A Matryoshka of Psyops: And Why General Armageddon Is Not Going Anywhere

June 30, 2023

Source

Pepe Escobar

The main problem faced by Russia is not the Hegemon and NATO: it’s domestic, Pepe Escobar writes.

The secret of a perfect psyop is that no one really understands it.

A perfect psyop accomplishes two tasks: it renders the enemy dazed and confused while achieving a set of very important goals.

It goes without saying that sooner rather than later we should see the real goals emerging out of the strategic play in Russia I described as The Longest Day.

The Longest Day may or may not have been a larger than life psyop.

To clear the fog, let’s start with a roundup of the usual “winner” suspects.

First one is undoubtedly Belarus. Due to the priceless mediation of Old Man Luka, Minsk is now gifted with the most experienced army in the world: the Wagner musicians, masters of conventional (Libya, Ukraine) and non-conventional (Syria, Central African Republic) war.

That is already inflicting the Fear of Hell in NATO, which is suddenly facing in its eastern flank a super pro army, very well equipped, and de facto uncontrollable, and on top of it hosted by a nation now equipped with nuclear weapons.

Simultaneously, Russia props up dissuasion on its western front. Like clockwork that is leading NATOstan to invest in ballooning military budgets (with funds it doesn’t have). That process happens to be a key plank of Russian strategy since at least March 2018.

And as an extra bonus Russia creates a 24/7 threat to the whole of Kiev’s northern front.

Not bad for a “mutiny”.

The Dance of the Oligarchs

Way more complex is Russia’s internal dynamics. Putin’s current and subsequent difficult decisions may entail loss of popularity coupled with loss of internal stability -depending on the manner Kremlin-defined strategic victories are presented to Russian public opinion.

Whatever 24/7 NATOstan mainstream media spin may come up with, the Kremlin’s official explanation for June 24 boils down to a Prighozin demonstration: he was just trying to shake things up.

It’s way more complicated than that. There were strategic gains, of course, and Prighozin seems to have followed a very risky script that in the end favors Moscow. But it’s still too early to tell.

A key sub-plot is how the Dance of the Oligarchs will proceed. Independent Russian media was already expecting some – treasonous – players, including state functionaries, to buy their one-way ticket when the going got tough (or to say they were “ill”, or refuse to answer important calls). The Duma – fed by Bortnikov’s FSB – is already working on a hefty list.

The Russian system – and Russian society as well – see people like these as supremely toxic: in fact much more dangerous than the demshiza (a term that mixes “democracy” and “schizophrenia”, applied to globalist neoliberals).

On the military front, it gets even more complicated. Putin has charged Defense Minister Shoigu to compile the list of Generals to be promoted after The Longest Day. To put it mildly, for quite a few people, from many different persuasions, Shoigu has become a toxic element in Russian politics.

Wagner – rebranded, and under new management – will continue to serve Russia’s interests via Minsk, including in Africa.

Old Man Luka, wily as ever, has already firmly stated there won’t be any provocations against NATO via Wagner. Wagner recruiting bureaus will not be opened in Belarus. Belarussians may join Wagner directly. As it stands, most of Wagner fighters are still in Lugansk.

For all practical purposes, from now on the Russian government won’t have anything to do, militarily and financially, with Wagner.

Additionally, there are no heavy weapons to be confiscated. Already on Monday, June 26, Wagner had moved their heavy weapons to Belarus. What remains – and had not been moved during The Longest Day – was returned to the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

The Dance of the Generals

A clear winner in the whole process is Russian public opinion: they made that graphically clear in Rostov. Everyone was supporting Putin, Russian soldiers, Wagner and Prighozin – at the same time. The overall objective was to improve the Russian army to win the war. It’s as straightforward as that.

The purge inside the MoD will be tough. Under the pretext of repression or “rebellion”, operetta Generals” (as defined by Putin himself) that did not train their soldiers properly, did not organize the mobilization properly, or were incompetent in battle, will definitely be axed.

The problem is that they’re all part of Gerasimov’s circle. To put it diplomatically, he needs to answer a lot of serious questions.

And that’s what brings us to the “General Armageddon has been arrested” monster fake news gleefully parroted by the whole of the NATOstan info universe.

General Surovikin did receive Prighozin in Rostov – but he was never an accomplice to the “rebellion”. Vice-Minister of Defense Yevkurov was also at the HQ in Rostov, and received Prighozin alongside Surovikin. Yevkurov may have played the role of strategically-placed observer.

The Prighozin rebellion soap opera de facto started back in February – and nothing was done to stop it. Regardless whether one shares the official narrative – or not.

What this implies is that the Russian state saw it coming. Does that make The Longest Day the Mother of All Maskirovskas?

Once again: it’s complicated. Unlike the collective West, Russia does not practice or enforce cancel culture. Wagner was protected via martial law. Any insult against a “musician” fighting neo-nazi Banderistan would be met by as much as a 15-year jail term. Each Wagner fighter is officially a Hero of Russia – something Putin himself always stressed.

On the maskirovka front, there’s no question the simmering tensions in Russian military circles before The Longest Day were manipulated, fog of war-style, to disorient the enemy. It worked like a charm. On the fateful June 24 itself, Surovikin was running a war, and not spending the day drinking brandy with Prighozin.

The NATOstan axis is really clutching at straws. It took just a Surovikin-related rumor to send them into rapture – proving once again how deeply they fear General Armageddon.

A key vector is how Surovikin is regarded by public opinion compared to the surviving “operetta Generals”.

He built the now legendary three-layered defense which is already burying the “counter-offensive”. He introduced the wildly successful Shahed-136 Iranian drones in the battlefield. And he organized the meat grinder devastation in Bakhmut/Artemyovsk – which has already entered the military annals.

Way back in the Autumn of 2022, it was General Armageddon who told Putin that Russian forces were not ready for a large-scale offensive.

So whatever the 5^th columnists fabricate, General Armadeggon is not going anywhere – except to win a war. And Russia is not “leaving” Africa. On the contrary: a rebranded Wagner is there to stay, and remains on speed dial in several latitudes.

The trend, short term, seems to point to a – convoluted – draining of the Russian military swamp. The Longest Day seems to have galvanized Russians of all stripes into identifying who the real enemy is – and how to defeat it, whatever it takes.

“Nothing happens by chance”

Historian Andrei Fursov, reviving Roosevelt, observed that “in politics, nothing happens by chance. If it happens, you bet it was foreseen.”

Well, maskirovska rides again.

Yet the main problem faced by Russia is not the Hegemon and NATO: it’s domestic.

Based on conversations with Russian analysts, and their impressions from very sharp people who lived in Russia, Ukraine and in the West, it would be possible to identify basically four main groups trying to impose their idea of Russia.

1. The “Back to the USSR” gang. Includes, of course, some former KGB. Have some kind of support from the general population. A lot of educated specialists (old school pros, mostly pension age). This project suggests a revolution – a 1917 on steroids. But where is Lenin?
2. The “Back to the Tsar” people. That would imply Russia as the “Third Rome” and a prominent role for the Orthodox Church. Hefty funds behind it. A big question mark is how much popular support, especially in “deep” Russia, they really have. This group has nothing to do with the Vatican – which is sold to The Great Reset.
3. The Plunderers – as in robbing Russia blind in favor of the Hegemon. Congregates 5^th columnists, and all manner of “totalitarian neoliberals” worshipping the “values” of the collective West. The remaining ones will soon get a knock on the door by the FSB. Their money is already blocked.
4. The Eurasianists. This is the most feasible project – in close collaboration with China, and aiming towards a multipolar world. There’s no place for Russian oligarchs here. Yet the degree of collaboration with China is still highly debatable. The real burning question: how to really integrate, in practice, the Belt and Road Initiative with the Greater Eurasia Partnership?

This is just a sketch – open for discussion. The first three projects may hardly work – for a series of complex reasons. And the fourth still has not gathered enough steam in Russia.

What is certain is that all of them are fighting each other. May the current draining of the military swamp also serve to clear the political skies.

by this author

• O que acontece na Rússia depois do Dia Mais Longo?
• Putin Wins – on All CountsPutin and What Really Matters in the Chessboard
• O Hegemon entrara em guerra hibrida total contra os BRICS
• The Hegemon Will Go Full Hybrid War Against BRICS+

“Western Values” Now Include Celebrating Terrorist Attacks Against Civilian Infrastructure

Oct 8 2022

Source

By Andrew Korybko

Since the “ends justify the means” in their Machiavellian calculations, even the Crimean Bridge’s damage as a result of a likely suicide truck bomb terrorist attack is worthy of celebration according to Russia’s opponents. This position totally discredits everything that the US’ “rules-based order” claims to uphold.

The US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine has been spun by the West’s Golden Billion as a supposed struggle in support of so-called “Western values”, yet these now include a curious addition to their subjective notions of “democracy” and “human rights”: celebrating terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure.  The Crimean Bridge was just damaged as a result of what video footage very strongly suggests was a suicide truck bomb terrorist attack, yet key influencers like Zelensky’s senior advisor Mikhail Podolyak and infamous Russiagate conspiracy theorist Adam Kinzinger have praised this provocation, not to mention their many minions in the media and associated trolls.

Their stance is that this civilian infrastructure was dual-use in the sense of having military applications related to logistically supporting Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, which thus makes it a “legitimate target”. They also cite Kiev’s opposition to its construction on territory that it still claims as its own despite not controlling it after the locals overwhelmingly voted to reunify with their historical Russian homeland in spring 2014. Since the “ends justify the means” in their Machiavellian calculations, even the Crimean Bridge’s damage as a result of a likely suicide truck bomb terrorist attack is worthy of celebration. This position totally discredits everything that the US’ “rules-based order” claims to uphold.

To explain, that concept has always been nothing but high-sounding rhetoric to disguise the arbitrary implementation of double standards intended to advance American interests at everyone else’s expense, especially its geostrategic rivals’ like Russia’s, China’s, and Iran’s. In this context, the hypocrisy is evidenced by condemning ISIS-like terrorist attacks against dual-use civilian infrastructure (which technically refers to every bridge in the world to various extents) whenever they occur within the declining unipolar hegemony’s “sphere of influence” while simultaneously praising – and possibly orchestrating or even directly carrying out – such attacks whenever they harm its rivals’ interests.

By contrast, the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, which includes the US’ aforementioned three geostrategic rivals) are united through their group’s charter through their shared principled opposition to terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Even in the event that the entered into hostilities with another state and decided to target its dual-use civilian infrastructure to advance their military-strategic aims, they’d thus do so through non-terrorist means such as conventional attacks or sabotage without stooping to the Golden Billion’s level of a suicide truck bomb terrorist attack like what video footage very strongly suggests was responsible for damaging the Crimean Bridge.

Exacerbating the moral divide between both sides, the US-led West’s Golden Billion and the BRICS-/SCO-led Global South, the first-mentioned’s key influencers and their supporters aren’t even attempting to claim “plausible deniability” over this terrorist attack but are proudly celebrating it on social media. Realistically speaking, it’s not surprising that their side resorted to these means out of desperation to inflict military, soft power, and strategic damage to their Russian opponent, but it wasn’t expected that they’d so openly praise what just happened. This observation shows that even they know that the “rules-based order” concept is hollow and self-interested rhetoric designed to gaslight naïve audiences.

Recognizing this, it becomes clear that the New Cold War between the unipolar and multipolar “camps” (for lack of a better description) is geostrategic at its core and not driven by “values” like the Golden Billion falsely claims. To be sure, the Global South still upholds its self-declared values in terms of how its members conduct themselves amidst this worldwide competition over the course of the global systemic transition to multipolarity, but their envisaged “ideological”/structural end game of a more democratic, equal, and just world order drives them much more than anything else. By publicly sacrificing their previously professed anti-terrorist values, the West showed that it doesn’t have any “moral superiority”.

Fake News Alert: Putin Hasn’t Been Overthrown In A Coup

Oct 8 2022

Source

By Andrew Korybko

As the cliched saying goes, trust is hard to earn but easily lost, and it’s even harder to regain after a viral QAnon-like conspiracy theory just discredited the Golden Billion’s perception managers in the New Cold War.

Social media and some online news sites went wild on Saturday speculating that President Putin was overthrown in a coup just hours after what video footage very strongly suggested was the truck bomb terrorist attack that Kiev carried out against the Crimean Bridge. That potentially game-changing development, which also has significant soft power implications for both sides, was swiftly followed by Ukrainian Interior Ministry advisor Anton Gerashenko tweeting that the Russian military closed off traffic in Moscow’s city center as part of their rolling regime change against President Putin.

This coincided with Zelensky’s senior advisor Mikhail Podolyak speculating about a “deep state” rift, particularly connected to Kiev’s conspiracy theory that it was Russia itself which supposedly blew up its own Crimean Bridge. This follows the spewing of similar conspiracy theories such as those claiming that Russia was bombing the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) under its control in its eponymous region, assassinated Darya Dugina, and was also responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines. All of these conspiracy theories were designed to deflect from the truth about each terrorist attack.

There’s another trend connected to each of these conspiracy theories too and it’s that they’re all intended to imply that there’s chaos in the Kremlin, so much so that different factions are allegedly sabotaging their newly restored world power’s special operation and even plotting their own coups against President Putin. All of the prior information warfare products are intended to collectively constructive this meta-narrative, which is supposed to sow suspicion about Russia’s internal stability and thus the sustainability of its grand strategic trajectory towards leading multipolarity.

This artificially manufactured narrative serves two purposes with respect to each targeted audience. The US-led West’s Golden Billion are expected to react with orgasmic glee at the thought of the Russian “deep state” (which refers to its permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies) fighting amongst themselves and thus making it likely that they can be divided-and-ruled into ultimately “Balkanizing” Russia. This wishful thinking is also meant to prevent them from revolting against their governments’ policy of giving a blank check to Kiev at the expense of meeting their own citizens’ needs.

As for the target audience among the Global South, this meta-narrative is aimed at getting them to think that the emerging Multipolar World Order is a fantasy that’s doomed to fail, hence why they must accept being the Golden Billion’s “junior partners” (neo-colonies) in perpetuity. In order to prevent their country from being punished for its independent policies that are apparently hopeless in this scenario, people should pressure their governments into cutting ties with Russia ahead of its “inevitable loss” in order to “get on the winning side” and thus “receive some benefits” while they “still have the chance”.

Put another way, this information warfare operation is inextricably connected to Color Revolutions since it’s driven by the desire to prevent them in the Golden Billion while advancing these exact same regime change scenarios in the Global South. The underlying narrative of both is that they tacitly appeal to each societies’ nationalist/patriotic sentiment exactly as the former Pentagon spy chief and a neoconservative Ukrainian lobbyist proposed in their piece for Politico last month exposing their side’s infowar plans against Russia, which can be extrapolated as applicable to other audiences too.

