the poison Romeo wanted,

“There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,

Doing more murders in this loathsome world,

Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.”

 

The last western Empire?

The Saker

The last western Empire?

August 01, 2019

[this column was written for the Unz Review]

“Missing the forest for the trees” is an apt metaphor if we take a look at most commentary describing the past twenty years or so. This period has been remarkable in the number of genuinely tectonic changes the international system has undergone. It all began during what I think of as the “Kristallnacht of international law,” 30 August September 1995, when the Empire attacked the Bosnian-Serbs in a direct and total violation of all the most fundamental principles of international law. Then there was 9/11, which gave the Neocons the “right” (or so they claimed) to threaten, attack, bomb, kill, maim, kidnap, assassinate, torture, blackmail and otherwise mistreat any person, group or nation on the planet simply because “we are the indispensable nation” and “you either are with the terrorists or with us“. During these same years, we saw Europe become a third-rate US colony incapable of defending even fundamental European geopolitical interests while the USA became a third-rate colony of Israel equally incapable of defending even fundamental US geopolitical interests. Most interestingly looking back, while the US and the EU were collapsing under the weight of their own mistakes, Russia and China were clearly on the ascend; Russia mostly in military terms (see here and here) and China mostly economically. Most crucially, Russia and China gradually agreed to become symbionts which, I would argue, is even stronger and more meaningful than if these two countries were united by some kind of formal alliance: alliances can be broken (especially when a western nation is involved), but symbiotic relationships usually last forever (well, nothing lasts forever, of course, but when a lifespan is measured in decades, it is the functional equivalent of “forever”, at least in geostrategic analytical terms). The Chinese have now developed an official, special, and unique expression to characterize that relationship with Russia. They speak of a “Strategic, comprehensive partnership of coordination for the new era.”

This is the AngloZionists’ worst nightmare, and their legacy ziomedia goes to great lengths to conceal the fact that Russia and China are, for all practical purposes, strategic allies. They also try hard to convince the Russian people that China is a threat to Russia (using bogus arguments, but never-mind that). It won’t work, while some Russians have fears about China, the Kremlin knows the truth of the matter and will continue to deepen Russia’s symbiotic relationship with China further. Not only that, it now appears that Iran is gradually being let in to this alliance. We have the most official confirmation possible of that fact in words spoken by General Patrushev in Israel after his meeting with US and Israeli officials: “Iran has always been and remains our ally and partner.”

I could go on listing various signs of the collapse of the AngloZionist Empire along with signs that a new, parallel, international world order is in the process of being built before our eyes. I have done that many times in the past, and I will not repeat it all here (those interested can click here and here). I will submit that the AngloZionists have reached a terminal stage of decay in which the question of “if” is replaced by “when.” But even more interesting would be to look at the “what”:

what does the collapse of the AngloZionist Empire really mean?

I rarely see this issue discussed and when it is, it is usually to provide all sorts of reassurances that the Empire will not really collapse, that it is too powerful, too rich and too big to fail and that the current political crises in the USA and Europe will simply result in a reactive transformation of the Empire once the specific problems plaguing it have been addressed. That kind of delusional nonsense is entirely out of touch with reality. And the reality of what is taking place before our eyes is much, much more dramatic and seminal than just fixing a few problems here and there and merrily keep going on.

One of the factors which lures us into a sense of complacency is that we have seen so many other empires in history collapse only to be replaced pretty quickly by some other, that we can’t even imagine that what is taking place right now is a much more dramatic phenomenon: the passage into gradual irrelevance of an entire civilization!

But first, let’s define our terms. For all the self-aggrandizing nonsense taught in western schools, Western civilization does not have its roots in ancient Rome or, even less so, in ancient Greece. The reality is that the Western civilization was born from the Middle-Ages in general and, especially, the 11th century which, not coincidentally, saw the following succession of moves by the Papacy:

These three closely related events are of absolutely crucial importance to the history of the West. The first step the West needed was to free itself from the influence and authority of the rest of the Christian world. Once the ties between Rome and the Christian world were severed, it was only logical for Rome to decree that the Pope now has the most extravagant super-powers no other bishop before him had ever dared contemplate. Finally, this new autonomy and desire for absolute control over our planet resulted in what could be called “the first European imperialist war”: the First Crusade.

To put it succinctly: the 11th century Franks were the real progenitors of modern “Western” Europe and the 11th century marked the first imperialist “foreign war” (to use a modern term). The name of the Empire of the Franks has changed over the centuries, but not its nature, essence, or purpose. Today the true heirs of the Franks are the AngloZionists (for a truly *superb* discussion of the Frankish role in destroying the true, ancient, Christian Roman civilization of the West, see here).

Over the next 900 years or more, many different empires replaced the Frankish Papacy, and most European countries had their “moment of glory” with colonies overseas and some kind of ideology which was, by definition and axiomatically, declared the only good (or even “the only Christian”) one, whereas the rest of the planet was living in uncivilized and generally terrible conditions which could only be mitigated by those who have *always* believed that they, their religion, their culture or their nation had some kind of messianic role in history (call it “manifest destiny” or “White man’s burden” or being a Kulturträger in quest of a richly deserved Lebensraum): the West Europeans.

It looks like most European nations had a try at being an empire and at imperialist wars. Even such modern mini-states like Holland, Portugal or Austria once were feared imperial powers. And each time one European Empire fell, there was always another one to take its place.

But today?

Who do you think could create an empire powerful enough to fill the void resulting from the collapse of the AngloZionist Empire?

The canonical answer is “China.” And I think that this is nonsense.

Empires cannot only trade. Trade alone is simply not enough to remain a viable empire. Empires also need military force, and not just any military force, but the kind of military force which makes resistance futile. The truth is that NO modern country has anywhere near the capabilities needed to replace the USA in the role of World Hegemon: not even uniting the Russian and Chinese militaries would achieve that result since these two countries do not have:

1) a worldwide network of bases (which the USA have, between 700-1000 depending on how you count)

2) a major strategic air-lift and sea-lift power projection capability

3) a network of so-called “allies” (colonial puppets, really) which will assist in any deployment of military force

But even more crucial is this: China and Russia have no desire whatsoever to become an empire again. These two countries have finally understood the eternal truth, which is that empires are like parasites who feed on the body which hosts them. Yes, not only are all empires always and inherently evil, but a good case can be made that the first victims of imperialism are always the nations which “host the empire” so to speak. Oh sure, the Chinese and the Russians want their countries to be truly free, powerful and sovereign, and they understand that this is only possible when you have a military which can deter an attack, but neither China nor Russia have any interests in policing the planet or imposing some regime change on other countries.

All they really want is to be safe from the USA, that’s it.

This new reality is particularly visible in the Middle-East where countries like the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia (this is the so-called “Axis of Kindness”) are currently only capable of deploying a military capable of massacring civilians or destroy the infrastructure of a country, but which cannot be used effectively against the two real regional powers with a modern military: Iran and Turkey.

But the most revealing litmus test was the US attempt to bully Venezuela back into submission. For all the fire and brimstone threats coming out of DC, the entire “Bolton plan(s?)” for Venezuela has/have resulted in a truly embarrassing failure: if the Sole “Hyperpower” on the planet cannot even overpower a tremendously weakened country right in its backyard, a country undergoing a major crisis, then indeed the US military should stick to the invasion of small countries like Monaco, Micronesia or maybe the Vatican (assuming the Swiss guard will not want to take a shot at the armed reps of the “indispensable nation”). The fact is that an increasing number of medium-sized “average” countries are now gradually acquiring the means to resist a US attack.

So if the writing is on the wall for the AngloZionist Empire, and if no country can replace the USA as imperial world hegemon, what does that mean?

It means the following: 1000 years of European imperialism is coming to an end!

This time around, neither Spain nor the UK nor Austria will take the place of the USA and try to become a world hegemon. In fact, there is not a single European nation which has a military even remotely capable of engaging the kind of “colony pacification” operations needed to keep your colonies in a suitable state of despair and terror. The French had their very last hurray in Algeria, the UK in the Falklands, Spain can’t even get Gibraltar back, and Holland has no real navy worth speaking about. As for central European countries, they are too busy brown-nosing the current empire to even think of becoming an empire (well, except Poland, of course, which dreams of some kind of Polish Empire between the Baltic and the Black Sea; let them, they have been dreaming about it for centuries, and they will still dream about it for many centuries to come…).

Now compare European militaries with the kind of armed forces you can find in Latin America or Asia? There is such a knee-jerk assumption of superiority in most Anglos that they completely fail to realize that medium and even small-sized countries can develop militaries sufficient enough to make an outright US invasion impossible or, at least, any occupation prohibitively expensive in terms of human lives and money (see herehere and here). This new reality also makes the typical US missile/airstrike campaign pretty useless: they will destroy a lot of buildings and bridges, they will turn the local TV stations (“propaganda outlets” in imperial terminology) into giant piles of smoking rubble and dead bodies, and they kill plenty of innocents, but that won’t result in any kind of regime change. The striking fact is that if we accept that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means, then we also have to admit, that under that definition, the US armed forces are totally useless since they cannot help the USA achieve any meaningful political goals.

The truth is that in military and economic terms, the “West” has already lost. The fact that those who understand don’t talk, and that those who talk about this (denying it, of course) have no understanding of what is taking place, makes no difference at all.

In theory, we could imagine that some kind of strong leader would come to power in the USA (the other western countries are utterly irrelevant), crush the Neocons like Putin crushed them in Russia, and prevent the brutal and sudden collapse of the Empire, but that ain’t gonna happen. If there is one thing which the past couple of decades have proven beyond reasonable doubt is that the imperial system is entirely unable to reform itself in spite of people like Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, Ross Perrot, Ron Paul, Mike Gravel or even Obama and Trump – all men who promised meaningful change and who were successfully prevented by the system of achieving anything meaningful. Thus the system is still 100% effective, at least inside the USA: it took the Neocons less than 30 days to crush Trump and all his promises of change, and now it even got Tulsi Gabbard to bow down and cave in to Neocons’ absolutely obligatory political orthodoxy and myths.

So what is likely to happen next?

Simply put, Asia will replace the Western World. But – crucially – this time around no empire will come to take the place of the AngloZionist one. Instead, a loose and informal coalition of mostly Asian countries will offer an alternative economic and civilizational model, which will be immensely attractive to the rest of the planet. As for the Empire, it will very effectively disband itself and slowly fade into irrelevance. Both US Americans and Europeans will, for the very first time in their history, have to behave like civilized people, which means that their traditional “model of development” (ransacking the entire planet and robbing everybody blind) will have to be replaced by one in which these US Americans and Europeans will have to work like everybody else to accumulate riches. This notion will absolutely horrify the current imperial ruling elites, but I wager that it will be welcomed by the majority of the people, especially when this “new” (for them) model will yield more peace and prosperity than the previous one!

Indeed, if the Neocons don’t blow up the entire planet in a nuclear holocaust, the USA and Europe will survive, but only after a painful transition period which could last for a decade or more. One of the factors which will immensely complicate the transition from Empire to “regular” country will be the profound and deep influence 1000 years of imperialism have had on the western cultures, especially in the completely megalomaniac United States (Professor John Marciano’s “Empire as a way of life” lecture series addresses this topic superbly – I highly recommend them!): One thousand years of brainwashing are not so easily overcome, especially on the subconscious (assumptions) level.

