Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s “State of the Nation” address

February 19, 2023

Good afternoon.

Former Presidents Áder and Schmitt and your Dear Wives, Mister Speaker, Leaders of Hungarian communities from beyond our borders, Ladies and Gentlemen,

As you are certainly aware, around two weeks ago a devastating earthquake shook Türkiye and Syria. The death toll is now over 44,000, and sadly this is not yet the end. Sorrows come suddenly, without warning, without knocking on the door, but simply smashing it open on us. In our sorrow, we find out who we can count on. We Hungarians can be counted on: 167 of our compatriots took part in the rescue work, and thirty-five people were rescued from the rubble by experts and volunteers who risked their lives in the process. Some of them are here with us now; let us salute our heroes, who have honoured us with their presence here. Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your sacrifice, a country is proud of you! Please stand up and let us see you!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

So much has happened in the past year – an election, the war, an energy crisis, inflation – that in fact I should spend several hours talking about it. Please do not start making for the door: it is too late now, if you are here, you are here. Tomorrow, on Sunday, you can rest yourselves after a speech of Atatürk or Fidel Castro proportions. But I will keep it shorter after all, because during a long political speech people lose their zest for life – and we are not here to lose our zest for life, but to renew our zest for life. And with that I have dived headlong into what I have to say. Today the most important question for the future is whether the enormous changes taking place in European life – which are bringing us new intellectual, political, economic and military challenges – will enhance or diminish Hungarians’ zest for life. These changes are putting pressure on the whole of Hungarian life and are confronting us with new questions. The success of the year 2023 will depend on whether we are energised by them or deflated by them.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As I circulate in international politics, I often think of the old Hungarian song: “Mother, I Didn’t Want That Kind of Horse”. And indeed, we Hungarians did not want to live in such a chaotic world. But, as my mother would say, “Son, life is not a request show.” And she is right.

Everything had been so well thought out: we had cut our way through the piles of rubble left behind by the socialist governments ousted in 2010, through the ruins of Wild-East socialism, through unemployment, through an economy gasping for breath, through foreign currency loans, through disaffected envy, through prostration to the West, through sky-high utility bills, through illicit gratuities in the healthcare system, through cheating the system while living on welfare benefits, and through resigned acceptance of the second-rate. We were just beginning to believe that there would be a place in the sun for every Hungarian, and that such a place would be here. It turned out that it is possible to live better from one’s work than from benefits, that having children is not a burden but a joy – or, to be more precise, a burden that is a joy. We were beginning to believe that life here would be fruitful, that there would be enough for everyone. We came to think that in order to get ahead we do not need to take from one another or take that which belongs to others, because the cake we can bake will be much bigger than any we have seen so far. One million people have been given work, and never before in Hungary have so many people been in work. The Hungarian economy has tripled in size and the minimum wage is now higher than the average wage was under our Socialist predecessors. We have brought forth a national Christian constitution that is worthy of us. We have reorganized the Hungarian state with courage that if not death-defying is at least Brussels-defying. And, brushing off the naysayers, we have built a new Hungarian economy in which everyone has received the chance to find their own destiny. True, it has been an arduous ten years, we have sweated a lot, our knees and elbows have been grazed and bruised, and we have collected our fair share of blisters; but we feel that it has been worthwhile. We have learned how to make headway in the renewed Hungary, we have seen that the effort has not been in vain, and it has dawned on us Magyars that “once more our name and story shall match our ancestors’ in glory”. This is why, after our first historic two-thirds majority in 2010, we won a two-thirds majority in each of the three subsequent parliamentary elections. We still gained such a majority now, even though the entire Left in Hungary combined their forces against us, even though Brussels tried to starve our treasury, and even though Uncle George [Soros] rolled 4 billion forints here from America to provide his comrades with ammunition – to shoot at us. They came a cropper, they shot wide: not a little, a lot. They fell flat on their faces, and I think they will pay the price.

Do you remember the film “Once Upon a Time in the West?” The dialogue at the beginning of the film? The Charles Bronson character, “Harmonica”, questions the three bandits waiting for him:
“And Frank?”
“Frank sent us”, they reply.
“Did you bring a horse for me?”
“No.”
Seeing their three horses, Harmonica says, “You brought two too many.”

