Pink Floyd rock legend Roger Waters made an impressive and impassioned plea for peace at the UN Security Council this week. The English-born singer-songwriter was invited by Russia to address the specially convened forum on the prospects of finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine.
Waters spoke eloquently and from the heart for over 14 minutes via a video link to the gathering at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York. Much respect is due to him for his strident call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine as well as for his general anti-war message on behalf of the world’s “voiceless majority”.
The 79-year-old artist has been a life-long advocate for peace and human rights, and many people around the world admire not only his musical creations but also his integrity and indefatigable defense of human rights. As he noted during his speech, his own father was killed in action during the Second World War when he was just an infant in 1944, and so he has been “touched by war”.
To his eternal credit, Waters has not taken megastar retirement in luxurious, mindless oblivion. He has remained as politically active and outspoken as when he was a younger artist, critical of exploitative corporate capitalist power and imperialist warmongering. With fierce integrity and poignant compassion, he has championed the cause of the Palestinian people and the freedom of publisher Julian Assange locked up in a British prison, among other causes. His music and artistry are a holistic expression of his pathos and politics.
He may have been invited by Russia to address the UNSC this week, but Waters showed himself to be no “apologist” for Moscow. During his speech, he claimed that Russia had “illegally invaded” Ukraine in February 2022, and he forthrightly condemned that. He is entitled to his opinion.
Nevertheless, he also condemned the provocations by the United States and NATO in building up Ukraine with armaments in the years before the conflict erupted last February. He denounced the war profiteering by Western powers from their relentless and reckless supplying of weapons to Ukraine which, he said, was risking a nuclear apocalypse if it spiralled into a bigger all-out confrontation.
The reactions to this noble intervention by Roger Waters were telling. While he spoke to the UNSC, the envoys from Ukraine fiddled on their phones, showing contemptible disrespect. Following his speech, the Ukrainian and the American representatives mocked Waters for peddling “Russian propaganda”.
There was little reporting in the Western media of his words. Some reportage tried to undermine his sincere calls for peace and his blistering critique of the warmongering capitalist system by focusing on what they claimed was his justification for Russian military action in Ukraine after he had said the war was “not unprovoked”.
Hardly surprising. Western mainstream news media have become so debased as propaganda channels that anyone who dares to discuss the historical context of the conflict is immediately smeared as a “Kremlin stooge”. Their media function is to prevent any intelligent, truthful understanding of how this conflict manifested or what is really at stake. The same goes for other conflicts and in particular, the next one Washington is fomenting with China.
Waters deserves immense praise for his courageous, unstinting calls for peace and for a broader understanding of the nature and causes of the conflict in Ukraine. But the dismissive response to his supplications illustrates clearly that the Western warmongers and their NeoNazi regime in Kiev have no intention or will to find a just peace. They are, to quote that classic song by Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb” to any feeling of justice and peace.
Thus, lamentably, his demands for an immediate ceasefire are naive. While many people around the world will admire the call for peace, it is misleading to not fully realize how the conflict in Ukraine came about and why it is being pursued by Western powers. Such appeals will not prevail against the war fundamentalists. Indeed, any ceasefire without resolving the root causes of the war would only prolong the conflict by allowing a rearming of the NATO-sponsored Kiev regime against Russia. Besides, Washington and its Western lackeys are “agreement incapable” and have no integrity.
The most effective immediate way to end the conflict is for Western powers to stop fueling it with the madcap armaments they are piling up in Ukraine. Washington and its European allies are embarking on endless rounds of supplying more offensive weapons. They have already committed to deploying battlefield tanks and this week there was more talk of supplying advanced NATO fighter jets as well as long-range missiles that can hit deep inside Russian territory. The lavish indulgence this week by Britain, France, Germany and the rest of the European Union towards Kiev’s incessant demands for more weapons shows that there is no interest in a genuine diplomatic dialogue for a peaceful settlement.
The European elite political class like their masters in Washington have dangerously distorted the conflict in Ukraine into one of absolute necessity for defeating alleged Russian aggression and “defending democracy”.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky – whose regime in Kiev is up to its eyes in corruption from the arms bazaar in that country as well as infested with Nazi-adulating paramilitaries – was feted in Europe this week with the preposterous claim that Ukraine was defending European values from Russian barbarity. The echo of Third Reich ideology and Russophobic propaganda here is truly astounding.
This war is an existential one. On the one hand, the defeat of Russia is being painted (falsely) as the ultimate challenge to supposed Western civilization. The West has made it a zero-sum contest based on false premises. On the other hand, a real existential issue is that the war is all about preserving American hegemony and propping up the floundering Western imperial global order. “Unipolar world domination,” as Roger Waters put it.
The blockbuster report this week by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh revealing well-founded allegations that the U.S. military blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany last September demonstrates that this war in Ukraine is only a part of a bigger geopolitical conflict. The Western media’s relative silence over what is ostensibly a staggering act of international terrorism by the Americans and their European minions is as damning as it is instructive.
Hersh credibly claims that the plot to sabotage the pipelines – signed off by the Biden administration – predated the Russian intervention in Ukraine. When added to ignominious admissions by European leaders that there was no intention of honoring the 2014-15 Minsk peace agreements because the tacit objective was always to weaponize Ukraine for an eventual showdown against Russia, then we begin to understand that the intrinsic agenda for war makes a mockery of the Western narrative about “defending Ukraine from Russian aggression”.
Appeals like that of Roger Waters – albeit principled and well-intentioned – are in the final analysis naive and, regrettably, futile. Such appeals presuppose that Western elites and their warmongering system are capable of peaceful and moral reasoning. They are not.
Russia had a legal and moral duty to defend the ethnic Russian people of former Ukraine from eight years of NATO-backed aggression after the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. That NATO aggression will not be stopped now by moralistic appeals. For we are talking about a system that is tantamount to a rabid dog that needs to be put down. And we are not talking about a system that is limited to the vile Kiev regime. We are talking about the entire U.S.-led capitalist system and its imperialist war machine. A system that has ravaged the world for eight decades since the end of World War Two.
Or to put it another way by way of taking issue with a contradiction in Roger Water’s speech: you can’t appeal to a “bully” to do the right thing. You have to punch the bully in the face.
On the bigger historical picture, it can be increasingly seen now in this present time that the Second World War did not bring about an end to Nazism, fascism and imperialism, especially as Western history books would narrate. The end of that horrendous war was only a respite from the disease. There will be no peace in Ukraine or anywhere else until that disease is terminated – once and for all.
You may be asking the question what on earth is “international fascism” and how could NATO be in support of such a thing?! Well, the ugly truth is that what took over world policy in our post-WWII era was in fact a continuation of a fascist outlook for a new world order. Fascism, contrary to what we were told, had not in fact been defeated but was given a brand new face for its public endeavours and went underground for some of its more unsavoury methods. The now official recognition of NATO’s Gladio networks, effectively made up of secret armies in service to NATO including a prominent membership of Nazis, trained to commit acts of terrorism and assassinations against Western citizens and their democratic governments is now acknowledged by historians, yet much of the Western populace remain uninformed about this decades long horrifying abuse of power which was used to support a transition towards far right-wing governments.
The thought behind International Fascism in a post-WWII world, was that it would be an alliance that would allow a superior form of organisation that would build up a new European world entity which would function as a model for what would in turn be used on the world stage under a League of Nations mandate.
It is for this reason why so many fascists who had dishonestly referred to themselves as “national socialists” happened to also be promoters of pan-Europeanism and pan-Americanism, and supported the continuation of the British Empire, for these three spheres would function as the three leading regionalisations under a new system of empire under the League of Nations construct. Africa was openly discussed amongst these imperialists and fascists as the necessary slave labour camp to support Europe’s needs.
It is for this reason that individuals such as Oswald Mosley, a leading British fascist who supported both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s reign, began advocating for a “united Europe” as a defense against the supposed communist threat immediately after the Second World War. A “united Europe” reunited with “former” fascists who had now become supposed “defenders of freedom” against the evil totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. Mosley complained in his Europe: Faith and Plan (published in 1958) that this resistance from some European quarters to ally themselves with the fascists against this communist threat was putting the free world in danger. He encouraged Europeans to forget the past abuses that were committed by the fascists, since they were ultimately doing what they thought best for Europe, and that they were not wrong in their outlook but perhaps too hasty and impatient in their execution of such a vision.
With the end of the Second World War, there appeared an almost instantaneous agreement among the Western European nations the need to defend their sovereignty against the rise of Soviet communism. Ironically the solution to this was the idea of a ‘New World Order’[1] for Europe. The Fifth Column was sold as a communist one, and thus the need to work with ‘former’ Nazis and fascists was justified to secure the European civilization from the threatened invasion by the ‘Asiatic hordes.’ Of course, the common people were not notified of this decision to reunite with the fascists; that not even before the end of the Second World War, there were discussions of aligning with the fascists to secure what was to be the ‘New World Order’.
To ensure that Europe would stand strong, it seemed only logical that it should form a European unity, able to collectively use their resources and military in a coordinated defense against this looming “Asian threat”. It would be interesting, that many nations who treated the army of Hitler with seeming indifference up to the very moment of invasion, would now trumpet loudly the need to prepare for war on all fronts (economically, culturally, politically, militarily including paramilitary) against the Eastern barbarians, and Mosley had positioned himself at the forefront of this clarion call.
In his The World Alternative (1936) Mosley wrote: “We must return to the fundamental concept of a European Nation which animated the war generation of 1918.” In reference to the openly pro-fascist former British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s (1916-1922) War Cabinet. When the Axis began losing crucial battles in 1943, this only intensified Europeanism as the new order’s last line of defense that would be entrusted to the younger generation. On November 14th, 1944 Mussolini proposed in the Verona programme “a European Community, with a federation of all nations and the development of Africa’s natural resources.”[2]
Stephen Dorril writes in his book Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism:[3]
“The Eastern Front was transformed into the ‘European Front’ as Europe’s defence became a supra-national moral obligation. The Waffen SS assumed the role of Europe’s army and its struggle to hold back the Bolsheviks from overrunning the West invoked an embryonic Europeanism, which became a central myth of post-war Fascism. Neo-Fascist thinker Maurice Bardeche wrote that ‘the Defense of the West has remained in the memory, and this is still the chief meaning of fascist ideas’.”
Churchill would also support such a direction with the United Europe Movement.[4]
On October 1st, 1947 Mosley published The Alternative, where he writes “Chaos looms and the people of Europe seek the alternative…Our creed was brought to dust because the Fascist outlook in each land was too national, we had no sense of European union.” A year later he wrote in The European Situation: The Third Force, that a united Europe will “insure that Europeans shall never be slaves either of West or East; either of finance or of bolshevism. We shall neither be bought by Wall Street nor conquered by the Kremlin.” However, the road to Europe’s salvation would not end there, according to Mosley, there would also be the need to secure labour from Africa to serve the needs of Europeans.
In 1948, the FBI, who were oddly stationed in London, had forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence headquarters that Mosley was planning a Fascist International.[5] The U.S. counterintelligence corps (CIC) also wrote a report noting that Mosley viewed “the national socialist elements in West Germany as the most suitable partners at the organising of a fascist concentration movement in Europe…[Mosley] was continuing the tradition of a Fascist International which Hitler was forced to abandon. He has hit on a stratagem which gives him the air of a progressive spirit.” The Austrian neo-Nazi paper Alpenruf wrote Dec 31st, 1949 “the spiritual centre of a cleansed Fascism is today neither in Germany nor in Austria, but – strange though it may seem – in England.” In the Swedish Fascist paper Vaegen Framat, they “claimed the European underground movements were growing but needed to be brought together to preserve everything that had been valuable in the past. The war had weakened their position and co-operation was essential, even for racial policies. Nations were not strong enough to enforce the unity of Europe.” [6]
This was the new chosen direction towards a Fascist International and none of it would have been possible without Churchill’s announcement of the Iron Curtain, for it pushed the European countries into this very configuration and justified the need to partner with ‘former’ fascists. The fascists did not need to militarily win the war, for the Europeans had walked into the Fascist International out of their own accord.
From this standpoint, WWII was in fact never won, rather it has been continued in the form of a Cold War to this very day. During this over 76 year long Cold War, fascist cells grew and were dispersed globally, and have come only relatively recently to be acknowledged under the umbrella term Gladio due to newly declassified intelligence dossiers. Mosley would also be at the forefront of these post-WWII paramilitary fascist cells, along with Karl-Heinz Priester and the legendary Nazi Otto Skorzeny who was one of the primary masterminds behind the entire Gladio network.[7]
The Gladio network was beholden to NATO, and thus it should not be surprising that the position of NATO Commander and Chief of Allied Forces Central Europewas a position that was filled SOLELY by ‘former’ Nazis for 16 YEARS STRAIGHT, from 1967-1983.
Mosley had concluded in his eerie introduction to his book Europe: Faith and Plan in support of a Pan-Europe:[8]
“In the light of all Europe’s recent history it is disingenuous nonsense to pretend that Germany is the only guilty party. It is more, it is a deliberate lie circulated for the vile purpose of perpetuating the division of Europe and for promoting the ultimate victory of communism. In the meantime it serves also the squalid purpose of those who snatch financial gain from the decay and collapse of a dying system, rather than make the effort to benefit both themselves and all Europe by honestly carrying the far greater rewards of constructive tasks in building the new system.
… In all nature the pangs of birth are severe, particularly in political nature. No fully grown man should be blamed for the pain or even the blood that accompanied his birth. For the long memory to linger on these things is to create a complex which can be disastrous to the whole psyche of Europe. That is precisely why we are continually invited to think about them.
Things were done in haste and passion which should now be forgotten. All who were drawn to the new movement of European dynamism and renaissance were people in too much of a hurry. It was a fault on the right side, for the results of the succeeding inertia are now plain to see. We felt that something must be done, and done quickly, to release the new and beneficent forces of science[9] and to wipe away unnecessary suffering from the face of humanity. We were impatient with the forces of inertia, reaction and anarchy which opposed the new European order of mind and will that we believed alone could do these things with the speed that was necessary.
…The catastrophe of this generation has destroyed the old landmarks of politics, and the modern mind should equally eliminate their memory. We have passed beyond Fascism and beyond many tenets of the old Democracy, because science has rendered them irrelevant in a world which confronts us with new facts. Not only are the facts of the post-war period new, but science is continually adding still newer facts.[10] Old policies have no relevance to the present, and old memories of bitterness should have no place in it either.
One great lesson alone we can all derive from the past. We owe to Europe self-restraint in moments of passion, and kindness at all times to our kindred. These evil things which have occurred are not only wrong, they do not pay. In the end they destroy those who commit them. The time-honoured standards of the European alone can endure. In the events of a great age, honour, truth and manly restraint are not only as necessary as in the past but more than ever essential. The great qualities in man should grow in proportion to the age, not diminish. Let us remember the past only long enough to learn this. Then let us forget [the past].
Europe needs a great act of oblivion, before a new birth.”
Operation Gladio: NATO’s Dagger
With the Second World War ‘won’, the world was very much under the impression that we were to take the phrase ‘Never Again’ to heart. Unfortunately, those in charge of forming Western policy and geopolitical strategy post-WWII could not have disagreed more.
Operation Unthinkable is a prime example of the sort of thinking that was ruminating within Britain and the United States post-Roosevelt. Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans by the British Chiefs of Staff against the Soviet Union in 1945. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces’ Joint Planning Staff (Roosevelt passed away on April 12th, 1945). One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to “impose the will of the Western Allies” on the Soviets. The second plan was a defensive scenario in which the British were to defend against a Soviet drive towards the North Sea and the Atlantic following the withdrawal of the American forces from the Continent.
Though the first plan of the operation would be shelved with the new government under Clement Attlee, this remained a predominantly governing mindset for British and American intelligence. However, contrary to what we are told today, the second plan of Operation Unthinkable was not shelved. It was in fact fully implemented under the initiation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This plan would continue through every other British Prime Minister’s term that followed afterward, without the knowledge of most members of the British government.
During the Second World War, preparations were made in the case of a possible German victory and ‘stay-behind’ guerilla warfare units were stationed throughout Europe. The model was the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, a top-secret guerilla-commando force established in 1940. It was the brainchild of Winston Churchill and was called ‘Churchill’s secret army.’ This program would eventually be adopted into NATO. After the Allied victory, these ‘stay-behind’ units were not disbanded but rather were strengthened and expanded in almost every European country, with direct aid and encouragement from the United States.
Daniele Ganser, a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland published NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe in 2005, which is regarded as an authoritative overview of NATO’s Operation Gladio networks and functions. This chapter will reference extensively Ganser’s pioneering work on this crucial history of Western clandestine warfare that was waged on Western civilians and their democratically elected governments for several decades under the guise of Soviet terrorism.
Daniele Ganser writes in NATO’s Secret Armies:[11]
“The clandestine network, which after the revelations of the Italian Prime Minister [Andreotti] was researched by judges, parliamentarians, academics and investigative journalists across Europe, is now understood to have been code-named ‘Gladio’ (the sword) in Italy., while in other countries the network operated under different names including ‘Absalon’ in Denmark, ‘ROC’ in Norway, ‘SDRA8’ in Belgium. In each country, leading members of the executive, including Prime Ministers, Presidents, Interior Ministers and Defense Ministers, were involved in the conspiracy, while the ‘Allied Clandestine Committee’ (ACC), sometimes also euphemistically called the ‘Allied Co-ordination Committee’ and ‘Clandestine Planning Committee’ (CPC), less conspicuously at times also called ‘Coordination and Planning Committee’ of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), coordinated the networks on the international level. The last confirmed secret meeting of ACC with representatives of European secret services took place on October 24, 1990 in Brussels.
…Leading officers of the secret network trained together with the U.S. Green Berets Special Forces in the United States of America and the British SAS Special Forces in England…In case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe the secret Gladio soldiers under NATO command… [formed a] stay-behind network operating behind enemy lines.”
However, the expected Soviet invasion never occurred. And thus, these secret armies found another purpose. They were to be used against the people. The desire was that by staging false-flag operations that were blamed on communists, panic and revulsion would be invoked sending voters flocking to the welcoming arms to so-called ‘secure’ right-wing governments. Italy, which had the largest and most powerful communist party in Europe, would be first on the hit-list. The Communist Party of Italy, admired for leading the fight against Mussolini, was expected to win in Italy’s first post-war election in June 1946. This, of course, was considered intolerable under the Iron Curtain diktat.
Investigative journalist Christopher Simpson writes in his book Blowback, how a substantial part of the funding for the opposition to the Communist Party of Italy, which was the Christian Democratic Party, came from captured Nazi assets, largely held by the Americans. This intervention tipped the balance in favour of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, which hid thousands of fascists in its ranks. The Christian Democratic Party would be the dominating party in Italy for five decades until it was dissolved in 1994.
In March 2001, General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, suggested that next to the Gladio secret army, the Italian secret service and a group of Italian right-wing terrorists, the massacres which had discredited the Italian communists had also been supported by the White House in Washington and the CIA. At a trial of right-wing extremists accused of having been involved in the Piazza Fontana massacre, General Maletti testified:
“The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism…The impression was that the Americans would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left… Italy has been dealt with as a sort of protectorate [of the United States]…”[12]
In order to ensure that no further communist support were to arise in Italy, Operation Gladio, with direction and support from the CIA and MI6, led a campaign of brutal violence against Italians that stretched into the better part of two decades known as the ‘years of lead,’ the anni di piombo.
Daniele Ganser writes in NATO’s Secret Armies:[13]
“According to the findings of the Belgian parliamentary investigation into Gladio, a secret non-orthodox warfare even preceded the foundation of the alliance [NATO]. As of 1948, non-orthodox warfare was coordinated by the so-called ‘Clandestine Committee of the Western Union’ (CCWU).
…When in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, CCWU [Clandestine Committee of the Western Union] was secretly integrated into the new international military apparatus and as of 1951 operated under the new label CPC [Clandestine Planning Committee]. At the time European NATO headquarters were in France and also the CPC was located in Paris. Like the CCWU before it the CPC was concerned with the planning, preparation and direction of non-orthodox warfare carried out by the stay-behind armies and Special Forces. Only officers with the highest NATO security clearance were allowed to enter CPC headquarters…under the guidance of CIA and MI6 experts the chiefs of the Western European Secret Services met at regular intervals during the year in order to coordinate measures of non-orthodox warfare in Western Europe.”
In 1959, an internal NATO briefing minute, dated June 1st, 1959, slipped into the hands of a British newspaper, which revealed that the task of the stay-behind units had been switched from confronting a Soviet invasion to confronting an “internal subversion”. The secret armies were henceforth to play a “determining role…not only on the general policy level of [domestic] warfare, but also on the politics of [domestic] emergency.”[14] What this meant was that a secret army of stay-behind units, under the direction of NATO, in absence of a Soviet threat, were to direct their actions to internal matters which would include espionage and acts of terrorism on the citizens of Europe with the support and cover of those nations’ police units. This would be used to further centralise control within right-wing governments who supported the NATO apparatus.