Finally, the current rather nasty reaction to the multi-culturalism imposed by the western ruling elites is no less pathological than this corrosive multi-culturalism in the first place. I am referring to the new theories “revisiting” WWII and finding inspiration in all things Third Reich, very much including a revival of racist/racialist theories. This is especially ridiculous (and offensive) when coming from people who try to impersonate Christians but who instead of prayers on their lips just spew 1488-like nonsense. These folks all represent precisely the kind of “opposition” the Neocons love to deal with and which they always (and I really mean *always*) end up defeating. This (pretend) opposition (useful idiots, really) will remain strong as long as it remains well funded (which it currently is). But as soon as the current megalomania (“We are the White Race! We built Athens and Rome! We are Evropa!!!”) ends with an inevitable faceplant, folks will eventually return to sanity and realize that no external scapegoat is responsible for the current state of the West. The sad truth is that the West did all this to itself (mainly due to arrogance and pride!), and the current waves of immigrants are nothing more than a 1000 years of really bad karma returning to where it came from initially. I don’t mean to suggest that folks in the West are all individually responsible for what is happening now. But I do say that all the folks in the West now live with the consequences of 1000 years of unrestrained imperialism. It will be hard, very hard, to change ways, but since that is also the only viable option, it will happen, sooner or later.

But still – there is hope. IF the Neocons don’t blow up the planet, and IF mankind is given enough time to study its history and understand where it took the wrong turn, then maybe, just maybe, there is hope.

I think that we can all find solace in the fact that no matter how ugly, stupid and evil the AngloZionist Empire is, no other empire will ever come to replace it.

In other words, should we survive the current empire (which is by no means certain!) then at least we can look forward to a planet with no empires left, only sovereign countries.

I submit that this is a future worth struggling for.

The Saker

فعلاً لم يحدث هذا منذ ألف عام

 

يوليو 25, 2019

ناصر قنديل

– في كلام سابق للأمين العام لحزب الله السيد حسن نصرالله إشارة اعتبرها مرشد الجمهورية الإسلامية في إيران الإمام علي الخامنئي بصيص أمل عن اقتراب موعد تحرير القدس من الاحتلال، وفقاً لما وصفه نصرالله بالاستدلال بالمنطق واقع المعادلات والتوازنات، رابطاً أمله الشخصي بالصلاة في القدس بمعادلة الحياة والموت التي لا يمكن التحكم بها، رغم وقوع توقعاته لتحرير القدس ضمن المدى المنطقي لما يمكنه من أن يكون شاهداً على التحرير، وفي كلام لاحق لمستشار الإمام الخامنئي الدكتور علي ولايتي، المعروف بمكانته في الملفات الاستراتيجية في فريق الإمام الخامنئي، إشارة إلى أن إسقاط الطائرة الأميركية الإلكترونية العملاقة واحتجاز ناقلة النفط البريطانية، أحداث تمثل منعطفاً في تاريخ العالم الإسلامي.

– بالعودة إلى التاريخ تبدو منطقة الساحل الشرقي للبحر المتوسط وعمقها الآسيوي، كميدان جغرافي للمواجهات التاريخية بين الغرب والشرق، مسرحاً لتسجيل انتصارات الغرب وهيمنته واستعراضاته العسكرية، وفرض مصالحه الاقتصادية منذ خمسة قرون على الأقل عندما بدأت الإمبراطورية العثمانية تقدّم التنازلات للدول الأوروبية في جنوب السلطنة، لضمان مصالحها في بلدان الشمال، وصولاً لتفكك السلطنة مع الحرب العالمية الأولى وما تبعها من ترسيخ للهيمنة الغربية، لكن حتى مراحل صعود السلطنة العثمانية لم تشهد ردعاً للصولات والجولات الغربية نحو شرق المتوسط، فخلالها نشأ ما عُرف بعهد القناصل، وتنامي الإرساليات، ونشوء النسخ البدائية للوكالات التجارية.

– آخر ما يكتبه التاريخ عن يد الشرق العليا في شرق المتوسط كان في تمكّن شعوب المنطقة من مواجهة حملات الفرنجة التي سُمّيت بالحروب الصليبية واتخذت الدين شعاراً لها لحشد المشاركة في التعبئة لقواتها تحت شعار الذهاب إلى القدس، بينما سحقت في طريقها إلى فلسطين كل الكنائس الشرقية وقتلت الآلاف من قساوستها ورهبانها، ودمّرت ممتلكاتها، وقتلت عشرات الآلاف من رعاياها، واللافت أن حروب الفرنجة نجحت يومها خلال الفترة الممتدة من نهاية القرن الحادي عشر إلى نهاية القرن الثاني عشر ببناء مستوطنات في فلسطين ونجحت بوضع يدها على القدس، بصورة لا تختلف كثيراً عن واقع كيان الاحتلال اليوم، وبقيت الأساطيل الغربية ومحاولات تأمين طريق بري بحملات مستديمة، هي مصدر الحماية الذي يشكل مصدر قوة هذا الكيان الاستيطاني الناشئ يومها.

– مع تحرير القدس في نهاية القرن الثاني عشر، وجعلها متاحة لكل المؤمنين لممارسة عباداتهم وشعائرهم الدينية، انتهت عملياً الحروب الكبرى وبقيت مناوشات استمرت تحت مسمّى حملات صليبية، لكنها لم تقدر أن تغير الواقع الجديد، حتى نشوء كيان الاحتلال منتصف القرن العشرين، لكن اللافت بالقياس التاريخي أنه منذ نشأة هذا الكيان القائم على اغتصاب فلسطين، للمرة الأولى يبدو محاصراً بصواريخ قوى المقاومة ومقاتليها من كل الجهات عاجزاً عن خوض حرب، وتبدو الأساطيل البحرية والجوية والبرية لنجدته عاجزة عن تشكيل توازن ردع في المنطقة. وهذا هو مغزى ما تمثله حوادث إسقاط الطائرة الأميركية واحتجاز الناقلة البريطانية.

– منذ ألف عام لم يحدث مثيل لذلك، رغم ما تلقته الأساطيل الغازية لنابليون بونابرت على سواحل مصر أو أسوار عكا، ورغم حروب المواجهة التي خاضها جمال عبد الناصر في مواجهة العدوان الثلاثي، فقد بقي في كل حالة منها مجال للإعداد لجولة مقبلة، حيث كان احتياط الغرب القوي ينتقل من ضفة إلى ضفة، كما هو حال الأفول الفرنسي لحساب بريطانيا والأفول البريطاني لحساب أميركا. وهذا مغزى القول اليوم إنه منعطف تاريخي، وبصيص أمل.

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Franklin Lamb: Introducing the Syria Resistance (PFLI) and it’s Leader

ED NOTE: Thanks to our friend Dr. Franklin Lamb for introducing the Syrian resistance and its Leader Ali Kayali fighting in all fronts, shoulder to shoulder with the Syrian Arab Army,  the takfirs sponsored by the zionists world order and its tools Saudia, Qatar, Turkey and the So-called March 14 movement. The resistance will continue until full liberation of Syrian Land, including south Syria (Palestine) and every inch of Syrian Land occupied by Turkey.
I added some pictures and the videos

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North of Latakia, Syria Posted on 
https://i0.wp.com/www.iskenderun.org/Fotogaleri/Sahil/iskenderun_sahil013.jpg
Every school kid here in Syria learns at an early age about the various colonial land grabs that have lopped off key parts of their ancient country, and they receive instruction about their national duty to recover this sacred territory. The concept applies equally to still-occupied Palestine, or at least it did before the 2011 uprising got started, albeit since then a degree of resentment has arisen over participation by some Palestinians with rebel groups seeking to topple the Syrian government.
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Be that as it may, one such land grab historically remembered, and which is currently galvanizing resistance on behalf of Syria, is that of Iskenderun, north of Latakia, in a disputed Syria-Turkish border area. As Turkish, Saudi, and Qatari-sponsored jihadists continue to enter the country, well worth remembering is it that Iskenderun is rich in natural resources and that for thousands of years it was part of Syria. But that status changed more than half a century ago when France cut it off from Syria and grafted it onto Turkey—and now some pro-government militias are fighting to get it back.
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The name derives from Alexander the Great, who around 333 BC encamped in the area and ordered a city be built, although the exact site of the historic city is subject to dispute. At any rate, the strategic importance of Iskenderun comes from its geographical relation to Syrian Gates, the easiest approach to the open ground of Hatay Province and Aleppo, and the dispute over it has been heating up recently, partly as a result of the current crisis.
It all started on July 5, 1938, when Turkish forces under Colonel Sukril Kanath launched an aggression, with French approval, and ethnically cleansed the local Armenian Christian and Allawi populations. The Turkish invasion was enabled by the French, partners with Britain in Sykes-Picot, who had remained as illegal occupiers of Syria, a holdover from the League of Nations mandate. The French were complicit in a rigged referendum, essentially ceding to Turkey this Syrian territory, which by then was referred to as the Republic of Hatay. It was a land grab. Pure and simple. And it was part of a secret deal to secure Turkey’s help with the fast approaching war with Germany. Paris and Ankara struck a deal: Turkey, while not joining the allies against Germany, declared neutrality and essentially sat out World War II.

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Commander Ali Kayali, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Iskenderun
Syria, rather than being expansionist, as it is sometimes accused of by Turkey and the Zionist regime, has actually been losing territory, not gaining it. “We lost northern Palestine in 1918, Lebanon in 1920, and the Iskenderun area through French duplicity,” said a retired diplomat here. “Surely Lebanon must also be returned to Syria. It was never a real country and it never will be as far as I am concerned. It is part of Syria!”Indeed, as Robert Fisk points out, after the First World War, most Lebanese wished their land to remain part of Syria (see the results of the King-Crane Commission) rather than live in a separate “nation” under French domination. As we parted, the gentleman shook my hand and declared: “Of course Iskendurun is part of Syria. No honest person can deny this!”
Enter one remarkable Syrian nationalist, Ali Kayali, aka “Abu Zaki”. So how did a polite gentleman from this region of Turkish-occupied Syria end up leading one of the most effective resistance militias in the northern theater in the current Syrian crisis? Basically he did it the same way as untold numbers of Palestinians supporting young Syrian men during the early 1980’s.
Ali went to Beirut to resist the 1982 Zionist aggression. There he was baptized by fire, so to speak, carrying the banner of his new group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Iskenderun (PFLI) under the tutelage of Dr. George Habash and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Ali fought in a number of south Lebanon fronts, and also inside West Beirut, but then after the PLO withdrawal (on 8/20/82), he returned to Syria, to Tartous, joining the rebellion against PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Near Bedwari camp he fought, as part of the Fatah Intifada uprising, this following the PLO split along -pro-Arafat and pro-Hafez Assad cleavages.

Later, Ali undertook study on his own in Tartous (Tripoli, Syria), and at one point escaped from prison in Turkey where he had been jailed for demonstrating against the fascist regime in Ankara. Returning to Syria, he joined Syrian Army battles against the Bilal Shaaban-led Al Tawhid Islamic (Muslim Brotherhood ), following which he and the PFLI moved to the area of Halba in Akkar, Lebanon, and organized a resistance training camp. Eventually, however, he returned to Syria to continue the fight to liberate the Syrian territory of Iskenderun, and while supported by Syrian citizens, the Kayali-led group was not formally part of the Syrian security/resistance apparatus.

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Commander Ali discussing PFLI positions
Speaking with non-government analysts in Latkia, this observer was repeatedly told that the PFLI has the reputation of understanding the geography and politics of the Syrian coast area where its fighters are currently active, including Aleppo, Banias, between Tartous and the countryside around Latakia, as well as the Idlib, Homs and Damascus areas.

As PFLI fighters and officials put it, “Syria will not kneel to the Zionist-Arab project to destroy the unity and independence of the Syrian Arab Republic.” According to one PFLI spokesperson, the group “supports and stands in the same trench, hand in hand with the state, confronting two foreign projects—the first being to destroy the achievements of the Syrian people and Syria’s social fabric and multi-cultural heritage, and the second being to infiltrate foreign intruders.”