This is what happened in Hungary in 2022. And as far as I can see, right now the Hungarian Frank, our “Feri” [Ferenc Gyurcsány], is trying to round up the horses that are left without owners. The lesson is that when you look at your opponent you should judge them not by their numbers but by their ability. It seems that God loves us.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Election victories – especially two-thirds majorities – are not something that people just hand you on a plate. There is work behind them, and the result of that work is appreciated by the people. Otherwise there will be no victory – and certainly no two-thirds majority. Of course, there are always malcontents, who think that we were just lucky. Fine, call it luck – once. But four times? If you are always lucky, it is also possible that you have something to offer; for example, you love your country and you are prepared to fight for it – at home, if need be, or in the world at large, if need be. The Left should understand that for victory millions of dollars and influential patrons are not enough. For victory, Dear Friends, luck is not enough: you need heart.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Just when we thought we were finally standing up straight, COVID hit us, in the spring of 2020 – three years ago now. It brought us pain and irretrievable losses. But we were right to hope that we would pull through it, get back on our feet and pick up where we had left off. I thought that we would arrive at where we always wanted to be. We would occupy the level in the world entitled to us by our talent, hard work and history. We would be among the best, somewhere in the vanguard. Once again, there would be many children, many millions of hearts who awaited the good news of an orderly, attractive and safe country, a green Carpathian Basin that can withstand climate change. And even though the lion and the lamb would not lie down together, we hoped that the Left would finally understand that this is a common homeland, and that we have no other.

And then war struck – or broke out. It is now one year old, and by every reckoning it could last for a long time – even several years, it seems. Everything has changed – including in politics and in the economy. The West has moved firmly in the direction of the Wild West. From the years of COVID the world has not got back on track, but we have moved into the years of war. In fact, since March 2020 – for almost three years – we have been living our lives under constant pressure. And this could easily turn into four or even five years. Of the thirty-two years since the fall of communism, 2022 was the most difficult. It was the most difficult year.

When the West entered the war with sanctions, we had to rethink everything. That occupied the months following the April election. We had to rethink economic policy, defence policy, military policy, and all of our foreign policy. In the glare of war, we had to re-examine all the major goals we had set ourselves in 2010, after our first two-thirds victory. We are nearing the end of this work. As I see it, there is no need to abandon or give up the goals, only to change the means by which they will be achieved. Our foreign policy remains: we want to continue to make friends, not enemies; we want everyone – East and West, North and South – to have a stake in the success of the Hungarians. The creation of connections instead of the formation of blocs. National unification will continue, and Hungarians beyond our borders can continue to count on us, because we are of the same blood. Our family policy will remain, our work-based economy will remain, our agreement with pensioners and the thirteenth month’s pension will remain, and so will the protection of reductions in household utility bills. We will continue the linking of universities to the economy. We can keep the strategic sectors – the banking sector, the energy sector and the media industry – in Hungarian hands, and we will even revive Hungarian ownership in the telecommunications and infocommunications sector. And we will not stop there, the windsock is already blowing in the wind. Sorry! And the promise made to the provinces remains: we are launching unprecedented developments and providing more resources than the Hungarian provinces have ever seen – even under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Alongside agricultural production, we are building up agricultural processing. We will revive the Hungarian food industry, which has been devastated by privatisation, and we will have national champions in the food industry who will also be able to compete in the world market. We shall not tolerate Hungarians having to buy food that is dumped on us from abroad. And we are retaining our plan for the eastern part of our country to catch up with the rest. It is time to finally unite Hunnia and Pannonia – both economically and in terms of living standards. This is why we are building bridges on the Danube, why the one at Paks will be completed, and why the one at Mohács will soon be started. We are placing the Debrecen-Nyíregyháza-Miskolc triangle alongside the Győr-Szombathely-Veszprém industrial zone. This will require energy, a lot of energy – more than ever before in Hungary. This is why we will build power stations and pipeline systems, even if Brussels is unwilling to play a role. Later there will be more. And we will not give up our most daring plan: to ensure that families with children are better off financially than those who do not have children. So, war or no war, we will have new family support decisions every year. The same is true this year, with women committing to having children paying no personal income tax until the age of 30. This is how it will be. But I know that for us Hungarians this is not enough. We know the joke we inherited from socialism: “We know what will happen, but the question is this: what will happen until then?”