Operation Gladio, which used the tactic Strategy of Tension, functioned on three basic levels. The first was a guerilla war to be fought primarily on the streets, in order to draw loyalties away from the Soviet Union. The second level was the political front and would involve NATO-inspired conspiracies, which typically accused certain governments of being in secret partnership with the USSR, in order to evict democratically elected governments unfriendly to the NATO state apparatus and replace them with puppet regimes. The third level was the assassination (hard and soft) of figures who were deemed obstructive to NATO’s aims. Examples of Gladio assassinations include Italy’s former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 (known as Sweden’s JFK), Turkey’s Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1961 along with two cabinet colleagues, and U.S. President Kennedy in 1963. As well as the soft assassination (character assassination) of UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson. These assassinations would typically be followed by a NATO/U.S. supported putsch. Attempted assassinations from Operation Gladio included President de Gaulle (more on this shortly) and Pope John Paul II.[15]
Yves Guerin-Serac: the Black Ops Grandmaster behind Operation Gladio
“He [Yves Guerin-Serac] was in thrall to his personal vision of a Christian-Fascist New World Order. He was also the intellectual mentor of Gladio terrorism. He wrote the basic training and propaganda manuals which can be fairly described as the Gladio order of battle.”
– Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart to Europe
Guerin-Serac was a war hero, agent provocateur, assassin, bomber, intelligence agent, Messianic Catholic, and the intellectual grandmaster behind the ‘Strategy of Tension’ essential to the success of Operation Gladio. Guerin-Serac published via Aginter Press the Gladio manual, including Our Political Activity in what can aptly be described as Gladio’s First Commandment:[16]
“Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favouring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s structures…In our view the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist and pro-Soviet activities…Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups.”
“Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation [breakdown of the state]: blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons)…
This destruction of the state must be carried out under the cover of ‘communist activities.’ After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus. Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation.”
Anarchic random violence was to be the solution to bring about such a state of instability thus allowing for a completely new system, a global authoritarian order. Yves Guerin-Serac, who was an open fascist, would not be the first to use false-flag tactics that were blamed on communists and used to justify more stringent police and military control from the state.
On the 27th of February 1933, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, shouted outside the burning of the Reichstag:
“This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very day be strung up!”[18]
It is quite incredible that people never seem to grow tired of these sort of theatrics as part of the popular narrative of what we are told shapes our history, no matter how many times we have heard it played before. The line of obvious patsies is also something that seems to never grow tiring. In the case of the Reichstag fire, now widely acknowledged as a false-flag, it was some befuddled Dutch Jew that was instantly accused.
The day after the fire, six days before the scheduled general election, Hitler persuaded the elderly and confused President von Hindenburg (the icon of the First World War) that the crisis was of such profound gravity it could only be met by complete abolition of all personal liberties. The Reichstag Fire Law conferred by Hindenburg gave Hitler many of the instruments that he required for a total seizure of power. Within two weeks, parliamentary democracy was also reduced to the smoking embers of history. It would not be the only false-flag to be orchestrated by Hitler.
Richard Cottrell writes in Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe :[19]
“SS units forced a small group of concentration camp victims ‘released’ from Buchenwald and disguised in Polish uniforms, to stage a false flag mock attack on the main radio tower in the Nazi controlled free state of Danzig. Citing provocation by the Poles, the German invasion of Poland followed.”
Guerin-Serac spent his life dedicated to a new Black Empire[20] which he dreamed would combine the universal divinity of the Roman church with the United States and Europe as successor to the Holy Roman Empire. This was Christian Fascism and Yves Guerin-Serac was its Crusader.[21] He belonged to several old gangs, including the first generation of ‘former’ Nazis and fascists. He also belonged to a veteran clan of French officers blooded in the Indochinese and Korean struggles and was a member of the elite troop of the 11ème Demi-Brigade Parachutiste du Choc, which worked with the SDECE (French intelligence agency). His connection to French Intelligence would be key in his becoming a founding member of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), a French terrorist group, made up of disaffected French officers, based in Spain which fought against Algerian independence. Guerin-Serac would form an intricate paramilitary and terrorist network throughout Europe, as well as training facilities to service Operation Gladio, via the cover of Aginter Press.
“Guerin-Serac arrived in Lisbon in 1966 with an inspirational blueprint for the next stage of the struggle against godless liberalism. He proposed…an organization that would act as nothing less than an international travel agency for terrorists. The principal funding was supplied by the CIA, according to the Pellegrino Commission established in 1995 by the Italian Senate to investigate the anni di piombo [years of lead]. Guido Salvini was the magistrate appointed to examine the 1969 bombing of the agricultural bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana. He pinned the blame firmly on Guerin-Serac’s Aginter Press. Salvini told the senators that Aginter operatives were active in Italy from 1967 onwards, instructing local militant neo-fascist organisations in the use of explosives. From this nugget, the CIA is positively connected to the Gladio wave of terrorism sweeping Europe.”
Behind the plain business shopfront of Aginter Press lay an invisible network designed to shuttle terrorists around Europe, Latin America, and Africa providing false documents and passports for killers posing as reporters and photographers including Guerin-Serac.[23]
“Aginter… was a Gladio finishing school, where recruits to the secret armies from all over Europe were trained in the arts of bomb making, assassination, psychological operations, destabilisation and counter-insurgency. Much of this was borrowed from the textbooks of the U.S. Army’s centre for covert warfare at Fort Bragg.Guest instructors from time to time included members of Britain’s SAS, the Green Berets …Guerin-Serac was blithely summoned to next door Spain to organise the death squads crushing resistance to the Franco regime. Aginter activities have been traced to all those countries where the Strategy of Tension operated at peak volume: Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Germany and Belgium.”
Britain’s Betrayal of its Greek Brothers-in-Arms in Support of Fascism
Britain did not wait for the end of WWII before cooperating with Nazis. Under Mussolini’s direction, Italian troops attacked Greece during the Second World War in 1940 but were defeated by the massive resistance of the Greek population. Hitler, in turn, sent his German troops which conquered the country and placed it under the control of the Axis Powers in 1941. The Greeks once again organised a massive resistance operation and throughout the war the German army faced great difficulties keeping the country under control. As in Italy and France, Greece’s strongest resistance organisation to the fascist occupation was dominated by the communists. ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army, had been founded on the initiative of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) some months after the German invasion. EAM, the political wing of the People’s Liberation Army was also dominated by the Greek communists. Out of a population of seven million up to two million Greeks were members of the EAM party, while 50,000 were actively fighting in the ranks of the ELAS army.[25]
ELAS’s operations were supported by the British secret army SOE.[26] Many personal friendships developed between the Greek ELAS resistance fighters and the British SOE liaison officers. However, this was abruptly severed in March 1943 when Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to halt all British support for ELAS, as he feared that Greece after the defeat of the Axis Powers could come under communist control. At that time, Greece was at the peak of fighting a war with the German Nazis.
In order to minimise the power of the Greek communists and socialists, London planned to reinstall the Greek conservative King George II, who had cooperated with the fascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas (Prime Minister of Greece from April 1936 – January 1941), to form a pro-fascist government. Metaxas had called for a fascist “new order” in Greece, argu1943,that the Great Depression proved the failure of democracy and that fascism was the solution.[27] This fascist solution occurred in alignment with the restoring of the Greek monarchy.[28] The crucial British Foreign Office directive of March 20th, 1943 stated “SOE should always veer in the direction of groups willing to support the King and Government, and furthermore impress on such groups as may be anti-monarchical the fact that the King and Government enjoy the fullest support of His Majesty’s Government [of Britain].”[29] King George II was less than popular among many Greeks after having cooperated with the fascist dictator Metaxas. Yet London pursued the conservative policy and in October 1943, the British Foreign Office even contemplated “a downright policy of attacking and weakening EAM by every means in our power.”[30]
‘Former’ Nazi collaborators and right-wing special units such as the fascist X Bands, with British support started to hunt and kill ELAS fighters. However, these groups did not enjoy popular support and recruitment levels were only at around 600 men. Thus, Churchill decided to up the ante, and in late 1944 gave the order for a new Greek army unit, which came to be known variously as the Greek mountain Brigade, the Hellenic Raiding Force, or LOK, its Greek acronym Lochos Oreinon Katadromon.[31] As it was aimed against the communists and the socialists, the unit excluded “almost all men with views ranging from moderate conservative to left wing. Under British military supervision and at Churchill’s express order, the unit was filled with royalists and anti-republicans.”[32]
“As ELAS fought against both the German Nazi occupiers and the British-sponsored Hellenic Raiding Force, Churchill feared a public relations disaster should it be revealed to the British public that London was secretly supporting the fascists against the Communists in Greece. In August 1944 he therefore instructed the BBC to eliminate ‘any credit of any kind’ to ELAS when reporting on the liberation of Greece. But only weeks later ELAS secured victory over the German occupiers and Hitler was forced to withdraw his soldiers also from Greece. Churchill immediately demanded that the resistance should disarm, an order which ELAS was willing to obey if it was equally applied to their only remaining enemy on the field, the British sponsored Hellenic Raiding Force.”
Britain refused to disband the secret right-wing army and thus large Greek demonstrations against Britain’s support for the fascist monarchy took place on December 3rd, 1944, a mere six weeks after Hitler’s forces had been defeated and pushed out of the country. A small group of 200-600 peaceful protestors, men, women and children, gathered at the Syntagma Square in Athens, the main square in front of the Greek parliament. A much larger group of 60,000 protestors were delayed by police blockades. British troops and police with machine guns were positioned on the rooftops.[34] Suddenly, and without warning, the peaceful demonstration was turned into a massacre as the command was given: “Shoot the bastards.” Shortly after the bloodbath, the main group of protestors arrived in the square. In a display of remarkable restraint, these 60,000 protestors held a peaceful demonstration against Britain’s support for the fascist monarchy, while among the dead bodies of their recently slain comrades.
In London, Churchill faced an angry House of Commons which demanded an explanation for the barbarity. While admitting that it had been a “shocking thing,” Churchill stressed that it was equally stupid to bring large numbers of unarmed children to a demonstration, while the city was full of armed men. The role of the secret right-wing army in the Syntagma massacre was never investigated.[35]
After the demonstration of force, the British reinstalled King George II and a succession of weak British puppet governments with right-wing leanings followed. A Greek resistance faction rearmed and took to the hills and in the fall of 1946 started a civil war against the British and the local right. An exhausted Britain asked in early 1947 for the United States’ support. Truman with his famous ‘Truman Doctrine’ in March 1947 was able to convince Congress to openly intervene in Greece. Greece was the first country to be invaded by the United States during the Cold War.[36] In the following decades, Washington put forward the argument used in Greece to justify its open or covert invasions of Korea, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama and several other countries.[37]
The United States secretly started Operation Torch and used chemical warfare to defeat the Greek resistance by dropping thousands of gallons of Napalm on Greece.[38] By late 1948, the Greek resistance which had defeated the Italian fascists, the German Nazis and the British troops, finally collapsed after years of heroic fighting. A hollowed out Greece joined NATO in 1952 and by that time “had been moulded into a supremely reliable ally-client of the United States. It was staunchly anti-Communist and well integrated into the NATO system.”[39]
Peter Murtagh writes in The Rape of Greece: The King, the Colonels and the Resistance:[40]
“The [Hellenic] Raiding Force doubled as the Greek arm of the clandestine pan-European guerilla network set up in the 1950s by NATO and the CIA which was controlled from NATO headquarters in Brussels by the Allied Coordination Committee…The Greek branch of the network was…known as Operation Sheepskin.”
Is this what Kalergi was referring to as his “Crusade for Pan-Europe”; a “clandestine pan-European guerilla network” to ‘defend’ Europe?
“The Greek junta consolidated its power through a regime of imprisonment and torture…Communists, Socialists, artists, academics, journalists, students, politically active women, priests, including their friends and families were [horrifically] tortured…’We are all democrats here’ Inspector Basil Lambro, the chief of the secret police of Athens, was fond of stressing. ‘Everybody who comes here talks. You’re not spoiling our record.’ The sadist torturer made it clear to his victims: ‘We are the government, you are nothing. The government isn’t alone. Behind the government are the Americans.’ If in the mood Basil also offered his analysis of world politics: ‘The whole world is in two parts, the Russians and the Americans. We are the Americans. Be grateful we’ve only tortured you a little. In Russia, they’d kill you’.”
The National Security Act of 1947, a Trojan horse, was a part of the new breed of legislation post-Roosevelt and led to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), placing it under the direction of the National Security Council (NSC). Although it did not explicitly authorize the CIA to conduct covert operations, Section 102 was sufficiently vague to permit abuse. By December 1947, less than four months after the creation of the CIA, the perceived necessity to “stem the flow of communism” in Western Europe—particularly Italy—by overt and covert “psychological warfare” forced the issue and NSC 4-A[42] was born. NSC 4-A would be replaced by NSC 10/2[43] less than one year later, approved by President Truman on June 18th, 1948, creating the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). NSC 10/2 was the first presidential document which specified a mechanism to approve and manage covert operations, and also the first in which the term “covert operations” was defined.
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the U.S. parliament investigated the CIA and the NSC via the Frank Church Senate Committee Hearings[44] and found that:
“The national elections in Europe in 1948 had been a primary motivation in the establishment of the OPC…By channeling funds to centre parties and developing media assets, OPC attempted to influence the election results – with considerable success…These activities formed the basis for covert political action for the next twenty years. By 1952 approximately forty different covert action projects were under way in one central European country alone…Until 1950 OPC’s paramilitary activities (also referred to as preventive action) were limited to plans and preparations for stay-behind nets in the event of future war. Requested by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these projected OPC operations focused, once again, on Western Europe and were designed to support NATO forces against Soviet attack.”[45]
George F. Kennan selected Frank Wisner as the first commander of the CIA covert action unit OPC. Wisner and other U.S. OPC officers “tended to be white Anglo-Saxon patricians from old families with old money…and they somewhat inherited traditional British attitudes toward the coloured races of the world.”[46] Wisner became the chief architect of the network of secret armies in Western Europe. From 1948-1950 the OPC was a renegade operation run by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. In 1950 the OPC was renamed the Directorate of Plans and continued under the direct commandership of Frank Wisner. George F. Kennan, OPC overseer at the time, would strongly support the passing of NSC 10/2 and CIA covert actions in Italy and beyond.
“…next to the Pentagon the U.S. Special Forces were also directly involved in the secret war against the Communists in Western Europe, as together with the SAS they trained the members of the stay-behind network. After the U.S. wartime secret service OSS had been disbanded after the end of the war the U.S. Special Forces were reborn with headquarters at Fort Bragg, Virginia, in 1952. General McClure established a Psychological Warfare Centre in Fort Bragg and in the summer of 1952 the first Special Forces unit, somewhat misleadingly called the 10th Special Forces Group was organised according to the OSS experience during the Second World War, and directly inherited the latter’s mission to carry out, like the British SAS, sabotage missions and to recruit, equip and train guerillas in order to exploit the resistance potential in both Eastern and Western Europe.
…At all times the U.S. Special Forces were set up in Fort Bragg in 1952 the name of the CIA covert action branch changed from ‘OPC’ to ‘Directorate of Plans’ (DP), and Wisner was promoted Deputy Director of Plans. Together with CIA Director Allen Dulles he intensified U.S. covert action operations on a global scale. Dulles authorised CIA assassination attempts on Castro and Lumumba as well as the CIA’s LSD experiments with unwitting subjects…”
Edward Lansdale who was chief of the Saigon Military Mission and a protégé of General Lemnitzer; who wanted to send a submarine to the shore outside Havana where it would create an “inferno of light.” At the same time, according to Lansdale’s plan, Cuba-based agents would warn the religious natives of the second coming of Christ and the Savior’s distaste for Fidel Castro. The plan was called ‘Elimination by Illumination,’ but was ultimately shelved.[48] It would be funny if such plans stayed on paper, but these men were responsible for the torture and deaths of countless individuals for the plans that made it into reality.
As soon as General Lemnitzer became Army Chief of Staff in 1959, he installed Lansdale at a desk in Deputy Defense Secretary Gilpatric’s office in the Pentagon. Lansdale was put in charge of Operation Mongoose under direct patronage of Lemnitzer with the main object to eliminate Castro in direct defiance of federal law prohibiting political assassinations. Operation Mongoose was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians and covert operations carried out by the CIA and was run out of JM/Wave in Miami. Lansdale would participate in many covert operations including raids and bombings in Cuba and other targets all over Latin America.
In March 1962, General Lemnitzer, not taking a hint as to what happened to Dulles, Bissell and Cabell, decided it would be a good idea to propose Operation Northwoods to President Kennedy for approval. Operation Northwoods was a proposed false-flag operation against American citizens, which called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets and subsequently blame the Cuban government in order to justify a war against Cuba. The plan was drafted by General Lemnitzer specifically and had a striking similarity with NATO’s Operation Gladio. The logic of Northwoods was the stripe of Gladio. The general staff inclined towards prefabricated violence because they believed benefits gained by the state count more than injustice against individuals. The only important criterion was reaching the objective and the objective was ultra right-wing government.
There was not a single item in the Northwoods manual that did not amount to a blatant act of treason, yet the U.S. military establishment dispatched Top Secret – Justification for U.S. military Intervention in Cuba straight to the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for onward transmission to President Kennedy. Needless to say, President Kennedy rejected the proposal and a few months later General Lemnitzer’s term was not renewed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served from October 1st 1960 to September 30th 1962.
However, NATO lost no time, and in November 1962 Lemnitzer was appointed commander of U.S. European Command and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of NATO, the latter to which he served from January 1st, 1963 to July 1st, 1969.
Lemnitzer was a perfect fit to oversee the cross-continental Gladio operations in Europe. He had been a prime motivating force in setting up the Special Forces Group in 1952 at Fort Bragg, where commandos were trained in the arts of guerilla insurgency in the events of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Before long the men who proudly wore distinctive green berets were cooperating discreetly with the armed forces of a string of European countries and participating in direct military operations some of them extremely sensitive and highly illegal if not downright treasonous.
One of these operations was the NATO/CIA coalition which had sponsored at least two attempts to assassinate President de Gaulle.[49] In response to this, de Gaulle had kicked NATO’s headquarters out of France, removed France from NATO and had given Lemnitzer a summary order to quit NATO. If President de Gaulle’s orders had been denied, he would have been prepared to go to war, and thus there was a bit of reshuffling, but essentially the game continued intact.
“France is determined to regain on her whole territory the full exercise of her sovereignty.”
– President of France Charles de Gaulle
It was thought by many of the pro-fascist imperialist persuasion that de Gaulle was ultimately going to play ball. That though he may have had his criticisms of fascism, he was at the end of the day an anti-communist and an imperialist and thus, it was inevitable that he would eventually ‘see the light’. This was something that the pro-fascists thought they could work with in the ‘restructuring’ of Europe amidst a Cold War.
“On the initiative of the U.S. and the British Special Forces SAS, a secret army was set up in France under the cover name ‘Plan Bleu’ (Blue Plan) whose task was to secretly prevent the powerful PCF [Communist Party of France] from coming to power. The Blue Plan, in other words, aimed to prevent France from turning red…The SAS, specialised in secret warfare, contacted the newly created French secret service Direction Generale des Etudes et Recherche (DGER) and agreed with them to set up a secret army in northern France across the Channel in the Bretagne.”
One month after having ousted the communists from the government, the French socialists attacked the military right and the CIA and exposed the Plan Bleu secret army. On June 30th, 1947, French socialist Minister of the Interior Edouard Depreux exposed that a secret right-wing army had been erected in France behind the back of politicians with the task to destabilize the French government. “Towards the end of 1946 we got to know of the existence of a black resistance network, made up of resistance fighters of the extreme-right, Vichy collaborators and [pro] monarchists…They had a secret attack plan called ‘Plan Bleu’, which should have come into action towards the end of July, or on August 6 [1947].”[51]
“The secret war against the Communists did not end when Plan Bleu was exposed and closed down in 1947. Much to the contrary, French Socialist Prime Minister Paul Ramadier saw to it that his trusted chiefs within the military secret service were not removed by the scandal. When the storm had passed he ordered Henri Ribiere, Chief of SDECE, and Pierre Fourcand, deputy Director of the SDECE, in late 1947 to erect a new anti-Communist secret army under the code name ‘Rose des Vents’ (Rose of the Winds, i.e. Compass Rose), the star-shaped official symbol of the NATO. The code name was well chosen, for when NATO was created in 1949 with headquarters in Paris, the SDECE coordinated its anti-Communist secret war closely with the miliary alliance. The secret soldiers understood that within its maritime original context the compass rose is the card pattern below the compass needle according to which the course is set, and according to which corrections are undertaken if the ship is in danger of steering off course.”
(left) NATO’s symbol, (right) ‘Rose des Vents (Rose of the Winds i.e. Compass Rose) name of a French anti-communist secret army established in 1947. NATO’s first headquarters was established in France in 1949.