One place the PFLI is currently fighting is the strategic rebel bastion of Yabrud, in the Qalamoun Mountains, north of Damascus, near the Lebanese border. On 3/3/14, during a meeting with this observer and some of his associates, Ali Kyali received a phone call relaying information that Sahel village, about four miles from Yabrud, had come under control of Syrian and pro-Syrian forces, including the PFLI. Remarkably open with battlefield details, Ali explained that pro-Syria forces do not want to occupy Yabrud, but rather the strategy is to control the villages surrounding it in order to trap al Nursa and other rebel militia inside. Asked about the trapped local population and reminded of the fate of the inner city populations of Aleppo, Homs and a dozen other locations, Ali shrugged and turned up his palms.

Today (3/7/14) the PFLI is fighting to try to cut off the road linking Yabrud to Arsal in eastern Lebanon, whose majority population supports the Syrian revolt. PFIL fighters were involved last week with the fall of Al-Sahl, a town a little over a mile south of Yabrud, and now are fighting in and around Yaboud, preparing for the anticipated final assault. According to Ali’s personal bodyguards, they are facing Al-Qaida’s Syria affiliate, al-Nusra Front. Some of PFLI’s 3000 troops are also fighting this week in Douma, Jobar, Aleppo, the countryside around Lattakia, and Deralcia near Nubek on the main Damascus-Homs highway. They also played a key role earlier in Baniyas, in the battle between Tartous and Latakia. One YouTube clip being given to visitors to the PFLI HQ in Latakia shows the group’s participation, including women, in a recent important battle against the ISIS:

The PFLI organization receives a variety of random and sporadic support from the local community, according to Mr. Kayali and his staff, but they, like most militia, need money and weapons and regular supplies of food. Also needed are places for the fighters to sleep, as well as more uniforms to accommodate a sharp influx of applicants seeking to join their ranks. Additionally there is the matter of funding death benefit payments for the families of PFLI men and women killed during resistance.

PFLI fighters are not paid salaries, which sets them apart financially from many Gulf-backed and Western-trained militia, who can garner monthly salaries from $500-$1,000. By contrast, pro-government popular committees, numbering approximately 5,000, and National Defense units, whose fighters number around 25,000, receive approximately 20,000 Syrian Pounds, or $126 a month. Footing much of this bill are Syrian businessmen such as Rami Mahlouf, cousin of President Bashar Assad. Regular Syrian army recruits get only 3000 Syrian pounds, or about $20 monthly, but they also receive food and lodging and health and travel benefits. Syrian army reservists are said to receive approximately $10.50 per month.

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“Joan of Arc” with part of her resistance family
For Ali Kayali, the PFLI is also a family matter. His wife and daughter and two sons are deeply connected with its resistance goals. His sons are fighters, as are his wife and daughter when called upon, though in-between time they do other resistance projects. Nicked-named “Joan of Arc,” his 22-year-old daughter attends medical school, but reportedly is also a ferocious fighter and adept battlefield tactician, with dramatic results in a number of battles against rebels over the past nearly two years. She is a strong, no-nonsense feminist and told me she loves to shock takfiris, who sometimes appear amazed to see her and her female unit chasing them up the side of some mountain.
It is said that an army (or a militia, for that matter) travels on its stomach. This observer was treated to an impromptu roadside lunch with half a dozen PFLI fighters last week. Their favorite cook, Mahmoud, a small guy who always seems to wear the same blue shirt, invited us. Within minutes, Mahmoud gathered some twigs and small chunks of wood, lit a small fire, covered it with a metal grate, grabbed a bag of flour, mixed in water, kneaded it a bit, and shaped and roasted some small, irregular round loaves. On these he sprinkled, from another plastic bag, some handfuls of spices. His fast and hot food was delicious, constituting Mhamra manouche (roasted pita bread with spicy red pepper sauce), Zaatar  manouche (oregano, thyme, & sesame seeds), and Jibneh (cheese) manouche.
Captagon Jihad?
Sitting in the lobby of a run-down, less-than-one-star, dockside hotel opposite the Mediterranean, a lodging establishment occasionally used as quarters by various militia, this observer and his companion spoke leisurely one early morning with one of Ali Kyali’s sons and a companion. When not fighting jihadists (in “Have AK-47, Will Travel”-mode), they are among his father’s bodyguards. I have for a while been interested in claims by Western governments that they are supplying “humanitarian non-lethal aid” to rebel groups, including night goggles, telecommunication equipment, and GPS devices. This observer views all such equipment as misnamed and indeed lethal inasmuch as they facilitate one side killing the other via night snipers or through expedition of troop movements. I was a bit surprised to learn what PFLI fighters thought of this kind of equipment being given to their adversaries and labeled ‘humanitarian aid.’
“Not having night goggles, except for some we take off the enemy, is not much of a problem for us because we can sense where al Nusra fighters are, and they tend not to fight at night,” Ali’s son told me.
I asked why the reluctance to fight at night, thinking maybe it had something to do with a religious edict of some sort, but once more I was mistaken.
“No it’s not that, it’s because they are too paranoid and exhausted, from taking captagon and even stronger drugs, to fight at night.”
According the guys I was sitting with, some with more than two years fighting experience with the PFLI, many, if not most, of the Gulf-sponsored jihadists are given bags of pills to enhance their battlefield courage. And it works to a degree. At dawn each day, jihadists take drugs, including large doses of captagon and other widely available drugs. There also are some particularly potent drugs, known locally as “baltcon,” “afoun,” and ”zolm,” as well as opium, heroin, cocaine, and hashish. The main drug routes into the Syrian battle zones, I was advised, run from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Lebanon, with lesser amounts coming via Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. Lebanon’s Bekaa valley apparently produces large amounts of captagon pills for shipment to the Gulf, and now to Syria. Jihadists high on drugs apparently feel invincible, and hostile, and do not fear death. Many are indeed ferocious and fearless fighters during the day, as many media sources have reported. But by nightfall, when the drug wears off, the fighters become exhausted and sometimes are found asleep on the very scene of battle they were fighting from.

“Many of the ‘Gulfies’ are in fact heavily addicted to strong heroin-like drugs. They crave them, and sometimes they even fight with their fellow militiamen to get their ‘fixes.’ We are told by some we capture that sometimes, when one of their comrades is killed, the fallen fighter’s ‘friends’ will descend on his body, not particularly to pray over it, but to rummage his pockets for his drugs.”

In point of fact, in 2011 alone, Lebanese authorities confiscated three amphetamine production labs, in addition to two Captagon-producing labs, which they claim were responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of the pills to the Gulf. The seizure of trucks with captagon in their chassis in Lebanon, and at Beirut airport, shows a growing demand for these products in the Syrian militia market. The UN recently reported that the Middle and Near East are experiencing the majority of drug busts globally.
Al Nusra Front and ISIS—being some of the more extreme “imported jihadists,” as some here call them—claim to be better fighters than Hezbollah, whose units set the fighting skill bar fairly high these days. Some of them claim they have not really started their battle to defeat Hezbollah on its own territory, but will do so when they are ready. But as one PFLI fighter explained, and some of his buddies nodded agreement, only when high on drugs do Qatari/Saudi jihadists exhibit bravery and bravado. Only then do they pose a serious threat, because they ignore normal defensive fighting tactics.
“We know many of these guys quite well. Lots of them were never even religious. There are many who are drug addicts, who get high and lose their fear of dying, so they are dangerous to confront, and they often use strange tactics.”
According to another PFLI source, the “imported Jihadists” die in high numbers because they ignore the battlefield realities. Their average number of dead in any given firefight over the past two years is estimated to be approximately five times the number of Hezbollah casualties, three times the number of PFLI fighters, and twice the number of casualties than the regular Syrian army.
As the Syrian crisis enters its fourth year, with more jihadists arriving and more militia being formed across the political and religious spectrum, the US intelligence community and congressional sources are now predicting the war will continue for another decade or more. It’s anyone’s guess what the post-Syrian crisis period will bring to this region given the rise of ethno-nationalism along with demands for the return of Sykes-Picot land grabs. There are also growing signs of a cataclysmic intifada in Palestine. When you add to all that US intelligence predictions of the overthrow of two, and possibly three, Gulf monarchies, another Hezbollah-Zionist war, plus the deterioration of the social and religious fabric across the region, the future looks bleak indeed.
Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

The saker

The European Saker - in his own words:First, a short introductory sitrep:  The least one could say is that over the past 2 days the events in the Ukraine moved fast, very, very fast. While I had intended to take 2 days off, I still kept an eye on the most recent development and jotted them down on my computer’s note pad. Here is what I wrote down (sorry for the shorthand):

  • Lukin did not sign
  • S&P downgrades Ukraine from CCC+ to CCC
  • Pogroms in Kiev
  • Attacks on Russian nationals
  • Burned buses (incl. Belarussian)
  • Yanuk did not attend Kharkov congress
  • Yanuk only cares about his security
  • Yanuk’s mansion was looted
  • Kharkov congress 3000 delegates
  • Phone threats to all political opponents
  • Black Sea Fleet on high alert
  • In the East local authorities take full control
  • Two Yanuk minister arrested while trying to flee
  • NOBODY WANTS A SPLIT UKRAINE NOT EVEN RUSSIA
  • BUT ONLY YULIA CAN HOLD IT TOGETHER
  • RADA discusses limiting Russian TV channels
  • Region turncoats bought over and threatened
  • Not referendum but force of arms will decide
  • Hunger is a real risk
  • 7’000’000 Russians in the Ukraine officially
  • 50% of Ukrainians speak Russian
  • 15’000 volunteers mobilized in Crimea
  • Also on Sunday, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice warned Russia it would be a “grave mistake” to intervene militarily
  • Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov 2005 – Head of Ukraine Security Service (SBU)
  • New regime says Ukraine needs 35 billion dollars
  • Hunger now a real risk
  • Russia recalls ambassador
  • Russian language basically banned
  • Appointed Mayor of Sevastopol replaced by Alexei Chalyi, a Russian citizen, directly elected by the local people.
  • EU policians claim they can offer 20 billion dollar to the Ukraine. How they will explain that to Greece is unclear.

Wow!  Clearly, things have gone far beyond the terms of the capitulation of Yanukovich to the insurgency so “brilliantly” mediated by the EU bureaucrats.  Truly, a qualitative change in the terms of the conflict has happened and the country is now in a de-facto situation of civil war.  But first, in order to make sense of what is taking place, we need to take a look far back into the distant past, as far back as the 13th century.

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Ukrainian nationalism – its roots and nature
PART ONE: a preliminary excursion in ancient history
Innocent III

1204 – The Eastern Crusade of Pope Innocent III:  Most people mistakenly believe that the Crusades only happened in the Middle-East and that they were only directed at Islam.  This is false.  In fact, while the official excuse for western imperialism at that time was to free the city of Jerusalem from the “Muslim infidels” the crusades also were aimed at either exterminating or converting the “Greek schismatics” i.e. the Orthodox Christians.  The most notorious episode of this anti-Orthodox crusade is the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, during the 4th Crusade, in which the city was subjected to three days of absolutely grotesque pillaging, looting and massacres by the western “Christians” who even looted and burned down Orthodox churches, monasteries and convents, raped nuns on church altars and even placed a prostitute on the Patriarchal throne.  This outpouring of genocidal hatred was hardly a fluke, but it was one of the earliest manifestation of something which would become a central feature of the mindset and ideology of the Latin Church. There is, however, another no less important episode in the history of the Latin hatred for the Orthodox Church which is far less known.