Returning to the news item that inspired this analysis, it’s obviously fake, which was confirmed by Italian journalist Rosalba Castelletti’s reporting from the Moscow city center clearly showing that it isn’t closed off as part of a rolling regime change like Gerashenko ridiculously claimed. This objectively existing and easily verifiable factual reality confirms that Kiev prematurely brought its months-long meta-narrative to a climax without anything to show for it, thus resulting in a disappointing outcome that’s attributable to its perception managers’ unprofessionalism, which ultimately discredited their side.

It would have been much better for their soft power and strategic interests to continue implying the scenario of Kremlin chaos behind the scenes without crossing the Rubicon by outright claiming that a coup was literally in progress when it obviously wasn’t. Even if Castelletti hadn’t discredited this fake news shortly after it entered the information ecosystem, the next day’s reality would have naturally done so instead exactly like what happened after last month’s uncannily similar fake news about a coup against President Xi. Both ultimately discredited those who participated in spreading those conspiracies.

That being the case, it can be said that each infowar provocation was counterproductive because the orchestrators prematurely brought them to a narrative climax without any result. The most strategic of their two targeted audiences, the one among the Global South, will therefore distrust those sources who played a role in constructing those meta-narratives and especially in passing the disappointing climax off as truth. As the cliched saying goes, trust is hard to earn but easily lost, and it’s even harder to regain after a viral QAnon-like conspiracy theory just discredited their side in the New Cold War. 

HOW COVERT BRITISH INFORMATION WARS TARGET RUSSIA, THREATENING CIVILIANS AND JOURNALISTS

By Kit Klarenberg

Source

In late July, a shocking interview with a captured Azov Battalion fighter began circulating online.

In the clip, the prisoner-of-war claimed that Oleksiy Arestovych, once a key advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, had, prior to the war, ordered his Neo-Nazi regiment (among other military units) to carry out and film “brutal murders” of captured Russian soldiers in service of an “information campaign.”

The purpose of this effort, the Azov fighter claimed, was to transmit the grisly footage to Russia in order to stoke anti-war sentiment among the population, and thus protests and upheaval.

Incendiary confessions and allegations emanating from prisoners-of-war should always be treated with intense skepticism. The likelihood they will be made under significant duress, and/or result from extensive coaching, is invariably high. Nonetheless, there are sound reasons not to reflexively discount the nameless combatant’s testimony.

While you would barely know it from Western media reporting, countless Russian soldiers have been tortured and killed in the most savage ways imaginable post-capture, each and every horrifying incident representing a grave war crime. There are numerous reports of prisoners being burnt with blowtorches and/or having their eyes gouged out before execution, and even those kept alive are frequently shot in their kneecaps to cripple them for life. Accompanying clips are voluminous, and have traveled widely.

As such, questions can only abound over whether this is a matter of dedicated strategy for Kiev, rather than the isolated, vengeful actions of individual soldiers or units, particularly given numerous officials have made dire public threats about the fate that awaits Russians should they participate in the war. For example, a senior battlefield doctor told Ukrainian state media in late March he had ordered his staff to castrate captives, as they were “cockroaches”.

Arestovych has also over the years made numerous deeply concerning comments endorsing ISIS, in particular the terror group’s “cruelty for show,” which he believes to be a “wise strategy.”

“They are acting very correctly…Those methods, the world needs them, even though this means terrorism, medieval levels of cruelty, burning people alive, shooting them or cutting off their heads. This is absolutely the way of the future,” he said in one TV interview.

Even more compellingly, leaked documents reviewed by MintPress show covert plans to “achieve influence” with Russians and turn them against the war and their government have been drawn up by a shadowy British intelligence contractor, led by an individual intimately tied to a previous clandestine effort aimed at achieving the same end, using atrocity propaganda from the Syrian crisis, in which Ukraine was also central.

As we shall see, there is no reason to believe this effort will be anything but counterproductive, and in the process put the liberty if not lives of Russians at significant risk, while emboldening the Kremlin significantly, and furthering its informational objectives.

https://twitter.com/KitKlarenberg/status/1468942567232397316?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1468942567232397316%7Ctwgr%5Ea68d82831a651952dc66c913335f0ffd2f18cca4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.iframe.ly%2Fapi%2Fiframe%3Fapp%3D1url%3Dhttps3A2F2Ftwitter.com2FKitKlarenberg2Fstatus2F1468942567232397316key%3Dbab15327a66f873fa9c0d80b90a8205a

‘A STREAM OF NARRATIVE OPPORTUNITIES’

The proposals were crafted by Valent Projects, exposed by MintPress in July as running a sinister social media censorship operation on behalf of U.S. intelligence front USAID, in conjunction with Chemonics International, which its own founder has admitted was created so he could “have my own CIA.” The contractor was the primary conduit via which U.S. funds and equipment reached bogus Syrian humanitarian group the White Helmets.

Submitted to the Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine, a support mechanism created by the governments of Britain, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S., the pair pledged to “map audiences critical to the Kremlin’s efforts, and identify opportunities to impact their narratives,” in order to support Kiev’s “strategic communications efforts.”

This would provide key decision makers within the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, and the Office of the President “a stream of ‘narrative opportunities’” with which to “influence” and “engage” audiences not only in Russia, but “other key states” including India and Turkey, via news outlets and social media.

Valent pledged to not only identify potential target demographics, but “their prevailing worldviews, how they access information and what narratives are likely to influence them,” and monitor their online interactions in real-time, in particular identifying when “key audiences express potential tension with official positions,” which could be exploited by Kiev.

This data could be segmented for different government departments, if say Defense chiefs were “interested in different audiences” than their Foreign Affairs counterparts. Overall, the entire Ukrainian administration would, it was pledged, be able to “affect measurable attitudinal and behavioral change amongst key Russian audiences” with Valent’s help.

While no mention is made in the document of this setup being used to further Arestovych’s macabre purported plans, it would certainly provide an efficacious means of achieving them. What is more though, there are sinister echoes in the proposal of an operation conducted by British intelligence contractor InCoStrat during the Syrian crisis, which was led by Valent’s founder-and-chief, Amil Khan.

Dubbed “Project Aurelius”, it sought to “increase the cost to the Russian leadership of sustained or increased intervention in the Syrian conflict by sensitizing Russian public opinion to the opportunity costs of their intervention in the conflict” – in the process not only ending the country’s decisive military involvement in the West’s dirty war, but destabilizing the government by disrupting its “domestic balancing act.”

A document related to the connivance spells out a “basic mechanism to achieving” its lofty objectives. In brief, it entailed “leveraging the reality of Russia’s Syria intervention as depicted in Syrian opposition media and presenting it to key Russian audiences, including mainstream news consumers.”

InCoStrat avowedly had “a number of assets already available to build this mechanism,” including “access to opposition-made media products” producing content refuting “Russian claims”, “the ability to task Syrian opposition media activists to capture raw material,” and “international communications specialists” based in Jordan with “the ability to establish and manage the effort” – Khan being chief among them.

‘EMBEDDED WITH TERRORISTS’

Such boasts significantly underplay the staggering scale of InCoStrat’s cloak-and-dagger machinations in Damascus. The contractor played a pivotal role in London’s long-running propaganda efforts over the course of the dirty war, which sought to disrupt and displace the government of Bashar al-Assad, convince citizens and international bodies that rabid Western and Gulf-backed militant groups rampaging across the country were a credible, “moderate” alternative, and would then flood media internationally with pro-opposition agitprop.

In service of this effort, InCoStrat trained hundreds of “stringers” across the country who fed content to three separate media production offices it managed, and established 10 separate FM radio stations, as well as numerous print magazines. On top of extensive domestic consumption in both occupied and government-controlled areas of Syria, the company fed this output to a network of “over 1,600 journalists and people of influence” globally.

InCoStrat furthermore carried out various elaborate “guerrilla” operations, which it described as “[using] the media to create [an] event” and “[initiating] an event to create media effect.” One example of these activities was “[exploiting] the concentrated presence of journalists” during the Geneva II conference in January 2014 “to put pressure on the regime.”

The company produced “postcards, posters and reports” to “draw behavioral parallels” between the Assad government and ISIS and dishonestly further the fiction that “a latent relationship exists between the two.” The company alleged in Foreign Office submissions that these productions were subsequently republished by “major news outlets” including the Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera.

In another, InCoStrat smuggled materials emphasizing alleged government atrocities – such as pictures “depicting the aftermath of a barrel bomb attack or victims of torture” – into “regime-held” areas of Syria, including Damascus. The company sought to “keep regime perpetration of war crimes in the spotlight at a crucial time when media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”

This work placed the company and its staff in extremely close quarters with numerous armed militias guilty of monstrous abuses, who have been credibly accused of orchestrating “false flag” events to precipitate Western intervention, including chemical weapons strikes, which may have necessitated choreographed massacres by the individuals and groups staging them.

For instance, InCoStrat bragged of having contacts with violent gangs in “some of the most impenetrable areas in the country,” such as Syria’s “eastern front,” which, at the time of writing, was dominated by ISIS. Its stringers were said to have “access to a variety of groups,” including Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, “with whom they have conducted interviews.” Amil Khan may well have been fundamental to cultivating these connections.

In one leaked file, InCoStrat is asked to provide evidence of its “proven track record of establishing and developing contacts in Arabic-speaking conflict affected states.” Khan’s alleged history of having “established relationships with, and embedded himself into terrorist organizations in the UK and the Middle East,” experience granting him “unique insight into their narratives, communication methods, recruitment processes and management of networks,” is cited as an example of the company’s prowess in this field.

‘UNDERMINE THE RUSSIAN POSITION’

To say the least, then, InCoStrat had “a number of assets available” to carry out Project Aurelius effectively.

The “only” public-facing element of the operation was a “Russian anti-Kremlin activist collective” based in Ukraine, “with access to foreign journalists and opinion influencers with media profiles,” who were able to “establish and run Russian social media pages” and infiltrate Russian opposition networks online on InCoStrat’s behalf.

Financing for the effort was markedly opaque, sent from Amman to a Syrian-run “media activist group” registered in Germany, which then dispatched regular payments to a parallel organization created in Kiev, covering its staffing and running costs, and expenses. Publicly, the money appeared to flow from a “Syrian interlocutor”, running crowdfunders and “eliciting donations from wealthy Syrians.”

The output of InCoStrat’s assorted Syrian media assets – and other opposition communications platforms – were monitored by a team led by Khan in Jordan, to “[identify] products that undermine the Russian position,” which were then compiled according to a “distribution plan that aims to maximize negative impact on Russian narratives around the intervention in Syria,” with a specific focus on “points of vulnerability.”

This material was then circulated to the Ukraine-based activists, translated, and spread across social media via private chats and social media groups. It was hoped the entire breadth of the Russian media, from opposition outlets such as Meduza and Novaya Gazeta, establishment liberal newspapers including Kommersant, and even “directly controlled pro-government media” would in turn pick up the stories, leading to wider civil society debate about the Syrian intervention, and corrosion in the government’s position at home and abroad.

It’s uncertain whether Aurelius succeeded in its goal of flooding Russian opposition channels with damaging disinformation, or how many journalists and publications recycled this targeted content believing it to be organic and grassroots in nature, but Moscow’s Syrian mission certainly doesn’t appear to have been deterred one iota.

Today, despite ongoing Israeli airstrikes, crippling Western sanctions and US occupation of its oil-producing areas, the country is steadily rebuilding itself and overwhelmingly under government control, in no small part due to Russian intervention.

It seems likely the proposal of Valent and Chemonics will be similarly impotent, not least because the brutality reserved for captured Russian soldiers, as apparently advocated by Arestovych, has surely reduced to zero the opportunity for Kiev to stage timely interventions, and exploit “potential tension with official positions” with target audiences in Russia. As the nameless Azov Battalion prisoner acknowledged in their testimony, such behavior “caused negativity in world public opinion,” least of all in Russia itself.

Other callous developments, including the widespread scattering of petal mines in civilian areas across the Donbas, indiscriminate attacks on the majority Russian Crimea, and Ukrainian soldiers using the cellphones of slain Russians to call and laughingly taunt their victims’ mothers back home, have inevitably been exploited by the Kremlin to further and legitimize its narratives about Kiev being a rabid, murderous fascist regime in urgent need of “denazification” and “demilitarization”.

One might argue that as a country embroiled in a David and Goliath battle, it is not only morally necessary, but eminently sensible, for Ukraine to explore any and all possible methods of evening the playing field. Yet Project Aurelius amply underlines the significant dangers and inherently counterproductive nature of covert Western information warfare initiatives.

Several media outlets identified as fruitful targets for Aurelius product have since fallen victim to Moscow’s Draconian, debilitating “foreign agent” laws, or simply been shut down by court order. In recent years, harassment and closure of opposition NGOs and information providers in Russia has frequently been triggered by the exposure of illicit – or insufficiently clear – Western funding and sponsorship.

The onset of conflict in Ukraine means an even less safe space for dissent in Russia. Thousands have reportedly received fines or prison sentences for opposing the war, while Kommersant reporter Ivan Safronov has been jailed for 22 years on dubious charges of treason. What fate would befall a journalist who wrote up content surreptitiously broadcast to them by Kiev courtesy of Valent and Chemonics, or a private citizen who shared it?

A NOBLE LIE?

If this war is won by Ukraine, it certainly will not be via covert psyops campaigns. Yet both Kiev and its Western backers have a significant vested interest in propagandizing the public in North America and Europe. Stories true or false of victimhood, heroism and battlefield success are key to ensuring the endless flow of weaponry and financial aid to a country outgunned and outmanned by its much larger neighbor, the economy and industry of which has already been comprehensively crippled.

During the Syrian crisis, the U.S. spent potentially in excess of one trillion on regime change efforts, a core component of which was a failed $1 billion secret dirty war led by the CIA. Britain pumped at least $400 million into achieving the same goal, a figure that does not take into account black operations conducted by intelligence agencies or covert military units. The sums involved in the Ukraine conflict will likely dwarf those totals.

International aid tracker DevEx calculated in late August that in the first six months of the war, over $100 billion had been committed to Kiev by Western countries, only a tiny fraction of which was “humanitarian-focused”. Seemingly each and every month, if not more frequently, yet further billions are allocated to Kiev by Washington, meaning the country is on track to become the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance since World War II. Europe has likewise committed vast resources.