Dear Friends,

If 2022 was the hardest year, 2023 will be the most dangerous year since the fall of communism. Alongside migration, which is gradually becoming a permanent feature, two new enemies and two new dangers are lurking: one is war, and the other is inflation. If we want to return to the upward trajectory from which the COVID pandemic pushed us, we must fend off these two threats: we must overcome them, we must fight our way through them. But how? Today this is what I will talk about.

How do we overcome the danger of war? We want to simply put an end to it, but we do not have the power to do so – we are not in that league. Therefore, if we want to protect Hungary, if we want a peaceful life for ourselves, we have only one choice: we must stay out of the Russo-Ukrainian war. So far this has not been easy, and it will not be easy in the future, because we are part of the Western world, we are members of NATO and the European Union, and everyone there is on the side of war – or at least acts as if they are. Can Hungary afford to remain on the side of peace in such circumstances, in a way that is directly opposed to that of our allies? Of course we can, because Hungary is an independent, free and sovereign state, and we recognise no one but God above us. But is it right – morally right – for us to stay out of the war? I am convinced that it is the right thing – and indeed the only right thing. Russia has attacked Ukraine, so we must let Ukrainian refugees into our country, and we have done well in supporting them with the largest humanitarian aid operation in our country’s history. This is the imperative of basic humanity, and we are complying with it. But we also see that the war in Ukraine is not a war between the armies of good and evil, but a war between the troops of two Slavic countries: a war limited in time and – for the time being – in space. It is their war, not ours. Hungary recognises Ukraine’s right to self defence, to fight against external aggression; but it would not be right from any point of view – including any moral point of view – to put the interests of Ukraine before those of Hungary. The Left in Hungary is also on the side of war: it would supply arms, take on the financial burden of war and sever relations with Russia. We are not doing this. We are not supplying arms. We are also being careful with money, because in the end the money due to us will be given by Brussels to Ukraine. For us, humanitarian support for Ukraine does not mean severing our ties with Russia, because that would run counter to our national interests, which we have the right to define for ourselves. Therefore we shall not agree to gas, oil or nuclear sanctions that would ruin Hungary. From the national consultation we know that there is national unity on this. This is why we are maintaining our economic relations with Russia; and indeed we are advising the whole Western world to do the same, because without relations there will be neither a ceasefire nor peace negotiations. This is why we do not agree with priests and church leaders being placed on sanctions lists; it is bad enough that this could happen to artists and athletes. And it is also important not to narrow our vision, and not to be provincial. Let us look beyond Brussels. Every country outside Europe is aware of the limited significance of the war in Ukraine and the primacy of its own national interest. Let us not isolate ourselves from the level-headed part of the world. The Hungarian viewpoint is an exception only in Europe – across the world it is the norm. The Hungarian government does not consider it realistic to assume that Russia is a threat to the security of Hungary or of Europe. Such an assumption is valid at most in relation to nuclear weapons; but the war in Ukraine is increasing the risk of their use, rather than reducing it. As far as conventional warfare is concerned, the Ukraine war has shown that Russia would not stand a chance against NATO. We understand that the Ukrainians are trying to convince Europe that the Russians will not stop until they reach the Atlantic, but the Hungarians are not buying that threat. The whole world has seen that Russian forces are not in a position to attack NATO, and will not be in such a position for a long time. I recall that a decade ago Hungary proposed the creation of a joint European force, and today we can see how unfortunate it was that this proposal fell on deaf ears.