Gregory IX

1242 – The Northern Crusades of Pope Gregory IX:  Unlike his predecessor who directed his soldiers towards the Holy Land, Pope Gregory IX had a very different idea: he wanted to convert the “pagans” of the North and East of Europe to the “true faith”.  In his mind, Orthodox Russia was part of these “pagan lands” and Orthodox Christians were pagans too.  His order to the Teutonic Knights (the spiritual successors of the Franks who had pillaged and destroyed Rome) was to either convert or kill all the pagans they would meet (this genocidal order was very similar to the one given by Ante Pavelic to his own forces against the Serbs during WWII: convert, kill or expel).  In most history books Pope Gregory IX has earned himself a name by instituting the Papal Inquisition (which has never been abolished, by the way), so it is of no surprise that this gentleman was in no mood to show any mercy to the “Greek schismatics”.  This time, however, the Pope’s hordes were met by a formidable defender: Prince Alexander Nevsky. Saint Alexander Nevsky’s “civilizational choice”

Saint Alexander Nevsky

Even before dealing with the Pope’s Crusaders Alexander Nevsky had already had to repel an earlier invasion of Russia by the West – the attempt to invade norther Russia by the Swedish Kingdom – which he defeated 1240 at the famousbattle of the Neva.  No less important, however, is the fact that Alexander Nevsky was unable to defeat Mongol invasion from the East and so he was placed between what can only be called a civilizational choice: he understood that Russia could not fight the Papacy and the Mongols at the same time, so the choice was simple: to submit to one and to resist the other. But which one should he chose to submit Russia to? Prince Alexander (who would later be glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church) was truly a deeply pious man who had a deep understanding of the Holy Scripture and who remembered the words of Christ when asked whether Jews should pay taxes to the Romans: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21) and “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28).  Alexander, who was very well informed of the policies of his enemies knew that the sole goal of the Mongols was to extract taxes from the Russians, but that they had no desire to convert anybody or to persecute the Church.  Quite to the contrary, the putatively “savage” Mongols respected the Church and its clergy and they never persecuted it.  In contrast, the Crusaders were given the specific order to convert or murder all the Orthodox Christians they would encounter as the Latins had done many times before, and as they would do many times later.  Thus Prince Alexander Nevsky chose to submit to the Mongol Khan and to fight the Crusaders whom he defeated at the famous Battle of the Ice in 1242. Western Russia occupied, fall of the 2nd Rome, rise of Moscow

Occupied Ukraine in the 14th c.

Having been defeated by Russia twice, western leaders temporarily renounced their invasion plans, but the Russian victory clearly did not endear the Russian people or culture to the western elites.  Predictably the next wave of invasions from the West began in the early 14th century and lasted until 1385 when the Union of Krewo sealed the union of Poland and Lithuania.  At that moment in time all of what would be called later “the Ukraine” was fully conquered by the Latins. In 1453, the Fall of Rome in the East, in Constantinople, marked the end of the “2nd Rome” and the end of the Roman civilization which had survived the Fall of Rome in by a full one thousand years (the western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD; the eastern Roman Empire fell in 1453). The Latins did attempt to submit the Orthodox world by a careful mix of threats and promises to assist Constantinople against the Ottomans at the so-called False Union of Florance, but they had failed, and Constantinople eventually fell to armies of Mehmet the Conqueror.  Thus, Moscow became the “Third Rome”, the last free Orthodox Christian Kingdom, the civilizational heir to the Roman civilization.  Moscow would now become the focal point of the Papist hatred for Orthodox Christianity.  The next western strike would come in 1595 and it would be a truly devastating one.

Clement VIII

1595 – Pope Clement VIII conceives the Ukraine By the end of the 16th century, most of western Russia had been occupied by the Latins for two hundred years (14th-16th), as long as the Mongol Yoke on eastern Russia (13th-15th century).  Predictably the situation of the Orthodox Christian peasants under the Latin occupation was nothing short of terrible.  For all practical purposes, it was enslaved, as Israel Shahak explains in his seminal book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: Due to many causes, medieval Poland lagged in its development behind countries like England and France; a strong feudal-type monarchy – yet without any parliamentary institutions – was formed there only in the 14th century, especially under Casimir the Great (1333-70). Immediately after his death, changes of dynasty and other factors led to a very rapid development of the power of the noble magnates, then also of the petty nobility, so that by 1572 the process of reduction of the king to a figure head and exclusion of all other non-noble estates from political power was virtually complete. (…) This process was accompanied by a debasement in the position of the Polish peasants (who had been free in the early Middle Ages) to the point of utter serfdom, hardly distinguishable from outright slavery and certainly the worst in Europe. The desire of noblemen in neighboring countries to enjoy the power of the Polish pan over his peasants (including the power of life and death without any right of appeal) was instrumental in the territorial expansion of Poland. The situation in the ‘eastern’ lands of Poland (Byelorussia and the Ukraine) – colonized and settled by newly enserfed peasants – was worst of all. Indeed, the local elites had been more then happy to apostatize and sell out to the Polish occupier to enjoy the privileges of slave-owning (before that Russia had never known serfdom!) while the enslaved peasants stubbornly held on to their faith (interestingly, this is also the period of history when Ukrainian Judeophobia was born – read Shahak for details).  Something needed to be done to find a “solution” to this “problem” and, sure enough, a Pope (Clement VIII) found it: the forcible conversion of the local Orthodox Christians to the Latin church: the so-called Union of Brest.  Thus began a long period of vicious persecution of the Orthodox peasantry by the combined efforts of the Polish nobility, their Jewish overseers and, especially, the Jesuits who justified any atrocity under the slogan “ad majorem Dei gloriam” (to the greater Glory of God).  One man, in particular, excelled in the persecution of Orthodox Christians: Josphat Kuntsevich (whose biography you can read about in this text: The Vatican and Russia).  Kuntsevich – who was eventually lynched by a mob of peasants – was buried in the Saint Peter basilica in Rome near, I kid you not, the relics of Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint John Chrysostom (!).  The Latins still refer to this mass murderer as “martyr for Christ” (see here for a typical Papist hagiography of Kuntsevich) and he is still greatly respected and admired amongst modern Ukrainian nationalists.  And I can see why – it is during these years of occupation and persecution that modern “Ukraine” was created, maybe not yet as a territory, but definitely as a cultural entity. The ethnogenesis of the “Ukrainian nation” Nations, like individuals, are born, live and die.  In fact, as Shlomo Sands so brilliantly demonstrated in his bookThe Invention of the Jewish People, nations are really invented, created.  In fact, the 20th century has shown us many nations invented ex-nihilo, out of nothing (in order to avoid offending somebody or getting sidetracked, I shall not give examples, but God knows there are many).  A “nation” does not need to have deep historical and cultural roots, it does not need to have a legitimate historiography, in fact, all it takes to “create a nation” is a certain amount of people identifying themselves as a community – all the rest can be created/invented later.  Thus the argument of some Russians that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian nation is fundamentally mistaken: if there are enough people identifying themselves as “Ukrainian” then a distinct “Ukrainian nation” exists.  It does not matter at all that there is no trace of that nation in history or that its founding myths are ridiculous as long as a distinct common is shared by its members.  And from that point of view, the existence of a Ukrainian nation fundamentally different from the Russian one is an undeniable reality.  And that is the immense achievement of the Latin Church – it undeniably succeeded in its desire to cut-off the western Russians from their historical roots and to create a new nation: the Ukrainians. As an aside, but an important one I think, I would note that the Mongols played a similarly crucial role in the creation of the modern Russian nation.  After all, what are the “founding blocks” of the Russian culture.  The culture of the Slavs before the Christianization of Russia in the 10th century?  Yes, but minimally.  The continuation of the Roman civilization after the Fall of the 2nd Rome?  Yes, to some degree, but not crucially.  The adoption of the Christian faith after the 10 century? Yes, definitely.  But the Russian *state* which grew out of the rather small Grand Duchy of Moscow was definitely shaped by the Mongol culture and statecraft, not Byzantium or ancient Rus.  It would not be incorrect to say that ancient Kievan Rus eventually gave birth to two distinct nations: a Ukrainian one fathered by the Papist occupation and a Russian one, fathered by the Mongol occupation. In that sense the russophobic statement of the Marquis de Custine “Grattez le Russe, et vous verrez un Tartare” (scratch the Russian and you will find a Mongol beneath) is correct.  Equally, however, I would argue that one could say that “scratch the Ukrainian, and you will find the Papist beneath”. At this point I do not want to continue outlining the history of the Ukraine because I think I have made my point clear: the Ukrainian nation is the product of the thousand year old hatred of Orthodox Christianity by the Papacy.  Just as modern rabbinical Judaism is really nothing more than an anti-Christianity, the modern Ukrainian national identity is basically centered on a rabid, absolutely irrational and paranoid hated and fear of Russia.  That is not to say that all the people which live in the Ukraine partake in that hysterical russophobia, not at all, but the nationalist hard-core definitely does.  And this point is so crucial that I felt that I had to make this long digression into ancient history to explain it. I have to add one more thing: the Latin Church has undergone tremendous changes in the 20th century and even its Jesuits have long departed from the traditions and ideas of their predecessors of the Counter-Reformation.  Though hatred of the Orthodox Christians and Russian still exists in some Latin circles, it has mostly been replaced by a desire to “incorporate” or swallow the Orthodox Church into the Papacy by means of the so-called “Ecumenical dialog”.  As for the rank and file Roman Catholic faithful – they simply have no idea at all about this history which, of course, is never taught to them The Papacy’s goal end is still the same – submission to the Pope.  But the methods and emotions have changed: it used to be hatred and terror, now its a “dialog of love”.  Amongst the Ukrainian nationalists and Uniats, however, the mindset practically has not changed.  From the likes of Stepan Bandera to his modern successor, Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector, the Ukrainian nationalists have kept the murderous hatred of Josphat Kuntsevich, hence some of the crazy statements these folks have made. We now need to make a 3 centuries long jump in time and look at the roots of Fascism and National-Socialism in the early 20th century.  We have to do this jump not because these centuries were not important for the Ukraine – they very much were – but for the sake of space and time.  The key feature of the time period we will skip is basically the rise on power of Russia, which became an Empire under Peter I and the corresponding weakening of the Polish and Lithuanian states which ended up completely occupied by Russia on several occasion. PART TWO: Fascism, National Socialism and their different roots We are typically taught that WWII war saw the victory of the “Allied Powers” against the “Axis powers“.   While not incorrect, these categories are often confusing.  For example, according to Wikipedia, France and Yugoslavia were part of the Allied Powers.  That, of course, depends on which regime one considers as legitimate, the one of Petain or de Gaulle or the one of Pavelic, Tito or Mikhailovich?  Also – does it really make sense to lump the Soviet Union with the British Empire and the USA?  What about Petain, Hitler and Hirohito?  Well, they were allies, no doubt here, but they were very different entities and their alliance was mostly one against common enemies rather than the result of real kinship.  This is particularly true of Hitler’s allies in Europe: Mussolini, of course, but also Franco, Petain or Pavlic.  Indeed, while both Hitler and Mussolini were atheist (and even rabid anti-clericalist), Franco, Petain and Pavelic were all devout Roman-Catholics.  And if the Papacy never felt comfortable with the secularist, nationalist and socialist ideas of Hitler or Mussolini, it gave its full support to Franco, Pavelic and Petain.  Hitler and Mussolini were primarily the expression of the views and interests of the petit bourgeois and worker classes, while Franco, Pavelic and Petain were very much an expression of the interests of the financial elites and noblity.  In France, in particular, the Petainist movement always had a very strong anti-1789 almost monarchist ethos.  Deeply, of course, there was not much love lost between the atheist-populist and Papist-monarchist groups.  But what did united is a common hatred for Jews, Bolsheviks, Russians and Orthodox Christians in general combined with a profoundly reactionary ideology. The two different Drang nach Osten Both the atheist-populist and the Papist-monarchists factions had in common a very strong “Drang nach Osten” and both saw themselves as Kulturträger, literally “carriers of civilization” to the savage barbarians of the East.  Hitler’s beef with the Soviet Union was, of course, the very high numbers of Jews in the Bolshevik Party (hence his talk of Judeo-Bolshevism) while the Papacy hated Jews, atheists and Orthodox Christians pretty much equally (Franco liked to speak of the “conspiración judeo masonica pagada con el oro de Moscú” or “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy paid for by Moscow’s gold”).  And while Hitler looked towards the East to provide land and slaves for his Master Race, the Papacy saw a fantastic opportunity to finally submit the “Photian schismatics” to Rome: already on the eve of WWI, Pope Pius X (who was canonized in 1954) pronounced “Russia is the greatest enemy Of the [Roman] Church” and “If Russia is victorious, then the schism is victorious” (and keep in mind that according to Latin doctrine – these folks are infallible when speaking ex-cathedra, in the name of the Church and on issues of faith).  Thus these two originally very different movement joined forces and united against the arch-enemy: Russia (whether atheist, Jewish and Bolshevik or Russian and Orthodox – it did not matter to them).  Needless to say, this toxic brew of hatred found an absolutely perfect Petri dish for its views amongst the Ukrainian nationalists, especially, in the Western Ukraine. Again, for a lack of time and space I will no go into a history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,Stepan Bandera or the “Ukrainian” SS Division Galizien, you can read about on the Internet.  I will just say that these forces were amongst the most cruel and murderous of any in WWII.  In fact, the most rabid atrocities of WWII were not committed by Hitler’s forces, not even the SS, but by the forces fully inspired and supported by the Vatican: the Croatian Ustashe of Ante Pavelic and the Ukrainian nationalists.  Eventually, the Ustashe and the Banderovsty were defeated, but a lot of its members not only survived the war, but prospered in exile, mostly in the USA and Canada, were the Angloshpere kept them away from actual politics, but active enough to be “defrosted” should the need arise.  And, sure enough, following the end of the Cold War, the AngloZionist Empire saw an opportunity to subvert and weaken its enemies: the descendants of the Ustashe were tasked with breaking up Yugoslavia while the descendants of Bandera were tasked with breaking the Ukraine as far away form Russia as possible.  In the same time, both in Yugoslavia and Russia, the AngloZionists directed another of its terrorist franchises – the Wahabi international aka “al-Qaeda” to join the Neo-Nazis and Papists in a common struggle against the Orthodox/Socialist Yugoslavia and Russia.  We all know what happened to Yugoslavia after that. PART THREE – the Ukraine – back to the future 2014 –  The belly is still fertile from which the foul beast sprang At this point in time I want to say a few things about the (now ex-) Ukrainian “opposition”.  During the past months, we were mostly told that it was represented by three men: Vitalii Klichko and his UDAR movement,Arsenii Iatseniuyk and his Batkivshchyna Party, and Oleh Tiagnibok, notorious leader of the Freedom Party.  Of course, the real leader of the Batkivshchyna Party always was Yulia Tymoshenko, but since she had been jailed by Yanukovich, she could not directly participate in the most recent events.  Most western observers have neglected to ask the question whether any of these political figures really could control the demonstrators on the Maidan square.  Furthermore, they also neglected to look into how a crowed armed mostly with stones, baseball bats, iron bars and Molotov cocktails had “suddenly” been replaced by a well-organized and well-armed force of what can only be called insurgents.  The force which really packed the most strength and firepower, was not composed of members of the UDAR, Batkivshchyna or even Freedom Party – the real owner of the Maidan and now of the rest of Kiev is the so-called Right Sector, a terrorist organization headed by Dmytro Yarosh:   