Along the way, major arms manufacturers are making a literal killing, in every sense. Despite a general downturn in stock markets the world over, the share prices of companies including BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Thales have remained strong. In a particularly brash manifestation of the Military Industrial Complex in effect, Zelensky is scheduled to deliver a headline speech at a major U.S. defense industry conference on September 21st.

There are legitimate and reasonable arguments for and against regular arms shipments to Kiev, although consideration of the latter perspective has been almost entirely absent from mainstream discourse. As such, one cannot help but wonder if the ultimate intended target audience of the kind of informational connivance plotted by Valent and Chemonics is, as with Syria, Western publics.

After all, it is their support and acquiescence that keeps the war machine ever-whirring – and the profits rising. And if enemy state citizens, journalists, and civil society activists end up as collateral damage, who cares.

Andrei Martyanov: Admiral Rickover or how American education was killed.

June 15, 2022

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أميركا تهرب إلى البلطيق وروسيا لديها ما يسحق الأطلسي

الأربعاء 18 أيار 2022

 محمد صادق الحسيني

واشنطن تتخبّط وتهرب من حفرة الى حفرة أعمق، في مواجهتها المحتدمة مع موسكو!

وطلب كلّ من فنلندا والسويد الانتماء لحلف الناتو ما هو في الواقع سوى مناورات أميركيّة بائسة سببها الهروب من الواقع المخزي لها في أوكرانيا ومستقبل الأطلسي القاتم هناك.

فالسويد وفنلندا يعتبران عملياً جزءاً من الناتو أصلاً سواء بنوع التسليح أو عبر قنوات التعاون المستمرة والمفتوحة بينهما وبين الناتو منذ سنوات، وهو الذي لديه مقرّان مهمان في كل من ستوكهولم وهلسنكي.

ثم أن الروس كانوا قد أعدّوا سلفاً لمثل هذا الاحتمال حتى قبل العملية الخاصة الجارية حالياً في أوكرانيا، عندما زرعوا مقاطعة كالينينغراد الروسية القريبة من البلطيق بمنظومة صواريخ اسكندر القادرة على ضرب أهداف خصمها على مدى ٥٠٠ كلم، ما يجعل البلدين وقواعد الناتو هناك هدفاً قابلاً للتدمير دون الدخول في عملية مباشرة .

ومع ذلك، فإنّ الروس لن يتقبّلوا مثل هذه الخطوة بسهولة، بل سيعتبرونها خطوة استفزازية إضافية في المواجهة الجارية بينهم وبين الأطلسي، باعتبارها خطوة تخلّ بقواعد التعامل المتفق عليها بين الغرب والشرق منذ عقود، تقوم واشنطن وحلفاؤها الأوروبيون الآن بالخروج عليها كما يلي:

 أولا: فنلندا كانت حتى العام ١٩١٧ جزءاً من الإمبراطورية الروسية ولم تنفك عنها الا بعد انتهاء الحرب العالمية الأولى وانتصار الثورة البلشفية بقيادة لينين ما فتح بالمجال لإعلان فنلندا دولة مستقلة. وهو الأمر الذي ترتب عليه نوع من التوافق الثنائي بين البلدين تكرّس رسمياً في معاهدة باريس الدولية في العام ١٩٤٧ تعهدت فيها فنلندا بعدم الانضمام لأي تجمع او دولة معادية للاتحاد السوفياتي .

وهي الدولة التي لديها حدود بحرية وبرية طولها أكثر من ١٣٠٠ كم شمالاً وشمال غرب وهو أمر خطير أن تتحوّل فجأة الى معسكر للناتو في حضن روسيا تماماً.

ثانياً: للسويد تاريخ من الحروب مع روسيا عندما كانت مملكة قوية كانت آخرها قبل نحو ٢٠٠ عام، خسرتها المملكة السويدية لصالح روسيا، ما أفرز يومها عقد الصلح بينهما على أن تعلن اوسلو حيادها التام، وهو ما ظلت ملتزمة به منذ ذلك الحين بشكل رسمي…

فما عدا مما بدا حتى تقرّر اليوم الانقلاب على ذلك الاتفاق!؟

اذن هي واشنطن التي تبحث عن مسار تصعيديّ إعلاميّ ظناً منها أنها تستطيع استنزاف موسكو في البلطيق بعد أن خسرت الرهان في البحر الأسود، لعلها في ذلك تضعف جبهة المواجهة بين تحالف الشرق الاقتصادي الكبير بقيادة الصين وبين الغرب الأميركي المتصدّع والذي بدأ يئنّ من تداعيات العملية الروسية الاقتصادية في أوكرانيا، كما تفيد كلّ التقارير، بما فيها ما ورد على لسان الناطق باسم البيت الأبيض أخيراً عندما ألحّ على الكونغرس لعمل أي شيء لإنقاذ مشروع لصندوق الدعم القومي لأوكرانيا والذي لا يملك أكثر من ٢٠٠ مليون دولار من أصل الـ ٤٠ مليار التي وعد بها بايدن خادمه زيلينيسكي…

لكن موسكو رغم كل ما يُشاع عن خطورة الوضع المستجدّ بخصوص هذه الخطوة، قادرة على سحق كلّ الوجود الأطلسي في البلطيق سواء عبر بيلاروسيا المتحالفة معها او عبر التقدم التسليحي الهائل الذي تملكه هناك نذكر على سبيل المثال منها فقط كاسحات الثلوج النووية القادرة على فتح الطريق لأسطول الشمال الروسي باتجاه المحيطين الهادئ والأطلسي.

ايّ انّ موسكو تستطيع أن تردّ الصاع صاعين وربما تفاجئهم من حيث لا يحتسبون بأسلحة لم تعلن عنها بعد…

‌فالكرملين كما تقول المصادر المتابعة لديه العديد من الأوراق للردّ على المخطط الغربي لمحاصرة روسيا بخطوات حازمة قد تصدم الغرب من جديد..

وطبقاً للمعلومات الواردة من موسكو فإنّ مجلس الأمن الروسي برئاسة بوتين يبحث العواقب السلبيّة لانضمام ‎فنلندا والسويد إلى الناتو على الأمن القومي بإقرار توصيات بوضع «بولندا في المرتبة التالية في مجال نزع النازية بعد أوكرانيا»، ما سيجعل الغرب يتلقى ضربة أقسى هذه المرة من أوكرانيا.

وهنا ربما يمكننا إدراك ما أخذ يردّده الروس كثيراً في الآونة الأخيرة حول خطر نشوب حرب عالمية أو نووية كارثية.

فهل تردّ موسكو في بولنداً رداً أقسى من أوكرانيا وتسكت مدافع الغرب مرة والى الأبدّ ام أننا مقبلون على اندلاع حرب عالميّة ثالثة فعلاً!؟

اليد العليا حتى الآن في المواجهة الروسية الأطلسية هي للروس، وهذا هو ما يدفع بايدن للتخبّط أكثر فأكثر، لكن ذلك لن يطول كثيراً بسبب الضعف البنيويّ لكلّ الآلة العسكرية الأميركية والأطلسية بالمقارنة مع الروسية المتقدمة عليها كثيراً جداً.

العالم يتحوّل نحو مزيد من انحسار القوة الأميركية وتصدّعها، لصالح غلبة تحالف شرقي صاعد.

بعدنا طيّبين قولوا الله…

• موسكو: سنصدّر النفط الذي رفضته أوروبا إلى آسيا ومناطق أخرى
• موسكو: ردّنا على انضمام فنلندا إلى «الأطلسي» بيد الجيش… وسيفاجئكم
• واشنطن تستفزّ بكين مجدداً: لجعل تايوان «مراقِباً» في منظمة الصحة العالمية
• هنري كيسنجر: الولايات المتحدة غير قادرة على التفرقة بين الصين وروسيا
• ملك الأردن: الفراغ الذي ستتركه روسيا في سوريا ستملؤه إيران

Andrei Martyanov: They are terrified when seeing this banner

April 28, 2022

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The Ukrainian Conflict Is a U.S./NATO Proxy War, but One Which Russia Is Poised to Win Decisively – Scott Ritter

April 9, 2022

Source

By Finian Cunningham

The West has sown the wind in sanctioning Russia; Russia will not reap the whirlwind, says Scott Ritter in an interview with the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who has gained international respect for his independence and integrity as a commentator on conflicts and foreign relations. This week, he was banned on the Twitter social media platform for challenging Western claims of a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, allegedly carried out by Russian troops. Moscow denies the claims, as have other independent analysts who point to evidence that the incident was a false-flag provocation perpetrated by NATO-backed Ukrainian Nazi regiments to undermine Russia internationally and bolster Western objectives. It is a foreboding sign of the times that Ritter should be banned for daring to question dubious narratives. (He was later reinstated following a public outcry against censorship.)

In the following interview for Strategic Culture Foundation, he makes the crucial point that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is exposing the involvement of the U.S. and NATO in the training and weaponizing of that country’s dominant Nazi regiments. That is why Western media have been so vehement in trying to distort the conflict and blame Russia. The truth about Western dirty involvement in Ukraine would be too much to bear for the Western public.

When Ritter served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s he later challenged Western media and government claims that Iraq was harboring WMDs. Those claims were used as a pretext for the U.S.-British war on Iraq launched in 1993 that cost over one million lives, destroyed a nation, created millions of displaced and millions of casualties, as well as spawned international terrorism. It later turned out that the WMD claims were based on deliberate lies for which no Western leader has been held accountable. Scott Ritter was vindicated in his warnings against that war and it is one reason why he is widely respected among international public opinion.

Ritter is a critical commentator on U.S. conflicts and foreign relations. He is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the Soviet Union implementing nuclear arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and as a UN inspector in Iraq (1991-98) overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of Scorpion King: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Clarity Press, 2020).

Interview

Question: Do you think that Russia has a just cause in launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24?

Scott Ritter: I believe Russia has articulated a cognizable claim of preemptive collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. The threat posed by NATO expansion, and Ukraine’s eight-year bombardment of the civilians of the Donbass fall under this umbrella.

Question: Do you think Russia has legitimate concerns about the Pentagon sponsoring biological weapons programs in laboratories in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: The Pentagon denies any biological weapons program, but admits biological research programs on Ukrainian soil. Documents captured by Russia have allegedly uncovered the existence of programs the components of which could be construed as having offensive biological warfare applications. The U.S. should be required to explain the purpose of these programs.

Question: What do you make of allegations in Western media that Russian troops committed war crimes in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities? It is claimed that Russian forces summarily executed civilians.

Scott Ritter: All claims of war crimes must be thoroughly investigated, including Ukrainian allegations that Russia killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. However, the data available about the Bucha incident does not sustain the Ukrainian claims, and as such, the media should refrain from echoing these claims as fact until a proper investigation of the evidence is conducted, either by the media, or unbiased authorities.

Question: Do you think the alleged Russian bombing of a hospital and an art theater in Mariupol were false-flag provocations?

Scott Ritter: Both locations are available for detailed forensic examination that would either confirm or refute Ukrainian allegations that these locations were struck by Russian aerial bombs. Other data, such as the existence of any NATO radar data that would put Russian aircraft over these two locations at the time of the alleged attack, should be collected. A detailed forensic examination of each site would go a long way in proving or disproving the Ukrainian claims through the collection of weapons fragments and the evaluation of environmental samples which would show the chemical composition of any explosive used, thereby allowing a better idea of what weapon or explosive was used to destroy the sites.

Question: Western governments and mainstream media have denigrated Russian objectives to “demilitarize and deNazify” Ukraine. The West says Russia has invented or grossly exaggerated these problems as a pretext for invasion. Do you think this Western denialism is because it doesn’t want to acknowledge that Russia may indeed have legitimate concerns, and secondly that to acknowledge would mean admitting that the West is part of the problem in the current war?

Scott Ritter: The irony is that the West had thoroughly documented the extent of the Nazi ideology in Ukraine’s civil, political, and military structures during and after the 2014 Maidan coup. This documented reality was deliberately obscured by the same sources that had previously documented its existence once the Russian invasion occurred. To acknowledge the existence of this odious ideology by NATO would require NATO to acknowledge the role it played in training and equipping Azov regiment personnel since 2015. The Russian documentation of its ongoing de-Nazification effort in Ukraine is a source of continual embarrassment to NATO, as it exposes the scope and scale of NATO’s role in empowering the militarization of Nazi ideology in Ukraine.

Question: For about four months before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, the Biden administration was asserting non-stop that Moscow was planning an invasion. Do you think this is a case of great intelligence on the part of Washington or the culmination of provocation by Washington resulting in Russian military action in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: We now know that the U.S. intelligence community under the Biden administration is committed to a policy of haphazardly “declassifying” intelligence for the purpose of shaping public opinion (so-called “getting ahead of the story”). There is no evidence that the intelligence regarding potential Russian military action was based upon anything other than politicized speculation derived from a crude analysis of Russian military dispositions void of any context. Any genuine intelligence assessment regarding the timing of any Russian military action would have incorporated the domestic political imperative of getting Duma [Russian parliamentary] approval for the deployment of Russian forces outside the borders of Russia, which carries with it the requirement of a cognizable justification for this military action under the UN Charter. This required political steps such as Donetsk and Lugansk declaring independence, and then petitioning the Russian parliament to recognize this independence, so that Russia could legitimately invoke Article 51. None of these factors was knowable when the Biden administration was issuing its warnings of imminent attack, thereby certifying the “intelligence” as being derived from fact-free speculation, and not intelligence at all.

Question: The Western media are reporting that the Russian military operation in Ukraine is floundering because it has not over-run Ukraine entirely. As a military expert, how do you see the Russian operation proceeding?

Scott Ritter: Russia is fighting a very difficult campaign hampered by its own constraint designed to limit civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure and the fact that Ukraine possesses a very well-trained military that is well led and equipped. Russia deployed some 200,000 troops in support of this operation. They are facing some 600,000 Ukrainian forces. The first phase of the Russian operation was designed to shape the battlefield to Russia’s advantage while diminishing the size and capacity of the Ukrainian ability to wage large-scale conflict. The second phase is focused on destroying the main Ukrainian force concentration in eastern Ukraine. Russia is well on its way to accomplishing this task.

Question: Do you see danger from Ukraine being turned into a proxy war by the United States and NATO partners against Russia in a way that attempts to repeat the West’s covert war in Syria or the Afghanistan war (1979-89) with the Soviet Union? There are reports of foreign legions being sent to Ukraine via NATO countries. Do you think there is a Western plan to embroil Russia in a proxy war that is aimed at sapping Russia politically, economically, and militarily?