However, there was one very large mistake that was made in establishing NATO’s base in France. De Gaulle was not going to play ball after all…
After the Second World War there was increasing pressure for European nations to commit to the NATO diktat. President of France Charles de Gaulle (1959-1969) disagreed with this orientation. One of the major points of this disagreement was over the force de frappe (nuclear striking force), which de Gaulle believed should be kept firmly outside of NATO’s control. He refused the prospect of France getting automatically dragged into a shooting war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. De Gaulle’s relentless pursuit of French nationalism and independence in foreign and military policies was clearly incompatible with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s charter. When de Gaulle began talk of delivering Algeria her independence, it was decided by former allies, and members of his own military and police that de Gaulle had to go.
On April 21st, 1961, a plot to overthrow President de Gaulle, organised by the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète, the French terrorist group run by Yves Guerin-Serac) swung into action. On that day, four disaffected generals known as the ‘ultra group’ staged a coup in Algiers. The civil caucus in Washington, Pentagon and NATO headquarters in France were all implicated in the plot to eliminate the French president and secure Algeria for the West. The coup leader, air force general Maurice Challe, was formerly commander of NATO’s forces in Central Europe.
The first outlines of the coup were agreed in the summer of 1960, when the former governor of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle, had a secret tête-à-tête with Richard M. Bissell. Bissell, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans (formerly called the OPC), the covert operations wing of the CIA, and close associate of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. In the same year, Challe stage-managed his resignation from NATO. In January 1961 the main plotters assembled, the chief item on the agenda was to form the OAS as an alternative government that would replace de Gaulle’s government once he had been toppled. Key figures in Plan Bleu were all present.[53] Challe’s forces in Algeria were secretly funded using channels closely connected to the French Gladio.[54] On the eve of the coup, Bissell, had an undisclosed meeting with Challe in Algiers. Challe was told that if he could get the country under control inside 48 hours, then the U.S. government would formally recognise his regime.[55] The putsch ultimately failed.
“When NATO was founded in 1949, its headquarters, including the SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe], were built in France. France was thereafter particularly vulnerable to NATO and CIA secret warfare as de Gaulle lamented – for together with NATO also the secret Gladio command centre CPC [Clandestine Planning Committee] was located in Paris as the Italian document ‘The special forces of SIFAR [Italian intelligence] and Operation Gladio’ of June 1959 revealed. ‘On the level of NATO the following activities must be mentioned: 1. The activity of the CPC of Paris…attached to SHAPE.’”
What this meant was that the Gladio command centre, the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) was located in Paris to directly coordinate with NATO’s headquarters. In other words, Gladio was working directly for the NATO command centre.
Ganser continues:
“Furthermore also the secret Gladio command centre ACC [ Allied Clandestine Committee] repeatedly met in Paris. It came as a massive shock to the White House in Washington when de Gaulle in February 1966 – due to a number of strategic and personnel motives that historians still struggle to explain – decided to challenge the United States head-on, and ordered NATO and the United States either to place their military bases in France under French control, or to dismantle them. The United States and NATO did not react to the ultimatum whereupon in a spectacular decision de Gaulle took France out of NATO’s military command on March 7, 1966 and expelled the entire NATO organisation together with its covert action agents from French territory. To the anger of Washington and the Pentagon the European headquarters of NATO had to move to Belgium. In Brussels, Mons and Casteau, new European NATO headquarters were being erected where they have remained until today. The Belgium parliamentary investigation into Gladio and secret warfare later confirmed that ‘in 1968 the Chair of CPC moved to Brussels.’ [in order to be with NATO] Research in Belgium furthermore revealed that the ACC secret warfare centre held a meeting with international participation in Brussels as late as October 23 and 24, 1990.
Belgium Gladio author Jan Willems drew attention to the sensitive fact that when de Gaulle withdrew the French army from the military-integrated command of NATO, some of the secret agreements between France and the United States were cancelled. ‘On this occasion it was revealed that secret protocols existed concerning the fight against Communist subversion, signed bilaterally by the United States and its NATO allies. De Gaulle denounced the protocols as an infringement of national sovereignty. Similar secret clauses were also revealed in other NATO states. In Italy Giuseppe de Lutiis revealed that when becoming a NATO member Italy in 1949 had signed not only the Atlantic Pact, but also secret protocols that provided for the creation of an unofficial organisation ‘charged with guaranteeing Italy’s internal alignment with the Western Block by any means, even if the electorate were to show a different inclination.’ And also in the initial NATO agreement in 1949 required that before a nation could join, it must have already established a national security authority to fight Communism through clandestine citizen cadres’.”
Not only was de Gaulle not going to go along with the secret armies of NATO, but he was going to actively intervene to ensure the sovereignty of Europe’s nations against the fascist imperialist end-goal of NATO and its secret Gladio arms. It was a full all-out-war in the underground world of intelligence and clandestine warfare, and de Gaulle was one of the very few that was fully equipped to play the game.
There would subsequently be over 30 assassination attempts on de Gaulle’s life during his presidency. After 43 years, in 2009, France would finally rejoin NATO, a decision made by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has had “an interesting record of winning elections with dramatic perfectly timed post-terror interventions…”[57] It should be noted that there has been a great deal of effort to either flatly deny or downplay France’s role in Gladio, and the involvement of NATO, however, these are demonstrably false. When Italy’s Operation Gladio was finally revealed to the world in the early 1990s (more on this shortly), there was a media frenzy inquiring into whether other governments within Europe were also implicated.
The French along with the British denied that their governments had any involvement in the Gladio networks. Italian Prime Minister Andreotti, not wanting to be the only boat sunk, mercilessly shattered the French cover-up when on November 10th, 1990 he declared that France also had taken part in the very recent meeting of the Gladio directing body ACC (Allied Clandestine Committee) in Belgium on October 23rd, 1990. It was only with Andreotti’s accusation that France changed its tune and acknowledged its role in Gladio, with French Defence Minister Jean Pierre Chevènement claiming that the French secret army was “completely passive…”[58]
In the Quiet of a Small Town
“Sex trafficking, industrial paedophilia, the reports of snuff movies made for political and financial blackmail, or just for profit, were all entangled in a black cobweb of spies, officially connived drug running, the secret paramilitary network, and the constant meddling of NATO’s high command in the internal affairs of the country.”
– Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe
Belgium is made up of a Flemish and French ethnic population. During WWII, many Flemings either openly or symbolically sided with the Germans, in hopes of Flemish nationhood – even within a Nazi commonwealth – doing away with Belgium altogether.
Richard Cottrell writes in Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe:[59]
“A residue from wartime fraternisation with the Germans led to Nazi-style paganistic symbolism and mystical blood bonding ceremonies within the Belgian stay-behind network and elements of the national armed forces, which in any event inclined to the Right. This mystical streak was set for a chilling significance in shaping many of the perversion yet to be wrought on Belgium.”
“According to Belgian Gladio author Jan Willems, the creation of WUCC [Western Union Clandestine Committee] in spring 1948 had been a direct consequence of a public speech by British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin held in London on January 22, 1948. In front of the British parliament Bevin had elaborated on his plan for a ‘Union Occidental’, an international organisation designed to counter what he perceived to be the Soviet threat in Europe…”
Ernest Bevin (Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs July 1945-March 1951) aided in the creation of NATO and was instrumental in the founding of the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, specialised in pro-colonial, anti-communist, disinformation propaganda, including black propaganda.[61] His commitment to the West European security system, made him eager to sign the Treaty of Brussels in 1948. It drew Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg into an arrangement for collective security, opening the way for the formation of NATO in 1949.[62] Bevin also played a role in Parliament misinforming MPs and failing to extradite the Mufti of Jerusalem, while in French custody, who had been installed and funded by the British government in Palestine and had worked closely with the Nazis during the Second World War.[63]
Little Belgium soon after NATO’s move to Brussels, had the second most powerful and intrusive crime cartels in Western Europe. In a very short time, Europe’s cockpit was also its chief narcotics and illegal arms hub, with a sideline of sex trafficking. According to investigative journalist Richard Cottrell,[64] the CIA had recruited Belgian Nazis – mostly, but not exclusively, Flemish – as soon as the war ended, and selected them for high offices at state and provincial levels. Such ‘former’ Belgian Nazi figures were protected from justice and released from prison under the protection of the CIA. NATO’s machinations along with General Lemnitzer’s imported experts in counterinsurgency[65] were responsible for the formation of the Belgian Gladio operations; divided into SDRA-8 (French) and STC/Mob (Flemish) divisions.[66]
“According to journalist Manuel Abramowitz – a leading investigator of the far Right in Belgium – neo-Nazis were egged on to infiltrate all the mechanisms of the state, with special attention reserved for the police and the army. By the 1980s, this level of penetration had become so deep – thanks to fascist fronts such as the neo-Nazi militia Westland New Post and its French speaking counterpart, Front de la Jeunesse – that Belgium’s military forces could be said to have fallen almost entirely under extremist control. Not once in the wake of the many false-flag operations over the coming decades, did convincing proof ever appear of a credible coordinated Left-wing subversive force operating on Belgian soil, while seditious organisations of the Far Right flourished openly.”
Senator Hugo Coveliers chairman of the special investigating committee probing gangsterism and terrorism in Belgium (1988-1990) tracked the presence of incriminating materials to a special unit called the ‘judicial police’. Here is what Coveliers said on what became known as the ‘scandal of the X-Dossiers’:
“Imagine, everywhere you hear that story about a blackmail dossier in which organisations of the extreme right are in the possession of pictures and videos on which a number of prominent people in and around Brussels have sex with young girls; minors it is said. The existence of this dossier has always been vehemently denied. Until it was proven that testimonies and videos of this affair indeed were in the possession of the police services.
The at first non-existing dossier turns out to exist. The videos without substance then turn out to be interesting enough after all to be handed over to the examining magistrate tasked with the investigation into the Gang of Nivelles [held responsible for some of the shop massacres]. But this person is subsequently afraid to testify about that! What do you think is going on here!”[68]
Cottrell, who is a former European Parliament MP and has conducted formal investigations ordered by the European Parliament, explores these avenues in greater detail in his book. He concludes that these sex-trafficking rings within Belgium, involving the abuse and murder of children, are encouraged among public officials for two reasons. The first is to produce incriminating blackmail making political retreat impossible. The second reason is that some of these activities that were recorded and retained in top secret files, were part of cultist initiation ceremonies.
“It was alleged these involved paganistic neo-Nazi traits such as blood rituals, practised by elements within the state’s secret forces, as well as the orthodox military structure.”
In the context of this, NATO’s twitter scandal posting the Black Sun Nazi occult symbol[70] for international women’s day in 2022, might not have been a slip-up after all…
Among the plethora of books H.G. Wells wrote, was “The New World Order,” (1940). It appears that Wells was among the very first to pioneer the now infamous term. ↑
Dorril, Stephen. (2006) Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism. Viking, London, New York, pg. 560-561. ↑
Chung, Cynthia. (2022) The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set: The Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy. See Chapter 2. ↑
Dorril, Stephen. (2006) Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism. Viking, London, New York, pg. 577. ↑
Dorril, Stephen. (2006) Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism. Viking, London, New York, pg. 15-16 ↑
Mosley wrote to Wells to congratulate him on a speech supporting ‘Liberal Fascism’. Mosley included a copy of his book The Greater Britain, and wrote “I am afraid the word ‘Liberal’ has not much relation in my book, but it certainly is an attempt to create a scientific Fascism which is free from the excess and repressions of the Continent…like most prophets, you will probably have the unpleasant experience of recognising many of your own teachings of the past reproduced and reshaped by less capable hands.” From Stephen Dorril’s book ‘Blackshirt.’ ↑
Refer to Chapter 1 of my book “The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set” for Mosley’s concept of a “scientific dictatorship” which was almost entirely influenced by H.G. Wells. ↑
Ganser, Daniele. (2005) NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, London, New York, pg. 1. ↑
Ganser, Daniele. (2005) NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, London, New York, pg. 28 ↑
Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press. Richard Cottrell is a former European Parliament MP and investigative journalist. Cottrell has also conducted formal investigations commissioned by the European Parliament. ↑
For more details around the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II see Richard Cottrell’s book Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe. ↑
Ganser, Daniele. (2005). NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, pg. 115-121. ↑
William L. Shirer. (1959) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, pg. 192. ↑
Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, Nato’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press. ↑
Black Empire is in reference to a Fascist Empire. ↑
Recall from Chapter 2 Kalergi’s Catholic Crusade for a Pan-Europe. ↑
Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press. ↑
Recall in Chapter 1, that Mosley and his son were working for a Spanish travel agency that was organising Otto Skorzeny’s travel itinerary, which was likely connected to Aginter Press. ↑
Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press. ↑
Ganser, Daniele. (2005). NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, pg. 212. ↑
Cliadakis, Harry. (January 1979). The Political and Diplomatic Background to the Metaxas Dictatorship, 1935-36. Journal of Contemporary History. 14 (1): pg. 117–138. ↑
The United States Senate. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence activities. Book IV: Supplementary detailed staff reports on foreign and military intelligence, pg. 36. ↑
Powers, Thomas. (January 1979) The man who kept the secrets: Richard helms and the CIA. Alfred A. Knopf, pg. 37. ↑
Ganser, Daniele. (2005). NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. Frank Cass, pg. 57. ↑
Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 143. ↑
Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press. ↑
Baylis, John (1982). Britain and the Dunkirk Treaty: The Origins of NATO. Journal of Strategic Studies. 5 (2): pg. 236–47. ↑
See Chapter 11 of my book ‘The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set.’ ↑
Richard Cottrell is a former European Parliament MP and investigative journalist. Cottrell has also conducted formal investigations commissioned by the European Parliament. ↑
See Chapter 8 of my book ‘The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set.’ ↑
Richard Cottrell. (2015) Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe. Progressive Press. ↑
Note from Michael Rossi Poli Sci who subtitled that video:
Dear Patreon Supporters,
First off, thank you once again for your pledged support and votes of confidence on my work.
Unfortunately, YouTube decided to remove the latest video I uploaded today (Sunday November 27) of Sergey Lavrov giving an interview on political extremism in Europe AS “hate speech”. How they came to that conclusion is beyond me, but I suppose it had to do with the video title having the word “extremism” in it, and “nazism” in the description.
Either way, YouTube removed the video and I have received my first Community Guideline strike, preventing me from upload, commenting, or interacting in any way on my channel for a week. I have appealed the strike, but I don’t know when I will hear back.
In the meantime, I have uploaded the video here and made it publicly accessible. Please feel free to share with those whom you think would benefit from it. For the next week, you’re my “ambassadors” of sorts 🙂
I hope to get this straightened out ASAP, because YouTube offers no prior warning or review of content before something gets flagged, and videos with direct “hate speech” get published all the time.
I may start moving more of the translated videos over here and making it Patrons Only.
Ukraine and the United States were the only two countries in the world that did not vote in the UN for the Resolution on the fight against the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism, xenophobia and intolerance. In addition, Ukraine has included pro-Nazi military formations in the regular army, and all this lead to the creation of collective psychopathology.
Therefore, the video of the execution of Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian troops, which circulated in the media and social networks, is far from the only video recording of war crimes by Ukrainian army.(1) Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, videos of beaten and stripped prisoners of war and civilians suspected of collaborating with the Russians have appeared on the network. Records of torture also circulated widely.
However, what shocks the public is that official Kyiv promotes the violation of the Geneva Convention and does not care about the promotion of war crimes. What are the reasons for such “public violence”, which greatly compromise both the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian president Zelensky himself?
It is certain that the Russian army in Ukraine also committed some crimes, bearing in mind that it is an armed formation of over 200,000 people. However, the Russian military police has an iron discipline in this matter, and such things are severely punished. And such an order comes from the Kremlin, because President Putin has repeatedly emphasized publicly that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation. And that the Russian army must take into account not only Ukrainian civilians but also captured soldiers.
The above can be confirmed by the fact that since the beginning of the conflict, a large number of independent journalists have been accompanying the Russian army and reporting from the front. It must be emphasized here that the majority of journalists are not from Russia but from the West. This is evidenced by the fact that more than once, due to journalists filming and revealing the positions of the Russian army, there have been losses of equipment in the Russian army.
But Russians are not characterized by cruelty. The main difference between Ukrainian nationalists and Russian fighters is different cultural traditions. In the 80th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, formed in Lviv from the natives of Western Ukraine, the personnel were brought up in the spirit of the traditions of the Ukrainian underground during the Second World War. Recall that then the supporters of Stepan Bandera shot back pro-Soviet and pro-Polish activists, including doctors and teachers sent to western Ukraine, and also massacred entire Jewish and Polish villages.
In the Russian mentality, mockery and mistreatment of prisoners is unacceptable. You can kill the enemy, but not torture. Russians in their ideology have always opposed themselves to the German Nazis with their concentration camps and gas chambers. So, if someone posted a video of the torture and murder of captured soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russian audience would explode with indignation, recognizing the perpetrators of such acts as war criminals.
However, the true reason for the appearance of Ukrainian torture videos lies not even in the different mentality of Ukrainian nationalists and Russians. In fact, Kiev propagandists deliberately give the green light to such videos. This is primarily done to scare Russian soldiers and reservists. And official Kiev does not pay much attention to these crimes.
Take for example the recent Ukrainian war crime in Makiivka. The Ukrainian army immediately began to claim that the video was staged and fake. However, it was the Western experts who confirmed the authenticity of the video and the Western media exerted pressure to launch an investigation.
However, such video propaganda of cruelty actually has a much more serious purpose. Its main task is to form a stable feeling of hatred between Russians and residents of Ukraine. EU residents have little idea of the mentality of the average Russian. The fact is that many in Russia sincerely consider the current war to be a civil one. Almost all Russians treat Ukrainians either as a very close people or as southwestern Russians. Half of the inhabitants of Ukraine have Russian surnames, relatives in Russia and use Russian as their main language. However, each such video should, according to the plan of Kiev radical propagandists, change the mentality of Russians more and more. They must hate all the inhabitants of Ukraine, stop treating them as “their own” and recognize that reconciliation with Ukraine and a new reunification with it is impossible. Peace will come sooner or later, but a steel wave of hatred will fall between the future Ukraine and Russia. At the same time, Russia’s desire to punish the killers of defenseless prisoners of war and civilians will also prevent the settlement of relations between Moscow and Kyiv for many decades.
The line of military contact between Russia and Ukraine is lengthening, fresh troops and new weapons are coming to the front from both sides. Obviously, the execution in Makiivka will not be the last video demonstrating the complete disregard of Kyiv, for “democratic values”, the Geneva Convention and human rights.
However, what appalls observers of the conflict in Ukraine even more is the fact that the Ukrainian army tortures and kills its own citizens. We could see this during the Ukrainian seizure of Izyum and Kherson. After which hundreds of Ukrainian citizens simply disappeared, that is, they were liquidated by the SBU and the Ukrainian army.
The question involuntarily begs itself, does a united Europe need such a Ukraine, proud of the massacres?
*The author with Pyatnashka commanders at outpost near Avdeevka, Donetsk People’s Republic. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
Published Nov 19, 2022, Covert Action[See the comments section, some apologists for the West’s war on Syria have resurfaced…]
Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.
Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.
But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk III peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.
Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally sent troops into Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.
Voices From the Frontlines of Former Eastern UkraineRepublics
In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbas commanders I spoke with there. [Watch our interview here]
To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbas.
From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.
It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbas forces now controlling it.
*“Vydra,” a unit commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbas to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.
“We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.”
There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”
His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.
A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbas, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.
An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.
A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”
The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.
Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.
“We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian.
I’ve been involved in sports a lot of time, wrestling. So, I’ve got a lot of friends in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Odessa, Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Transcarpathia.
I have relatives in western Ukraine, and we still communicate. Yes, they say one thing on the street, but when we talk to each other, they say, ‘Well, you have to, because the SBU is listening.’
Ukraine shouts about democracy, then puts people in handcuffs for no reason. My aunt got in trouble because they found my photo on her Skype.
And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]
He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country.
“When the artillery hit the city of Yenakievo, east of Gorlovka, we were defenseless. We went with hunting rifles and torches to fight them. Most of the weapons we had later were captured from them. We had to go to the battlefield without weapons in order to get the weapons.”
When asked if he was concerned that Ukrainian forces might take Donetsk he replied no, of course not, they didn’t succeed in 2014, they won’t now.
When asked whether he had a message for soldiers of the Ukrainian army, Vydra replied without hesitating, “Go home! We’ve been saying that since 2014: Go home. Unequivocally, we don’t want them here, but we don’t want to kill them. I’m not speaking about nationalists, I’m speaking about Ukrainian soldiers, who are drafted or forcefully employed in the Ukrainian army. Guys, go home, either surrender or go. This is our land. We’re not leaving, we’re not going anywhere.”
I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:
“Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”
“It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”
I asked whether he thought friendship between Ukrainians and Russians would be possible.
“It will take years for any friendship. Take Chechnya, one region of Russia, it was at war. But slowly, slowly…We must all live together. We are one people.” Indeed, now Chechen fighters are one of the most effective forces fighting alongside Donbas and Russian soldiers to liberate Donbas areas from Ukrainian forces.
He opened a zippered trousers pocket and proudly brandished a small plastic sleeve containing children’s drawings, also containing icons of saints and Christ, and prayers…
“This is very personal, it’s like my guardian angel. I put it in plastic, I don’t even keep my ID in plastic. I’ve been carrying this one in my pocket since February. I’ve been in all sorts of hot spots. A child drew this, we receive letters from children. It’s very nice to look at them when it’s hard and we are under fire.”