Dmytro Yarosh and his troops

If the photo above looks like it might have been taken in Chechnia during the war, that is because it could have been: many Ukrainian nationalists fought on the side of the Wahabis in Chechnia, often under the banner of theUNA-UNSO terrorist organization.  They also fought in Georgia against Russia, hence the visit Saakashvili made twice to the Maidan Square. It would be logical to ask what percentage of the people of the Ukraine support Mr Yarosh and his Right Sector.  It is hard to tell, but probably a seizable but small minority.  By most estimates, the most popular leaders of the new regime are Tymoshenko and Klichko, followed by Tiagnibok – at least that was true before the revolution of last Sunday.  But that is hardly relevant: most Chechens were not Wahabis, most Croats were not Ustashe and most Kosovo Albanians were not KLA – that did not prevent these small but well armed groups from having a decisive control over the events. This places the new regime in a very difficult situation: either it complies with the agenda of the likes of Yarosh and his Right Sector, or it risks to be swiped away by an armed insurrection.  Keep in mind that the Ukrainian military basically exists only on paper and that the police forces are in no condition to impose their authority on the extremists.

What is worse, the Presidency of Yushchenko has shown that the so-called “moderate” nationalists constantly kowtow to the extremists.  Thus Yushchenko even made Bandera “hero of Ukraine” (the decision was later rescinded) and printed nice little stamps with his face.  The problem with that is kind of seemingly innocuous action is in reality a rehabilitation of genocidal ideology and that it sends a truly terrifying and revolting message to the East Ukrainians and Russians in the Ukraine: we are back and we mean business. It has mostly been overlooked, but a similar situation took place in Croatia at the moment of the breakup of Yugoslavia: the Croats, even the so-called “moderates” found nothing more intelligent to do than to immediately reintroduce the checkered flag of the Ustashe of Pavelic as a “Croatian national symbol”.  To what degree this encouraged the Serbs in the Krajinas to take up arms is open to debate, but it certainly did not help. The same thing is now also taking place in the Ukraine.  Besides the yellow and blue flags of the western Ukraine, one can also see lots of black and red flags, the flag of the Banderovsty, along with all sorts of neo-Nazi symbols.  And, again, it does not really matter how many Ukrainians are suffering from genocidal tendencies, what matters is how these flags are seen in the eastern Ukraine or by the 7 million Russians who live in the Ukraine. The reaction to the coup in Kiev was immediate.  Check out this screenshot of a video showing a mass rally in the city of Sevastopol:

Mass rally in Sevastopol

Notice the flags?  Before the coup, the rallies in the east featured almost exclusively Ukrainian yellow and blue flags, now the flags are mostly Russian with a few interspersed Russian Navy flags: the people are either angry or frightened.  Probably both.  And the potential for violence therefore rapidly escalates. Check out this video of an attempt by pro-regime activist to hold a demonstration in the city of Kerch and see for yourself how rapidly the situation gets of out control.  The angry crowd begins with screams of “go away!” and “Fascists!” but soon the cops lose control of the situation and a mob begins to assault the nationalist activists.  See for yourself:

Just as in Croatia and Bosnia, EU and US politicians have ignored (whether by stupidity or deliberately) that fear begets violence which, in turn, begets more fear, in an endless positive feedback loop which is almost impossible to stop. So where do we go from here? Frankly, I had some hopes that Yulia Tumoshenko might still save the Ukraine.   No, not because I like her, but because I recognize the strength of her personality, especially when compared to the either terminally stupid (Tiagnibok, Klichko) or spineless (Iatseniuk, Yanukovich) men in Ukrainian politics.  As one Russian journalist put it yesterday: its good to finally see a “real man” entering the Ukrainian political scene.  And indeed, for all her other faults, Yulia has three things going for her: she is very intelligent, she is strong willed and she is very popular.  Or, at least, that was what she had going for her before Yanukovich threw her in jail.  When I saw the footage of her appearance on the Maidan, on a wheel-chair, her face puffed up, sounding hysterical and completely unaware of the fact that she was surrounded by neo-Nazis I began having my doubts.  Clearly, she had a very bad time in Yanukovich’s dungeon.  And to those who will say that she has every bit as corrupt as all the other oligarchs I would say this: while all the other oligarchs see power as a way to make money, Tymoshenko sees money as a way to seize power.  There is a huge difference here. Then, unlike Tiagnibok or Yarosh, Tymoshenko does not look genocidal, not has she ever tried to play the role of a “modern Bandera”.  Then, unlike the typical Ukrainian neo-Nazis, Yulia is nominally Orthodox, not “Greek Catholic” (i.e. Latin).  Not that I believe that any of them are particularly religions, no, but at least Tymoshenko was not raised with the kind of maniacal hatred for everything Russian in which “Greek Catholic” kids are typically raised. Finally, Tymoshenko is definitely smart enough to understand that there is no way to keep the Ukraine as a unitary state if the neo-Nazis are de-facto in power, whether directly of through a number of “moderate” puppets. So maybe I was naive, but I had some hope that Yulia could keep the Ukraine together.  No, not because I am such a true supporter of the “Independent Ukraine”, but because I would find any solution preferable to a partition of the Ukraine which would inevitably become violent. Why is violence inevitable? Paradoxically,  the main cause here are not the followers of Bandera.  Some of them have, in fact, spoken in favor of a separation of the western Ukraine from the rest of the country.  As far as I know, they are in the minority, but it is still interesting that at least some of then are aware that the notion of turning all of the Ukraine into Galicia is simply ludicrous.  Most nationalists are, however, dead set against any partition for two reasons.  Prestige: they know that “their” Ukraine is, in reality, much smaller than the Ukraine inherited form the Soviet era.  Money: they know that all the real wealth of the Ukraine is in the East.  Last, but not least, the real puppet-masters of the Ukrainian nationalists (the US) want to deprive Russia of the wealth of the eastern Ukraine and of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast.  So anybody expecting the nationalists to gracefully agree to a civil divorce between West and Southeast is day dreaming: it ain’t happening, at least not by referendum or any other form of consultations. History also teaches us that it is impossible to force two groups to coexist when the hate and fear each other, at least not without *a lot* of violence. The situation in the East is as simple as it is stark: Yanukovich is politically dead.  The party of regions has basically exploded and new politicians are pupping up in Kharkov, in Sevastopol and in other cities.  Large self-defense forces are being organized locally and the population is basically ready to fight.  Considering the circumstances, these are all positive developments.  On the negative side there is the fact that the eastern oligarchs are still here, still ready to betray their own people for profit (just as the Ukrainian elites did during the Union of Brest) and that the local political forces are, by most accounts, being rather amateurishly organized.  Finally, there is a great deal of uncertainty about what Russia really wants. What about Russia in all this? I think that Russia truly does want to avoid a civil war in the Ukraine and that it prefers a separate Ukraine to a partition.  Why?  Think of it: For Russia a separate and independent Ukraine is first and foremost a way of avoiding being drawn into a civil war. If, say, Tymoshenko managed to supress the neo-Nazis and negotiate some kind of modus vivendibetween, on one hand, the western Ukraine and Kiev and, on the other, the eastern and southern Ukraine there is little doubt that she and Putin could find some peaceful and pragmatic way to coexist.  Oh, I am not speaking about a love-fest, that is simply not going to happen, but at least some mutually beneficial, civil and pragmatic relations are imaginable.  That would most definitely be the Kremlin’s preferred option (which just goes to show how stupid and paranoid the Ukie nationalist – and Susan Rice – are when they hallucinate about a Russian invasion of the Ukraine). The other option is to have the nationalists take full-control over all of the Ukraine.  That seems extremely unlikely to me, but who knows?  I have been disappointed with Ukie politicians enough to put the worst possible outcome past them.  That would mean that the Russian-Ukrainian border would turn into something between the Wall which separated the two parts of Germany during the Cold War or the DMZ between the two part of Korea.  From a military point of view, not a problem at all.  As I wrote in the past, even if NATO deploys troops in the Ukraine, which they would, that close to the Russian territory military assets basically turn into lucrative targets: Russia would deploy enough Iskanders to cover its target list and that’s all.  As for the Black Sea Fleet, it could either simply refuse to leave and see if NATO has the stomach to try for force it, or engage in the costly but possible fallback option of relocating to Novorossiysk (admittedly, not a good option, but better than nothing).  But, again, this is an exceedingly unlikely scenario. Which leaves option three: the nationalist attempt to subdue the south and east and fail. The violence escalates and eventually Russia is drawn in.  Now in purely military terms, Russia could very easily defeat any Ukie army which would attempt to fight it.  As for NATO and the US – they don’t have the means to deploy some “combined joint task force” to repel the Russian military in the Ukraine.  So short of starting a mutually destructive nuclear war, they would have to accept the facts on the ground.  But just imagine the nightmare resulting from a Russian military operation in eastern Ukraine!  It would be back to a new Cold War, but this time on steroids: western politicians would scramble over each other to denounce, declare, threaten, condemn, proclaim, sanction, and pledge God knows what kind of nonsense.  Hysterical russophobia will become the order of the day and the AngloZionist Empire would finally find the kind of eternal enemy it has desperately been seeking for since the end of the First Cold War.  If they got really ugly, and they probably would, China would most likely get involved too and we would have exactly the kind of planet the 1% plutocracy has been dreaming about for so many years: Oceania locked into a total war against Eurasia and Eastasia, just like Orwell had predicted it:

This is most definitely not what Russia – or China – need.  And yet, this is a real risk if a civil war breaks out in the Ukraine.  One “least bad” option to avoid such a scenario would be to make sure that the east and southern Ukrainians are strong enough to repel a nationalist invasion by themselves so that the Russian military can stay out of the conflict. So there is the difficult judgment call the Kremlin needs to make: the Kremlin has to decide whether: a) the eastern and southern Ukrainian people are disorganized, demoralized, made passive by the rule of corrupt oligarchs and basically unable to defend themselves. or b) the eastern and southern Ukrainian people are united, organized and determined enough to really make a stand and fight the neo-Nazis down to the last bullet. In the first case, the Kremlin would have to basically protect the Russian borders and prepare to manage the large numbers of refugees which will inevitably cross the border. In the second case, the Kremlin would have a strong incentive to assist the eastern and southern Ukrainians by all possible means short of an over and direct military intervention. Both of these options are dangerous and none of them is preferable to a united Ukraine lead by a more or less rational leader.  This is why, at least at the initial stage, I expect Russia to *really* support any halfway sane regime in Kiev in the hope to avoid a breakup of the Ukraine. What about the US and the EU in all this? Well, as I recently wrote, the US and the EU have very different objective in the Ukraine: the EU wants a market for its goods and services, the US want to hurt Russia as much as possible.  We have all seen the total lack of effectiveness of the EU bureaucrats and their naive attempts at finding a negotiated solution.  The US foreign policy goal has the advantage of being simple yet clear: fuck Russia and fuck the EU!  From the US point of view, the worse the situation becomes, the better it is for Uncle Sam.  At the very least, this hurts Russia, at the very best, it gives the US a wonderful pretext to “protect” Europe from the “resurgent Russian bear” while standing up for civilization, democracy and progress.  A Neocons wet dream… And then, there is the “S factor”: stupidity, plain and simple.  What often seems to be the result of some machiavellian plan cooked up in a deep basement of the White House, the CIA or the Pentagon is often a mind-blowing example of the truly phenomenal stupidity, ignorance and arrogance of our leaders.  They believe themselves to be so powerful as to be free from the need to understand a culture, a history or even a single foreign language.  After all, if a US policy was to failed somewhere, the response could always be the same: fuck them!  Fuck the Yugoslavs! Fuck the Serbs!  Fuck the Iraqis!  Fuck the Afghans!  Fuck the Pakistanis!  Fuck the Libyans, and the Egyptians, and the Palestinians, and fuck the Somalis, the Koreans, the Colombians and the Venezuelans and, of course, fuck the Canadians, the Mexicans, and the Africans, and, of course, fuck the Russians, fuck the Chinese, and fuck everybody else with it!   No matter how stupid or how destructive a US policy towards another party it – it either works, or fuck them!  Ms Nuland’s words could really become the State Departments or the CIA’s official motto. My conclusion?  Pessimistic, of course 🙂 Those reading my blog for a while already will not be surprised to see that, yet again, I have reached a very pessimistic conclusion: the future of the Ukraine looks absolutely terrible: the country is ruined, it has no economy, it is socially, culturally and politically nonviable, it will most likely be lead either by imbeciles or by racist manics and the biggest power on the planet will spare no efforts to add more fuel on the fire.  Keep in mind that no a single Ukrainian politician has anything even remotely resembling a plan to resurrect the currently dead Ukrainian economy.  The only and last chance for the Ukraine was to survive on the “Russian financial respirator” – but that has now been turned off, at least for the foreseeable future: the Ukies can have their Banderovite Revolution, but the Russians don’t have to pay for it. Last November I wrote a piece entitled The gates of Hell are opening for the Ukraine in which I pretty much predicted what has happened since.  I wrote:

I am assuming that the the Eurobureaucrats and the Ukrainian nationalists will eventually prevail, and that Yanukovich will either fully complete his apparent “zag” and reverse his decision, or lose power. One way or another the the Eurobureaucrats and the Ukrainian nationalists will, I think, prevail. There will be more joyful demonstrations, fireworks and celebrations in Kiev, along with lots of self-righteous back-slapping and high-fiving in Brussels, and then the gates of Hell will truly open for the Ukraine.

We are now at this point: the Ukraine has now crossed the gates of Hell and has fully entered in a long cycle of tragedy and violence.  This is truly immensely sad.  And the blame for what will happen next lies first and foremost with those forces who recklessly opened the Pandora’s box of medieval and 20th century hatreds and who encouraged the nationalist demon to strike yet again and with those who stood by and did nothing: the US and EU politicians amongst whom not one single one could be found to speak the truth.  May they all rot in hell for what they have done! The Saker

Lies, damn lies, and hasbara fiction (training given)

 

by Stuart Littlewood

Saturday, October 20th, 2012
Stuart Littlewood
Now targeting young minds…

Israel’s propagandists have a training manual that teaches the art of sugar-coating and downright lying so that gullible audiences will easily swallow their poison.

HasbaraNotice how everything Israelis dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”. They’d have us all believe we are in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in a collective act of aggression orchestrated by Tel Aviv, Washington and London.

The 116-page instruction manual, called the 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was produced by The Israel Project (TIP), which describes itself as “non-partisan” on Twitter but elsewhere says it’s “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. See here for an evaluation

TIP provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West.

And because God, the Great Real Estate Agent in the Sky, gave them the keys to the Holy Land their abominable behaviour is deserving of our support.

The manual teaches the propaganda tricks that Israel’s scribblers and drivellers use to try and justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and their contempt for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweet.

Here’s a sample slice of hasbara (i.e. pro-Israel propaganda) from the comments to a recent article I penned about the great American journalist Grace Halsell, who fought tirelessly for justice and did so much to expose the nonsense peddled by Christian-Zionism before she died in 2000

Pad Dar · Top Commenter

There is no place called p-stine. My suggestion for p-stinian sympathizers is that you should visit, find out what it is REALLY like there without anyone from either side telling you. REALLY find out what you are supporting. Me thinks this reader [commenter later edited this to ‘writer’] has *NEVER* visited the place called pstine. But, you should. Israel is all over the book of Revelation. There ARE, in fact, close to 300K Messianis and Christians in Israel. The word of GOD does NOT change, with or without Hagee. God plainly says to ‘bless’ Israel. OF COURSE it matters if their government sticks and that should be reported. But, what this site and millions of others FAIL to do, is narrow it down TO the Israeli govt. But, you don’t, so everyone hates Israelis because of that. Very unfortunate. VISIT P-stine. Especially near S. ISRAEL, close to Sderot and Ashkelon, and WAKE THE HELL UP. There is NO American that I know that wants rockets shot at them on a DAILY basis. But, of course, GRACE (BAD name for an UN graceful person) you don’t report THAT.

In the back of my Bible there’s a map of “Palestine at the Time of Our Saviour”. An earlier map of the same territory calls it Canaan. True, there’s also a map showing the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel which came to a sticky end in 597BC. If you go to you’ll see how the Jewish Virtual Library (part of The American-Israeli Co-operative Enterprise) has wiped Palestine off their modern-day map, so let’s hear no more about Hamas or Iran wanting to wipe Israel off the map.

There was even a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem for nearly 100 years, but we don’t make a big fuss about it.

In any case, who takes the scribblings of ancient scribes – the hasbara myth-makers of their time – without a very large pinch of salt?

Pad Dar gratuitously insults Grace when she’s not here to defend herself, and seems to be saying that Grace never visited the place called “Pstine”. Grace, in one of her own articles

says: “By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians. My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem.”

And this tribute to her In Washington Report  tells us…

In highly acclaimed books such as Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics, she described her young years as a Christian and trips to the Holy Land she later took, “disguised” as a follower, with televangelist Rev. Jerry Falwell. She revealed the unsavory relationship between Falwell and right-wing Israeli leaders, reporting, for example, that the evangelical Falwell had been provided by Israel with an expensive private plane. And that, despite the fact that some 15 percent of Palestinians are Christian, Falwell’s American Christian tour groups rarely saw or had the opportunity to talk to Middle East Christians.

Or was our hasbara commenter claiming I’ve never visited Palestine? If so, wrong again. The question is, has Pad Dar ever been there?
He/she talks of Sderot and rockets. The hasbara instruction manual has the following advice:

“Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Israelis claim 12,000 rockets were fired from Gaza in the 8 years up to the start of Operation Cast Lead. But they never say how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) Israel’s F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza in the same period.

And they are careful not to mention that the township of Sderot, targeted by Gaza’s rockets and therefore a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime, is built on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village called Najd, whose inhabitants were forced to flee by Jewish terrorists in May 1948. Najd wasn’t allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition – they stole it at gun-point.

There is NO American that I know, or Brit, who would stand for being thrown out of his home by foreign thugs. So if anyone needs to WAKE THE HELL UP it’s you, Pad Dar! Get a grip on the facts.

Remember too that Ben Gurion airport, which serves Tel Aviv, was formerly Lydda airport. Lydda, shown on my biblical map of Palestine, was a major Arab town and communications hub during the British mandate and designated Palestinian in the 1947 UN Partition. In July 1948 Israeli terrorist troops seized the town, shot it up and drove out the population. Donald Neff reported how, as part of the ethnic cleansing, the Israelis massacred 426 men, women, and children. 176 of them were slaughtered in the town’s main mosque. Of all the blood-baths they say this was the biggest.also  See

Out of a population of 19,000 only 1,052 were allowed to stay. The others who survived the murderous onslaught were forced to walk into exile in the scalding July heat leaving a trail of bodies – men, women and children – along the way.

Who was responsible for this act of infamy? Israel’s great ‘hero’ Moshe Dayan, who later became defence minister and foreign minister.

Next time you touch down at Ben Gurion airport, Pad Dar, you should kiss the ground and say, “Hi Palestine, nice to see you again.” Israel has no right to it at all – it was stolen in a terror raid, just like Najd/Sderot and hundreds of other Palestinian cities, towns and villages. Is this how the Great Real Estate Agent in the Sky hands over the keys to the old kingdom?
Today I received another gem from somebody calling themselves ‘Michelle’…

Your remarks about “Israel occupying the Holy Land” reflects an embarrassingly ignorance of the facts. Israel is the Holy Land, established 3000 years ago by the Jewish People, verified by the archaeological record and Biblical and Quranic texts, in which Israel appears 2500 times. Jesus Christ is called the King of Israel in the New Testament and an entire chapter in the Quran is devoted to “Bani Israil” The Children of Israel. Your so-called palestinians are merely illegal Arab interlopers most of whom invaded Israel in the early to mid-20th century. The most common “palestinian” surname is al-Masri, “the Egyptian” In fact, Jews are the only indigenous nation ever established in Israel over the course of the last 3,000 years.
Fact or hasbara fiction, Michelle? Are you by any chance another one of the hundreds of cyber-scribblers hired and trained by the Tel Aviv lie machine?

Meet the hasbara experts

The Israel Project among other things offers students a Media Fellowship with 9 weeks training and a stipend of $2500. One of the fellowships is in Web Advocacy and Outreach under Brandon Gray, who has former connections with the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) campaign training institute in Washington. The tasks it covers include

  • online pro-Israel advocacy by updating TIP’s Twitter and Facebook accounts
  • Posting TIP videos on Facebook and YouTube
  • Monitoring anti-Israel Web sites and news outlets

TIP’s ‘David Project’ is designed to “educate and prepare college students to assume leadership roles and support their efforts to deliver Israel programs and events to thousands of students on their campuses. Our ground-breaking Israel education curricula and our unique programs are present in more than 130 Jewish high schools and middle schools, laying a foundation for pro-Israel attitudes and advocacy in college and beyond.”