Scott Ritter: The Ukrainian conflict is a proxy war, but one which Russia is poised to win decisively. While there appears to be a NATO/western plan to embroil Russia in a “new Afghanistan”, I don’t see any risk of this conflict dragging on for more than a few more weeks at the most before Russia accomplishes a strategic victory over Ukraine.

Question: There is an arrogant assumption among Western governments that they can impose crippling economic sanctions on Russia in a similar way to what they did on Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea among others. But would you agree that if Russia begins to impose its own counter-sanctions by restricting oil and gas exports then the Western states may end up reaping a whirlwind that is devastating to their societies?

Scott Ritter: Russia was warned well in advance about the scope and scale of U.S.-led sanctions that would be imposed if Russia were to invade Ukraine. Russia has prepared its own counter-sanction strategy which will not only defeat the Western sanctions but further strengthen Russia’s economy by decoupling it from the West and Western control/influence. We see evidence of the effectiveness of this counter-campaign as the Russian ruble is strengthened, the Russian stock market enjoys positive traction, and Europe and the U.S. flounder economically. The West has sown the wind in sanctioning Russia; Russia will not reap the whirlwind.

Zakharova: West Uses Expulsion of Russian Diplomats as Information, Political Attack

April 6 2022

By Staff, Agencies

Western countries in recent decades have begun using the declaration of Russian diplomats as persona non grata as an information and political attack, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Sputnik radio on Wednesday.

“Over the last decades, the collective West has begun to use the declaration of Russian diplomats as persona non grata, that is, imposing sanctions on them, isolating them from the opportunity to work in the region they had studied… as a tool not of diplomatic work, but of information and political attack,” she said.

According to Zakharova, the West “necessarily needs to show some kind of heaping of their actions.”

“They call it solidarity, but it has nothing to do with it,” the diplomat added.

The spokeswoman then drew attention to the fact that the expulsion of Russian diplomats has always been carried out publicly, loudly, and demonstratively.

Western countries even went so far as to start making public the names of diplomats and providing their personal data, Zakharova said, adding that “All of this was accompanied… by conditions beyond our understanding, under which our diplomats had to leave the country.”

“All this was done on purpose to create a sense of guilt on the Russian side for something that no one had done, at least under the headlines under which Russian diplomats were expelled. There was nothing in terms of factual arguments, it was purely a verbal attack,” she underscored.

دولة الاحتلال وحركات المقاومة في ظل الهزّة الأوكرانية.. تقدير موقف

الخميس، 24 مارس 2022

تدور الحرب في أوكرانيا كما بات واضحًا بين معسكرين، أحدهما روسيٌ مدعوم صينيًا بشكلٍ أساسيٍ، وبدعمٍ غير مباشرٍ من دولٍ أخرى تسعى لكسر الهيمنة الأمريكية والأحادية القطبية. وفي المقابل، معسكرٌ غربيٌ بقيادة الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية، مع بعض الدول التي تخضع كليًا للنفوذ الأمريكي كاليابان مثلًا، لكن في وضع حلفاء أمريكا تفصيلٌ على ما سيأتي لاحقًا.

ويمكن قراءة أهداف كل معسكرٍ على النحو الآتي:

ـ تسعى روسيا بدايةً إلى هدفٍ مباشرٍ يتمثل في تحييد الخطر الأوكراني،الذي باتت تُشكِّله أوكرانيا عليها بعد أحداث “الثورة الملونة” في 2014، التي تم هندستها أمريكيًا، والتي أفضت إلى تنصيب نظامٍ عميلٍ للغرب، حيث باشر هذا النظام بدعمٍ وتوجيهٍ أمريكيين مساعي الانضمام لحلف شمال الأطلسي بصورة فعلية، في خطوةٍ تصب في مصلحة الأمريكي، لكنها تتعارض والمصالح القومية الأوكرانية بصفتها دولة جارة لروسيا، وتربطها بها علاقات تاريخية مميزة.

وأما الهدف الروسي الصيني الأبعد، فيتمثل في إلحاق هزيمةٍ إستراتيجيةٍ بالولايات المتحدة الأمريكية عبر إحباط خطتها في أوكرانيا، مما يثبِّت: أولًا، تراجع القدرة الأمريكية على الساحة الدولية. وثانيًا، فتح الباب أمام دينامية بعيدة المدى يمكن أن تفضي إلى إعادة تموضع دول الاتحاد السوفييتي السابقة خارج نفوذ حلف شمال الأطلسي، ويكون هذا حال حصل إعادة لعقارب الساعة إلى 1997.

ـ أما الأهداف الأمريكية المباشرة في هذه الحرب، فتتمثل في محاولة إنهاك روسيا عسكريًا قدر المستطاع في أوكرانيا كهدفٍ تكتيكيٍ، مما سيضعف من مكانة روسيا العسكرية إذا ما نجحت في ذلك أمريكا وحلف شمال الأطلسي. وأما إستراتيجيًا، فتسعى أمريكا إلى تدمير الاقتصاد الروسي وانهياره بشكلٍ كاملٍ، وذلك من خلال الحرب الاقتصادية الشرسة التي تشنها بالشراكة مع حلفائها ضد روسيا، في محاولةٍ لإنهاء الدور الروسي تمامًا، مما يمكن أن يفضي إلى تفكك روسيا الاتحادية لاحقًا، وتعي روسيا أن الحرب الاقتصادية التي بدأها الغرب عليها مستمرةٌ حتى بعد انتهاء المعركة العسكرية في أوكرانيا، ولا أدل على ذلك من تصريح رئيس وزراء بريطانيا حينما قال: إن إعادة تطبيع العلاقات مع بوتين كما حصل بعد 2014 سيكون خطأ، وكذلك تلك الدعوات التي خرجت من بعض الأوساط الغربية والتي تدعو إلى محاكمة الرئيس فلاديمير بوتين كمجرم حرب!

وأما على المدى المتوسط أو البعيد حسب تطورات الحرب ضد روسيا، فتهدف أمريكا من وراء تحييد روسيا عن ساحة التنافس الدولي إلى التفرغ لمواجهة الصين لاحقًا، بعد أن تكون قد أفقدت الصين حليفًا إستراتيجيًا، يعد وجوده عاملًا حاسمًا في المواجهة الأمريكية الصينية، وبعد أن بات الأمريكي يعتقد بصعوبة تكرار تجربة هنري كيسنجر مع الصين في حقبة الحرب الباردة.

إذن، فنحن أمام حربٍ دوليةٍ حاسمةٍ، يسعى كل طرفٍ فيها إلى تحقيق نصرٍ إستراتيجيٍ، لذلك الراجح أن تطول هذه الحرب وتزداد تعقيدًا مع مرور الزمن، وبات هذا المسار يتجلى في تصاعد حدة الخطاب الصيني في مواجهة الضغوط الأمريكية عليها، وفي المقابل في التصاعد التدريجي للضغوط الأمريكية على الصين، وذلك في محاولةٍ لإجبارها على الابتعاد عن روسيا في هذا الاشتباك، وتأتي العقوبات التي فرضتها أمريكا مؤخرًا على مسؤولين صينيين من خارج سياق الأحداث في هذا الاطار.

وتبرز هنا القضية التي يود تقدير الموقف هذا التركيز عليها، فلقد كان لافتًا موقف بعض حلفاء الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية التقليديين اتجاه الحرب الدائرة، حيث مازالت دولٌ كالإمارات والسعودية وتركيا ومعهم دولة الاحتلال تتململ في اتخاذ موقفٍ واضحٍ، يساند بشكلٍ كاملٍ وعمليٍ الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية ضد روسيا، وتتباين التقديرات حول خلفيات هذا التململ، فمنها ما يضع موقفيّ الإمارات والسعودية ضمن مناوراتٍ سياسيةٍ بهدف تحصيل مكاسب من الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية في ملفاتٍ إقليميةٍ، كملف العودة إلى الاتفاق النووي مع إيران وملف الحرب على اليمن، وأخرى تضع موقف تركيا ودولة الاحتلال في سياق حساباتٍ لدى هذين الأخيرين، تتعلق بعدم رغبتهما في إغضاب روسيا، لا سيما بعد أن بات لروسيا حضورٌ حاسمٌ في منطقتنا.

لكن أيً كان الحال، فالراجح أمران: 

ـ أن هذا التململ ما كان ليكون لولا تراجع سطوة الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية على حلفائها وفي العالم عمومًا، بغض النظر عن دوافع كل طرف لموقفه الضبابي اتجاه المعركة الراهنة.

ـ أنه نتيجةً لطبيعة المعركة الإستراتيجية كما تبين آنفًا، وارتفاع احتمالية أن تطول وتزداد تعقيدًا مع مرور الزمن، فمن الطبيعي أن يزداد الضغط الأمريكي على حلفائه لاتخاذ موقفٍ واضحٍ ضمن أحد المعسكرين المتقابلين، وهذا ما بدأت تظهر مؤشراته بالفعل.

وعليه، ستجد دولة الاحتلال نفسها مضطرًة للاختيار عاجلًا أم آجلًا، وعلى الأغلب لن تتمكن من المراوغة في مواقفه كثيرًا مع احتدام المعارك، وستكون من عجائب الدنيا إن اختارت التموضع في المعسكر الشرقي ضد المعسكر الغربي، فدولة الاحتلال ليست حليفًا للغرب وحسب، بل هي صنيعته بالكامل، ومرتبطٌة به عضويًا ووجوديًا، وتظل هذه الحقائق أمرًا حاسمًا في خياراتها، مهما تعددت علاقات دولة الاحتلال بدولٍ أخرى حول العالم كبيرةً كانت أم صغيرةً، ويشار هنا إلى الأنباء التي تم تداولها عن بدء الترتيبات لزيارةٍ محتملةٍ لرئيس وزراء دولة الاحتلال قريبًا للعاصمة الأوكرانية كييف.

توصيف “العملية العسكرية الخاصة” الروسية في أوكرانيا على أنها احتلال، ليس بالأمر الأبيض والأسود حسب القانون الدولي كما يحاول الغرب الترويج، فنجد مثلًا أن دولتين كبيرتين وأساسيتين كالصين والهند قد رفضتا إدانة “العملية العسكرية الخاصة” الروسية في أوكرانيا،

وكون هذه المعركة المحتدمة حاليًا تعد معركةً مصيريةً لروسيا وحتى للصين، فلابد أن يكون لتموضع دولة الاحتلال في المعسكر الغربي ـ كما هو متوقعٌ ـ أثرٌ بالغٌ على علاقاتها بروسيا وبالصين كذلك.

ويفتح هذا لحركات المقاومة لا سيما الفلسطينية منها، بابًا واسعًا للعب على تناقض المصالح بين روسيا والصين وبين الكيان المؤقت إذا ما أحسنت اقتناص الفرصة، ففي نهاية المطاف، الكثير من السلاح النوعي والكاسر للتوازن الذي حصلت عليه حركات المقاومة كان روسيًا وصينيًا.

ويبقى أخيرًا الإشارة إلى كون توصيف “العملية العسكرية الخاصة” الروسية في أوكرانيا على أنها احتلال، ليس بالأمر الأبيض والأسود حسب القانون الدولي كما يحاول الغرب الترويج، فنجد مثلًا أن دولتين كبيرتين وأساسيتين كالصين والهند قد رفضتا إدانة “العملية العسكرية الخاصة” الروسية في أوكرانيا، هذا ناهيك عن أنه لا خلاف على كون العقوبات الاقتصادية أحادية الجانب، التي فرضها الغرب على روسيا، تعد خرقًا سافرًا لقواعد التجارة الدولية، وقوانين حرية التجارة حسب منظمة التجارة العالمية “WTO”.

وأما بخصوص الموقف الذي تم وصفه من البعض بموقفٍ “أخلاقي”، والذي قالت به بعض الهيئات العربية التي باتت لبرالية الهوى في جل مواقفها، ومنسجمةً مع الدعاية الغربية في تَقييم غالبية الأحداث الدولية والإقليمية، بغض النظر عن توجه تلك الهيئات سواءً أكانت إسلاميةً أم علمانيةً أم يساريةً، فبإمكانهم مراجعة كلمة الرئيس الأوكراني أمام “كنيست” الكيان المؤقت، حينما ادعى أن ما تتعرض له أوكرانيا من “خطر وعدوان” روسي، يماثل ما يتعرض له الكيان المؤقت من حركات المقاومة، ويحق لنا توقع أن يعتمد الغرب هذه الرواية كونها تدغدغ مشاعره العنصرية وتنسجم مع مصالحه الاستعمارية.

*كاتب وباحث سياسي

Chris Hedges: Waltzing Toward Armageddon with the Merchants of Death

March 14, 2022

“Raft of Doom” / Illustration by Mr. Fish

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

By Chris Hedges

Source

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

That is why they have resurrected it.

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

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

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

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

The Butcher’s Cut | Illustration by Mr. Fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Why It’s So Important For Russia To Denazify & Demilitarize The “Anti-Russia”

4 MARCH 2022

By Andrew Korybko

Source

Denazification will result in the “ideological vaccination” of the Ukrainian “deep state” and the society that it’s supposed to represent (even though it hasn’t legitimately represented its indigenously multicultural people for the past eight years). This will in turn sustainably ensure that this fraternal country isn’t ever hijacked by foreign forces in order to transform it into a proxy Hybrid War weapon by artificially reinventing itself as the “anti-Russia” in accordance with literal World War II-era fascist ideology. Upon the success of this ambitious goal, Ukraine’s demilitarization can then be sustained as well.

Much has been written in the US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) mocking Russia’s stated aims to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, which President Putin described on Thursday during a meeting with his Security Council, as having turned into an “anti-Russia”, throughout the course of its special military intervention there. The prevailing narrative is that the Russian leader has lost his mind since the MSM has successfully gaslit so many folks into denying the presence of literal Nazi-glorifying fascists in the US-backed post-coup Ukrainian structures (particularly its political and military ones) and even going as far as to describe any contrarian claims as “anti-Semitic”. Furthermore, their targeted audience has been misled into thinking that Ukraine isn’t capable of ever posing any sort of military threat to Russia.

The author clarified the facts in three of his recent pieces that will now be shared below, the first of which hyperlinks to around a dozen prior related analyses. These should at the very least be skimmed through if the reader isn’t already familiar with the author’s arguments in order to avoid being confused by the rest of the clarifications that will follow in the present article:

* “Politico Is Wrong: It’s The US-Led West, Not President Putin, Who Miscalculated”

* “The Guardian Is Wrong: It’s Not Anti-Semitic To Describe Ukraine As Fascist”

* “Russia’s Upcoming International Anti-Fascist Conference Is An Important Soft Power Move”

Basically, Russian intelligence concluded that NATO’s clandestine military infrastructure in Ukraine would be used to launch a surprise attack against their country upon the US’ successful neutralization of its nuclear second-strike capabilities. The fascist ideology that influences most of the Ukrainian elite has resulted in turning their country into an “anti-Russia” in the sense of seeing itself as Russia’s enemy.