He read one letter:
“We are waiting for you. Thank you for risking your lives to defend Donbas. Yulia and Ira.”
“I don’t even know who are Yulia and Ira,” he said smiling.
Showing the icons, he said, “This is Saint Ushakov, our great commander. This is Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Protector. This Abkhazi icon was given to me by the guys. This is a prayer book. And here is a prayer,” he said of one page prayer.
“These words are to support when times are very hard. When there is heavy shelling, it can go on for hours. So, while you’re sitting there, you can read this.
Especially for the younger guys, 22, 23 years old, just finished college. This is new to them.”
Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War
Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]
“America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there.
And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.
However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.”
“Kabar,” a commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]
When asked about his feeling regarding Ukrainians, “Kabar” replied similarly to Vydra.
“We don’t blame the whole Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are our friends, they are our relatives. They’ve been struck by evil, and it’s not their fault, ordinary people are not to blame for this. We will liberate them from fascism, we’ll show them brotherhood, and we’ll make friends.
This is a good opportunity for us to defeat evil. God has honored us with this right to fight evil.”
Kamaz, when asked why he is fighting, replied that this is his homeland, he was born here, and that he has a son who he doesn’t want to inherit Ukraine’s war on the Donbas.
“I myself am Greek by nationality. Ukrainians are Slavs, they are our brothers, their grandfathers fought together shoulder to shoulder with our grandfathers against Nazism and fascism. We are here to finish it, so that our children live a normal happy life. We are fighting for the future.”
He spoke of America’s continuous need for war.
“We’ve seen it in Syria and Yugoslavia, where they destroyed everything and then set everything up their own way, so the people must submit, almost like slaves.”
I asked whether he thought peace between Ukraine and Russia is possible.
“Yes, possibly, why not? But at the moment, the President of Ukraine said there will be no negotiations.
Negotiations are possible, but I think not with this president. When he comes to his senses, he will not be able to negotiate, because he took a lot of money.”
Before leaving the outpost, we chatted a bit with the commanders. A puppy sought the attention of a young soldier. Another puppy ran around our feet. The outpost commanders and soldiers take care of the dogs. Their presence added a somewhat surreal touch to the scene: an outpost which is routinely shelled, where life can cease to exist at any moment, and these happy, well-cared for puppies running around like dogs anywhere.
Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders
While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbas republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.
The sacrifices which the people of the Donbas republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense.
Just as the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army were maligned, so too have Donbas forces have been maligned by Western media, though both are defending their homelands from terrorist forces trained and funded by the West. Terrorists given the freedom to commit endless atrocities against Donbas civilians.
These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity.
Ahead of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, calls to de-politicize sports seem ridiculous and senseless upon examining the inseparable historical connection between sports and politics.
Debunking the myth of ‘de-politicizing’ sports
A few days before the 2022 Qatar World Cup, French President Emmanuel said that sport should not be politicized.
“I think we must not politicize sport,” said Macron, whose national team is defending the title it won in Russia in 2018.
Macron, who will go to Qatar if the French team reaches the semifinals, said it was “a very bad idea to politicize sport,” noting that France will host the Olympic Games in 2024.
This comes amid a wave of criticism that Qatar is being subjected to over reports that many migrant workers — predominantly from South Asia and South-East Asia and Africa — have suffered from exploitation and widespread labor abuses while working on the Gulf country’s World Cup projects.
Doha is also accused of allegedly paying bribes to some football federations in exchange for winning the right to host the FIFA World Cup on its territory.
It seems that the French President is contradicting himself and has apparently “forgotten” his interference and role in ensuring that French player Kylian Mbappe remains in France with his current team Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), as well as forcing coach Didier Deschamps to call Real Madrid player Karim Benzema to the French national team and participate in the 2020 European Championship, as per investigative journalist Romain Molina.
It also seems that Macron has forgotten that his country’s football federation did politicize sport and was the first to call for the expulsion of the Russian national team from the 2022 World Cup following the start of the war in Ukraine, showing clear double standards and turning a blind eye on several other issues pertaining to human rights, such as Israeli occupation crimes against Palestinians for example.
Soon after the Ukraine war broke out, numerous sports governing bodies suspended Russia from international competitions. However, these bans coincided with unprecedented support for Ukraine despite these bodies banning any other form of political or religious expression on the field.
Solidarity with #Ukraine is being shown across stadiums worldwide, breaking the sports no-politics doctrine. On the other hand, athletes and football clubs were fined and even punished for showing support for #Palestine. Who's politicizing the matter? #Russiapic.twitter.com/GVZ6Sxjyfl
Aside from the French President’s shallow argument, let’s not forget that, historically, sports have always been intertwined with politics and used as a theater to promote political ideology, voice political messages and criticism, shift diplomatic feuds to sports arenas, and whitewash human rights violations by political regimes – also known as sportswashing.
Several sports clubs around the world were even established on the basis of politics, were influenced by their founders who are usually into politics, and their fans follow certain political ideologies.
Felix Jakens, head of Priority Campaigns and Individuals at Risk at Amnesty International UK, defines sportswashing as “a process or moment where a country with a bad human rights record attempts to use sport as a way to create positive PR to clean up its image and deflect attention away from its human rights record.”
For example, when Italy was awarded the right to host the second FIFA World Cup in 1934, Italian fascist Benito Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to whitewash his regime’s image in front of the international community, despite the heinous crimes committed at the time.
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini awarding the 1934 World Cup to Italy’s players (AP)
Similarly, Adolph Hitler used the 1936 Olympics held in Germany in an attempt to promote Nazism and prove the superiority of the Aryan-race athletes.
Adolph Hitler during the Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany in August 1936 (AP)
The same can be said about Argentina organizing the 1978 World Cup under the dictatorship of General Jorge Videla, where matches would be played a few meters away from where thousands of dissidents were being tortured.
On the other hand, the sports arena was also used, by athletes and fans, to protest injustice and show support for rightful causes.
In fact, when late boxing champion Muhammed Ali was drafted into the US Army to take part in the Vietnam war in 1966, the African-American athlete expressed his rejection of the decision, saying, “I will say directly, no, I will not go 10,000 miles to help kill innocent people.”
As a result, Ali was stripped of his title and suspended from boxing before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in June 1971.
Boxing Heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali 1965 (AP)
In a related context, after receiving the gold and bronze medals for the men’s 200-meter race at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, African-American runners John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised a fist in a Black Power salute in protest of mistreatment and systematic racism in one of the most iconic images of 20th-century sports.
Despite being demonized by the press and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) later expelling the two from the Games, Smith said this act of activism “was a cry for freedom and for human rights” and that “we had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
Tommie Smith and John Carlos (Bettmann/Bettmann Archive)
Most recently, in continuation of Carlos and Smith’s activism in the sports arena, several athletes all over the world “take a knee” before the start of games in protest of police brutality and systematic racism and in support of their victims, and multiple sports federations and clubs have endorsed this cause, especially after the death of African American George Floyd, who was brutally killed by a white police officer in the US city of Minneapolis.
When it comes to fandom, in late 2018, fans of the Raja Athletic Club of Casablanca (RCA), known for their endless support for the Palestinian cause, impressed the world with a new chant called “Fbladi Dalmouni,” i.e. “In my country, I suffered from injustice.”
The lyrics of the chant recount the suffering of the Moroccan youths and blame the country’s government for corruption, the economic situation, and oppressing freedom of expression.
RCA fans are only one example of the political messages and numerous causes that sports fans express during events in order to grab attention and make their voices heard against injustice and oppression.
Another example is notably Celtic F.C. fans, who have always openly declared their support for the Palestinian cause by abundantly raising Palestinian flags in their stadium, all whilst chanting pro-Palestinian anthems. FIFA usually fines the Scottish Football Association over Celtic fans’ acts of solidarity with the Palestinian people, deeming it “not appropriate for a sports event.”
In stark contrast, FIFA, along with other major sports bodies, allow themselves to practice double standards and violate their rules by hailing acts of solidarity with Ukraine.
As such, it becomes clear that amid such political activism in sports, as well as other similar acts, a call such as Macron’s to de-politicize sports seems ridiculous and senseless upon examining the inseparable historical connection between sports and politics.
The French President’s call is also unjust and would deprive athletes and fans of a huge platform to voice their opinion and shed light on their causes in a world full of injustices.
World Cup 2022.. How to involve the international conflict in the football event?
An artificially-imposed union in unnatural borders is known as ‘a construct’. Constructs are artificial, as they are populated by different peoples, who speak different languages and have different cultures, and who would prefer to live in their own common nation-state because of those differences. For these reasons constructs are always imposed top-down for ‘reasons of State’ and rejected by those who are oppressed by them at the grassroots. Constructs are only ever popular among the elites which invent them and make money from them. They rarely achieve more than 50% popularity, usually far less. They are always rejected by the people at the bottom of the pile. This is why constructs never last.
1. The USA as a Construct
For instance, the USA, founded on exploitation, gun-law, slavery and the genocide of its native peoples, is a construct. Its straight-line borders are artificial, the result of wars and treaties, forced on others by historical circumstances or illegal occupations, for example as in Alaska and Hawaii. Much of its southern territory is Spanish-named and was stolen from Mexico and is now – such is the justice of history and the reward of patience – being reoccupied by Spanish speakers.
As for the northern border, that was fixed because basically the lands northwards were cold and uninviting. The vast majority of them, except for a very narrow strip close to the US border, spread up to the Arctic and were uninhabitable. Thus, the US elite left them to the unwanted whom they called ‘Canadians’, who presented no threat to them.
As regards its ‘United’ States, they are the result of an incredibly bloody Civil War, leaving as many as one million dead, the equivalent of ten million today. It was directed by an industrial elite in the North-East and the result, enforced by genocide, was by many never accepted. That elite was Zionist (not Jewish, though many of its financiers were Jews) in its proclamation that it was exceptional and that its ‘manifest destiny’ (i.e. manifest only to themselves) was to spread ‘from sea to shining sea’.
2. Europe and its Constructs
Europe (meaning by etymology ‘the west’) is also a construct, its identity going back to an ancient Greek myth. For the Romans 2,000 years ago, it did not exist separately from Asia and Africa. Indeed, it is artificially separated from Asia (meaning by etymology ‘the east’), from where its peoples emigrated. There is no natural border between the European peninsula and Asia: its eastern border is purely political and for the moment fixed in the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus.
Moreover, nearly all of its languages are ‘Indo-European’ and have their origins in a language spoken in today’s Turkey (Asia Minor) or even further east, well over 5,000 years ago. The historically recent contempt of ‘Europe’ for anything ‘Asian’, contemptuously termed ‘Asiatic’ or ‘barbarian’, is simply a rejection of its own origins and a self-justification for its artificial state of separation.
In the early 90s the then French President, Chirac, called on all: ‘Creeons l’Europe, Faisons l’Europe, il faut construire l’Europe’ (Let us create Europe, Let us make Europe, We must build Europe’). This was simply an open admission that Europe did not exist. It does not.
Within contemporary Europe the EU, the UK and the Ukraine are obviously constructs. The EU goes back only to 1993, the Ukraine to 1992, and the UK to 1922. In other words, they are all temporary inventions of the twentieth century. Now we are in the twenty-first century, we can see that they will not last much longer.
a. The EU
Taking the most recent construct first, we can see that many of the now 27 countries of the EU, which the UK left after 47 turbulent years, experiencing it and its predecessors as a straitjacket, are constructs. We would make exceptions only for some small countries: Portugal, the Czech Lands, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Malta and the five sparsely-populated Nordics: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, the latter both Non-EU. (The total population of the five Nordics is just 27 million, 40% of the population of France or the UK).
Spain is a construct, Catalans and Basques reject it. France is a construct, Basques, Bretons, Occitans, Corsicans and Alsaciens reject it. Belgium, Italy and Germany are constructs that go back no further than the nineteenth century and Germany has been reinvented radically over that time, as the Second Reich of 1871 disappeared in 1918 and the Third Reich of 1933 lasted only twelve years, after which the borders of Germany changed radically.
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were constructs. Czechoslovakia split into its two natural entities, but the fate of the far more complex Yugoslavia is far from resolved. Yugoslavia disintegrated into a number of states, most of which have unnatural borders, not unlike several other European countries, for example, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania. And here we do not even mention the unresolved problem of occupied Cyprus. Obviously, those who claim to be in favour of self-determination are not.
The EU elite comes from the borderlands of Latin-Germanic/Protestant-Catholic Europe. These run through Belgium, Luxembourg and eastern France (the Brussels-Luxembourg-Strasbourg axis). This elite was US-formed, like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer. As the former President of France, Giscard d’Estaing, stated, the Common Market (predecessor of the EU) was until the 1970s little more than a ‘Neo-Carolingian Empire’. In other words, it was a recreation of the ‘Empire’ of Charlemagne, who was not a French leader or founder of the French educational system, as French State schoolbooks claim. He was a vicious and illiterate German barbarian who spoke no French and was tall, so called Karl the Tall, disguised by the French name ‘Charlemagne’.
His EU ‘Empire’ with its violent warrior class of Franks was recreated a millennium later by other Fascistic tyrants, Napoleon and Hitler; hardly a recommendation for the EU, though EU membership and territory are almost identical to their blood-soaked Empires. Moreover, both those Empires failed because they too tried to invade Russian territory. Although it is not necessary or inevitable, history does in fact repeat itself, simply because of the greatest human stupidity – not to learn the lessons of history. And so it goes on and today the earth of the Ukraine is soaked in blood again.
b. The Ukraine
Although the word ‘Ukraine’, meaning borderland, is ancient, the concept of a country called ‘the Ukraine’, like its Austrian flag, goes back only to the Austro-Hungarian Imperialism of the late nineteenth-century. The Ukraine as a nation-state is an even more recent construct.
The Ukraine was invented largely by Non-Russian Communist dictators for political reasons, in 1922, 1939 and 1954, and has existed as a separate state only for thirty years. It has never been an independent state, having been completely dependent on a Jewish oligarchic elite over its thirty years of existence. And since 2014 it has been a US conquest-state and so vassal.
Constructs are dangerous things (1). Just as the construct of ‘Belgium’ (the southern Netherlands and part of northern France) was used as a pretext for World War I in 1914, the construct of ‘Poland’ (then consisting of Poland and large and oppressed parts of Belarus and Galicia) was used as a pretext for World War II in 1939, so the Ukraine was used as a pretext for what we call World War III (2014 – present).
From 2014 on, for eight years, a huge Ukrainian force, over 500,000 strong, was gathered, trained, dug in and armed by NATO in order to invade Russia from the eastern Ukraine. This is the origin of the present Third World War, which is now in its ninth year and slaughtered nearly seven million in its biological warfare (covid) phase alone. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians is now on the hands of the USA, its vassals and their foreign financiers.
c. The UK
The UK in its present form, England, Scotland, Wales and an occupied piece of north-eastern Ireland, was founded in the same year as the Soviet Ukraine – 1922. However, its origins go way back to the violence of a Viking-Norman elite, financed by Jewish merchants from Rouen. (Until 1066 there were no Jews in any of the Four Nations, England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland).
Those Normans are nothing to do with contemporary Normandy and Norman people. Those ‘Normans’ (= Northmen) were a cosmopolitan, French-speaking Viking elite, temporarily based in north-western France. They marauded all over Europe, notably in Sicily, Southern Italy and England, wherever, in fact, as conquistadors they could see opportunities for power and gold. The ships they used to invade were in fact Viking drakkar, dragon-ships, as can be seen from pictures of them in the eleventh-century English-made Tapestry, at present in Bayeux in Normandy.
In 1066 and after, the Normans, led by William the Bastard/Conquistador, conquered England by genocide, though most of his mercenary force consisted of Flemings and Bretons, the bandit scum of north-western Europe. In other words, only the leadership elite were ‘Normans’. Their alliance of pillaging bandits went on to conquer Wales, Scotland and, in the twelfth century, Ireland, where they were known as ‘Anglo-Normans’.
Then they created a ‘Hundred Years War’ with France and intervened in other interminable wars on mainland Europe. However, their much later racial and ideological descendants and adepts, of all nationalities, went on to conquer worldwide territories in what became known as ‘The British Empire’. In fact, this was ‘The Norman Empire’. Noted for its ‘raiding and trading’, that is, pillaging and looting, it was the ultimate Viking enterprise, violent warriors replaced by ruthless traders, battle-axes by trade monopolies, excommunications by trade sanctions.
The Constructing Elites
The elites who have imposed these constructs all have something in common – their intolerance. We would call them ‘Exceptionalists’ to describe that unique intolerance, because that is how they consider themselves and they actually use their imagined ‘exceptionalism’ to justify the darkest of deeds. According to them, all who are different have to be destroyed – ‘cancelled’. ‘We are best, and therefore…’. This is only the racism of Hitler: ‘We are Aryans, and therefore…’. They call themselves ‘Judeo-Christians’. The Saker very aptly calls them Anglo-Zionists. Again we repeat that here we must distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Many Jews are anti-Zionist and many Zionists are not at all Jews (2). Let us give two examples.
I remember talking many years ago to an Englishman, then aged 102, a true Victorian, who told me that he was convinced that God was English. And he was serious. I told him that after the US provocation of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (when American infamy entered a new phase), surely his god had changed nationalities and become American. He replied to me that English and Americans were the same anyway. He was a Zionist, but he was not a Jew. Then about twenty years ago an 80 year-old Dutchman from Alkmaar told me that: ‘After the War (= 1945) the world’s policeman was no longer English, but American’. (He never explained to me why the world needed a policeman and who had chosen him). He too was a Zionist, but not a Jew.
All of this of course is known as ‘cultural prejudice’ or, more simply, ignorance and bigotry. Thus: ‘We want to steal Iraq’s oil and gas. Because we are Americans, we are exceptional and we have the right to do this. This is the international rules-based order which we have established’. These people are Zionists, but they are not necessarily Jews.
Conclusion: Reconstruction
It is a spiritual law (also known as ‘common sense’) that you do not destroy anything, until you have something better to replace it with. In other words, you do not deconstruct, if you are not first ready to reconstruct. What exactly the future of the USA is I could not say, though I would say that it will fall back into its natural components, for that is the destiny of all constructs – they de-compose, as artifice is always taken over by nature – like a corpse in the grave. All constructs become corpses, some quite rapidly, as in today’s deeply tragic Ukraine.
Europe’s destiny is to rejoin Asia, which is its origin in every sense, including the origin of Christianity. For Christianity is not by origin European. The defection of Western Europe from Christian Tradition almost exactly 1,000 years ago (3) and its construct of ‘Catholicism’ (4), which 500 years later split into a myriad of State-moulded sects (5), which have lasted another 500 years and are now rapidly dying out, signified its schism from Asia. It was only from the eleventh century on that the word ‘Europe’ began to be used to define a geographical entity, being firmly established only by 1300 (6).
Western Europe even began to call the old Christian Capital of New Rome/Constantinople on the frontiers of Europe and Asia, symbolised therefore by a double-headed eagle, ‘Byzantium’. It even invented the word ‘Byzantine’ to describe its own labyrinthine bureaucracy and convoluted hypocrisy. (There is nothing so ‘Byzantine’ as perfidious Albion). Then, in 1204, the new Judeo-Christian ‘Catholics’ sacked the Christian Capital, weakening it and so enabling it to be conquered by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453.
Now comes the, as yet faint, possibility of Europe’s return to its roots after its thousand-years of captivity. In order to do this, Europe has to free itself from the dictatorship of the atheist elite, now based in the USA, but with important offshoots in Western Europe, especially in post-Protestant north-western Europe.
Europe has to recognise the Four Asian Civilisations, founded on religion and rooted in history, which have given Asia and the world its history. Chronologically, these are: the Hindu world of the Subcontinent (Hindustan), the Confucian-Buddhist-Taoist Chinese world, the Orthodox Christian world (today based in Russia, but which spreads southwards to its origin in Jerusalem and beyond) and the Muslim world of Asia and North Africa. They represent three-quarters of the world. You will never get away from them. Stop fighting among yourselves and fighting against them and learn to live with them.
9 November 2022
Notes:
1. We also have the example of the construct of Kuwait, artificially divided from artificial Iraq, designed with its straight lines by British cunning and greed. It was the pretext for the First Genocide in Iraq in 1990-1991.
3. The Pope of Rome whose name was permanently removed from the lists (‘diptychs’) of Orthodox Christian leaders in Rome by the Orthodox Christian Patriarch of Constantinople was the Germanising Benedict VIII (1012-1024). Since him no further Popes of Rome have been recognised and commemorated as Orthodox Christians in the Orthodox world.
4. Today’s ailing Roman Catholic leader, Pope Francis, is said to be the last Pope. This is according to the Prophecies of St Malachy, though that document is much disputed and considered by many to be pure fiction.
5. As one English writer, writing of his own country, put it nearly a century ago: ‘Religion (in the late sixteenth century) was not about conversing with the Eternal, but keeping people quiet in the Eternal’s name’. And: ‘Religion then was not building churches, it was preparing to smash churches and put up conventicles where one could hate one’s neighbour as oneself’.