Dear Friends,

While our pro-peace position and the pro-war position of others accentuate differences between us, they also obscure the fact that we are in full agreement on strategic objectives. We want Russia not to be a threat to Europe, and we want there to be a sufficiently broad and deep area between Russia and Hungary: a sovereign Ukraine. The difference between us is in our view of the means to achieve this: those who support the war think that this can be achieved by defeating Russia; and we think that it can be achieved by an immediate ceasefire and negotiations. There is another strong argument in favour of our proposal: the only thing that can save lives is a ceasefire. Loss of life is already being expressed in the hundreds of thousands. The pain, widowhood, growing numbers of orphans and oceanic waves of suffering can only be calmed by a ceasefire.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The war has also revealed some instructive and weighty truths. Let us not pass them by without speaking of them. First of all, there is the question of our membership of NATO. Let us make it clear that for Hungary NATO membership is vital. We are too far to the east – on the eastern edge of the western world – to renounce it. It would of course be easier if we were further in: following the example of Austria and Switzerland, we too could play with the idea of neutrality. But history has not given us that luxury. NATO is a defence alliance. It is a military defence alliance which was formed so that we can defend one another. This is why we joined, and this is why – thinking back to 45 years of Soviet occupation – I experienced the historic satisfaction of signing the Treaty of Accession. It is at least as important to clearly understand what NATO is not. NATO is not a war alliance. NATO is not a war coalition. Membership of NATO does not imply any obligation beyond joint defence, nor can member countries expect any other member to jointly attack a third country for some joint military objective. If some NATO members, or a group of them, want to carry out acts of war outside the territory of the member countries, they must do so outside the framework of NATO: those who want to will participate; those who do not want to will not.

Dear Friends,

No matter how strong and powerful, anyone who thinks they can supervise, manage and gradually calibrate the conduct of war is overestimating their own power and underestimating the risky nature of war. Those who make such mistakes are usually far removed from the devastating realities of frontline warfare. But we live here, and the war is on the soil of a neighbouring country. Brusselites have not yet sacrificed their lives in this war, but Hungarians have. While Hungarian symbols are being taken down in Munkács/Mukachevo, while Hungarian principals are being dismissed from our schools, many are dying heroes’ deaths on the front. The Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia does not deserve this. More respect for Hungarians from Munkács/Mukachevo, Kyiv/Kiev, Brussels and Washington!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Europe is drifting towards war. It is balancing on a narrow plank. Indeed its countries are already indirectly at war with Russia. If you supply weapons, if you provide the satellite information for military action, if you train the soldiers of one of the belligerents, if you finance the entire state apparatus of one of the belligerents and impose sanctions on the other, then, no matter what you say, you are at war – indirectly for the time being. The risk of being drawn in is now chronic. It started with helmets, it has continued with the delivery of non-lethal equipment, we are now seeing tanks being sent, fighter planes are on the agenda, and soon we will hear about so-called “peacekeeping troops”. It reminds one of sleepwalkers on a roof. We also need to understand how the pro-war people succumbed to somnambulism and how they ended up on the rooftops. Despite all our differences of opinion, we understand our Polish and Baltic friends: their history explains a great deal. But the others?

It did not have to happen this way – or rather it could have happened differently. We could have given a guarantee that we would not admit Ukraine to NATO; but we did the opposite, and confirmed our earlier decision in 2008 that we would admit them. We could also have followed the solution that we adopted in 2008 when the Russo-Georgian war broke out, and Russia occupied 20 per cent of Georgia’s territory. Back then we decided to prevent the fire spreading, and under the leadership of President Sarkozy – who negotiated brilliantly – the conflict was localised and a ceasefire was achieved. We could have done what we did in 2014 under Angela Merkel, when Russia attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Then we could have opted for war, like the present one, but we – the West – chose a different option: negotiation instead of combat, peace instead of war. I remember that there were pro-war people then, but there was also strong German and French leadership, which was brave and took timely action. That is how war was avoided and the Minsk agreement was reached. A year ago the West decided otherwise. When Russia launched an attack, the West did not isolate the conflict, but elevated it to a pan-European level. It could have classified it as a local, regional war or as a military conflict between two Slavic states, as Hungary proposed. What happened is yet another argument against the Brussels superstate and in favour of strong nation states. When the Member States decided, there was peace; when the imperial centre decided, there was war.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Looking to the future, it is also instructive to note how we lost our pro-peace allies. A year ago we were not alone in the peace camp. There were, for example, the Germans, who supplied no weapons, only helmets. By comparison, in a few weeks’ time Leopard tanks will be rolling eastwards across Ukrainian soil, down towards the Russian border. Perhaps even the old maps are still around. The Germans turned together with the others, or the others turned together with the Germans. That is how the peace camp faded away. It is hard to believe that the Germans took this turn of their own accord. Today they act as if they were always on board. The modern German school: they do not simply change sides, but openly announce that they are jumping right to the front. They are thorough people, and when they do something, they do it seriously. And the other countries thought that if the Germans could not resist that kind of external pressure then they, too, would be unlikely to. And so they seeped from the peace camp into the war camp. That left two of us: Hungary and the Vatican. We cannot complain about the company, but we need to address some serious consequences.