Having very briefly explained all of that, the piece will now proceed to informing readers about the importance of denazifying and demilitarizing this anti-Russian entity. So as not to be misunderstood or have any of the subsequent insight maliciously misportrayed, the “anti-Russia” description doesn’t refer to the Ukrainian people in general nor their eponymous state but to the function that their US-backed post-coup permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) consider their country playing in the region vis-à-vis Russia. It also refers to the ideology that they seek to impose upon the rest of society in order to turn it against this fraternal neighboring people, many of whom live within the borders of Lenin’s lingering unnatural mini-empire and are historically indigenous to its territory.

The denazification goal is crucial to achieve in order to sustainably ensure peace between the historically united Russian and Ukrainian people, as President Putin described them in his detailed article from last summer. Their “deep state” was captured by US-backed radicals that literally glorify Hitler’s World War II collaborators who participated in the Holocaust as well as the genocide of Poles, Roma, Russians, and other minorities living on what’s nowadays Ukrainian territory. Their disproportionate influence in shaping their state’s policy and the views of society have turned them into the US’ anti-Russian vanguard for waging that declining unipolar hegemon’s Hybrid War against Moscow by proxy. These fascists have poisoned the minds of countless Ukrainians in the eight years since coming to power.

No self-respecting state can accept the indefinite presence of such hostile and genuinely fascist forces on its border, let alone those that have turned many of these historically united fraternal people against them. That’s not even to mention the explicit security threats that this “anti-Russia” poses with respect to its national security strategy’s aims to support a terrorist underground against their designated opponent, to say nothing of its leadership’s recent hints to develop a nuclear weapon. Quite clearly, the continued existence of this “anti-Russia” – which to remind the reader, refers solely to the US-backed ideological radicals that seized control of Ukraine’s deep state and not its society nor the state itself – poses an existential threat to Russia, and that’s even without its clandestine hosting of NATO bases.

Denazification will result in the “ideological vaccination” of the Ukrainian “deep state” and the society that it’s supposed to represent (even though it hasn’t legitimately represented its indigenously multicultural people for the past eight years). This will in turn sustainably ensure that this fraternal country isn’t ever hijacked by foreign forces in order to transform it into a proxy Hybrid War weapon by artificially reinventing itself as the “anti-Russia” in accordance with literal World War II-era fascist ideology. Upon the success of this ambitious goal, Ukraine’s demilitarization can then be sustained as well. To be sure, the country is already largely demilitarized as a result of Russia’s precision strikes taking out over 1,800 Ukrainian military facilities, including those that could have been used by NATO.  

Nevertheless, Ukraine can always rebuild those sites with time if its leadership remains under the control of foreign forces and influenced by fascist ideology, which is why denazifying the country’s “deep state” and those members of society that support such hateful views is the prerequisite to sustainably ensuring the country’s demilitarization. In other words, the ideological-social goals of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine take priority over its military ones even though the present optics seem to suggest otherwise for some. Ukraine’s denazification and subsequent demilitarization are the only ways to uphold the integrity of Russia’s national security red lines in that country which Kiev and its Western patrons have hitherto refused to respect despite Russia’s diplomatic requests to do so.

While most scenario forecasts predict that these interconnected goals can most easily be achieved through the eventual change of Ukraine’s regime, it’s at least theoretically possible that President Zelensky could remain in power if he simply undertook the political decisions required to fulfill Russia’s reasonable requests. After all, Russia has no interest in multi-managing political affairs in this neighboring country and it especially doesn’t want to take responsibility for directly ensuring the socio-economic well-being of its multicultural people due to the hefty costs involved, which became even more disproportionate upon the US-led West’s unprecedented sanctions that they just imposed on Russia. It would thus be easier if Zelensky simply did what’s needed to resolve these issues right away.

Instead, it regrettably seems to be the case that he remains controlled by both his American patrons and their fascist proxies below him in spite of he himself being very proud of his Jewish identity that obviously puts him at odds with the ideology being imposed upon his people by Ukraine’s US-backed ruling elite. If he can be successfully liberated from those pernicious forces or come to finally realize that his people’s best interests are ensured by agreeing to Russia’s reasonable requests, then it’s indeed possible for him to remain in office since he was democratically elected even though he then went back on his wildly popular campaign promise to pursue peaceful solutions to the Donbass conflict and attendant tensions with Russia.

However it ends up happening, there should be no doubt that Ukraine’s denazification and demilitarization will successfully be achieved throughout the course of Russia’s special operation there. These are issues of grand strategic importance for Russia since they’re directly connected to upholding the integrity of its national security red lines. The MSM gaslit the world by misportraying the expansion of US-led NATO’s regional military infrastructure as allegedly being done under defensive pretexts even though these moves – and especially those in Ukraine – unquestionably occurred at the expense of Russia’s security. Russia’s special operation in Ukraine is essentially restoring strategic stability between these nuclear superpowers and preventing the US from exploiting that country as its anti-Russian proxy.

The US’ False Flag & Crisis Actor Speculation About Russia Is Self-Discrediting

4 FEBRUARY 2022

By Andrew Korybko

Source

This exercise in the very definition of doublethink is self-discrediting and intellectually insulting.

The subversive anti-Russian faction of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) is so desperate to provoke a Russian-Ukrainian proxy war that it’s now pushing speculation about Russia supposedly plotting to carry out a false flag attack comprised of crisis actors. State Department spokesman Ned Price shared this allegation without any evidence whatsoever during a press conference on Thursday, which prompted the Associated Press’ Matt Lee to immediately challenge him. The latter even compared Price’s speculation to “Alex Jones territory” during their unforgettable exchange that can be read in full here and which was summarized here.

The US had up until this point denied the very conceptual existence of false flags and crisis actors, having previously claimed that even discussing them is nothing more than a so-called “conspiracy theory” in spite of both having been objectively confirmed to exist throughout history. Russia’s prior efforts to preempt what it described as the US’ own false flag chemical weapons attacks in Syria were always met with scorn, condemnation, and even mockery by the American Establishment yet now that very same Establishment wants the world to blindly accept their own similar such claims about Russia. This exercise in the very definition of doublethink is self-discrediting and intellectually insulting.

To be absolutely clear, false flags and crisis actors are real, but not every claim thereof is true. The US government has no credibility on the international stage after fabricating evidence about Iraq’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and most recently denying the impending fall of Kabul to the Taliban until it actually happened, among many other examples that can be mentioned. Nobody should believe the US when it claims that Russia is plotting a false flag attack in Eastern Ukraine or even within its own territory according to Price and plans to even involve crisis actors who’ll pretend to be corpses. No such dramatic accusation can be publicly shared in any serious fashion within presenting factual proof.

It’s beyond arrogant for Price and his “deep state” backers to expect anyone to blindly believe their false flag and crisis actor speculation about Russia. It’s much more believable that the US itself is plotting what can be described as a reverse-false flag scenario whereby its intelligence agencies and/or their proxies within Ukraine’s either carry out their own false flag attack that they blame on Russia, or actually strike that country or Russian-friendly rebels in Donbass, but then describe any such footage as a so-called “Russian false flag with crisis actors”. After all, the US’ perception management (propaganda) capabilities are masterful and well documented so they shouldn’t be underestimated.

Another pertinent point to bring up is that Price made his accusation on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics’ Opening Ceremony that many had already expected the US to try to spoil in one way or another. President Putin is currently in the Chinese capital to attend this ceremony and meet with his counterpart. Considering this context, it’s very probable that the US is implying that it might move forward with the abovementioned reverse-false flag scenario in the coming days while the Russian leader is still abroad or at the very least wants this scenario to hang heavy over his head like a Damocles’ sword. Put another way, this is a psy-op against both the whole world and President Putin personally.

Be that as it is, this doesn’t mean that it’ll automatically succeed. The US already lacks credibility, let alone after making such a dramatic false flag and crisis actor claim about Russia without presently even a shred of factual evidence when publicly challenged by a seasoned reporter. In that event that anything resembling the scenario that Price shared ends up transpiring, nobody should doubt that such a sequence of events would actually be due to the US’ own reverse-false flag scenario and not whatever it baselessly accused Russia of. It remains to be seen whether that’ll even happen, but the very fact that Price brought up his warped version of this scenario suggests that the US is seriously considering it.

The Longest War Of The 21st Century

15 JANUARY 2022

By Konrad Rekas

Source

The United States and Russia negotiate about limitation of the arms race, which is now even more obvious.   Central-European media threat the public with the “New Yalta” slogan, at the same time promising the inevitable victory of the only right Euro-Atlantic system.  Meanwhile, the geopolitical and geostrategic situation is more complex and much more dangerous, not only for the whole of Europe, being something different than simple new demarcation of spheres of influence between the powers.

No-Missiles Zone

The Cold War has always been closest to the transition to a hot one when it comes to strategic balance of power measured by the deployment and range of missile systems.  This was the case when in 1962 the Soviet Union reverted an attempt to locate American missiles in Turkey, what is known at misleading name of the Cuban Crisis.  That follows in 1980s, when the symbols of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s aggressive imperialism were Pershings, Tomahawks and the Trident System (still continued by UK).  Whenever war hawks prevail in the Euro-Atlantic zone – it can be seen in the translocation of offensive combat systems, moving closer and closer to the borders of the Russian Federation.

In practice, since Donald Trump’s anti-Chinese policy killed the INF (ДРСМД) – there is no effective international regulation of the ongoing, though not officially announced, arms race between the US and the rest of the world.  Of course, a very one-sided race, because although no one denies the modernity and training of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the power of the People’s Liberation Army – these are the Americans, however, who spend more ($778 billion) on armaments than the next eleven countries on this list combined, eight of which are American allies and dependent countries.  This massive dependence of US policy on the interests of the military-industrial complex, unchanged since the Cold War, always leaves a margin of concern whether such a huge arsenal will tempt someone to finally be used.  Even just to make some space for new purchases…

Disarmament or at least non-proliferation negotiations are therefore a necessity, as urgent as during the most dangerous crises of the two-Blocks era.  In the 1950s example of such an initiative was the Rapacki Plan.  The Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Adam Rapacki, proposed establishing of a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe, encompassing the territories of both Blocks, i.e. both German states, Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Despite support from Moscow, Prague and East Berlin, as well as a very sympathetic reception by anti-war Western circles – this proposal failed facing the resistance of Atlantic militarists.  However, it would certainly be worth referring to it today by creating such a zone excluded from the relocation of missile systems, including at least Poland, Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Scandinavia and the Baltic states.  Depending on a willingness of interested states, similar treaties could also be signed in Asia and other regions of the World.  Otherwise, we are threatened with a permanent state of universal hybrid war – with the possibility of turning into a full-blown global conflict at any time.

Will Russians invade Ukraine?  I invite them to dinner!

Of course, the USA, UK and NATO explain all their expansive actions in the East with „Russia’s aggressive plans towards Ukraine”.  We should add that these plans are so secret and diabolical that thanks to the Western media and politicians, people talk about them over a beer in a pub and at family lunches.  They are so obvious and known to everyone…  It is probably not difficult to guess that if something is the subject of such a clear and intrusive propaganda campaign – we can be absolutely sure that there is no relation to reality.  I have repeated many times, for the past seven years, when almost every day after the Euromaidan the Russian invasion into Ukraine was foretold: if only Russia wants that, after the morning roll call in Rostov, its soldiers will have lunch in Kharkiv, dinner in Kiev, and still have enough time for afternoon tea in Lviv cafes.  And for supper I invite them to the present Polish-Ukrainian border, near which I live…

Unfortunately, however, Russia has not attacked – because the Russians are not responsible for solving other nations’ problems.  Since we know more about the first years of People’s Republics in Donbas, the more we read and hear about the moderating role of Russia, which has tried to stop the escalation of the conflict.  This is not the place to judge whether it was right to grab the hands of Donbas field commanders, not letting them to go too far to the west.  The fact is, however, that it was so.  Russia could have liberated all of Ukraine (or conquered it if someone prefer that) a long time ago, and no one, least the West, could do anything about it.  Why then should it suddenly change politics and interfere with all this Ukrainian mess, especially announcing own entrance with so long run-up?  Just to help Western war hawks, gunmakers and the funny Kiev cacique who dreams of war to save his own stool?

Anyway, even in the Western media we can hear trumpets to retreat now.  After several months of continuous counting, how many thousands of Russian tanks are about to break into a peaceful Ukraine – suddenly we can hear and read that it was probably… “Putin’s bluff” and possibly Russia does not want to invade anyone.  For readers experienced in reading between the lines – the change of the message is therefore clear:  “We will never admit we lied, but now we can say that there will be no war”.  Well, looking at Ukraine’s impressive war budget (323 billion hryvnias, over 11 billion dollars!) it should be noted that the “Russo-Ukrainian war” has already fulfilled some of its tasks. The cash that the West “lends” to Kiev returns to the West in the form of military purchases, the business is booming, and the military-industrial complex with the media on its services counts profits.

For the New International Order

Therefore, there is no doubt that the period of World unipolarity has come to an end, but the new international order has not yet been clearly shaped.  All these collisions and conflicts are absolutely natural way of establishing new rules and defining new spheres of influence.  The descending empires often struggle with such problems, especially previously hiding and denying own weakness and decay.  The United States simply must put on mean face, flex muscles and show the longest missiles.  This is how they understand their prestige, these are their internal needs, and this is how they want to guarantee the subordination of the remaining vassals.  Escaping the crisis with a recent expansion attempt, distracting rivals, delaying the inevitable – these are normal tactical tricks.  Unfortunately, trying to displace reality by throwing everything on one card and creating a global war threat – that is also an option on the table.  And that is no secret that there are American circles that would not hesitate to set the World on fire believing that “all-or-nothing” and “if not us – no one!”.

Of course, however, there are also pragmatists, as well as that part of financial capital sceptical about the policies implemented by states, pointing out that these are large corporations, not the great powers, which became the real subjects of the international order.  These great interests will decide WAR or PEACE and so far (as we can see) the arguments are weighed.  Not only between Washington and Moscow, but even more between Wall Street, City and Beijing/Shanghai.

And as far poor Ukraine concerned… Well, it will be the subject of a conflict between the West and Russia as long as there is still something to be stolen left.  Although organized plunder has been going on practically from the first moments after the Euromaidan – Ukraine is still potentially a very rich country.  Do we not remember how during the previous World War the Germans even uprooted black soils and took them away by trains?  If the Ukrainians themselves do nothing about it, their country will only be left to itself when the last train with their resources leaves for the West.  And even then, Ukraine will be assigned the role of a battlefield, including atomic one.