6. See ‘The Europeanization of Europe’, Pp. 269-291 in The Making of Europe by Robert Bartlett (1993).
I do apologise for the rare error which comes from not checking the text enough times. For example, Kuleba is of course the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, not the Minister of the Interior. Thank you, readers, for any factual corrections!
2. Why did the Russian Revolution happen, if everything was going so well before 1917?
There never was a Revolution. It is a myth of Western/Soviet history. But there was a mutiny of the ruling class, effectively a revolt of the uprooted, English- and French-speaking elite, or aristocracy, against Russia. They had great wealth and so they wanted what comes next – power. The people, apart from the bread and circus mob, did not follow, but were too weak and disorganised to resist. The mutiny was organised, abetted and aided by foreign powers, above all by the British from their Embassy in the then capital in Saint Petersburg.
Empires always use the same techniques. Just as the Romans had their client-states and proconsuls or governors (in Jerusalem it was Pontius Pilate) and took the children of the local elite hostage by ‘educating’ (= indoctrinating/ westernising) them in their home capitals and main cities, so did Imperial Britain, and today so does the USA. Local treachery goes a long way when you give all the traitors in the capital a lot of dollars (remember how they flew planes stuffed with billions of dollars into Baghdad?) and some infrastructure (as in a recent classic case, Kiev in 2014). However, do not blame foreign powers entirely – no foreign power can do anything if there is not local treachery. But you can always find locals who will sell their souls for a mess of pottage/dollars.
3. Nazism
Although back on 29 March, in my very first writing for The Saker, What Does Nazism Mean?, I explained what Nazism is, there is still confusion. In speaking of Nazism in the Ukraine, the Russian Federation is not speaking of Nazism as a phenomenon that existed for twelve years during the Third Reich and was marked, by other things, by its persecution of the Jews. Nazism, and so denazification, is something far greater, far more ancient, far more profound.
Nazism is the millennial ideology of the (imagined) Superiority of the Western/Westernised World, the ideology of the ‘master race’. It began with the First Reich of the Carolingians of 800-1806, the foundation act of the Western ‘Middle Ages’. And it was repeated in the Second Reich of the Prussian militarists of 1871-1918, long before the Third Reich. Thus, we can call also the Normans Nazis, the Crusaders Nazis, the Conquistadors Nazis, British merchants in India – Nazis. The largely British genocide of Native Americans was a Nazi act, as was the Belgian genocide of the Congolese, as was the Japanese genocide in Chinese Nanking, as was the Hitlerian holocaust of the Slavs (30 million), as was the US genocide of the Vietnamese. Today the USA and its UK/EU/Canadian/Australian etc vassals, ‘the Collective West’, are the Fourth Reich.
Yes, it is true that throughout history probably all countries or ethnic groups or tribes or clans have at some point attacked another country in order to try and grab its resources. The vital difference here is that Western attacks are not one-offs out of greed. They are institutionalised, systematic, justified as part of a millennial ideology, and they are global. Various words have been used to justify this Nazi ideology, from Catholicism to Protestantism, from Spanish to British, from German to Israeli, from freedom to democracy, and from American to Woke. It is all the same thing, still the same evil banditry and brutal thuggery of organised violence behind the excuse. The ‘Cancel Russia’ bookburning of the 2020s is just as Nazi as Hitler’s bookburning of the 1930s. It is the same Anti-Culture of the same Anti-Civilization. Whatever tag you want to give it, ‘Western’, ‘Nazi’, ‘European’, ‘American’, ‘Woke’, it is ultimately all the same Satanism.
This is why the conflict in the Ukraine, which could so easily have remained a purely local affair in the Donbass and been over in 2014, spread to the whole of Novorossija (the east and south of the ‘Ukraine’) and has spread throughout Eastern and Western Europe. Russia’s primary task, indeed mission, and many of us knew this from the very outset and indeed have believed in it all our lives, is to free Europe of ‘Nazism’, to ‘denazify’ Europe. (China can deal with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Australia and, quite easily, Africa; Russia may deal, quite easily, with Latin America. As for the USA and Canada, like Israel, they will have to be quarantined, isolated and left to rot until they decontaminate themselves, like corpses which over time only leave bleached bones.
This denazification will hopefully chiefly be political, economic and ideological – but it may in some cases also have to be military, as in the Ukraine. This is what Operation Z is about. In writing these very words, I am very modestly taking part in Operation Z and you, in reading these words, are also taking part in Operation Z. Z is the Great Liberation. We have been waiting for this moment all our lives, whether we realised it or not.
4. What are the sources for the article about Russia before the ‘Revolution’, Myths from the Past and the Third Incarnation of Russia since 1721?
There are few sources in English. This is deliberate. Few things resembling the truth about Russia get written or translated – which is of course part of the systematic censorship of Russia. The bibliography below represents only the tip of the iceberg, therefore I would rather call it an essential reading list:
In Russian:
The Diaries of Nicholas II, in 3 Volumes, ed. S. V. Mironenko, Moscow, 2013
Alferiev E. E., Tsar Nicholas II as a Man of Strong Will, New York-Jordanville, 1983
Belousov P. (compiled), The Tsar and Russia, Otchij Dom, Moscow, 2017 (Contains reprints of many important articles by Solonevich, Nekrasov, Obruchev, Obolensky, Pavlov, Tikhmenev, Stremoukhov, Zajtsev and others)
Bokhanov A. N., Rasputin, the Anatomy of a Myth, Moscow, 2000
Bokhanov A. N., Nicholas II, Moscow, Veche, 2008
Borisiuk A. A., The History of Russia Which They Ordered To Be Forgotten, Moscow, Veche 2018 (2nd edition). (Statistical Facts)
Brazol B.L., The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II in Facts and Figures (1894-1917), New York, 1959
Dolmatov V., The Sovereign, Twenty Three Steps Up, Dostoinstvo, Moscow 2015
Gubanov V. (compiled), The Holy Tsar Nicholas II and the New Russian Martyrs, Stavros, Moscow, 2004
Kapkov K.G., The Spiritual World of Emperor Nicholas II and His Family, Moscow-Livadia, 2017
Kobylin V. The Anatomy of a Betrayal, the Sources of the Anti-Monarchist Conspiracy, Saint Petersburg, 1998 (reprint)
Mirek A., The Emperor Nicholas II and the Destiny of Orthodox Russia, Spiritual Enlightenment, Moscow, 2013
Mironova T., From Beneath the Lie, Vesti, Saint Petersburg, 2005
Multatuli P.V., The Foreign Policy of Emperor Nicholas II (1894-1917), Moscow, 2012
Multatuli P.V., Myths and the Truth about the Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, Ekaterinburg, 2013
Multatuli P.V., Nicholas II, The Way of the Cross, Smolin, Moscow, 2013
Multatuli P.V., Emperor Nicholas II, The Man and the Monarch, and, Emperor Nicholas II the Martyr, Veche, Moscow, 2018
Multatuli P.V., Emperor Nicholas II, The Tragedy of a Misunderstood Sovereign, Smolin, Moscow, 2018
Oldenburg S. S., The Reign of Nicholas II, Saint Petersburg, Petropol, 1991 (reprint)
Platonov O., Nicholas II, His Life and Reign, Saint Petersburg, 1999
Platonov O., Nicholas II in His Secret Correspondence, Algorithm, Moscow, 2005
Platonov O., A Life for the Tsar, Rodnaya Strana, Moscow, 2015
Reshetnikov L., To Return to Russia, Moscow, 2013
Shargunov Archpriest A., The Miracles of the Royal Martyrs, 2 Volumes, Moscow, 2000
Shargunov Archpriest A., The Tsar, Zlatoust, Moscow, 2013
Zhevakhov N.D. Memoirs, Saint Petersburg, 2014
In English:
Den L., The Real Tsaritsa, Nabu Public Domain Reprints, Undated
Maylunas A. and Mironenko S., A Lifelong Passion, Nicholas and Alexandra, Weidenfeld, London, 1996 (Their Correspondence)
Nekrasov G., Nicholas II as Military Commander, Sovereign Journal No 5, Royal Russia, 2017
Rogger H., Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia, Berkley, 1986
Romanova Olga Alexandrovna, 25 Chapters of My Life, Librario, Kinloss, 2009 (reprint)
Vorres I., The Last Grand Duchess, Olga Alexandrovna, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964
Wilton E. and Sokolov N., The Last Days of the Romanovs, General Books, Memphis, 2012 (reprint)
In French:
Chavelsky G., J’ai Vecu La Fin de la Russie Imperiale, Editions Singulieres, Sete, 2011. (A very good translation and a portrait of the traitors surrounding Tsar Nicholas, written by one of them)
Gilliard P., Le Tragique Destin de Nicolas II et de sa famille, Payot, Paris, 1929
Jacoby Jean, Le Tsar Nicholas II et la Revolution, Fayard, Paris, 1931
Joukoff Archpriest B. (compiled), Nicolas II, Le Dernier Empereur Orthodoxe, Villemoisson, 2015
Loupan V., Nicholas II, Le Saint Tsar, Syrtes, Paris, 2001
5. Who am I?
I am the Russian Orthodox rector of a very large parish in Europe. I have served in many countries in Western Europe and have lived in Russia and the Ukraine. I have also worked as a lecturer in Russian and European history and politics. Enough said.
Make no mistake about it: The tragic war that is currently taking place on Ukrainian battlefields is not between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, but between the Russian Federation and the US-controlled NATO. The latter, also called ‘the collective West’, promotes an aggressive ideology of organised violence, a politically- economically- and militarily-enforced doctrine euphemistically known as ‘Globalism’. This means hegemony by the Western world, which arrogantly calls itself ‘the international community’, over the whole planet. NATO is losing that war, which uses NATO-trained Ukrainians as its proxy cannon fodder, in three spheres, political, economic and military.
Firstly, politically, the West has finally understood that it cannot execute regime change in Moscow. Its pipedream of replacing the highly popular President Putin with is CIA stooge Navalny is not going to happen. As for the West’s puppet-president in Kiev, he is only a creature of Washington and its oligarchs. A professional actor, he is unable to speak for himself, but is a spokesman for the NATO which he loves.
Secondly, economically, the West faces serious resistance to the 6,000 sanctions it has imposed on Russia and Russians. Those sanctions have backfired. In the West, we can testify to this every time we buy fuel or food. The combination of high inflation (10% +) and even higher energy prices, caused almost solely by these illegal anti-Russian sanctions, are threatening the collapse of Western economies, much more than threatening Russia or China. As a result of this reverse effect of sanctions against Russia, the rouble is at a three-year high, standing at about 64 to the US dollar and rising, though immediately after the sanctions it had briefly gone down to 150 to the dollar.
After strenuously denying that they would do it, already most countries in Europe (at least 17 for now), including Germany and Italy, have agreed to open accounts with Gazprombank, as Russia advised them to do and to pay for oil and gas in roubles. And this number is growing by the week. The problems will be even greater with food shortages, as the world food chain is highly integrated and the agricultural production of Russia and the Ukraine (now controlled by Russia) is at least 40% of the world’s grain production. Just days ago it was announced that Russia expects record grain production this year (130 million tonnes). Russia may yet demand payment in roubles for all this as well.
The sanctions against Russia have divided Europe and are threatening to divide NATO. President Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO member, has announced that he would veto the entry to NATO of Finland and Sweden into NATO. At the same time, Russia has announced that it will cut off Finland’s natural gas supply. Swedish leaders are re-thinking their entry to NATO.
Thirdly, militarily, it is clear that the Ukraine, with huge numbers of desertions and surrenders, has no chance of winning the war against Russia. Most of its military equipment has already been wiped out and newly-delivered and often antiquated Western equipment will make little difference, even if it is not destroyed by Russian missiles as soon as it reaches the Ukraine. The conflict could now be over within weeks, rather than months. The US ‘Defense Secretary’ (= Minister for Offense), Lloyd Austin, has desperately called the Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu to beg for a ceasefire. Would you agree to a ceasefire when in less than three months and with only 10% of your military forces you have already occupied an area greater than England inside the Ukraine, an area that produces 75% of Ukrainian GDP?
The panic of financial disaster in the West has begun to set in. As a result, the French President Macron has told President Zelensky (that is, told Washington) to give up part of Ukraine’s sovereignty and at last start serious negotiations with Russia. Macron is also trying to free French mercenaries from Azovstal in Mariupol, but the problem is much bigger than this, as the whole of Europe is facing economic meltdown. And the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, has asked President Biden to contact President Putin and ‘give peace a chance’. Note that Mario Draghi is a former president of the European Central Bank and a Goldman Sachs puppet – just as Macron is a Rothschild puppet.
There have always been empires and invasions throughout history. However, they have always been local and not been justified as the only possible global ideology, a ‘New World Order’, to be imposed by violence all over the planet. After the NATO war is over, lost by ‘the collective West’, NATO Centralism, the ideology of a ‘Unipolar World’, controlled from Washington, must end. However, Centralism must also come to an end everywhere else, like that under Soviet-period Moscow (1).
However, Nationalism must also come to an end. Here we should remember that the very word ‘Nazism’ comes from the German words for ‘National Socialism’. (Nationalism entails hatred for others, whereas Patriotism means the ability not only to love your own country, but also love the countries of others, not hate their countries). And the Ukraine has a history of Nazism, stretching back over eighty years. Moreover, today’s leading Kiev soldiery are Nazi nationalists and represent the tribalism so typical of Western Europe, responsible in the twentieth century for two huge wars which it spread worldwide. The Nazi Ukrainian cries of ‘Glory to the Ukraine’ and their slogan of ‘Ukraine above Everything’ are slogans of Nazism.
Let us move to a world that is multipolar and multicentric, which has unity in diversity and diversity in unity. If we do not move towards this, we will probably be lost. For a multipolar, multicivilisational and multicultural world, the world of seven billion human beings already, is the only civilized world, the only true international community.
Note:
1. Here anti-Semites will tell you that the Centralism of Soviet-period Moscow was founded by the Bolsheviks, of whom over 80% were Jews. Firstly, it should be pointed out that they were atheist Jews, internationalists like Bronstein/Trotsky, who supported the ‘Third International’. In other words, they were political Zionists (not religious Zionists, indeed, they were anti-religious). And let us recall that a huge number of Jews were and are anti-Zionists and a huge number of Zionists were and are not at all Jews. This is why the Saker rightly uses the term ‘Anglo-Zionism’ for these unipolar centralisers.
On May 8, when Victory in Europe (VE) Day is celebrated in the West, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN that Russia had “nothing to celebrate” on its own Victory Day on May 9.
Her reasoning, faithfully transcribed on the US mission’s website, was that “They have not succeeded in defeating the Ukrainians.”
Given that Victory Day and VE Day both specifically commemorate the allied defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Thomas-Greenfield’s comments were like saying the US, Britain and France had nothing to celebrate this year because they got chased out of Afghanistan by the Taliban last August.
The ambassador is either an apologist for Nazism or merely too ignorant to do her job. She should at least read some objective reports about the conflict in the Ukraine.
In fact Russians had two immediate military victories to celebrate that Monday. Russian and Lugansk People’s Republic troops captured the town of Popasna, a lynchpin in the Ukrainian army’s defensive line that it had held for eight years.
Meanwhile Kiev, apparently desperate for a victory of its own to rain on the parade through Moscow’s Red Square, launched an airborne and marine assault on the now-famous Zmeinyy (Snake) Island off the coast of Odessa oblast.
Some sources say the Russians withdrew their small force holding the island as bait for a trap, but either way it went horribly wrong for the Ukrainians. They lost four jet fighters and strike aircraft, up to 10 helicopters, a corvette and three infantry landing craft. More than 60 of their personnel were killed, of which 27 were abandoned on the island.
The Ukraine is like a bull elephant that has been shot right in the heart in mid-charge. The beast keeps on bellowing and rampaging around, not yet realising that it’s already dead.
It becomes clearer by the day that the Ukrainian army attempting to occupy the remains of the Donbass republics, newly recognised by Russia just as the West ‘recognised’ its creations of Kosovo and South Sudan, is dead on its feet.
Its navy, air force, artillery, tanks and transportation are almost destroyed. Its casualties are replaced with boys and old men press-ganged off the streets of Kiev and Lvov, some without proper boots. Its senior officers are fled or dead.
Meanwhile the collective West, dominated as always by the Washington, pours in its hodgepodge of arms that belong in a museum, not on the battlefield. The latest arrivals are the 90 much-vaunted 155mm howitzers donated by the Pentagon — and made in UK, because the US military-industrial complex seemingly can’t produce a simple towed cannon any more.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin insisted on April 28 that the artillery pieces would prove “decisive” in the war with Russia. The former Raytheon executive can’t stop speaking in his arms industry sales patter. 90 guns is about what the Ukrainian army is losing every week. What use are they anyway against Russia’s hypersonic missiles, with a range of hundreds of miles and an accuracy radius of seven metres?
Pouring random assortments of arms into a country and expecting it to win against a well-organised and equipped opponent is just as incoherent a strategy as the war of attrition the US waged in Vietnam, or sending a whole army into a frontal assault on a mountain pass defended by a thousand.
Who is going to operate all this stuff if most of the experienced weapon and vehicle crews have become casualties or prisoners? How is it even supposed to get to the front when Russia has air superiority over the country and stand-off weapons that can reach right out to the border with Poland and kill hundreds of foreign mercenaries?
“Ukraine clearly believes it can win and so does everyone here,” Austin told his NATO counterparts at the Rammstein airbase a few days earlier, in a touching display of mass delusion on a US-occupied piece of Germany. “Ukraine needs our help to win today and they will still need our help when the war is over.”
In a pre-recorded virtual address to the Ukrainian parliament on May 3, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made similar exhortations. “The so-called irresistible force of Putin’s war machine has broken on the immoveable object of Ukrainian patriotism,” Johnson declared triumphantly. “Ukraine will win, Ukraine will be free.”
Kiev is claiming it can rebuild its exhausted, demoralised, bled-white army in the west of the country — or better yet, in NATO-member Poland — and march east in a great wave of self-righteous retribution to reclaim the Donbass and Crimea.
This is accompanied by bizarre fascistic artwork of crusader knights, flying the 30-year-old Ukrainian flag, slaughtering Russian army orcs — literal fantasy role-playing game orcs with the letter ‘Z’ marked on their foreheads. And Western leaders are actually taking this stuff seriously.
Austin believes that fighting this war the last drop of Ukrainian blood will weaken the Russian military enough that it won’t be able to fight another war for years to come. Not so long ago this retired four-star general publicly referred to present-day Russia as the Soviet Union, whether by accident or on purpose we do not now.
Perhaps Austin should read a little history and discover that the USSR lost 27 million human lives in the war against Nazi Germany and its many European fascist allies, all now current or prospective NATO members.
Six million Soviets soldiers and partisans fell on the battlefield. Three million more were murdered by the Nazis as as prisoners of war, along with 18 million civilians.
Yet the Soviet Union emerged from that cataclysmic war stronger than ever, as the superpower that counter-balanced the US in the post-war order.
Like Germany in 1945, the Ukraine is marching fanatically towards its terrible Götterdämmerung, leaving a trail of footprints in its own blood. And NATO is standing behind, cheering it on and prolonging the death-agony.
President of Russia – Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Federation Armed Forces Vladimir Putin attended a military parade marking the 77th anniversary of Victory in the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War.
Overall, 11,000 personnel and 131 units of military equipment were engaged in the parade.
* * *
Address by the President of Russia at the military parade
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Fellow Russian citizens,
Dear veterans,
Comrade soldiers and seamen, sergeants and sergeant majors, midshipmen and warrant officers,
Comrade officers, generals and admirals,
I congratulate you on the Day of Great Victory!
The defence of our Motherland when its destiny was at stake has always been sacred. It was the feeling of true patriotism that Minin and Pozharsky’s militia stood up for the Fatherland, soldiers went on the offensive at the Borodino Field and fought the enemy outside Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk, Stalingrad and Kursk, Sevastopol and Kharkov.
Today, as in the past, you are fighting for our people in Donbass, for the security of our Motherland, for Russia.
May 9, 1945 has been enshrined in world history forever as a triumph of the united Soviet people, its cohesion and spiritual power, an unparalleled feat on the front lines and on the home front.
Victory Day is intimately dear to all of us. There is no family in Russia that was not burnt by the Great Patriotic War. Its memory never fades. On this day, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the heroes march in an endless flow of the Immortal Regiment. They carry photos of their family members, the fallen soldiers who remained young forever, and the veterans who are already gone.
We take pride in the unconquered courageous generation of the victors, we are proud of being their successors, and it is our duty to preserve the memory of those who defeated Nazism and entrusted us with being vigilant and doing everything to thwart the horror of another global war.
Therefore, despite all controversies in international relations, Russia has always advocated the establishment of an equal and indivisible security system which is critically needed for the entire international community.
Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.
Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.
Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their minions was unavoidable.
Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat grew every day.
Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.
The United States began claiming their exceptionalism, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, thus denigrating not just the entire world but also their satellites, who have to pretend not to see anything, and to obediently put up with it.