Sinister. Imagine the situation in, say, 5 years’ time. The Arabs and Iranians and specifically the Palestinians set their face against media training and communications long ago. They are amateurs, and in the case of the Palestinians not even that. Lazy, shiftless, unresponsive and a closed shop. Writers like me have no access, receive no support. Why do we bother? Good question. It now has more to do with resisting the tide of Zionism that swamps our own country.

TIP’s executive director, Marcus Sheff, served in the IDF for 25 years – “the world’s most moral army”. Did he dream that one up, by any chance? He was a prominent spokesperson for the IDF during the second Intifada and the Lebanon War. Today, he trains senior IDF officers in media skills.

Josh Block is CEO and president of TIP, and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. He’s dead against the Palestinians gaining statehood and wrote in Politico
that the Obama administration and Congress were right to stand against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State and must vigorously lobby other countries, large and small, to join in pressuring the PA to call it off. If Palestinians go ahead it would undermine the quest for peace and risk anti-Israel terrorism.

Block says another reason for opposing the Palestinian move is that “recognition of this Palestinian government would be the recognition of a terrorist state — given the Hamas-Fatah unity pact…”

There are the legal reasons too, he says. “These underscore that the fictional Palestinian state conjured up for the United Nations doesn’t meet international law standards…”
Screamingly funny, that, considering that Israeli law falls well short.

“…And it doesn’t have defined territory… Perhaps most important, it would be a terrorist ‘state’, ruled by Hamas, which the EU, the United States, Japan, Canada and other countries have designated as a terrorist organization.”

The article simply oozes hasbara. Block throws in other reasons such as economic stability and political institutions, reliance on $1 billion from donor states and another $1.5 billion in tax revenue collected [but often withheld] by the Israeli government, and how “the Palestinian Authority is in the midst of a financial crisis”.

Those things of course couldn’t have anything to do with the illegal occupation and strangulation of the West Bank and the illegal blockade of Gaza by Block’s nice friends, could it?

And isn’t Israel in receipt of billions of American tax dollars disguised as aid?
No prizes for guessing that Block is the former spokesman for AIPAC.

Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, can now be read on the internet by visiting www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

One Response to Lies, damn lies, and hasbara fiction (training given)

An American film……

Raja

https://i0.wp.com/spazioweb.inwind.it/moviewallpapers/image/gone_with_wind.jpg
Life is but a film
(be sure to get the right role !!)

From Rafik el Hariri´s assassination,(14.Feb.2005)
up to this Syrian-Spring, (14.Feb.2012)
it is one and the same long “American-film”.
The same actors, same producers and the same Script.
The Camera-man thinks that all we are blind
and the sound-engineer does not want us to hear everything.
The Oscar is granted even before the film finishes
and the critics are paid by the producers, themselves.
This film is called :
Gone with the Democracy
in which, the heroes are either hanged, or exiled,
or hospitalised , or lynched to death.

Originally this film was called “Gone with the wind
but this wind became a hurricane and later even a tsunami.

Winds,hurricanes and tsunami cannot be held accountable
therefore this so called “Democracy” shall have , some day,
to answer for its crimes.

After the Crusaders , came now the Democratisers !!

Raja Chemayel

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

In the name of……another name.

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FAD

https://i0.wp.com/i108.photobucket.com/albums/n13/aphra_behn/slavery2tradeimage.jpg
“Civilisation”
then, meant enslaving other humans
to build a land they stole from ,also ,other humans.

In the past 350 years
the Western-World
invaded and occupied
and colonised 2/3 of this Globe……..
all that happened,
 in the name of
Christianity and of the Christianising of others.

Today,  they do the same ,but,
in the name of Democracy and Democratising
or eventually in the name of “Human-rights”.

Ask ,please, Bernard Koushner….
https://i0.wp.com/www.enjoyfrance.com/images/stories/france/news/French-Foreign-Minister-Bernard-Kouchner.jpg

They could not christianise the Muslim-world
because all the Muslims believed, anyhow, in the same Jesus Christ,
so now they want, to democratise-the-Muslim-world.

Hoping that the Muslim-world shall soon obey the rule
and the reign of the Talmud.


Raja Chemayel

a Christian-Muslim and a democrat-Arab
 

Posted by Tlaxcala at 7:39 PM

Go back 3000 years…….

>

Frustrated Arab’s Diary

Go back in History for 1000 years,
then for 2000 years,
and again up to 3000 years….
You shall notice that Jerusalem
and also the whole of the Holy Lands
have enjoyed real Peace with the outside world
and also real-internal-social-Peace 
(and inter-religious-harmony and tolerance)
only when ruled by Islam or by a Muslim ruler.
Check it out ,
re-control what I have just wrote
and come back , if you wish…..
Raja Chemayel
not a historian nor a muslim
simply an potent-spectator.
Posted by Tlaxcala at 11:32 PM

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Christian Arabs’ Plight: No to Foreign ‘Protection’

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By Nicola Nasser – Bir Zeit, West Bank

 

Suddenly, the U. S.-European alliance is acting to protect the ‘existence’ of the Christian Arab minority against the Muslim Arab majority whose very existence is besieged and threatened by this same alliance, drawing on a wide spread Islamophobia while at the same time exacerbating Islamophobia among western audiences whom the international financial crisis is now crushing to the extent that it does not spare them time or resources to question the real political motives of their governments, which have been preoccupied for decades now with restructuring the Arab world geographically, demographically, politically and culturally against the will of its peoples with a pronounced aim of creating a “new Middle East.”
Muslims with christians , hand with hand

Ironically this sudden western awakening to the plight of Christian Arabs comes at a time when all Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, are crushed by U.S. and Israeli military occupation or foreign political hegemony, but worse still when they are in the grip of a social upheaval in the very states that are by will or by coercion loyal to this alliance, where unbalanced development and an unemployment rate more than double the world average are pushing masses onto the streets to challenge the legitimacy of their own pro – west governments. Exactly at this time, when Arab masses need their “social” unity for national liberation, sovereignty, liberty and freedom, a European campaign is being waged to divide them along religious and sectarian lines.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy — who on Dec. 9, 2009 wrote in Le Monde defending a Switzerland vote banning Muslim mosques from building minarets and made a national fuss on banning less than two thousand French citizens from wearing Niqab — said on Jan. 6 that he “cannot accept” what he described as “religious cleansing” of Arab Christians. His Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, wrote to the EU’s foreign affairs baroness, Catherine Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response. France took the initiative to call a meeting of the UN Security Council last Nov. 9 to discuss international protection of Iraqi Christians. On Dec. 22, Italy’s foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country was presenting a resolution to the UN to condemn their “persecution.” Together with his French, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, Frattini wrote a joint letter to Ashton asking her to table the issue at the foreign ministers meeting on January 31 and to consider taking “concrete measures” to protect them. On Dec. 17, the German Bundestag passed a resolution defending the freedom of religion around tee world, but viewed with “great concern” the resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on March 25 last year against the “defamation of religions” because it “undermines the existing human rights understanding.”

The European political reaction sounds excessively selective in its concern over an allegedly missing right of the freedom of religion of the Christian minority in a region where civil and human rights for the Muslim majority are missing thanks in the first place for the support the regional governing regimes, which confiscate these same rights, receive from the U.S. – European alliance, and the European selectivity allegedly in defense of the “threatened” existence of the Christian Arab minorities speaks louder when it is compared with the deafening European silence over the threatened existence of the Arab and Islamic cultural identities of the majority, let alone the European incitement against both identities, a double standard that explicitly invokes suspicious questions about the credibility and sincerity of the European “rights” concerns and about the real political goals behind these pronounced concerns. For example, more than 300 mosques were attacked, some of them of a UNESCO World Heritage Center standards, hundreds of Muslim clerics were murdered, millions of Muslims were forced either to migrate internally or immigrate externally in the U.S. – occupied Iraq, and the plight of Iraqi Christians has been and still is merely a side show of the overall destruction of the whole state there, but the European rights consciousness did not and still does not find it worth a similar call for defense and protection.

Unfortunately, this traditional European divide – and – rule policy in the Arab world, as it was the case for centuries, is today finding ample papal blessing from the Vatican to justify itself, not in the eyes of Arabs, but in the eyes of its own audiences. President Sarkozy’s whistle blower cry this January 6 that Christians in the Arab – Islamic world are victims of a planned ‘religious cleansing,” came on the backdrop of the Vatican’s Pope Benedict XVI repeated call on the world leaders to rise up for the protection and “defense of the Christians in the Middle East.” It is a cry fraught with the connotations of the historical precedent of the Vatican – blessed Fourth Crusade, which consisted mainly of a crusading army originating from areas within France and which was diverted from invading Egypt by sea to the sacking of Constantinople, the capital of the political and spiritual rival, the Orthodox Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Arab – Muslim world belong, instead of “liberating” Jerusalem from Muslims.

Pope Benedict XVI’s wilful or careless indifference towards exploiting his church concerns by “secular” politicians like Sarkozy to serve their down to earth goals, or towards exacerbating Islamophobia, which in turn fuels Christianphobia, is reminiscent of how the older Sarkozy –type “Christ – abiding” and non – secular politicians concealed from the bulk of the crusading army a letter from Pope Innocent III, who made the new Fourth Crusade the goal of his pontificate, warning against the diversion of the crusade, forbidding any atrocities against “Christian neighbors” and threatening excommunication. In as much as the indifference of the crusader pope to carry out his threat had led to the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Muslims less than three hundred years later and turning the crusades into a war against the rival church more than against the Muslims, the indifference of the present day Pope Benedict XVI is threatening to counterproductively achieve the demise of Christian existence in the “East,” which he has made, it seems, the goal of his pontificate.

Ever since the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, Arab Christians in the Muslim world have been wary of the messages and emissaries of Rome as a cultural spearhead of foreign invasion and hegemony. Even a Catholic loyal to the Vatican like the incumbent Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, had this to tell the Israeli Haaretz exclusively four days before Benedict XVI’s “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land in September 2009: “The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here. One word for the Muslims and I’m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I’m in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.” Patriarch Twal’s fears were vindicated last week when Egypt recalled its Vatican envoy for consultations over the Pope’s remarks on Egyptian Copts: The “new statements from the Vatican” are “unacceptable interference” in Egypt’s “internal affairs,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement. Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed recently wrote that similar papal remarks were to the “fundamentalists .. a blessing in disguise.”

Pope Benedict XVI since he occupied the papacy seat seems totally insensitive to the worries of his representative in Jerusalem; he doesn’t seem short of words and seems careful not to miss an opportunity to utter provocative anti-Muslim pronouncements that place both his church clergy and followers on the defensive among both their Christian as well as Muslim compatriots. However, he places them in a more critical position by his helplessness to find any words or an opportunity in his latest torrential rhetoric about the protection of Christians and their plight in Holy Land itself, where they have been victims of actual ethnic and religious cleansing for more than sixty years now since the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared independent on the ruins of their homes.

From a regional perspective, both Christian and Muslim, the very existence of Christians is threatened, besieged and gradually cleansed by the Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity – – where Christ was born, spread the word of God, love and peace and crucified. The papal silence on this simple fact of life is much louder in the region than Pope’s pronounced appeals for the defense and protection of Christians on the peripheries of the birthplace of Christianity, in Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon for example, because when the center of Christian gravity crumbles in Jerusalem, the periphery supports would not hold for long and even the important St, Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican would be a pale substitute, and the center of Christian gravity in Jerusalem is almost totally Judaized, and is off limits to the Christians both in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity as well as to their brethren on the Arab and Muslim periphery, unless they are granted an Israeli military permit to visit, which is rare and very tightly selective.