We need to honestly face the fact that the war is getting wilder and more brutal, and so we had better be prepared for the tone used against us to get harsher and more abusive: provocations, insults, threats and blackmail. I cannot promise that it will be easy, but I can promise that we shall stand our ground. Long gone are the days when we were subject to diplomatic pressure which still respected sovereignty. Where are the good old days, when in 2014 Hillary Clinton sent just one “good friend” to persuade the Hungarians of the error of their ways with anti-government protests and a few travel bans? We manoeuvred well then, our calculations worked, and in the form of Donald Trump friendly relief troops arrived – fortunately not here, but in Washington. Since then a lot of water has flowed down the Potomac. Fortunately the White House has retained its sense of humour, and instead of a “good friend”, President Biden has sent us a “press man”, an ambassador to ratchet up the pressure on us and do whatever it takes to press the Hungarians into the camp of war: to press a statement out of us in which we commit ourselves to joining in. This is fine, humour can help friendship survive hard times. But we should avoid the possibility that next time they send someone called Puccini!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We see that in 2024 America will have another election, and our Republican friends are flexing their muscles in preparation for their return. I also expect that democracy will show its strength in Europe, that public opinion will become increasingly pro-peace, demanding a ceasefire, peace talks, more sanity and – if necessary – new governments. It will not be a walk in the park, but then the smoother and more leisurely roads all lead to war.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have no illusions, we are not naive, and neither are we the flower children of ‘68 or dreaming pacifists. We know that the negotiations will not be between the Ukrainians and the Russians: peace will come when the Americans and the Russians negotiate with each other. That will inevitably happen, but the later it happens, the higher the price we will all pay. War enthusiasts believe that time is on the side of the Ukrainians and the West, so the fight must go on: it will change the balance of power, there will be victory over Russia, and victory will bring peace. The Hungarian government, however, believes that continued fighting will not bring victory and will not bring peace, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people, a widening conflict, countries engaged in open warfare, years of war, destruction, suffering and the threat of world war. So let us Hungarians stand by peace, but let the Defence Minister keep his powder dry. That is all I have to say about the war.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

If we want to fight inflation, we must start with understanding. Why is there inflation all over Europe? Brussels has unleashed this affliction on us, with its sanctions on energy. The disease is called sanction inflation and the virus is the Brussels sanctions. Sanctions are the weapons in Brussels’ war policy. They target Russia, but they hit Europe. It was not so long ago that Brussels promised that these sanctions would bring an end to the war. A year has passed, and the end of the war is not getting closer, but ever more distant. They also promised that they would not extend the sanctions to energy. But then they did. The price of natural gas multiplied, reaching 350 euros at the end of August. That is a record, something not seen in living memory. The situation has improved, but the price of natural gas is still several times higher than the 20-euro level of two years ago. Moreover, and few people know this, in Brussels the price of gas was linked to the price of electricity. Together with the Poles we protested, but to no avail. The rise in gas prices has therefore been immediately accompanied by a rise in electricity prices – even when that electricity is not produced by gas turbines, but by solar, wind, hydro, coal or nuclear power. It is economics 101 that energy price hikes drive up the price of all products. This is especially true if you import most of your energy from abroad, as Hungary does. Moreover, it has turned out that we have not deprived Russia of revenue, but have given them more money. In 2022 the profits of the world oil and gas industry increased by 70 per cent, without the mammoth corporations concerned renewing anything or producing more: they just pocketed the extra profit from sanctions, which they made Europeans pay for. In 2022 the sanctions took four thousand billion forints out of the pockets of Hungarians. Four thousand billion forints! This is how much more money Hungarian companies, the state and families in Hungary have spent on energy alone, because of the sanctions. This amount could have been spent by companies on wage increases, by the state on tax cuts or family support, and by families on buying a home or on their children.