But we are a different country. Russia has a different character. We will never give up our love for our Motherland, our faith and traditional values, our ancestors’ customs and respect for all peoples and cultures.
Meanwhile, the West seems to be set to cancel these millennia-old values. Such moral degradation underlies the cynical falsifications of World War II history, escalating Russophobia, praising traitors, mocking their victims’ memory and crossing out the courage of those who won the Victory through suffering.
We are aware that US veterans who wanted to come to the parade in Moscow were actually forbidden to do so. But I want them to know: We are proud of your deeds and your contribution to our common Victory.
We honour all soldiers of the allied armies – the Americans, the English, the French, Resistance fighters, brave soldiers and partisans in China – all those who defeated Nazism and militarism.
Comrades,
Donbass militia alongside with the Russian Army are fighting on their land today, where princes Svyatoslav and Vladimir Monomakh’s retainers, solders under the command of Rumyantsev and Potemkin, Suvorov and Brusilov crushed their enemies, where Great Patriotic War heroes Nikolai Vatutin, Sidor Kovpak and Lyudmila Pavlichenko stood to the end.
I am addressing our Armed Forces and Donbass militia. You are fighting for our Motherland, its future, so that nobody forgets the lessons of World War II, so that there is no place in the world for torturers, death squads and Nazis.
Today, we bow our heads to the sacred memory of all those who lost their lives in the Great Patriotic War, the memories of the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, relatives and friends.
We bow our heads to the memory of the Odessa martyrs who were burned alive in the House of Trade Unions in May 2014, to the memory of the old people, women and children of Donbass who were killed in atrocious and barbaric shelling by neo-Nazis. We bow our heads to our fighting comrades who died a brave death in the righteous battle – for Russia.
I declare a minute of silence.
(A minute of silence.)
The loss of each officer and soldier is painful for all of us and an irretrievable loss for the families and friends. The government, regional authorities, enterprises and public organisations will do everything to wrap such families in care and help them. Special support will be given to the children of the killed and wounded comrades-in-arms. The Presidential Executive Order to this effect was signed today.
I wish a speedy recovery to the wounded soldiers and officers, and I thank doctors, paramedics, nurses and staff of military hospitals for their selfless work. Our deepest gratitude goes to you for saving each life, oftentimes sparing no thought for yourselves under shelling on the frontlines.
Comrades,
Soldiers and officers from many regions of our enormous Motherland, including those who arrived straight from Donbass, from the combat area, are standing now shoulder-to-shoulder here, on Red Square.
We remember how Russia’s enemies tried to use international terrorist gangs against us, how they tried to seed inter-ethnic and religious strife so as to weaken us from within and divide us. They failed completely.
Today, our warriors of different ethnicities are fighting together, shielding each other from bullets and shrapnel like brothers.
This is where the power of Russia lies, a great invincible power of our united multi-ethnic nation.
You are defending today what your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought for. The wellbeing and security of their Motherland was their top priority in life. Loyalty to our Fatherland is the main value and a reliable foundation of Russia’s independence for us, their successors, too.
Those who crushed Nazism during the Great Patriotic War showed us an example of heroism for all ages. This is the generation of victors, and we will always look up to them.
Glory to our heroic Armed Forces!
For Russia! For Victory!
Hooray!
—
Laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Former Israeli premier Ehud Barak has expressed concern that Israel will cease to exist before the 80th anniversary of its 1948 establishment, Israeli media reported on Saturday.
In an interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Barak predicted a doom-and-gloom scenario for Israel.
“Former #Israeli PM Ehud Barak warns of the curse of the ‘8th decade’ on Israel and it’s possible demise before its 80th anniversary”@AJArabic Caption: “Throughout Jewish history, the Jews did not have a state for more than 80 years..(1/2) https://t.co/XKHQPCnKaL
— Translating Palestine (@TranslatingPali) May 8, 2022
“Throughout the Jewish history, the Jews did not rule for more than eighty years, except in the two kingdoms of David and the Hasmonean dynasty, and in both periods, their disintegration began in the eighth decade,” Barak said.
Barak noted that many regimes, including those in the United States, Italy, and Russia, have experienced the curse of the eighth decade, and that Israel is no exception, drawing an analogy between the Zionist regime and fascism, nazism and communism.
According to the poll's findings, 33% of Israelis have contemplated moving out of the country over the last year. Sixty-six percent of respondents aged 18 and 24 said they had thought about leaving Israel compared to 53% of Israelis aged 25 to 34. (1/2)https://t.co/8vcJhhvVPa
The ultra-conservative former premier’s fears echo prevailing fears in Israel.
A recent survey of young Israeli adults found that nearly half of the population in the occupied Palestinian territories is not optimistic about Israel’s future, with more than one-third of people thinking about migrating for jobs and better life.
In this deep dive with historian and author Matt Ehret we examine the history of Zionism in Ukraine and the origin of many of the Zionist ultra nationalist groups now occupying Palestinian territory since the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of Palestine) in 1948.
We look at the emergence of the Chabad Lubavitch sect that was established before Zionism came into existence and has its origins in Ukraine – now with 10,000 emissaries in 100 countries at the cutting edge of Zionist expansionism. This group is believed to be responsible for the majority of the price tag attacks in occupied Palestine, denies the right to return for all Palestinians and leads the ideological war against non adherents of Judaism.
We make the link between this secular ultra nationalist ideology and consider how it is mutually inclusive of the Ukrainian far right and Nazi elements that now dominate Ukrainian politics, military and police. Matt analyses the Oligarchical power base behind these cults and how it ties into the Great Reset/WEF agenda that is threatening Humanity.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
by Ramin Mazaheri
Starting in 1917 the same reactionary European nations which attacked in the 7 European Wars Against the French Revolution now transferred this same refusal to make peace with the Soviet Union. The problem has always been an idea – anti-autocracy, the idea from which Socialist Democracy flows (and the Yellow Vests) – not a particular nation.
(This is the seventh chapter in a new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. Please click here for the article which announces this book and explains its goals.)
There is a clear moment when France definitively handed over its longtime leadership of European progressive politics. It is not 1914, when, unlike the Soviet Bolsheviks, French socialists went along with World War I: it is the creation of the Popular Front (Front Populaire) following the death of 15 people in a right-wing riot in 1934. The idea that committed socialists must be united with everyone from fake-leftists to right-wingers in order to fight fascism proved to be a total catastrophe.
Yet this idea remains the policy of Western leftism today, and it is still producing catastrophes.
The European lesson of the 1930s is that the working and middle class handed power to the socialists and communists – who immediately gave power back to the bourgeois!
Ever since the Brexit vote against the neoliberal and neo-imperial European Union Western democracies are perpetually stuck in 1936: constantly warning of “fascism” and constantly producing failures as bad as the original Popular Front in France.
However, because there is a total misunderstanding of what “fascism” is it is critical for us to end the Western propaganda on the rise of Germanic National Socialism in order to properly understand European history then and now. It is “Germanic” and not just “German” because their adherents were from Austria, Hungary, Prussia and other longtime German language/culture areas.
Germanic National Socialism had something vital in common with socialism: a clear rejection of Western Liberal Democracy, which was first installed in France’s 2nd Republic of 1848. Without elucidating the common thread of post 1789 political history — that Western Liberal Democracy is an oligarchy which has been barely modified from autocracy – European history makes no sense in 1936 or after. We may as well say Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t a leftist revolutionary!
We move from the Paris Commune to 1936 because what occurred in 1936 was extremely similar: In February 1936 the electoral victory of a Popular Front coalition in Spain led to a legal take-over by socialists and anti-monarchists, only to see an international coalition of reactionaries arise to prop up the dictator General Francisco Franco and to foment civil and international war.
The Popular Front in France actually created the disastrous policy of “nonintervention” – the French left created it order to not intervene in the neighbouring Spanish Civil War. Nearly all of Europe signed up to diplomatically isolate and economically blockade the Spanish Republic. Indeed, Western Liberal Democracy wants to talk honestly about the Spanish Civil War as much as they want to they want to talk honestly the Paris Commune, 1848 or the 7 European Wars Against the French Revolution.
In May 1936 what would become the final elections of the French 3rd Republic were held. Amid the Great Depression the centre-left and left finally won control of the government, with 60% of the vote, and via campaigns expressly against the unprecedented power of the historically-new banking oligarchy. In July the Spanish Civil War began, and despite massive French support for the Republican leftists France’s allegedly left-wing government colluded with the British on the policy of non-intervention. Viewed from the new center of progressive politics – Moscow – the Popular Front’s non-intervention confirmed to the USSR that Western Europe was never going to have a socialist revolution; that such an idea had been a fool’s errand for over three decades; that Western Europe was going to side with fascism and go over to it, as Vichy France soon would. The USSR and Mexico would be the only nations to provide armed support to the Spanish Republic.
The Popular Front and Leon Blum, the first Socialist to be Prime Minister in France, would do a U-turn on the promised domestic reforms he was elected to implement. This is exactly what the Socialists François Mitterrand and François Hollande would do in 1983 and 2012, respectively. 1936 marks the point when Western leftists indisputably proved that they have abandoned Socialist Democracy in favor of Western Liberal Democracy – a fundamentally right-wing ideology rooted in monarchism, autocracy and oligarchy – and are thus right-wingers on the global political spectrum.
In April 1938 France’s Popular Front collapsed after failure in almost every sense. Its colossal disappointment after such huge progressive excitement caused massive disillusionment and directly led to the establishment of fascism in France two years later. The Popular Front provided the death knell for Western Liberal Democracy. Rather it should have, but by 1946 fascists, royalists and Western Liberal Democrats would – to steal a phrase from Marx regarding a similar melding for all classes of wealth in the 19th century – “become bourgeois”, i.e. all meld into one in order to stop Socialist Democracy.
This is where the West remains today.
They are totally against Socialist Democracy at home and abroad, and claiming Popular Fronts are needed to elect fake-leftist candidates who inevitably prove to be tools of long-running oligarchies.
In September 1938, now led by the Reformists (this is the most accurate term for the very misleadingly named “Radical Party” of France), the Munich Pact saw France stab the USSR in the back on the Franco-USSR pact of 1935, which stipulated joint military action against German belligerence. The Munich Betrayal, as it’s also known, saw France and the United Kingdom collude with fascist Germany and Italy to hand a huge chunk of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Instead of combatting Germany’s war on Czechoslovakia the Popular Front preferred “appeasement” with fascism.
The collusion would continue: France and the UK recognised Franco in February 1939, even though he held just two-thirds of the country and not Madrid. (The army Franco originally led to start the war was the Spanish Army of Africa, based in Morocco. Much like France with Algeria in 1848, we see the pernicious domestic political effects of Europe’s Old World imperialism once again.)
Because we have located the start of neoliberalism and European neo-imperialism with the Paris Commune we see how these collusions make sense: these are Western Liberal Democratic countries, thus run by an oligarchical elite, thus opposed to any socialist-inspired country. They will always wage war against socialistic ideas which oppose oligarchical Western liberalism which, thanks to the domination of the banker class by the start of the 20th century, is more “globalist” than inter-marrying monarchs ever were. Popular Fronts are inevitably proven to be useless – they are mere safety valves for genuine leftism.
By June 1939 national polls showed that 84% of Britain favored an Anglo-French-Soviet military alliance – Britain’s Western Liberal Democratic politicians had no choice but to give the appearance of an effort. After six weeks of negotiations it became clear to Moscow that Britain’s appallingly minor representations were not interested in any sort of alliance with Socialist Democracy.
Only two days after they left a German delegation arrived in Moscow and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (a non-aggression pact and not any sort of alliance) was concluded precisely because the USSR saw that Western Liberal Democracies would never allow peaceful relations with socialist-inspired systems. Just as the revolutionary Napoleon Bonaparte wasted time in a burnt-down Moscow trying to make peace with an autocrat who never wanted it, so the USSR wasted time trying to make peace with autocrats and oligarchs.
Yellow Vest: “What I want for Christmas is for the Yellow Vests to join France’s social movements to stop Macron’s neoliberalism. But it would be even better if the whole world would become Yellow Vests to stop the ravages of high finance and globalisation.”
(Note: this book intersperses over 100 quotations taken from actual, marching Yellow Vests which were originally published in news reports on PressTV.)
Western leftists (mostly Trotskyists) howled that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a betrayal of leftist ideals. That’s a stunningly opportunistic and hollow claim, considering just how much France’s Popular Front and Western Liberal Democracies failed to defend Spain, and also how Western nations refused make peace with Moscow. Moscow had waited for 19 years for any other European country to turn socialist, but European progressive political thought was spent in Western Europe after 150 years.
Thus the USSR had given up, as it was clearly the eve of war. The Stalinists would certainly be proven right that fascism would sweep Germany, Austria, Spain and France – history clearly exonerates them, and indicts Western Liberal Democracy.
The USSR made a non-aggression pact with Germanic socialism because at the time so many assumed that fascism was going to fully replace totally discredited Western Liberal Democracies. That may seem hard to believe today, but the idea that Western Liberal Democracy was totally dead was a fundamental assumption of leftists, such as Trotsky.
It’s vital to understand this proper timeline of European history leading up to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact because it is entirely in keeping with the overarching theme of European history since 1789: collusion by oligarchical elites to rule in autocratic fashion, and in order to suppress Socialist Democratic ideas.
Of course Western Liberal Democracy has always tried to obscure this history, and they still do: a resolution adopted by the European Union in 2019 stated that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact “paved the way for the outbreak of World War II”, in a shameful rewriting of history. I don’t expect the EU to pass resolutions for the 7 European Wars Against the French Revolution, the failed Revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune anytime soon….
The West’s elite is fighting for Western Liberal Democracy, and thus they do not permit honest discussion and honest critiques of Western Liberal Democracy. This explains why there is no admission regarding the historical reality that Nazism and 1930s European fascism won power precisely because so many people grasped that Western Liberal Democracy was nothing but awful oligarchy.
Denying this historical reality is why Western politics has stopped making sense to the average Westerner: They simply cannot understand what fascism was, what it is, or how it arose – it arose via fascism’s successful, popular condemnation of Western Liberal Democracy.
The problem is that socialists don’t stress this point enough, in their nonsensical fear of being seen as colluding with fascism.
Knowing what ‘fascism’ truly is, and why socialists shouldn’t disavow it completely
Just as monarchy and feudalism was totally discredited to the average European by 1848, so Western Liberal Democracy and “debt feudalism/Bankocracy” was totally discredited by 1939.
This successful condemnation is why it’s simply inaccurate and absurd to say things like the “Nazis had no socialism”. To do so is tremendously counterproductive and simply false. Mussolini was the editor of Avanti!, the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party, and was once a leading Italian socialist. Socialists do not want to admit these things, but the failure caused by not explaining fascism’s relationship with socialism is that we cannot understand Western political history if we relinquish the incredibly necessary democratic criticism of Western Liberal Democracy and “Capitalism With Western Characteristics” as evidenced by fascism’s rise.
Hitler, reader of Marx, summed it up the initial similarities himself in 1922: Without his alleged “essential principle” – race – Nazism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground”.
However, instead of dispossessing a noble class via class politics he dispossessed races to creat a new noble class… and that is not really socialism, nor anything advocated in Marxism.
Why should socialists fear admitting the Marxism in Germanic socialism? If they do it’s probably because they seek the approval of Western Liberal Democrats. It’s clear that by including race – this is… not truly Marxism or socialism, but something different.
Or when Hitler rejected the class struggle, vital to socialism, by saying: “There are no such things as classes: They cannot be. Class means caste and caste means race.” Well, Nazism may include some Marxist analyses of political and economic historical development but this is… not really socialism, but something different.
Making an alliance with corporate powers, instead of appropriating from the greedy expropriators… this is not really socialism, either.
Choosing central guidance instead of central majority ownership… this is not really socialism.
Hitler was also the least internationalist politician you can think of – he totally rejected the internationalism of the class struggle and replaced it with a “community of the volk”. He only wanted to protect Teutonic citizens in his all-Germanic nation.
We can go on and on pointing out these differences.
But the rejection of Western Liberal Democracy – due to its decades of failures by an oligarchical, corrupt, plutocratic leadership barely different from 18th century monarchy – that actually is the same as socialism. The rejection of Western Liberal Democratic economics – due to the decades of failures by free market capitalism (i.e. the economic component of liberalism) – that is the same as socialism.
The Western Liberal Democrats of today simply do not want to talk about their often democratic rejection by people who feel its failures intimately.
Yellow Vest: “Our media have lost all credibility. Everything that you see on the mainstream media, and all of their reporters are under the boot of the government. For them the Yellow Vests don’t even exist anymore, on both the private and public stations.
So what was German National Socialism and Italian Fascism? It is socialism minus the hopeful egalitarianism and the internationalism, and replaced with pessimistic Darwinian elitism and racism. It’s a right-wing socialism whose only virtue is that it openly opposes the rich-are-smarter-and-should-rule ideology of Western Liberal Democracy, which opposed most of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, won the counter-revolutions of 1848, laid the foundations of the neo-imperial European Union in 1871, colluded to create World War I in order to forestall socialist revolution and which was ruining society in the 1930s just as it does today.
But proponents of elites who rule through a Bankocracy don’t want people to understand that fascism and Germanic National Socialism came to power by opposing the domination of international high finance and liberalism (whether “neo-”, “ultra-” or sans-préfixe it’s all the same: free markets, unregulated capitalism, rights only for those who can afford it), which forever is ultimately cover for an autocratic oligarchy.
So it can’t be stressed enough: Socialism has nothing to fear from free, honest, patient examination of the Nazis’ relationship with socialism. What needs to be rectified is the total disavowal of fascism which excludes its criticisms of Western Liberal Democracy.
However, Western Liberal Democracy has much to fear regarding true discussions of their relationship with the Nazis. They, over and over, allied with fascism against socialism in the 1930s; they colluded with the surviving Nazis and fascists after 1945; they encouraged 3rd-generation Nazis in places like Ukraine in the 21st century. Thus since the 1930s fascism and Western Liberal Democracy has been cooperating for more often than they have been fighting.
Where does fascism fit in the course of European economic development since 1492?
The fascists ultimately came to power by claiming they were different in their economic aims than Western Liberal Democrats.
By the turn of the 20th century industrialisation was no longer a novelty but the defining economic force. Landed wealth, Old World colonisation wealth, sea-trading wealth and mid-late 19th century industrial-financial wealth had been melded together into a banker-dominated financial system in which – of course – old money was predominant. The new banking system they created controlled the means of production and usuriously owned the land on which serfs recently lived. This is a clear timeline of economic history – it is not hard to understand, nor is it eternal.
Fascists promised to expropriate the wealth now held in the stewardship of banks and to do it via a new class – that of the magistrate; of individualist political power.
The word “fascism” stems from “fasces”, which is a bundle of sticks wrapped together topped by an ax. It’s originally an Etruscan symbol which symbolised the power of – not the people wrapped together – the magistrate. What was the magistrate in Rome? He was a high-ranking officer with both executive and judicial powers. Whatever the wealth or justice which Roman magistrates allowed to “trickle-down” was entirely up to them. It was an elitist, 1%-centered system and fascism’s advance was (allegedly) making the 1% class open to competition (which they said begins in one’s DNA) and cutting out the longtime aristocracy and new bankers. We see this is exactly like in Western Liberal Democracy today, and we now see why these two forces have allied together. The seal of the United States Senate, an aristocratic house of lords, features two crossed fasces.
Beyond autocratic powers for a non-monarchical elite, Western Liberal Democracy also mostly agreed with the key plank of the fascist’s economic program. “Central planning” does exist in modern Western countries – it is based around the military. For example, in the United States their economy is guided by the Pentagon, the world’s largest employer. The Pentagon hands out the fruits of their taxpayer-funded research to private companies; enriches their native bourgeoisie with hugely corrupt contracts; provides jobs for the masses terribly ineffectively; but it very effectively enriches their 1%.
Fascism was never for the people but dedicated to the power of those in power; for the status quo; for submission to essentially autocratic magistrates and politicians; against the redistribution of wealth and political power. It is only socialism which reduces the power of the magistrate, who makes him accountable and who improves the person of the magistrate by making sure he is not solely drawn from the elite, grasping class.
Fascism is different from the globalist class of Western Liberal Democracy by insisting on nationalist competition and national sovereignty. The arrival of the European Union, the euro and the Eurogroup, which will supersede national laws without any concern for ideals of democracy, will render these desires essentially irrelevant. The main sin of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, or of Marine Le Pen, is that these two fascist politicians both seek to restore some aspects of national sovereignty.
Trotsky wrote: “Fascism, as we know, is born between the union of the despair of the middle-classes and the terrorist policy of big capital.” Yet the West never takes a class view and elevates big capital to the status of demigods – this is why to them fascism must always be solely race-related and never economic-related. It’s simply a half-truth, and not understanding and combating this dooms Western politics – and their own history – to total misunderstanding.
The 1% and their lackeys immediately called the Yellow Vests fascists because it was a union of the lower and middle classes – like in the Paris Commune it also included a union of the lower class and the proletariat with the petty bourgeois small shopkeeper.