Viewed from Christian regional perspective, the papal appeals for their protection could hardly be described other than contradictory, if not hypocrite, particularly in view of a Vatican’s document in July 2007, approved by Benedict XVI, which declared Catholicism as “the only true church of Christ” and “other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches.” So, “what” Christians Pope Benedict is appealing to defend and protect? A year earlier, Coptic Pope Shenouda III denied there was any dialogue or contacts with the Vatican although thirty three years before both sides agreed to form joint committees for bilateral dialogue. With the exception of Armenian church as a late newcomer but nonetheless an independent church, the Coptic, Orthodox, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac, Melkite and other Eastern communions have existed and coexisted among and with Arabs since the earliest days of Christianity, because they are Arabs either by ethnicity or by culture and they are the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Middle East and an integral part of the Arab society.

Islamophobia is warning that Muslims are “returning” to Islam, but is it not top on the agenda of Pope Benedict XVI to return Europe to Christianity? “We must reject both secularism and fundamentalism,” the Pope said in his annual address on Christmas Day, but is it not secularism that the Pope, Europe and the U.S. are preaching now to de-Arabise and de-Islamise Arabs? This double standard ironical western contradiction deprives their calls for the protection of Arab Christians of whatever credibility it might still have in the Arab eyes. Their “protection” will prove counterproductive sooner or later. Christianphobia that fuels anti – Christian blind terror is an already active byproduct.

The ‘Church of Islam’

Commenting on the Synod of Middle East Christian leaders that convened in the Vatican last October, the spiritual leader of the Melkite “Catholics,” Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, Gregorios III, had this to say, quoted by the Lebanese Daily Star last December: “The Synod for the Middle East is a Synod for Arab countries, for Arabs, a Synod for Arab Christians in symbiosis with their Arab society. It is a Synod for the ‘Church of the Arabs’ and ‘Church of Islam’.” The adviser to the Muslim Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, Dr. Mohammad Al-Sammak, who was invited to the Synod, recognized the Arab identity of Christians in the Middle East: “I cannot live my being Arabic without the Middle Eastern Christian Arab .. They are an integral part of the .. formation of Islamic civilization,” he told the Synod.

Politically and religiously these Christians have been on the other side of the Vatican – blessed old or modern western conquests, and politically and religiously they have been all along protected by Arabs and Muslims, otherwise they would not have survived. Their existence is now under threat because the existence of their Arab – Islamic incubator is on the line, besieged either by direct military occupation in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan or by economic sanctions and political hegemony; their existence was not threatened when the Arab – Islamic state was an empire and a world power, nor was it threatened during the crusades despite the atrocities committed by their western co-religious crusaders, which would have invited a reprisal had it not been for the teachings of Islam itself.

The U.S. – led world war on terror targeting mainly Arabs and Muslims is perplexing western pro – law, peace and human rights audiences by smoke –screening their governments’ military adventures and modern crusades, which is the real action that created terrorism as the only possible reaction expected by the overpowered nations. However the invading creator and the created terrorists in their bloody divide are smoke – screening also any possible resurface of the forgotten Islamic covenants that protected the indigenous two thousand – year old Arab Christians since the advent of Islam in the seventh century. In the year 628 AD, a Christian delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt’s Sinai, met Prophet Mohammad and requested his protection. The Prophet granted them a protection charter.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware and a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, wrote this about the charter: “The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even though it was penned in 628 A.D., it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person. A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties! The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable.” In the year 631, Prophet Muhammad received a delegation of sixty Christians from Najran in the Prophet’s mosque in Medinah, allowed them to pray in the mosque, and concluded the “covenant to the Christians of Najran” treaty which granted them religious and administrative autonomy as citizens of the Islamic State. In 637, Islamic Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab granted the similar “Covenant of Omar” to the Patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius.

However, neither Islamophobians nor their terrorist Islamists have any interest but to dump these Islamic ideological covenants for the protection of Arab Christians. No Arab Christian fears for his life form his Muslim neighbor or his government, but he or she definitely fears these two protagonists, who are both foreign to his history and culture. No foreign protection of Arab Christians could match the protection and solidarity they received from their Muslim compatriots both in Iraq and Egypt following the bombings of a church in Baghdad on October 31 and a church in Alexandria on New Year Eve. In the latter case there were reports of Muslim human shields to protect the Christmas religious celebrations of Egyptian Christians, let alone the solidarity statements by both outlawed Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya and the Muslim Brotherhood and the thousands of police deployed for the same purpose, in a remarkable show of national unity and historic coexistence.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), scheduled to meet in the UAE on January 19, will discuss the situation of Christians in member states, according to Lebanon parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri. On this background, there are also reports that Egypt will ask the Arab League economic summit this month, to discuss foreign, and in particular western, interference in Arab Affairs. European offers of protection are already backlashing.

The only real threat to the existence of Arab Christians showed for the first time when the European colonialism first, then the U.S. imperialism, self – appointed western powers as their protectors. It is noteworthy that in both the Iraqi and Egyptian cases the native Christian Arabs are now paying the heavy price of the U.S. anti – Pan –Arabism of both late Jamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Their plight started with the forcing of pro – U.S. regimes in both countries.

To describe the latest attacks against Christians as a plan of “religious cleansing,” as President Sarkozy has done, suggests a persecution that doesn’t exist; this is “not the case in the Middle East at the moment,” it is “not supported by the wider community,” said Fiona McCallum of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who is a specialist on the Christian communities in the Middle East, adding: “It’s important to also note that immigration takes place from the region from both Christians and Muslims as well.”

– Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.


River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

The hatemonger from the Netherlands

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[ 06/12/2010 – 11:40 PM ]
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine
Israel’s manifestly fascist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has once again demonstrated virulent malice and ill-will toward Muslims in general by inviting anti-Islam Dutch leader, Geert Wilders, to visit Occupied Palestine to spew his hatred and racism before a Jewish audience.

Wilders arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday, 4 December, as the biggest fire in Israel’s history was still raging near Haifa, consuming large swaths of the Carmel natural forests.

However, the calamity seems to have had no effect on Lieberman’s fascist mindset as evident from the thuggish foreign minister’s invitation to one of the most racist men in contemporary Europe to Israel to malign Islam, incite against the Palestinians and call for their ethnic cleansing.

One would have hoped that the ferocious fire, which killed dozens of Israelis and morphed some of the best natural forests in occupied Palestine into ash, would introduce some humility and modesty to Israel’s psych and collective mindset.

However, it seems regrettably that racism’s stranglehold on Israel’s way of thinking is so strong that even a colossal calamity won’t leave a dent on Israel’s view of the outside world, especially their ultimate victims, the Palestinian people.

Wilders is very much like Peter the Hermit who instigated Christian Europe to wage the infamous Crusades. His fiery incitement eventually caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians.

Likewise, Wilders, a hateful and repulsive figure who is shunned by marny people of good will from all religious confessions, shamelessly advocates an internecine war of extermination against Muslims all over the world. He may not use words like “slaughter, extermination and genocide,” but this is exactly the connotation carried in his hateful messages.

In Tel Aviv, the hatemonger from the Netherlands said what Jewish fascist wanted to hear.

He called for ethnic cleansing of non-Jews, presumably including Christians like himself. He said that Jewish settlement expansion would create defensible borders for Israel, as if the most powerful state in the Middle East which also happens to control rather tightly the most powerful nation on earth were suffering from indefensible borders.

He also urged Israel to annex the West Bank. He didn’t say what Israel should do with some three million Palestinians in the occupied territory. But it was easily understood that he advocated murderous repression on a genocidal scale to carry out his evil designs.

Wilders readily echoed one of the most favorite Zionist mantras, namely that Jordan is Palestine, saying that Jordan should be forced to take in Palestinians.

His words were music to many Judeo-Nazi elements who are dreaming of making occupied Palestine Arab-free.

Unfortunately, his nefarious incitement raised no eyebrows among Israeli officials, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who constantly claims that Israel respects all religions and is interested in establishing good relation with Arab and Muslim countries.

There is no doubt that Israel, especially under this conspicuously fascist government (fascist because even its own cabinet ministers publicly acknowledge that Israel is becoming a fascist state par excellance) represents the perfect environment for the growth and prosperity of fascism.

Wilders’ vilification of Islam and Muslims is effectively a call for genocide. And, ironically, it took place as Muslim countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, were coming to Israel’s aid to put off the huge fire near Haifa.

Hence, one is prompted to ask: Is this the Jewish way of showing gratitude to these Muslim nations?

Besides, Jews, of all people, should realize that incitement against a religious or ethnic community could lead to genocide.

When Wilders calls Muslims, rather indiscriminately, terrorists who want to destroy western civilization; he effectively is urging the west to murder Muslims in the millions.

This is why this man, and others of similar feather, should be treated as potential Hitlers.

But why would Israel, which claims to be a light upon the nations, enthusiastically receive and warmly welcome a potential Hitler?

This is the difficult question that Jews everywhere must answer honestly.

Well, the answer as far as this writer is concerned, is because Israel, which calls herself the nation-state of the Jewish people, is fascist at heart and racist to the hilt.

Otherwise, why would Israel become a pilgrimage site for every fascist under the sun?

A last word to those gullible Arab and Muslim states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Morocco, which seem to be eager to endear themselves to Israel and Zionist circles despite the latter’s repeated provocations and effronteries.

Try to show a modicum of respect for your people, for your religion and for your national honor. Do you always need to be reminded that befriending Israel is very much like living with a venomous snake in the same room?

Perhaps the analogy might sound harsh to many. But what would you say of a state that seeks our friendship but at the same time invites the most virulent enemy of Muslims to vilify and dehumanize us and call for our deportation and extermination from our ancestral land?

Does this sound an expression of good will to you?

If not, then show some respect for yourselves.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

One Myth less…….and one Fact more .

Frustrated Arab\s Diary

https://i0.wp.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/24213003.jpg
this is where Arab-christians have hidden
away from Byzantines and from the Romans
before the coming of Islam.

The Myth that the early Christians in the Lebanon
have had to hide away high up  in the mountains
by fear of the invading-Islam- waves “,
in the seventh century,
is completely incorrect , and much misleading too.

Those early (Maronite) Christians were already hiding
up in those mountains, 150 years, before Islam
ever came to the Lebanon and Syria.

Indeed,
those (Maronite)Christian s were fearing the Byzantines
who have sent (christian)- royal-armies to persecute them and to
burn down their cloisters… …and their churches.
There were basic theological differences and interpretations,
 among other dogma´s, like the identity of Jesus  or the
leadership of the different Churches.

More over ,
many christian-Arab- local-sects joined with the Islamic armies
to fight back against the Imperial-Byzantines -Tyranny.
As some arab-christians- tribes also fought along side Islam
to invade Persia and beyond .

Four centuries later ,
Arab-Christians of the near East were completely divided,
as to what to do with the invading Crusaders… ….
and they fought on both sides of those wars.

Fourteen centuries after Islam ,
Arab-Christians are still “alive and kicking” ,
which is a compliment to Islam .

Now,
if you still see Christians in the mountains of the Lebanon,today,
they are only hiding away from the summer-heat of Beirut….

And if you still see Christians in Iraq ,
they are probably waiting for the return
of the next Saddam Hussein
while the Copts of Egypt are hoping
for another Gamal Abdel-Nasser.

Raja Chemayel
a Christian-Arab from 1.100 meters high in the mountains of the Lebanon
into minus 3 meters below-sea-level. ……. in Amsterdam.

NB:
All Christian of the Middle East shared the same fate
and the same fears. But none of them were forced
nor even asked to join Islam.
Romans and Byzantines  have killed more christian-arabs
when the Islam has practically  killed none !!

Posted by Тлакскала at 6:34 PM 0 comments Links to this post