As we know, Zelensky’s team has already legalised privatisation of land, privileging large foreign property, previously hidden in the form of leases and joint ventures.  In 2022 there is going to be a bargain with 700 of the 3,500 remaining state-owned enterprises, especially the power industry, mining and metallurgical one.  This a reason why Zelensky announced his cabaret “war with the oligarchs” (that means with himself?) – so no one would prevent Western capital from grazing on Ukrainian wealth.  To consume it in peace – capital must threat with war.  That is the whole secret of “Russian aggression plans against Ukraine”…

There will be no other end of the World

So, is the threat of global conflict just a kind of marketing trick?  Not exactly or probably not only.   A few years ago, there was quite popular theory that World War 3 had already begun, but we do not see all its symptoms yet.  The shortage of more dramatic moments made sceptics question this hypothesis – after all better, worse, but we live somehow.  The international situation is quite normal, although from crisis to crisis and overall we can focus on other issues, from celebrities trough climate to pandemic.  The problem is that the prophets of World War 3 were right.  Only, as in the poem by the Polish-Lithuanian poet Czesław Miłosz about the end of the World that no one noticed – perhaps there will be no more global war other than a permanently hybrid war.  And the inhabitants of not infected parts of the World will doubt if it is real at all.  But an endless war for the New World Order will spread everywhere on more and more fronts.

The war we already know from Donbas, Syria, Yemen, Transcaucasia, now also Kazakhstan, soon maybe Taiwan, Ukraine or Baltic States.  But also many, many other conflicts in which enemies from one theatre of operations will often and suddenly become tactical allies elsewhere.  This can be a war not only between states, because we already know that it is possible to fight almost entirely with private capital, only hiring states to carry out heavier air strikes.  Finally, it is a war in which whole cities can disappear under bombs and missiles, as it has been till now.  But also the one in which some silent killer will fly through a window and this child’s-toy-like thing will win the decisive battle.

And most of us, if we only have a bit of luck – might never even notice…

Why Russia is Ready to Check-mate the U.S. and its Western Empire

January 11, 2022

By Finian Cunningham

Source

The Western empire-builders are weakened and exposed in the eyes of their own populations and thus are disarmed politically to pursue confrontation.

Author and commentator Alex Krainer explains in the following interview why Russia is now strong enough to take a definitive stand against the United States and its Western empire-builders. This is the wider historical context for high-level negotiations being conducted this week between Russia and the U.S. and NATO in which Moscow has asserted red lines for its national security.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.-led Western powers became deluded with arrogant entitlement. As Krainer points out, the Western empire-builders presumed to have the right to wage wars and flout international law. For much of the past three-decade period, Russia was too weak economically and politically to challenge this reckless aggression. But now it has grown strong enough to “check-mate the empire’s global ambitions”. This is why war or regime change in Russia has become an obsessive goal for the U.S. and Western partners. It accounts for the relentless sanctions, Russophobia and surge in tensions over Ukraine and more recently Kazakhstan.

Russia is perceived as an obstacle to Western control over the strategically vital Eurasian continent. The prize of Eurasia has long been coveted by Western imperialists, from the British Empire’s Sir Halford Mackinder to the U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski. As Krainer notes, it was this imperial calculation by the Anglo-American capitalists that led to the building up of Nazi Germany as a bludgeon to destroy the Soviet Union and purportedly to give the empire-builders global hegemony. This imperial machination led to World War II and the greatest conflagration in human history with as many as 85 million dead. The Soviet Union and China accounted for more than half of the death toll.

Today, the Western imperialists are prepared to start another catastrophic war, even if it risks a nuclear Armageddon, contends Krainer. But he says that Russia is strong enough to now force the Western imperialists into political detente. He believes that the Russian leadership has calculated that the Western empire-builders are weakened and exposed in the eyes of their own populations and thus are disarmed politically to pursue confrontation.

Alex Krainer is a commodities trader and hedge fund manager whose market analysis can be found at I-System Trend Following. He is also a commentator on international politics at thenakedhedgie.com. A recent article reassesses the British “appeasement policy” towards Hitler in the 1930s arguing the real aim was to weaponize the Third Reich against the Soviet Union. He refers to this deeper historical account to demolish false analogies made today by Western politicians and pundits who absurdly compare Russia and Putin with Nazi Germany and Hitler. Krainer is the author of the ground-breaking book “Grand Deception: the Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act and Anti-Russian Sanctions”.

Alex Krainer

Interview

Question: Some American and European politicians are demanding that there should be “no appeasement” towards Russia over the mounting tensions and security crisis regarding Ukraine and Europe generally. The insinuation is that Russia is comparable to Nazi Germany in the 1930s by allegedly posing an existential threat to Europe’s security. You point out that there is a grossly distorted analogy here with how Britain and France are accused of “appeasement” of Nazi Germany in the lead-up to the Second World War. Can you explain?

Alex Krainer: Western powers seem to have largely lost institutional brakes on waging war. Someone cries “human rights,” and we seem prepared to obliterate entire nations with hardly any debate, discussion, or any long-term plan. The consent for war, or “kinetic action”, is simply contrived by myriad think-tanks, often directly or indirectly funded by the military-industrial complex. With unhindered access to the media, these organizations produce rhetoric that rationalizes hostility, demonization of targeted adversaries and justifications for war. Today, as tensions with Russia have escalated to a boiling point, some of them draw historical parallels between today’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Among others, Victoria Nuland and Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger have recently invoked Britain’s 1938 policy of appeasement that caused the destruction of Czechoslovakia and empowered Hitler. The insinuation is that today, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, Donbas is Sudetenland and that Vladimir Putin is Hitler. If the parallels were valid, they would imply that we should pay almost any price to avoid repeating Neville Chamberlain’s errors of judgment that plunged Europe into the tragedy of World War II. Of course, the parallels are entirely false, but unfortunately, this is not widely understood.

Question: Going deeper into the history of that fateful pre-WWII period, you contend that the British Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain was not so much “appeasing” Hitler’s Nazi Germany but rather London was covertly green lighting Berlin’s expansionism and the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland territory. Therefore, can British policy be blamed for starting the war in Europe and the subsequent criminal aggression of Nazi Germany?

Alex Krainer: London was definitely covertly green lighting Berlin’s expansionism. However, it’s quite possible that they did much more than that. Today we have compelling evidence that Hitler was actually recruited, cultivated and empowered to carry water for the globalist agenda of the empire builders based on Wall Street and the City of London. In fact, Western powers do this as a matter of course: they incubate nationalistic leaders they can plant in different nations but who would remain loyal to them. Examples include Russia’s Alexey Navalny and Venezuela’s Juan Guaido. The problem was that Adolf Hitler was massively empowered with capital and military technology and became something of a monster in the heart of Europe. He also had his own ideas about his historical mission and didn’t hesitate to bite the hands that had fed him. But some of these facts remain obscured to this day as the victors made sure to write a sanitized and airbrushed history of World War II. With regard to appeasement, the distortion was that the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain only appeased Hitler and sacrificed Czechoslovakia in order to preserve peace in Europe. In other words, Chamberlain had good intentions but made a bad error of judgment. This is not what happened; Chamberlain and his foreign policy cabal which included Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir John Simon, Lord Runciman, and Sir Samuel Hoare took a very active role in the negotiations between Hitler’s Germany and Czechoslovakia and the result – Germany’s taking over of Czechoslovakia’s most developed and most industrialized region of Sudetenland – was exactly what they had intended.

Question: It is not widely known, as you point out, that British and American finance capital was heavily supporting the Third Reich in the run-up to WWII. What were the geopolitical objectives behind this support from Britain and the United States for Nazi Germany?

Alex Krainer: As with every empire, the British Empire’s objective was world domination, and the arrangement they had envisioned and planned was a “three-block” system. As Lord Halifax articulated it after the Munich conference in September 1938, the three blocks included control of the far-Eastern dominions in alliance with Japan, control of the Euro-Atlantic block in alliance with the United States and the control of central and eastern European continent through Germany as the hegemon in that region. Germany was also intended as the bludgeon to wield against and destroy Russia and thus eliminate the British Empire’s perennial rival in controlling the Eurasian landmass. The empire builders have not given up on this three-block vision of the new global order, which is perhaps most visibly exemplified by the Trilateral Commission, co-founded in 1973 by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The difference is that today the agenda is being pursued through ostensibly democratic institutions of the European Union while still consistently empowering Germany as the dominant power among the supposed equals. And Russia remains the rival to destroy either through war or regime change. However, it seems to me that their game is up and the fantasy of dominating the world has receded beyond reach today.

Question: If we apply that kind of understanding of history to today, are you contending that the United States, Britain and other NATO powers are trying to similarly contain Russia through fomenting tensions and aggression in Europe, albeit in the language of “defending Ukraine”?

Alex Krainer: There’s no doubt about that – the more you pay attention, the more obvious it is. The foundational principle of the conflict between Russia and the U.S. and Britain is the struggle for control of the Eurasian landmass which has been the empire builders’ overarching imperative ever since Sir Halford Mackinder explicitly formulated it in 1904 in his Heartland Theory. In “Democratic Ideals and Reality,” he wrote that, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-island; who rules the World-island controls the world.” Since then, the empire changed headquarters from London to Washington DC, but this imperative has not changed. Zbigniew Brzezinski reaffirmed it again in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard,” explaining also the empire builders’ rationale for this ambition: “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. … About 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world’s GDP and about 3/4ths of the world’s known energy resources.”

This obsession is part and parcel of Western policy toward Russia continuously to this day. In August 2018 in a briefing to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Wess Mitchell stated that the “central aim of the [Trump] administration’s foreign policy is to defend U.S. domination of Eurasian landmass as the foremost U.S. national security interest and to prepare the nation for this challenge.” Mitchell also said that the administration was “working with our close ally the UK to form an international coalition for coordinating efforts in this field.” Now, if Russia reasserts itself as the dominant power in Eastern Europe, this pretty much check-mates the empire’s global ambitions, so containing Russia and limiting its influence in Europe is absolutely critical and I think they will not give up on this even at the price of a nuclear war.

Question: Russia has put forward security proposals to the U.S. and NATO calling for a written guarantee of no further eastward expansion of the bloc to include membership of Ukraine and other neighboring countries. Moscow also wants guarantees of no American strike weapons to be installed in neighboring territories. Critics of Russia say these demands are an unreasonable ultimatum from Moscow that impinges on nations’ freedom of choice to determine their security options. How do you see it?

Alex Krainer: I think that much of the West is torn between cooperation and trade with Russia and the policy of Cold War and confrontation. As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has recently put it addressing “our friends” in Europe, “a choice is shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine” and championing the cause of peace and stability. He literally put it in those terms and I think his words do reflect the continent’s dilemma. For the ordinary people and most businesses, the choice is between having a strong export market for their products and abundant energy keeping their homes warm and their societies running and an acute energy crisis and the risk of a hot war with a nuclear power. For the empire builders it is equally clear: no matter how delusional, they will never give up on their ambition to rule the world. As late John Kenneth Galbraith noted, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”.

I think that the Russian leadership has no illusions about the nature of their conflict with the West, but in putting forward their tough security proposals they have chosen the moment of fractious politics across much of the West to force a showdown between the forces representing legitimate democratic concerns in the Western societies and those representing the interest of the empire builders. Today those proposals may seem unreasonable to some, but this is only because we all got accustomed to the idea that Western powers somehow have the right to do as they well please while other powers have no right to object or assert their own security concerns.

Question: Do you think Russia can be faulted for not being more proactive in past years on objecting to NATO expansion? Moscow maintains it was given verbal guarantees in the late 1990s by U.S. leaders that there would be no eastward expansion of the military bloc. Yet as we know, NATO membership was given to former Warsaw Pact nations Poland and Hungary in 1999, then to the Baltic states in 2004, and in 2008 an offer made to the former Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Georgia. Therefore, has Russia been complacent in passively allowing the present security crisis to evolve in Europe? In other words, does the appeasement argument actually run in reverse, namely that Russia has been at fault for appeasing the United States and NATO?

Alex Krainer: After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia very nearly disintegrated. Its economy collapsed and experienced the longest depression recorded anywhere during the 20th century. It was in a very weak position and Western powers took advantage of that weakness to expand NATO eastward to secure that imperative of dominating Eastern Europe and through it the Eurasian landmass. It is true that Russia suffered this breach of faith rather passively, but Russian leadership probably judged that they were not in the position to credibly counter the West, that they were too vulnerable to Western sanctions and that they needed to rebuild their economic, political, diplomatic and military muscle. I think you have a point in saying that the appeasement argument might run in reverse, but in this case, I believe Russia’s strategy has been to play a long game and wait to confront the West from a position of strength. Twenty years ago, Russia was broken while today it is a force to reckon with. We’ll see how things play out, but one thing is certain – the empire builders now have a worthy adversary.

Question: Do you see a diplomatic solution to the crisis?

Alex Krainer: A diplomatic solution will have to be found – this is inevitable. Even if we see a hot war break out between Russia and the U.S. and NATO, such a conflict would not last forever and in the end the adversaries would still have to sit at a table and sign some sort of a treaty. Of course, for 99.99% of all involved, a diplomatic solution now would be preferable to one following a nuclear Armageddon. I tend to be more optimistic and hope that we won’t see a war break out, but I’ve already lived through the breakout of war and I know firsthand that the unthinkable can actually happen so we shouldn’t be complacent either. To the extent that the legitimate institutions and mechanisms of democracy still function in the West, we ought to use them to put pressure on our policymakers to defend peace. I would certainly prefer to see Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines rather than another tragic European war fought ultimately for someone’s delusional agenda of world domination.

Endnote: By way of demonstrating the reality of which nation is most responsible for war and destruction since the end of World War II, Alex Krainer cited the following study and comment. The astounding disconnect with public perception says a lot about the propaganda function of Western media:

He writes: In June of 2014, a group of American researchers published an article in the American Journal of Public Health, pointing out that, “Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001, and since then, others, including Afghanistan and Iraq.” To be sure, each of these wars was duly explained and justified to the American public and for all those Americans who believe that their government would never deceive them, each war was defensible and fought for a good reason. Nonetheless, the fact that one nation initiated more than 80% of all wars in the last seventy years does require an explanation.”

Will ‘Godless liberalism’ Force Russia to Close Its ‘Window on the West’?