Yellow Vest: “For 10 years we have only created instability. 75% of France has serious economic difficulties. We have closed hospitals, nurseries, schools – everything is being closed, and this can’t go on!”
Due to there insistence on elitism, fascism could have only ever allied with Liberal Democracy – the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact is as far as it ever could have gone. However, if they had somehow allied with the USSR against Liberal Democracy what would they have permanently smashed? Answer: the Bankocracy which rules today.
It’s vital to recognise that, because the current usage of “fascist” completely lacks this historical-economic component.
The fascism of the 2020s is even more right-wing than the fascism of the 1930s
Due to the refusal to honestly talk about fascism – on both the Western left and the Western right – Western politics today are simply a catastrophe of nonsense and misinformation.
Their lack of knowledge allows them to obscure the fact that modern Western “fascists” are even more right-wing than Hitler, who was quite reliant on the Marxist explanation of 19th century history and economics. However, the modern right wing has expunged Marxism, and thus they cannot be actual fascists. Racism and fascism cannot be mere synonyms for each other – unless the goal is to neuter them of all meaning.
Being more right-wing than Hitler… that seems like something which should be understood, no? However, Western Liberal Democracy doesn’t want anything but propaganda regarding other systems and regarding its own failures and treasons.
The best term for today’s alleged “fascists” would be “Nalis” – Nationalist Liberalists: they have all the jingoism, militarism, authoritarianism and imperialism of 1930s fascists but combine it with right-wing Liberalist political structures, economic inequality and historical analyses.
It’s a simple and accurate political description, but only socialist-inspired countries which have fully rejected Western Liberal Democracy would ever apply the term “Nali”: Just as uninformed socialists don’t want to admit any ideological similarities with Nazism, so uninformed Western Liberal Democrats don’t want to admit that they are actually fighting internecine wars with their “National Liberalist” brethren. The use of “Nazi” or “fascist” is a way to distance themselves from each other despite the obvious similarities between each other.
And what do Western Liberal Democrats care if calling far-right Ukrainians “Nazis” in 2022 unfairly tarnishes socialism and spreads misinformation – both wings of Liberalists (one nationalist, the other globalist) are united in their anti-socialism.
Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are two example of open Nalis, but so are two enemies – Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. The Russian military operation in Ukraine has been a catastrophe of misinformation on both sides regarding who is a “fascist” and who is a “liberal”, and precisely because neither can admit that fascism and liberalism coincide and almost always ally, historically. Thus this battle between two Nali states is either a historical anomaly or, as I predict, Russia’s invasion will mark a step away from their Nalism since 1991 and back towards Socialist Democracy. If Russia continues to insist that “Russophobia” totally equates with “Nazism”, then this will herald their failure to return the fold of progressive politics.
In France, by 2017 the Great Financial Crisis – just the latest periodic failure of liberalism – had inflamed the masses too much for every single politician to ignore: Marine Le Pen thus dropped the Reaganism of her father and made it to the second round of the presidential election. She defended economic ideas which were both similar to the French left and to the Germanic National Socialists of the 1930s. In the 2022 campaign Le Pen reverted back to far-right economics, dropping all her promises for things like a “Frexit” vote within six months of election and for repudiating banker debt, yet the mainstream media called her “fascist” throughout the entire time.
The modern French and Western model was essentially created from 1928-1945, and what it took from fascism and Germanic National Socialism is that economic planning must be limited to the military, and that xenophobia, identity politics and security are spectacles just big enough to dominate the headlines, and thus to ignore liberalism’s failures. To put it in 2022 presidential candidate Eric Zemmour’s terms: France’s economic problem is Muslim welfare, not banker welfare. It’s a pathetic intellectual analysis. When the unrest in Ukraine began France immediately realised that and Zemmour’s popularity quickly halved.
Yellow Vest: “If you look around here you see people of all colours and religions. For me it goes beyond questions of origin – it’s really a question of social justice, regardless of someone’s ethnicity or religion.”
During the 2022 campaign the convicted racist Zemmour said he was, “here to save the French people and France…not here to save the world.” It’s a telling, semi-messianic remark because it is truly straight out of Adolf Hitler’s platform in the 1930s.
But such a comparison was never made by the mainstream media, and it could never be made. Many have heard of Godwin’s Law, or the rule of Nazi analogies: an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches. However, an important corollary is that whenever someone compares someone or something to Nazism – that person has lost the argument and/or the argument is summarily over.
Essentially, the world is to accept that all discussions of Western politics cannot discuss the anti-Western Liberalism ideology which was Germanic Nazism.
Thus it was impossible for them to accurately describe a 2022 French election where the four top candidates were all on the far-right – either economically, politically, culturally or all three. In the two-week interim between their two rounds of voting any criticism of Emmanuel Macron’s record was immediately shouted down in the mainstream media as “support for fascism” – voters wondered which candidate they were referring to. The failure to delineate fascism from Western Liberal Democracy means that we also cannot understand where they have reconciled a century later, just as how liberalism and monarchy eventually reconciled.
The Western right is stuck in falsely believing that the right of 2020 is the same as in the 1930s, despite all the anti-racist gains made since then; the Western left is stuck in falsely believing that their “Popular Front” tactic is actual leftism, despite being neutered of Marxism and socialism. This is why Western versions of history and their political discourse today simply make no sense. It only makes sense if we remember that obscuring political truths is a hallmark of Western Liberal Democratic history, and thus their versions are not truthful nor complete at all.
Not wanting to accurately define fascism or liberalism, but certain in their rejection of Socialist Democracy, after the first round vote in 2022 all the losing candidates (except Zemmour) immediately called for a Popular Front against Le Pen, just as they did in 2017. What’s vital and new is that the Yellow Vests empathically refused this form of class-collaborationism. The People’s Front tactic must be seen for what it is: not an effort to fight fascism but as a way to cement fake-leftism.
Trotsky wrote: “The racists pillage the Marxist program, successfully transforming certain of its sections into an instrument of social demagogy. The ‘Communists’ (?) as a matter of fact refuse their own program, substituting for it the rotten refuse of reformism. Can one conceive of a more fraudulent bankruptcy?”
Trotsky wrote that in 1935 but anyone can see that this is where the West is stuck, still:
Racists reject certain sections of Western Liberal Democrat economics in order to preserve White citizens from the united Bankocrats, while left-wingers hysterically prop up right-leaning moderates who only seek to refine Liberalism into an ever-more unequal system. Can you conceive of a more fraudulent ideological bankruptcy than modern Western politics?
If “Nali” ever did catch on one thing is certain: it would be a huge improvement.
<—>
Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value!
Publication date: June 1, 2022.
Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.
There is a small break in the clouds of the western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started.
The Health of the Sick, Europe’s Hot Summer and even Colder Winter
“It’s West Europeans that want to distinguish themselves from us, they don’t have a monopoly on “Europeanness”… We are even more European than they are.”
-Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev
Growing up in the 90s in Italy, we were taught from the 5th grade on about WWII. The Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the valiant partisans, and of course “the liberation”. Photographic and moving images from the archives are constantly played, repeated every year, perhaps dangerously, to the point of banality. The moral of course was that this was the war against wars and therefore the last. A strong “West” united against barbarity would make sure that history would not repeat itself; the raison d’être of the modern European project.
Today, images of civilians executed by Nazis for accepting provisions from the Russian military, and blatant war crimes against prisoners of war are promptly labeled as “Russian disinformation”. Nothing discovered on the ground in Ukraine could be as dark as what the West could manufacture from their media rooms armed with “satellite images” demonstrating Russia’s innate appetite for expansion and violence.
All great reasons to attempt to destabilize Russia through sanctions. The second-rate European ruling classes obediently dragged their economy, kicking and screaming, toward “The End of History”. In total denial of the disintegration of the Atlantic hegemon, while ignoring the integration unfolding on the very continent on which they live, Eurasia.
It is possible that the fatal concoction of hyper-globalization, digital reality, woke cancel culture and biomedical security has caused unprecedented amnesia of modern history on the Western masses. The crucial eight decades after World War II and its resulting rules-based world order relegated to the darkest annals of memory.
The second of May 1945, as such, is a conveniently neglected historic fact. It is the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, finishing Nazi Germany. More than one month before the arrival of American and British forces. Equally important is that every move after the Potsdam Berlin conference in 1945 by the Western winners of the war was targeted specifically at isolating the USSR, trashing previous agreements.
Shortly after, in February 1946, on the propaganda front George Keenan’s “Long Telegram”- hit piece on the Slavic soul, cold and incapable of modernizing with Western civilizations – was instrumental in creating the rhetoric to “other” Russia, and facilitated the creation of consent around what would become the Western bloc’s “containment” strategy toward the Soviet Union.
If one simply examines the dates of key events such as:
1. The Deutsch Mark reform on 17th June 1948 and the Blockade of West Berlin on 24th June 1948;
2. Proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949 and the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic 7th October 1949;
3. Proposal for a free, demilitarised West Berlin refused on 27th November 1958, and the Berlin Wall construction beginning on 13th August 1961.
The West made every move first, for which there was a Soviet response, not the other way around. Ignoring the Yalta agreements that occupied Germany would be controlled under mutual agreement under unified command of the three winning powers, and Potsdam conference article 14: “during the occupation period Germany will be treated as a single economic entity.”
But still, in the years connecting the Potsdam Berlin conference and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Moscow continued to ask for negotiations, proposing several maneuvers that could end in a peace treaty for all Germany. It was reported that crickets could be heard on the western front.
The German reparations promised to Europe (including of course to the USSR) under the auspices of Yalta and Potsdam would be replaced with the American credit scheme Marshall Plan, keeping the USA war-time economic boom moving, through the reconstruction of battered Europe- its economy now under direct control of the international monetary institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944; namely, the IMF and World Bank. The Marshall Plan (which was offered to USSR, but was quickly rejected) through its various industrial and economic re-incarnations, such as the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), and the ACUE (American Committee for the united Europa) evolved into the European Union.
No wonder Russians have always seen Europe as a total colony. They shouldered the reconstruction of their territory, sacrificing abundance for independence while watching NATO/American bases swallow Europe from their front yard.
So what is the trouble with Europe today? The European project in reality is very transparent, with a hierarchy designed specifically to have a single center of power within Europe securing the hegemonic interests of its master abroad, while still living in the intoxicating fumes of the fantasy surrounding the Berlin Wall.
Coming out of the 1929 market crash, the United States revitalized its economy weaponizing the allied war effort in the old continent. The cost of their help was 120 NATO/USA bases and 40 American nuclear bombs in Italy alone, the homogenization of “European identity”, and the territory’s transformation into America’s missile launching pad and buffer zone.
Turning its back on institutionalized Nazism in Ukraine for America’s imperialistic goals, West Europe is becoming the moral sick-man of the world. While quickly descending into economic and cultural chaos it is irreparably losing the trust of the neighbors that count. If “European values” mean only speaking and never listening as in the past 500 years, then one can only hope that if anything at all is left of Homer and Cicero that they will be preserved in that land lost in the translation of Dostoyevsky and Gagarin.
There is a small break in the clouds of the Western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started.
But first, a remedy is required, only time will tell the prescription.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
يقول أحد الجنرالات المخضرمين العارفين بقوانين الحرب والذين شاركوا في صناعة بعض من معاركها، إن ثلاثة قرارات اتخذها الجنرال فلاديمير بوتين تحتاج شجاعة استثنائيّة يصعب أن يمتلكها قائد عسكريّ أو سياسيّ، الأول هو قرار بدء الحرب في ظروف جيوسياسية شديدة التعقيد. فالرئيس بوتين كان يعلم أنه يدخل غمار حقل شوك مليء بالمفاجآت والاحتمالات ليس ما جرى إلا بعضاً منها. وقرار الحرب على أوكرانيا يعادل عام 1961 قراراً أميركياً بغزو كوبا، بينما الظروف ليست معكوسة، فلا روسيا هي أميركا الستينيات القوة التي يمكن لأحد مواجهتها، ولا أوكرانيا هي كوبا المحاصرة والضعيفة. والثاني هو قرار تفعيل الأسلحة النووية ورفع جاهزيتها الى مستوى التأهب، وهو قرار يعادل الاستعداد لدخول حرب نووية، لم يسبق أن فعله أحد آخر، حتى أميركا والاتحاد السوفياتي في مرحلة النزاع حول الصواريخ السوفياتية في كوبا وما عرف بأزمة الخنازير بقيا على مسافة من مثل هذا القرار. والقرار الثالث هو إعلان الانسحاب من المحور الرئيسي للهجوم الروسي الذي استهدف العاصمة كييف، وكان على مقربة من قلبها، واتخاذ القرار من طرف واحد بما فيه من مخاطرة بالاضطرار للعودة لاسترداد المناطق التي تم الانسحاب منها بكلفة أعلى، وما فيه من فرص للخصوم لتصويره هزيمة للجيش الروسي واعترافاً بالفشل، هو قرار يصعب على قادة عسكريين وسياسيين كثيرين اتخاذه.
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التجول الافتراضي لبضع دقائق في عقل الرئيس بوتين يبدو رحلة مغرية، لمحاولة استكشاف ما يدور في عقل هذا الرجل الذي تدور على طاولته وبين يديه، خرائط العالم الجديد، وتتوقف على تواقيعه مصائر الكثير من السياسات والحسابات والحروب. وهذا التجول الافتراضي هو حصيلة حوار ممتع للتداول في الفرضيات التي وضعها الرئيس بوتين لدى رسم سياق حربه واتخاذ قراراته، جرى مع صديق خبير بطريقة تفكير الرئيس الروسي من جهة، ومتابع لتفاصيل السياسات الدولية والحروب المعاصرة، وصراعات الطاقة والجغرافيا السياسية المندلعة منذ مطلع القرن الحادي والعشرين، من جهة مقابلة، وتبدأ الرحلة من السؤال الأهم، ماذا يريد الرئيس بوتين، وماذا يخشى؟
تبدأ الخلاصة الأولى بالاكتشاف الخطير، وهو أن الرئيس بوتين لا يخشى الحرب النووية وهو واثق من كسبها إذا اندلعت، وهو يعتقد أن الخوف منها سيتسبب بالذعر السياسي ودفع أثمان بلا طائل تحت شعار تفاديها. وأن الحرب النووية اذا كانت ضمن خطة الطرف الغربي المقابل فسيكون دفع العبودية الكاملة ثمناً لتفاديها هو الطريقة الوحيدة لاستبعادها، واذا لم تكن ضمن مشروع الغرب، فإن الاستعداد لها وعدم خشيتها لن يدفعا بالغرب نحوها، بل سيجعلانه مستعداً للتفكير بجدية وعقلانية، باستحالة الجمع بين تفاديها وممارسة الهيمنة والعبودية على العالم دولاً وشعوباً، ورفض الأخذ بمعايير موحدة لمقاربة القضايا الدولية الشائكة والمتراكمة، والتي تشكل علاقة الشرق بالغرب أهمها، ومحورها الرئيسي، ولذلك فإن الرئيس بوتين حسم أمر عدم الخشية من الحرب النووية مبكراً واتخذ الاستعدادات العسكرية وغير العسكرية التي تتيح له الخروج منها منتصراً، معتبراً أن هذا هو أقصر الطرق لمنع وقوعها، وأنه التعبير الأسمى عن الحس الإنساني بالسعي لتفادي الخراب الذي ستحمله للعالم. وهذه القناعة هي التي كانت وراء إنفاق مئات مليارات الدولارات على تطوير الأسلحة الاستراتيجية التي لم يكشف الا عن القليل منها، لكن الغرب يعرف ويعترف بأن روسيا للمرة الأولى تسبقه على هذا الصعيد بعشر سنوات.
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إذا كان الأمر الأول هو ما لا يخشاه الرئيس بوتين فما الذي يخشاه؟ الذي كان يخشاه الرئيس بوتين، هو أن ينجح الغرب بصياغة مواجهة ذكية تفكك العلاقة بين مستويات الحرب الثلاثة، المستوى الأوكراني – الأوكراني ومحوره التعامل المنصف قانونياً وإنسانياً وثقافياً ولغوياً مع الأصول الروسية، لأن هذا هو محور قضية دونباس، العنصرية المبنية على هوية غربية شوفينية تجاه كل ما يمت لروسيا بصلة بالدم او الدين او اللغة. والمستوى الثاني هو المستوى الإقليمي، ومحوره التوازن الأمني في أوروبا بين روسيا ودول الناتو، وكانت رسالة موسكو لطلب الضمانات الأمنية من واشنطن، تتضمن عرضاً وافياً لمضمون عناوينه، وقضية أوكرانيا وانضمامها للناتو كانت رأس جبل الجليد في هذا الملف. والمحور الثالث هو مستوى العلاقات الدولية وسعي روسيا لنظام عالمي جديد متعدد الأقطاب صرح المسؤولون الروس مراراً عن فهمهم له وسعيهم إليه. وهذا المحور هو الإطار الحاضن عملياً وسياسياً واستراتيجياً لكل تفاصيل وسياقات الحرب الأوكرانية من الزاوية الروسية. ويعتقد الرئيس بوتين أنه لو نجح الغرب بفك التشابك بين هذه المحاور، فبادر عبر الحكومة الأوكرانية بإعلان الانفتاح العملي على مقتضيات إنهاء الحقبة العنصرية بحق ذوي الأصول والمتعلقات الروسية، وشجع على التفاوض حول حياد أوكرانيا، كترجمة طبيعية للتسليم باستحالة ضمها إلى الناتو، لنجح بحرمان روسيا من المنصة التي وفرتها الحرب للهم الاستراتيجي الأول لروسيا وهو إعادة صياغة العلاقات الدولية، ولنجح الغرب بمحاصرتها كقوة إقليمية وحرمانها من فرصة لعب دور القوة الدولية العظمى، التي تستحيل هزيمتها، كما تقول وقائع ما بعد حزمات العقوبات الأشد قسوة، وأزمات الطاقة والغذاء التي تدق أبواب العالم من أوروبا أولاً.
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الحصيلة الأولى للجولة أن الرئيس بوتين يعتبر أنه نجح بفرض تفادي الحرب النووية بوضعها خياراً حاضراً على الطاولة، وأن الغرب تصرّف بحماقة وغباوة سهلت عليه مهمة جعل النظام العالمي الجديد محور الصراع، بعدما زاد الربط بين محاور الصراع الثلاثة، فبدلاً من تفكيك السياسات العنصرية بحق ذوي الأصول والمتعلقات الروسية في أوكرانيا قام بعولمة العنصرية ضد الروس عبر ما حملته كل العقوبات الغربية، بصورة استنهضت الوطنية الروسية إلى درجة غير مسبوقة تحت الشعور بخطر التهديد، وجعلت حربهم الوجودية هي الحرب التي يخوضها بوتين، ولو كانت الأثمان اعلى كلفة عما هي الآن بالأرواح وظروف المعيشة، والروس دفعوا ملايين الأرواح وعمران مدنهم كلها تقريباً لاجتثاث عنصرية مشابهة مثلتها النازية التي ستحتفل روسيا بذكرى النصر عليها قريبا، وبدلاً من التشجيع على حياد أوكرانيا يتحدث الغرب عن ضم دولتي فنلندا والسويد المحايدتين إلى الناتو، وبدلاً من تحييد قطاعي الطاقة والعملات كنقاط ضعف غربية كان يجب عدم كشفها، ذهب الغرب الى الملعب الذي يرغب به الرئيس بوتين لمنازلة الغرب وهو ليس إلا في نقطة البداية بعد.
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قرار بدء الحرب وقرار تفعيل السلاح النووي كانا ترجمة لهذا الفهم، وقد تحققت هذه الأهداف، وقرار الانسحاب من محيط كييف ترجمة للاطمئنان بأن المحور الثالث للحرب، أي مستقبل العلاقات الدولية، صار هو العامل الحاسم، فمن الخطأ المساهمة بمنح البعد الأوكراني من الحرب أبعد مما يستحق، والحرب لم تعد الا منصة مفتوحة لأسابيع أو شهور او سنوات، حتى يتحقق الهدف، وهو ولادة نظام عالمي جديد. ومدة الحرب يقررها مدى مواصلة اوروبا محاولة الجمع المستحيل بين مصالحها الجوهرية والتبعية لأميركا، وما تظنه واشنطن لعبة عض على الأصابع تنتظر من يصرخ أولاً، هي في الحقيقة لعبة لحس مبرد، فيها طرف يلاعب لسانه بالمبرد ويتلذذ بطعم دمه، كحال أوروبا، ومن يعض على الإصبع الأوروبي هو الأميركي وليس روسيا. وروسيا تعض على الإصبع الأميركي من بوابة قدرة أوروبا على التحمل، وقدرة أميركا على تخيل مستقبلها دون أوروبا، وموعد الصراخ الأوروبي قريب، ومثله موعد الصراخ الأميركي. في عقل الرئيس بوتين معادلة، مرتاح لمسار الأمور وفقاً للخطة والتوقيت المقررين، ومستعد لكل الاحتمالات، لكن يصعب على الكثيرين فهم معنى ذلك بسهولة، إلا عندما يراهم يجلسون الى طاولة التفاوض لمناقشة ما هو أبعد من أوكرانيا والأمن الأوروبي وأمن الطاقة، لرسم قواعد جديدة للعلاقات الدولية تثق موسكو ويثق الرئيس بوتين أن مكانة موسكو فيها ستكون حاسمة ومقررة.