December 31, 2021

By Robert Bridge

Source

The problem is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

For centuries, Russia has been open to adopting popular Western traditions, but as the invasive cultural weed known as progressive liberalism enters the scene, Moscow is now forced to rethink the level of its engagement. With the internet and ubiquitous social media, however, such a cultural distancing will not be easy.

Russian Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725), from the vantage point of his newly built capital of Saint Petersburg, encouraged his fellow Russians to emulate particular Western styles that he believed were civilized and cultivated. One of his less popular pro-Western reforms involved an edict that forbade beards among government officials and nobles.

“Peter, beardless himself, regarded beards as unnecessary, uncivilized and ridiculous,” wrote Peter Massie in his biography ‘Peter the Great’. “They made his country a subject of mirth and mockery in the West … Within a week of his return [from a trip around Europe], he went to a banquet given by [Army Commander Alexis] Shein and sent his court fool, Jacob Turgenov, around the room in the role of barber. The process was often uncomfortable; shaving long, thick beards with a dry razor left many gouges and cuts where the sharp blade had come to close. But no one dared object…”

Eventually, Tsar Peter relaxed his edict, allowing anyone who paid a hefty ‘beard tax’ to keep their beloved facial hair.

Fast forward about three centuries and we find Russian President Vladimir Putin starting to apply the emergency brakes on Russia’s import of Western ideas and traditions, many of which are far from innocuous.

During his annual end-of-year Q&A press conference, Putin was asked about issues that have obsessed the Western mind, like transgenderism and the rejection of traditional concepts, such as mother, father and gender – one-time unquestionable biological facts that are now open to a variety of interpretations according to the personal whims of each individual.

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.https://t.co/SyxFnnboM1

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 12, 2021

“I adhere to that traditional approach that a woman is a woman and a man is a man. A mother is a mother, a father is a father,” Putin responded with a frankness that would make a modern liberal faint. “And I hope that our society has the internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religious denominations of the Russian Federation.”

Comparing the proliferation of such dangerous ideas to the spread of a pandemic, the Russian leader, hinting at the moral strength provided by Orthodoxy, argued that all Russian citizens enjoy “a certain internal moral protection against this obscurantism that you’ve just mentioned.”

Putin then alluded to a criminal case in the United States where a criminal serving time for rape declared that he was female and, after being transferred to a women’s prison, committed the same crime in his cell.

“It is necessary to fight [progressive liberalism] not with direct orders and shouts and accusations but with the support for our traditional values,” he asserted.

📺 @RT_com presents a manual on just how one should (might) celebrate Christmas in 2021/22. In the eye of the beholder.

☝️ RT reminds -> in the age of new ethics and cancel culture all things conservative turn progressive. Or should they?#ThinkForYourself & #MerryChristmas! pic.twitter.com/BkSIAYRAb7

— MFA Russia 🇷🇺 (@mfa_russia) December 25, 2021

Here is the tremendous quandary now confronting Russia: since most people these days are more likely to be holding a smartphone and checking their social media accounts than reading Tolstoy, Bulgakov or Dostoevsky, ‘closing the window’ on dubious Western values is not so straightforward. The problem for Russia, and many other countries, is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from such adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

To get an idea exactly how popular social media has become, this year the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok dethroned the behemoth Google – with all of its myriad services, like Maps, Translate, News, etc – from the top spot, while Facebook took third place. Meanwhile, Netflix, with its not-so-subtle programming on behalf of half-baked woke ideas, grabbed seventh place.

A one-minute scroll down TikTok’s main page tells a person everything they need to know about the platform’s content, which could be summed up in three words: lewd, vulgar and repulsive. There is literally no sign of intelligent life forms whatsoever. Indeed, the majority of the content creators appear to be very young and, shockingly, in various hedonistic stages of disrobing and debauchery.

That must be of no small concern when it is considered that over 29 million Russians use TikTok, and the largest share of the audience was represented by female users at nearly 56 percent as of May 2021 (12-24 year olds make up 26 percent of its audience). Many psychologists attribute this heavy social media usage to a dramatic uptick in adolescents – particularly females – expressing early confusion about their gender.

In one peer-reviewed academic study, it was found that “86.7% of parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both.”

While TikTok is not the only social media company with a formidable footprint in Russia (Russia’s very own VKontakte, a popular alternative to Facebook, is the most popular social media site in the country, with some 70 million monthly users), it certainly ranks as one of the most disruptive in terms of its ability to shape the soft minds of predominantly young users. Yet to date it seems that Russia is content to merely mimic the Chinese platform. In September, Gazprom-Media unveiled a new platform called Yappy, which, like TikTok, enables users to record 60-second videos. The main target audience is for those people in the 14-34 age range.

Nevertheless, signs of a Russian pushback against the messaging are on the horizon. Twitter, for example, received a warning in March by the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor that it could be blocked from the country if it refuses to “remove content that incites minors to commit suicide, contains child pornography or information about the use of drugs.”

The Russian watchdog demanded the removal of more than 28,000 posts, links and publications, which reportedly included more than 2,500 calls for children to kill themselves and 450 involving child pornography.

The problem with social media and its inherently negative influence is not limited to Russia, of course. In January, Italian regulators forced TikTok to block underage users from using its app, after a 10-year-old girl from Palermo died attempting to perform a dangerous social media challenge that involved participants cutting off their oxygen supply to experience a high.

These types of peer-pressure challenges affecting children, which oftentimes do not make themselves known to parents (and the authorities) until the damage has already been done, can be described as a direct threat to national security, and perhaps more so for Russia than other countries.

As the vapid Western gospel of wokeness is widely disseminated from every social media pulpit, brainwashing children about strange new creeds, like transgenderism, this places the nuclear family unit under direct attack. And for a country like Russia, suffering as it is from low demographics amid a pandemic, such an attack cannot go unanswered forever.

“From both a humanitarian and geopolitical perspective, bearing in mind the people of the country – 146 million for such a vast territory is absolutely insufficient,” Putin told the assembled journalists. “We now have around 81 million people of working age – we have to seriously increase that by 2024 and 2030. It’s one of the factors of economic growth,” he added.

Clearly, woke ideology, with its marked tendency to assist in the impregnation of the mind – not the womb – has absolutely no place in modern Russia, and not just from a moralistic point of view. The question that now faces Russia at this critical juncture in its turbulent history, amid tumbling population rates, is how to keep these corrosive Western ‘values’ at bay, while allowing for the exchange of respectable ideas and technology. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that nothing less than Russia’s survival hinges on the right answer. 

Russian FM Lavrov speaks in exclusive RT interview

December 22, 2021

“The one Who Accuses is the One Who Is” – President Putin’s Response to Biden’s Calling him a “Killer”

March 24, 2021

By Peter Koenig for the Saker Blog

On March 16, 2021, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos held an exclusive interview with President Joe Biden. In the context of the United States’ chief intelligence office releasing an unclassified report on foreign meddling in the 2020 US election, concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw sweeping efforts aimed at “denigrating” President Joe Biden’s candidacy, Biden told Stephanopoulos that he had warned Putin about a potential response during a call in late January.

This is verbatim the ABC News Report of March 17, 2021:

“He will pay a price,” Biden said. “We had a long talk, he and I, when we — I know him relatively well. And the conversation started off, I said, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.”

Stephanopoulos then asked: “So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?”
“Mmm hmm, I do,” Biden replied.

Stephanopoulos: “So, what price is he going to pay?”
Biden: “The price he is going to pay, well, you’ll see shortly.”

Stephanopoulos also asked Biden, when you met him (Putin, in the past), you told him that he didn’t have a soul… and Biden retorted: yes, I told him. And Putin responded, “we understand each other.”

When President Putin spoke later to the media in Moscow, answering a question about his reaction to Biden’s accusing him to be a “killer”, Putin just said, “I wish him good health, and I mean it without irony.”

Speaking on television, reflecting philosophically, Putin said, “I remember when we were young, playing in the playground and accusing each other of little things, we always see ourself in the mirror and project our own image of ourselves on to the other, like “the one who accuses is the one who did it”.

President Putin last Thursday (18 March) challenged Biden to talk, I invite President Biden to talk on Friday or on Monday publicly online live… to which Biden did not respond. Presumably Given Biden’s often confused mind, to put it benignly, he was advised to abstain from such a conversation with President Putin.

The tension between the US and Russia has hardly been stronger and the diplomatic relation between the two countries is at its lowest in the past decades. President Putin recalled immediately the Russian Ambassador from Washington for “consultation” – a euphemism for declaring a serious rupture in the relationship of the two countries.

Later in a small media gathering in Moscow, Mr. Putin said he would deal with America on his terms. He also philosophized about Biden’s thoughtless slandering, when he talked to ABC’s anchor Stephanopoulos. He referred to children accusing one another, the going saying is, “the one who accuses is the one who is”. This is equally valid for adults.

When later asked at a Press Conference whether Biden regretted having suggested Putin was a “killer”, the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, replied, “No. The President gave a straight answer to a straight question.” – That reflects all too well the intellectual and diplomatic level of US Presidents and their entourage. Though Biden may be a special case of being a blind-folded bully, previous US Presidents’ track record is not much better.
——

President Putin is one of the world’s most brilliant Statesman. The other one is China’s President Xi Jinping. Together, their alliance, their vision and diplomacy, their conflict avoidance – and constant search for peaceful solutions to world disorders – have kept our planet out of a nuclear Armageddon for the last couple of decades. That’s quite an achievement, given the warmongers in Washington and by extension in Europe – and given the over two-dozen NATO bases in Europe, inching ever closer to the gates of Moscow and surrounding China – all the way through the South China Sea.

Obama once promised he would station more than half of the US Navy fleet in the South China Sea, making sure China was surrounded from everywhere. He made true on his promise. Its Obama’s infamous “Pivot to Asia”. And so, he did with Russia. That included and still includes deadly economic sanctions on countries that once-upon-a-time counted with Washington – and Europe – as partners.

How many people were killed by these sanctions in North Korea, Russia, China? How many were – and still are – being killed by the totally illegal sanctions – illegal by any standards of international law – in Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, DPRK (North Korea) – and by extension through Israel in Palestine – and many more nations of our planet? – Let alone the “eternal war on terror” – an invention to keep killing people for the good of the United States, for their control over humanity – and not least for the enormous profit bonanza of the US military industrial complex.

Shall we mention the mass killing caused by President Clinton’s initiated NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia; or the six still ongoing wars, initiated by President father Bush with the first Gulf war in 1991, then officially expanded by son Bush in 2001 and 2003 with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then further expanded by four more wars in the Middle East – Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen – under the Obama Administration. And how about the explicitly Obama-approved massive extra-judiciary drone killings around the world, with focus on the Middle East?

Aren’t we talking about tens and tens of thousands of deaths, assassinated people, a genocide by US presidents with the complicity of so-called European leaders (sic)?

Did President Putin and President Xi ever call them “killers” or murderers? – They could have, but they didn’t. However, that is what President Putin meant when he referred to Biden’s call him a “killer” – “It takes one to know one”, or rather “the one who accuses is the one who is”. The emperor and the emperor’s servants are a cabal of “killers” – a better fitting term is mass murderers.
——

Now President Biden, then VP to Obama was an intimate part of it, of clamping down on Russia and China. Biden was also part of the intensification of the Iraq war, as well as of the destruction of Libya and the brutal murder of President Qadhafi. Though Hillary’s initiative (then Obama’s Secretary of State), Biden fully supported her.

So, President Putin’s wise response was remarkable. See here https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-reaction-idUSKBN2BA0S1?fbclid=IwAR2RWXH1UPWt3KhWjffR_TPbwugWlklMjf3k6UYhxdDX37NMS4b2FjS51NY “The one who accuses is the one who is” – he said, referring to a psychic wisdom that one looks in the mirror when accusing others of a crime or a sin. In other words, Biden projects his own character onto Putin. Mr. Putin, politely and diplomatically said, they were different, had different cultures and different values. He also wished President Biden good health – genuinely good health, no irony, he stressed.

Before closing on such a conciliatory note, Putin referred to some American atrocities, dating back to the very beginning of American history which started with the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of indigenous Americans, for which American Presidents were responsible.

Also mentioned should be the brutal killings in Iraq, with special focus on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as well as Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase detention center and lately the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, also known as the Afghan National Detention facility, outside of Kabul – and renovated by the US Corps of Engineers to accommodate war prisoners taken by US / NATO forces. And not least, nor last, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba.

These are just a few of the hundreds of detention camps around the world, where thousands of prisoners were tortured and executed under orders and supervision of the US / NATO. Since WWII an estimated 20 to 30 million people were killed due to direct or indirect US intervention around the world. War crimes abound.

Yet, Mr. Putin didn’t call any of the US Presidents a “killer”. But it is crystal clear what he meant, when he said, “The one who accuses is the one who is”.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Why Russia is driving the West crazy

February 10, 2021

by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted on Asia Times

Future historians may register it as the day when usually unflappable Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov decided he had had enough:

We are getting used to the fact that the European Union are trying to impose unilateral restrictions, illegitimate restrictions and we proceed from the assumption at this stage that the European Union is an unreliable partner.

Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, on an official visit to Moscow, had to take it on the chin.

Lavrov, always the perfect gentleman, added, “I hope that the strategic review that will take place soon will focus on the key interests of the European Union and that these talks will help to make our contacts more constructive.”

He was referring to the EU heads of state and government’s summit at the European Council next month, where they will discuss Russia. Lavrov harbors no illusions the “unreliable partners” will behave like adults.

Yet something immensely intriguing can be found in Lavrov’s opening remarks in his meeting with Borrell: “The main problem we all face is the lack of normalcy in relations between Russia and the European Union – the two largest players in the Eurasian space. It is an unhealthy situation, which does not benefit anyone.”

The two largest players in the Eurasian space (italics mine). Let that sink in. We’ll be back to it in a moment.

As it stands, the EU seems irretrievably addicted to worsening the “unhealthy situation”. European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen memorably botched the Brussels vaccine game. Essentially, she sent Borrell to Moscow to ask for licensing rights for European firms to produce the Sputnik V vaccine – which will soon be approved by the EU.

And yet Eurocrats prefer to dabble in hysteria, promoting the antics of NATO asset and convicted fraudster Navalny – the Russian Guaido.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, under the cover of “strategic deterrence”, the head of the US STRATCOM, Admiral Charles Richard, casually let it slip that “there is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state.”

So the blame for the next – and final – war is already apportioned to the “destabilizing” behavior of Russia and China. It’s assumed they will be “losing” – and then, in a fit of rage, will go nuclear. The Pentagon will be no more than a victim; after all, claims Mr. STRATCOM, we are not “stuck in the Cold War”.

STRATCOM planners could do worse than read crack military analyst Andrei Martyanov, who for years has been on the forefront detailing how the new hypersonic paradigm – and not nuclear weapons – has changed the nature of warfare.

After a detailed technical discussion, Martyanov shows how “the United States simply has no good options currently. None. The less bad option, however, is to talk to Russians and not in terms of geopolitical BS and wet dreams that the United States, somehow, can convince Russia “to abandon” China – US has nothing, zero, to offer Russia to do so. But at least Russians and Americans may finally settle peacefully this “hegemony” BS between themselves and then convince China to finally sit as a Big Three at the table and finally decide how to run the world. This is the only chance for the US to stay relevant in the new world.”

The Golden Horde imprint

As much as the chances are negligible of the EU getting a grip on the “unhealthy situation” with Russia, there’s no evidence what Martyanov outlined will be contemplated by the US Deep State.

The path ahead seems ineluctable: perpetual sanctions; perpetual NATO expansion alongside Russia’s borders; the build up of a ring of hostile states around Russia; perpetual US interference on Russian internal affairs – complete with an army of fifth columnists; perpetual, full spectrum information war.

Lavrov is increasingly making it crystal clear that Moscow expects nothing else. Facts on the ground, though, will keep accumulating.

Nordstream 2 will be finished – sanctions or no sanctions – and will supply much needed natural gas to Germany and the EU. Convicted fraudster Navalny – 1% of real “popularity” in Russia – will remain in jail. Citizens across the EU will get Sputnik V. The Russia-China strategic partnership will continue to solidify.

To understand how we have come to this unholy Russophobic mess, an essential road map is provided by Russian Conservatism , an exciting, new political philosophy study by Glenn Diesen, associate professor at University of Southeastern Norway, lecturer at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and one of my distinguished interlocutors in Moscow.

Diesen starts focusing on the essentials: geography, topography and history. Russia is a vast land power without enough access to the seas. Geography, he argues, conditions the foundations of “conservative policies defined by autocracy, an ambiguous and complex concept of nationalism, and the enduring role of the Orthodox Church” – something that implies resistance to “radical secularism”.

It’s always crucial to remember that Russia has no natural defensible borders; it has been invaded or occupied by Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, the Mongol Golden Horde, Crimean Tatars and Napoleon. Not to mention the immensely bloody Nazi invasion.

What’s in a word? Everything: “security”, in Russian, is byezopasnost. That happens to be a negative, as byez means “without” and opasnost means “danger”.

Russia’s complex, unique historical make-up always presented serious problems. Yes, there was close affinity with the Byzantine empire. But if Russia “claimed transfer of imperial authority from Constantinople it would be forced to conquer it.” And to claim the successor, role and heritage of the Golden Horde would relegate Russia to the status of an Asiatic power only.

On the Russian path to modernization, the Mongol invasion provoked not only a geographical schism, but left its imprint on politics: “Autocracy became a necessity following the Mongol legacy and the establishment of Russia as an Eurasian empire with a vast and poorly connected geographical expanse”.

“A colossal East West”

Russia is all about East meets West. Diesen reminds us how Nikolai Berdyaev, one of the leading 20^th century conservatives, already nailed it in 1947: “The inconsistency and complexity of the Russian soul may be due to the fact that in Russia two streams of world history – East and West – jostle and influence one another (…) Russia is a complete section of the world – a colossal East West.”

The Trans-Siberian railroad, built to solidify the internal cohesion of the Russian empire and to project power in Asia, was a major game-changer: “With Russian agricultural settlements expanding to the east, Russia was increasingly replacing the ancient roads who had previously controlled and connected Eurasia.”

It’s fascinating to watch how the development of Russian economics ended up on Mackinder’s Heartland theory – according to which control of the world required control of the Eurasian supercontinent. What terrified Mackinder is that Russian railways connecting Eurasia would undermine the whole power structure of Britain as a maritime empire.

Diesen also shows how Eurasianism – emerging in the 1920s among émigrés in response to 1917 – was in fact an evolution of Russian conservatism.

Eurasianism, for a number of reasons, never became a unified political movement. The core of Eurasianism is the notion that Russia was not a mere Eastern European state. After the 13^th century Mongol invasion and the 16^th century conquest of Tatar kingdoms, Russia’s history and geography could not be only European. The future would require a more balanced approach – and engagement with Asia.

Dostoyevsky had brilliantly framed it ahead of anyone, in 1881:

Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans. We have served Europe too well, we have taken too great a part in her domestic quarrels (…) We have bowed ourselves like slaves before the Europeans and have only gained their hatred and contempt. It is time to turn away from ungrateful Europe. Our future is in Asia.

Lev Gumilev was arguably the superstar among a new generation of Eurasianists. He argued that Russia had been founded on a natural coalition between Slavs, Mongols and Turks. The Ancient Rus and the Great Steppe, published in 1989, had an immense impact in Russia after the fall of the USSR – as I learned first hand from my Russian hosts when I arrived in Moscow via the Trans-Siberian in the winter of 1992.

As Diesen frames it, Gumilev was offering a sort of third way, beyond European nationalism and utopian internationalism. A Lev Gumilev University has been established in Kazakhstan. Putin has referred to Gumilev as “the great Eurasian of our time”.

Diesen reminds us that even George Kennan, in 1994, recognized the conservative struggle for “this tragically injured and spiritually diminished country”. Putin, in 2005, was way sharper. He stressed,

the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. And for the Russian people, it was a real drama (…) The old ideals were destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or simply hastily reformed…With unrestricted control over information flows, groups of oligarchs served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty started to be accepted as the norm. All this evolved against a background of the most severe economic recession, unstable finances and paralysis in the social sphere.

Applying “sovereign democracy”

And so we reach the crucial European question.

In the 1990s, led by Atlanticists, Russian foreign policy was focused on Greater Europe, a concept based on Gorbachev’s Common European Home.

And yet post-Cold War Europe, in practice, ended up configured as the non-stop expansion of NATO and the birth – and expansion – of the EU. All sorts of liberal contortionisms were deployed to include all of Europe while excluding Russia.

Diesen has the merit of summarizing the whole process in a single sentence: “The new liberal Europe represented a British-American continuity in terms of the rule of maritime powers, and Mackinder’s objective to organize the German-Russian relationship in a zero-sum format to prevent the alignment of interests”.

No wonder Putin, subsequently, had to be erected as the Supreme Scarecrow, or “the new Hitler”. Putin rejected outright the role for Russia of mere apprentice to Western civilization – and its corollary, (neo) liberal hegemony.

Still, he remained quite accommodating. In 2005, Putin stressed, “above all else Russia was, is and will, of course, be a major European power”. What he wanted was to decouple liberalism from power politics – by rejecting the fundamentals of liberal hegemony.

Putin was saying there’s no single democratic model. That was eventually conceptualized as “sovereign democracy”. Democracy cannot exist without sovereignty; so that discards Western “supervision” to make it work.

Diesen sharply observes that if the USSR was a “radical, left-wing Eurasianism, some of its Eurasian characteristics could be transferred to conservative Eurasianism.” Diesen notes how Sergey Karaganov, sometimes referred to as the “Russian Kissinger”, has shown “that the Soviet Union was central to decolonization and it mid-wifed the rise of Asia by depriving the West of the ability to impose its will on the world through military force, which the West had done from the 16^th century until the 1940s”.

This is largely acknowledged across vast stretches of the Global South – from Latin America and Africa to Southeast Asia.

Eurasia’s western peninsula

So after the end of the Cold War and the failure of Greater Europe, Moscow’s pivot to Asia to build Greater Eurasia could not but have an air of historical inevitability.

The logic is impeccable. The two geoeconomic hubs of Eurasia are Europe and East Asia. Moscow wants to connect them economically into a supercontinent: that’s where Greater Eurasia joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But then there’s the extra Russian dimension, as Diesen notes: the “transition away from the usual periphery of these centers of power and towards the center of a new regional construct”.

From a conservative perspective, emphasizes Diesen, “the political economy of Greater Eurasia enables Russia to overcome its historical obsession with the West and establish an organic Russian path to modernization”.

That implies the development of strategic industries; connectivity corridors; financial instruments; infrastructure projects to connect European Russia with Siberia and Pacific Russia. All that under a new concept: an industrialized, conservative political economy.

The Russia-China strategic partnership happens to be active in all these three geoeconomic sectors: strategic industries/techno platforms, connectivity corridors and financial instruments.

That propels the discussion, once again, to the supreme categorical imperative: the confrontation between the Heartland and a maritime power.

The three great Eurasian powers, historically, were the Scythians, the Huns and the Mongols. The key reason for their fragmentation and decadence is that they were not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.

The fourth great Eurasian power was the Russian empire – and its successor, the USSR. A key reason the USSR collapsed is because, once gain, it was not able to reach – and control – Eurasia’s maritime borders.

The US prevented it by applying a composite of Mackinder, Mahan and Spykman. The US strategy even became known as the Spykman-Kennan containment mechanism – all these “forward deployments” in the maritime periphery of Eurasia, in Western Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.

We all know by now how the overall US offshore strategy – as well as the primary reason for the US to enter both WWI and WWII – was to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon by all means necessary.

As for the US as hegemon, that would be crudely conceptualized – with requisite imperial arrogance – by Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski in 1997: “To prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together”. Good old Divide and Rule, applied via “system-dominance”.

It’s this system that is now tumbling down – much to the despair of the usual suspects. Diesen notes how, “in the past, pushing Russia into Asia would relegate Russia to economic obscurity and eliminate its status as a European power.” But now, with the center of geoeconomic gravity shifting to China and East Asia, it’s a whole new ball game.

The 24/7 US demonization of Russia-China, coupled with the “unhealthy situation” mentality of the EU minions, only helps to drive Russia closer and closer to China exactly at the juncture where the West’s two centuries-only world dominance, as Andre Gunder Frank conclusively proved , is coming to an end.

Diesen, perhaps too diplomatically, expects that “relations between Russia and the West will also ultimately change with the rise of Eurasia. The West’s hostile strategy to Russia is conditioned on the idea that Russia has nowhere else to go, and must accept whatever the West offers in terms of “partnership”. The rise of the East fundamentally alters Moscow’s relationship with the West by enabling Russia to diversify its partnerships”.

We may be fast approaching the point where Great Eurasia’s Russia will present Germany with a take it or leave it offer. Either we build the Heartland together, or we will build it with China – and you will be just a historical bystander. Of course there’s always the inter-galaxy distant possibility of a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing axis. Stranger things have happened.

Meanwhile, Diesen is confident that “the Eurasian land powers will eventually incorporate Europe and other states on the inner periphery of Eurasia. Political loyalties will incrementally shift as economic interests turn to the East, and Europe is gradually becoming the western peninsula of Greater Eurasia”.

Talk about food for thought for the peninsular peddlers of the “unhealthy situation”.

The West uses trustfulness of Russians

The Saker

The Russians should hate their state, their authorities, and then Russia will sink into chaos and become weaker. It seems the Russians had to develop an antidote against such a primitive approach.

original text by Petr Akopov
translated for the Saker blog by Olga
source: https://m.vz.ru/opinions/2021/1/20/1080946.html

Among the loud and quite predictable campaign in the West in response to detention of Alexei Navalny – with declaring him a “prisoner of conscience”, demands to free him immediately b threats of sanctions – the most indicative is this one: “Kremlin attacks on Navalny is not simply violation of human rights? It’s an insult of the people of Russia, who want their voice to be heard/

This is the statement by Jack Sallivan who becomes an advisor on national security for POTUS. This is the core of Western policy towards Russia.

Here is what they sell us: “friends of Russian people” (the most russophobic-minded western politicians always specify that their claims are not to the people, but to the authorities, and the poor people moan under the yoke of authorities) want to convince the people of Russia that they give them a helping hand. It’s not necessary to be an expert in history in relationships between Russia and the West, not necessary even to know Russian history to see this endlessly repeated approach – “tyranny regime” in Russia is dangerous for the world and its own citizens and is seeking to suppress all neighbouring people and oppresses its own people, only true heroes challenge it, so the West helps them with all means in their hard but noble struggle/

This is such a stable structure that it doesn’t change for many centuries. And it is considering that during the last 104 years in Russia there were three absolutely different forms of government and ideological patterns of power. That is to believe that Russian authorities threatened the world and its own people under the tzars, under bolshevics and under Putin the person should be either typical russophobe or typical idiot.

We won’t remind the times of Ivan Groznyi or Peter the Great – at that time they also tried to frighten the children but media and communications didn’t allow to address to “suffering Russian people” directly. However, the last two hundred years they apply this very pattern – “Russian authorities do not express the opinion of the people, so we will speak on his behalf” – we mean the West.

Yes, the is here because nor Herzen, nor Lenin, nor white immigrants, nor Solzhenitsyn were of any interest for our western “friends”. That is their real views, aspirations, struggles, tosses, and searches – all of it is just the pretext to confirm the simple propaganda thesis: the authorities in Russia have nothing to do with people, the power is a tyrany and it’s occupational that’s why the people should (no – they dream of!) to overthrow it and we’ll help them with the best of our abilities. All this structure serves absolutely pragmatic geopolitical interests of deterrence or even submission of Russia. That’s why the help to Russian people in its nature always turns out to be a military intervention and sometimes is limited to information war.

Russians should hate their authorities, their state (even better – their history). And then Russia will sink in unrest and become weaker. It seems Russians should develop an antidote against such a primitive method long ago. But there is a problem – one of the main our qualities is very strong self-reflection, empathy, doubt in everything and everybody. Together with our civilizational pursuit of justice it makes us exceptionally trusting nation. It isn’t gullibility of fools. It is trustfullness of honest people searching for truth and considering every person who speaks about fairness to be an honest and good man.

Many times it backfired us, but the main deterring factor was always the same – reasonable and responsible authorities. Though only till the moment when in authority and elite in general there was no critical mass (not the majority, even some minority) of people who had no experience of working through the consequences of imposing “starry-eyed dreams”. Then there happened a division during which the most irresponsible and adventurous part of elite took over speculating on people’s aspirations. The country fell into unrest, division and nearly perished.

But how much the West loved and praised it! What praises to “people’s authority” were sung by the “friends of Russian people” – both after February 1917 and August-December 1991. At last Russian people threw off the tzar (communist) yoke, at last the best people came to power! Now Russia will become a part of civilized world which gladly will hold it in its arms!

These were the moments when Russia fell apart and perished and its geopolitical rivals divided it into spheres of influence and bought its treasures cheap. But when Russia began to restore that very moment it was declared a threat to humanity and its authorities were claimed tyranny and anti-popular. This fairy tale is old enough – it’s time to repeat it?