Some months ago, while chatting about world events, media lies, and how people who dare to think critically are often dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, we joked about being “reality theorists”, and I liked the sound of that term. Our plans to have a conversation got delayed, but finally came about the other morning.
In our first conversation, Airika and I discussed a variety of things, from Palestine to Syria to Ukraine and more. Airika is a phenomenal researcher & very expressive, articulate, woman. We’ll be having these conversations a lot more frequently, on a wide range of issues, particularly things she has researched deeply.
by Prof. Slobodan Antonić – (Translated by Joran Velikonja)
In this article I will present the various plans that Germany had with the Serbs and Russians after the expected victory in World War II. Why do I fall back to history? We frequently perceive Hitler and Nazism as an aberration in Western history. But Hitler was, in fact, just openly announcing that in Europe he will do what the West has already done elsewhere. As we’ll see, Hitler took the extermination of the Native Americans as a model for the colonization of Slavic lands, Russia in particular.
“It would be best if Serbia just disappeared from the map” —as attested by Hermann Neubacher, that opinion was prevalent within the German leadership in 1941 (see here, p. 89). But we find the same opinion in The Manchester Guardian (as The Guardian was formerly called), in August 1914: “If it were physically possible for Servia to be towed out to sea and sunk there, the air of Europe would at once seem cleaner” (here; here, p. 53).
Actually, the only difference between Hitler and the English was Hitler’s brutally proclaiming to do—and he had done as much as he could—what others in the West were doing slower and more subtly, the things they didn’t yet dare to undertake or weren’t able to accomplish.
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Unlike the Kaiser, who wanted territorial expansion towards the Middle East and a redistribution of African and Asian colonies, Hitler’s primary goal was to colonize Slavic lands, from the Baltic to the Black Sea for starters and then onward to the Urals.
In Mein Kampf he writes that the Kaiser was mistaken in pushing Germany southwards. “When in today’s Europe we speak of new soil and land”, he wrote, “we primarily mean only Russia and the peripheral countries subservient to her. It appears that destiny itself wants to show us the way. […] The giant Empire in the East is ripe for its downfall.” (here; 44th unabridged German edition, p. 742-3; compare here, p. 118)
By the way, Hitler had adopted many concepts from the West. As J. Q. Whitman revealed in Hitlerʼs American Model (2017), race laws in the United States were the legal inspiration for the race laws in the Third Reich. In his book Hitler: The Definitive Biography (2014), John Toland showed how impressed Hitler had been with the system of Indian Reservations, the extermination of the indigenous peoples, the epidemics and starvation policies. According to Toland, when speaking to the German leaders, the Führer frequently “extolled the efficacy of the American extermination of the ‘red savages’ by starvation and in unequal combat” (here, p. 802).
“As a passionate reader of Karl May’s novels”, writes John Pool in his book Hitler and His Secret Partners (1997), “he would frequently refer to the Russians as redskins. He saw a parallel between his own efforts to occupy and colonize Russia and the conquest of the American West” (p. 272). He used to say that in the European East the Germans “had one single purpose: Germanization by peopling with Germans and treating the locals as redskins”. He even encouraged military officers to read Karl May and learn about all kinds of combat with the natives.
How did the Germans imagine their colonization of Russia and Eastern Europe?
The Generalplan Ost (1942) anticipated three types of agricultural estates to accomplish the colonization of Slavic lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea: individual (25-29 hectares; approx. 60-70 acres), intermediate (40-100 ha; approx. 100-250 acres) and large ones (250 ha; approx. 620 acres). The colonization was supposed to be carried out by some 6 to 12 million Germans, settled in areas from which 31 million Slavs would be banished across the Urals. The displacement would include 65 percent of Ukrainians and 75 percent of Belorusians, leaving behind 14 million Slavs, primarily as servants and unskilled workers (here).
The Plan foresaw an initial establishment of three settler colonies: in the Baltic (Memel-Narew Gebiet), in the Leningrad Oblast (Ingermannland) and in Crimea (Gotengau; see map here). Their foundation would have been Germanic farmers-warriors, living on family or collective estates, as in some form of a Military Frontier. Regional centers would have consisted of settler towns, 36 of them, numbering 20,000 inhabitants each, interconnected by a network of highways and railroad lines. The colonies were supposed to spread gradually, until they would merge into a unified whole.
The Slavs would have been exiled from their towns, whereas in the villages they would have been retained as farm hands. Slavic education wouldn’t have gone further than reading and writing (while also switching over to the Latin alphabet; here, p. 122). Hitler even thought that the Slavs should not be taught anything beyond the “knowledge of traffic signs, to be able to stay out of our way” (ibid.).
“Hitler liked to reiterate that the words Russia and Russian should be forbidden. Allowed are only Muscovy and Muscovites. After the victory of the Reich, the Muscovites will be simply driven onto their reservations, like the Indians in the USA” (here, p. 285).
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What would have happened to Serbia?
In his book The German New Order and South-East Europe (in Serbian: Nemački novi poredak i Jugoistočna Evropa), Milan Ristović describes the plans for Serbia. Generally, there were two plans in existence.
According to the first one, submitted to the Ministry of External Affairs in July 1941, two million ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia were to be amassed in the Danubian German state Prinz Eugen Stadt. [or Staat?] It would have stood sentry over communications along the Danube and, akin to the Military Frontier, barring access to the Lebensraum from the south and east (here, pp. 101-106; 362-363).
Pursuant to that plan, the Serbs would have been exiled from Belgrade, Smederevo and other places along the Danube. The Plan stipulates that the “Serbs have to be driven away from the Danube and out of Belgrade in order to stress their political insignificance and to prevent any new plots against Germany, the order in the Balkans and in Europe — a frequent historical occurrence” (ibid., p. 106).
Belgrade was chosen as the heart of the German Danubian state, as the strategic center of the river basins of the Tisa, Drava, Sava and Morava. It was to become the “fortress of the Reich” in the borderland (Reichsfestung Belgrad), with the specific task of safeguarding two economic resources of key importance for Grossdeutschland: the Djerdap Gorge (Iron Gates) and the mining complex in Bor (ibid., pp. 105-106).
The Djerdap Gorge was essential for navigation control on the Danube and as the place where the Germans intended to build the largest hydropower plant in Europe.
On 25 September 1941 Hitler proudly proclaimed that now the Germans had finally returned to “places which already witnessed the breakthrough of the Germanic-German race: we were standing at the Iron Gates, we had been in Belgrade, we had entered the Russian space” (276). Two weeks later he speaks enthusiastically of the Danube as the “river course of the future” (der Zukunftsstrom). It will connect Germany, via the Black Sea, with the boundless granaries of her future colonies around the Dnieper and Don, then with the oil wells around Baku (the pipeline reached ports on the Black Sea), as well as with coal mines in the Donbas (276) [[1]].
Exhilarated by the conquests of Belarus and the Ukraine, Hitler then presents his vision of the future, in which the Danube is the main traffic artery of the Grossraum (the German economic space): “As big as it may become, the Danube-Main Canal cannot be built sufficiently large; of course, the Danube-Oder Canal should be added to it; thus, we will be getting an economic bloodstream of unheard-of proportions; Europe will be the land of unlimited possibilities” (276).
The Germans also worked out a plan (Grossprojekt “Eisernes Tor”) which anticipated the construction of a hydropower plant at the Iron Gates, “producing as much electricity as one half of all German power plants” (282). From the Iron Gates, electricity would have been transmitted to Graz and Vienna. Also foreseen was the “creation of one of the largest aluminum production facilities in Europe” due to the proximity of Romanian bauxite (Bihor Mountains) (ibid.). The Iron Gates Dam would be built by Russian prisoners and all construction was to be completed by 1947 (282-283).
The other key resource belonging to Serbia, was the Bor Mining Complex. It was the largest copper ore deposit in Europe, making Yugoslavia the top producer of copper on the continent in 1941 (here, p. 103). In 1943 the Germans were extracting up to 50,000 tonnes of ore per month (here, p. 354). Other Serbian ore resources, too, were of interest to the Greater Germanic Reich, such as lead mines (Trepča, Kopaonik, Avala, Ajvalija, Janjevo, Lece, Novo brdo i Rudnik) or antimony (40 % of European production: Krupanj, Zajača, Lisa and Bujanovac; here, p. 105).
So, all that had to be placed under control through the establishment of the Danubian German state, from which, as stated, the Serbs would have been displaced. Reichsminister Krosigk announced in 1942 the possibility of a new “Migration Period” (Völkerwanderung), with mass displacement—as he explicitly specified—of the Czechs, Poles and Serbs (here, p. 91).
* * *
But Hitler himself was not thrilled with the idea of a Prinz Eugen Stadt [or Staat?]. He planned to recruit the required six to twelve million German colonists of the European East by including those same two million Danube Swabians (111-113; 363). He did not, in fact, consider the area of the Danube basin in the Balkans as part of the German “living space” (Lebensraum), but rather as merely a piece of the Germanic “economic sphere” (Wirtschaftsraum; 172-173).
Hitler actually perceived the Balkans as a “junkyard of small states” (Kleinstaatgerümpel), which only the Germans can rearrange and civilize (50-51). After the Reichʼs victory those staes, too, would be placed into a special vassal relationship of stepwise arranged semi-sovereign and pseudo-sovereign statelets, as was planned in Berlin (ibid.).
Europe outside the Reich was regarded as the German Grossraum (larger habitat), which—after the victory—would see the establishment of a “hierarchy of peoples/nations” (Rangordnung der Völker/der Nationen). Even Italians were aware that within that order only the Germans would be at the top. As early as 13 October 1941 Mussolini was saying that Italy, too, would be reduced to a colony and might be forced to cede to the Reich parts of her territory, such as Trieste (334).
The Balkan peoples, deemed anyway poorly suitable for assimilation (nichtumvolkbar; 83), would be at the bottom of the European hierarchy, whereas the Serbs, as the “sworn enemies of order” (361), would find themselves on the bottom rung—provided, of course, that they were not re-educated in the meantime (362) [[2]].
That’s why the Serbs were treated as one of those peoples, along with the Russians and Poles, who “would have to remain under German dominion in the long run” (65). Unlike the vassal states, such as Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria, which still had certain elements of independence, Serbia and Greece (the latter also perceived as a “problematic” country; 70), were occupied territories, where the administration was directly installed by the occupying power (360). Serbia was put under a particularly strict occupation regime (62,184 people were executed by firing squads; here, 116,264), while the Serbs across the border on the Drina were even worse off, having been mercilessly turned over to the Croatian genocide.
Still, even the “truncated Serbia” (Rumpfserbien; 285) probably would have become part of the European order in the end. But what would have been her fate?
The Germans didn’t really see the future European Völkerordnung as an order of states (Denken in Staaten), but rather as a system of commercial colonies (74-75; 161). The countries outside the Reich, especially those at the edge of the Grossraum, would be “advised” to “refrain” from developing their own “manufacturing of automobiles, electrical devices, locomotives, engines for transportation and industry, precision mechanics, chemicals, dyes…”, which would be under the exclusive authority of Germany. Others would have to stick to agriculture, mining and the coarsest processing of raw materials, “which do not require a particularly qualified workforce” (187). In order to absorb the agricultural labor surplus, industry would have to be developed in the Balkans, too, but it would be primarily linked with the exploitation of natural resources and only for the first phase of their processing (188).
As part of the de-industrialization idea, particularly with regard to the defense industry, 268 railway freight cars containing 4,488 pieces of machinery were hauled off to Germany from the Military Engineering Plant in Kragujevac, Serbia, in the course of 1941 alone! In March of 1943, 43 more freight cars were towed away, followed by another 37 in April. In the second half of 1943, 94 additional carriages with machinery were taken from Kragujevac, 96 freight cars with machinery from the Military Engineering Plant in Čačak, 88 freight cars from the factory in Obilić, 140 freight cars from the plant in Ravnjak close to Kruševac, 75 freight cars from the Military Engineering Plant in Lazarevac, 84 carriages from the “Vistad” factory, and so on. “This was the best organized looting of third-party property in recorded history” (here, p. 106).
The plan was to eliminate any competition to the Reich’s economy in all European vassal states, so as to ensure “absolute supremacy of German corporations” (here, p. 200). By way of example, the administration and use of the remaining industrial facilities in Serbia was handed over to the management of 29 major German companies with the entire production intended for the Reich, so that “almost nothing was left for the needs of Serbia and the Serbian public” (here, p. 108). Only the rail-road network enjoyed unlimited investment, but its primary role was to enable a more efficient exploitation of natural resources for the Grossdeutsches Reich (here, p. 188).
In addition to ores, large amounts of grain and lumber from Serbia were also hauled off to Grossdeutschland. As early as 19 June 1941 it was announced that farmers must cede for compulsory purchase all grain except 30 kilograms of wheat or 60 kilograms of corn per household member (here, p. 117). In 1942 Serbia was forced to deliver 320,000 tonnes of wheat, 600,000 tonnes of corn and 90,000 tonnes of oats, rye and barley (118). The “purchase” of all commodities was paid for with the money which Serbia had to remit as contribution for its own occupation (119-120), so that Germany was getting all goods from Serbia literally free of charge.
As a result of the export of lumber (but also due to insurgent activities), Serbia—although densely forested—was left with almost no firewood. In Belgrade they even contemplated “to log the Košutnjak park-forest and Mount Avala, in order to save the urban population from the approaching winter” (123).
But still, despite all that, it was assessed in Germany that, in fact, “the workforce from the South-East (of Europe) is the most valuable export commodity these countries can give us even now, but especially after the war” (here, p. 255). The Balkans was regarded as an “inexhaustible workforce pool” (257), able to provide to the Reich “more than three million workers”, of which number at least 1.5 million would be seasonal labor (up to ten months per year; 255). The war interfered with a more substantial export of manpower to the Reich and yet, from Serbia alone, 80,000 workers went (or were deported) to Germany (268).
Most interesting of all, this entire colonial order in Europe, designed for the unrestrained exploitation of markets, labor and natural resources, was supposed to be masked beneath the narrative of a “common European future” and a Europe “from Sweden to the Balkans” (352). In order to minimize the resistance of the vanquished peoples, it was recommended as early as 1940 to avoid the term “German large-area economy” (Grossraumwirtschaft) and to speak “always and only of Europe” (151). In the propaganda it was emphasized that “Germany does not seek to hold sway over countries”, the only ostensible goal being “an economically whole” Europe in which the peoples would “economically complement” each other (155). This “complementing” became reality after Germany tore down almost all intra-European (zwischeneuropäische) borders (288).
Hitler himself was actually a great European, except that he equated “European” with “pan-German” (31-32). The Germans, by the way, did not view the ongoing war in Europe as merely a war of conquest, but as a form of great economic restructuring. “This is not a war for throne and altar”, as Goebbels kept explaining (31 May 1942)—or rather it is not a war about who will govern over the peoples nor what their religion will be. According to the Reichsminister für Propaganda, this is “a war for raw materials” because we Germans “only want to cash in” (150).
It is clear that in such a system Serbia would have been but a marginal colony, no more than a German depot from which cheap labor, food and raw materials are taken as needed.
* * *
I am sure that the the above text was triggering parallels with contemporary circumstances in the reader’s mind, both in the geostrategic [[3]] [3] and economic sense. Russia got away (for the time being)—although the West hasn’t given up its pretensions to dismember her as a nation and subdue her as a culture (patterned after the Vatican’s current formula of “consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary”). But today’s Serbia is clearly not too far from the position assigned to her by the Nazi Plan B.
Now, I would add to this only an insight into the current wave of mass exodus to Germany. The Germans, as they say, currently need 1.4 million workers and our people are in demand because they easily integrate and assimilate. But don’t you have the feeling that in today’s Serbia there appears to exist some hidden Ministry of Emigration and Propaganda to Depart for Germany?
Another story is the open propaganda to emigrate, cultivated by, say, the daily Danas, in its column charmingly titled “Our People around the World”. It was already pointed out by Zoran Ćirjaković that this column had been “converted into a campaign for turning oneʼs back on Serbia”. The captions from the column speak for themselves: “Leaving Serbia wasnʼt easy, but it was essential”; “Despite all changes, life in Dubai is incomparably better than in Serbia”; “I miss Serbia, but Austria has offered me security”; “Itʼs not our fault, our system is rotten”; “We Serbs know how to get by and to gain respect”; “People from Serbia are accustomed to being more resourceful than ‘normal folks’”; “I bid adieu to this Serbia, but the love for the country still remains”…
“Along with the columns of numerous haters of this country”, notes Ćirjaković, “those shamefully spun testimonies of the escapees paint an image of Serbia as a repugnant, hopeless gas chamber in which no progress is possible”.
But Danas is surely the favorite paper of the German ambassador, too. On its pages, denkverbot is any topic that could awaken an ever so slight awareness of the colonial status in which Serbia finds itself, but even more so of the possible ways out of that situation (about some of which I have written here and here).
“The greatest success of (neo)colonialism is to convince people that it does not exist”. That’s why the first step towards emancipation is for us to understand the nature of the Atlanticist spirit, then to recognize the strategic interests of the West and to vow to ourselves, but also to each other, that we won’t allow them to be ousted from the Danube (so they could settle here some other, more suitable people); and no, we won’t allow to be treated, or to treat ourselves, as if we were — redskins.
Himmler had suggested, in his time, that the “Serbian people has grown out of rebellions over the centuries” and that with us one has to be forever on guard. Because no matter how defeated he may appear, “a Serb is always a Serb” (here, p. 90).
We only have to remain Serbs. Is that so much of a problem?
[] In other respects, too, the Danube was the main transportation route for bulk cargo (Massengüter) — oil, lumber, grain and ores, not only because back then the traffic network was less well developed, but also on account of the much cheaper fluvial transport as compared to road and railway traffic (here, p. 277; 286). For instance, all the oil from Ploeşti (Romania), the main European oilfield at that time (278), was transported to the Reich upstream the Danube. That’s why Hitler was saying that “to safeguard navigation, the Iron Gates have to be placed under the umbrella of the Wehrmacht and stay under it in perpetuity” (283). ↑
[] It is a fact that the Germans held Serbs in high regard as warriors and on that account were seeing them as a dangerous disturbance factor of their New Order. Hitler lamented that he tried to win over the Serbs “by promising them Thessalonica” and “demanding nothing of them”, only to burst out that “never before in his life was he as outraged as on March 27”, when it became obvious that “the Serbs were just a gang of conspirators” (89).“The Serbs, as eternal instigators of unrest, have to be cornered and suppressed as much as possible” was the dominant view in the upper echelons of the Reich, as attested by Neubacher (89). When in 1943 he suggested to Hitler to annex Montenegro to Serbia, the latter responded that the “Serbs (historically) have demonstrated their state-building power and far-reaching goals, all the way to the Aegean Sea”, and that “a people with such a political sense of mission” should not be allowed “to become dominant in the Balkans” (90). ↑
Allegedly, Chanel customers must sign a form saying that they will not take the items sold by the brand to the Russian Federation, as per some internal document of the boutique chain.
We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future. But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle.Seems like those running the legacy of the “great Coco” have found a way to join the Russophobic “cancel Russia” campaign.
Weird, right? What’s the link between Russia’s anti-Nazi operation and the French fashion house?
But the link is there. We just opened a closet to find some well-preserved 80-year-old skeletons.
During World War II, Coco Chanel herself was a collaborator and a Third Reich agent. She is widely known to have had connections to the occupation authorities in France. Baron Hans Guenther Freiherr von Dincklage, an attaché of the German government in charge of the Nazi propaganda in Paris, was among her dearest friends.
Coco Chanel, also known as informer F-7124 as per Abwehr records, supported the German masters of Paris so much that she took part in the attempts to organise secret negotiations between the Reich and the United Kingdom. One should say that the Germans valued Coco and had her live in a luxurious apartment at the Ritz hotel, while ordinary Parisians struggled to make ends meet under the German occupation, while the country’s economy was under enormous strain.
Moreover, the fashion designer accepted the help of the Nazis to reach her business goals. Before the war, she sold her Chanel No. 5 production facility to Jewish manufacturers. Then, she engaged the Germans to try and reclaim the rights to the perfume sale profits.
After France was liberated, she was called to answer for all of that. The fashion house does not advertise it but Coco was arrested at the end of the war. She was later released as a favour to Churchill (and here is London again) and was banned from France after the occupation was over, for years, residing in the “neutral” Switzerland.
The brand’s management has always emphasised that the Chanel house traditions are as strong as ever. Well, no doubt about that now. Investigative reporter Hal Vaughan wrote about the founder of the fashion house: “The Nazis were in power, and Chanel gravitated to power.”
The brand was never bothered by such things as concentration camps, mass killings and war crimes perpetrated by the SS and Gestapo divisions.
We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future.
But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle.
And the Chanel house can get back to square one and support Nazism, just like its founder did. But now everyone will know.
Yes, of course posted by Amarynth, for the women here!
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