One just stands amidst the glass palaces of Brussels, not wanting to believe what is going on there. We have to face reality: instead of help, Brussels is giving us more sanctions. The Brussels bureaucracy, with well-considered bad intentions, has not given Hungary or Poland their share of the European Recovery Programme. In 2022, in the most difficult year, we did not receive money that the Member States took out as a joint loan, according to which we Hungarians will have to pay back our share. They are looking for nits to pick out of Hungary’s rule of law, while a police van is on permanent standby at the European Parliament building. In reality it is the Member States that should be monitoring Brussels, not Brussels monitoring the Member States. I hope this will be the case after the European elections in 2024. If Brussels wants to go to war under any circumstances, then it should go to war against inflation. It is not doing so. But we are continuously fighting our own war on inflation. We have already enacted two dozen or so measures to protect families and businesses.

The most important thing now, my friends, is not to see inflation as an inescapable scourge. And even though inflation is peaking and placing a heavy burden on families, it should not frighten us, it should not chill us, and we should not be resigned to it. Action must be taken, and it will yield results. I learned from Sándor Demján that in times of crisis there is no such thing as normativity. You must intervene in the economy with courage. This is what we are doing, which is why the average family today is saving 181,000 forints a month in reduced utility bills. This is unique in the whole of Europe. The Left is calling for the food price freeze to be withdrawn, but it will remain until we can bring inflation down. The Left – together with the banks, unsurprisingly – is also calling for the lifting of the retail interest rate freeze. But the interest rate freeze is protecting 350,000 families from interest rate rises, and until interest rates start to fall, the freeze should stay in place. Instead of withdrawing it, we have extended it to student loans. So today we are protecting 200,000 students from inflation. Student loans are interest-free, and the interest rate on a free-use student loan is half the market rate. And now we are introducing a reduced-rate county travel pass. From 1 May, we will offer monthly nationwide and county passes valid for both bus and rail travel. The monthly pass will cost 9,450 forints, and the monthly nationwide pass will cost 18,900 forints. Those who travel to work by public transport can save a considerable amount.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Forging a good shield – one that can absorb heavy blows – is expensive. Therefore windfall profits must be taken from where they occur. We have taxed banks, energy companies and multinational retail chains. And the windfall profits taken are put into the fund to preserve cuts in household utility bills.

In summary, 2022 was a year that could have broken the backbone of the Hungarian economy. The official doomsayers, respected former central bank governors and former right-wing economists were also expecting this, and were already administering the last rites to us. Bankruptcies, unemployment, currency collapse, insolvency, Armageddon: that was what the Left predicted. Now, in February, employment is higher than ever, foreign exchange reserves are at record levels, and the forint has stabilised. The truth is that, alongside and in spite of painfully high inflation, in 2022 the Hungarian economy broke three records. A hat-trick. I hope coach [Marco] Rossi is listening. Never have so many people been in work in Hungary. Our exports have broken records, and never before has there been so much investment in Hungary as there was in 2022. This is why we are still on our feet despite high prices, and this is why the economy will not stall in 2023. Inflation is like a tiger, and you only have one bullet. If you miss, it will eat you up. Please trust us, we will hit it. You can bet on it: by the end of the year we will have inflation in single digits.

Dear Friends,

As we can see, the situation is serious, but not hopeless – in fact it is encouraging. Hungarians’ survival instincts are operating, they can see things clearly, and – as the national consultation has shown – there is broad agreement on the main objectives. Here today I thank all those who took part in the national consultation. We will stay out of war, Hungary will remain an island of peace and security, and we will conquer inflation – this is always the Government’s job, and there will be no mistakes. But there is something else that a government, however confident it may be, will not be able to do on its own. You know, everyone has heard, what a despicable thing happened in one of our schools. One cannot understand why the sky does not fall, why the earth does not open up to swallow up those whose place is under it.

Dear Friends,

Let us say it how it is: paedophilia cannot be forgiven. Children are sacred to us, and it falls to adults to protect children at all costs. We do not care that the world has gone mad. We do not care what repellent aberrations some people indulge in. We do not care how Brussels excuses and explains the inexplicable. This is Hungary! And this is where the strictest child protection system in Europe should be! The legislation is there, and the missing pieces will be found, but even the most determined government cannot succeed in this matter on its own. It will require everyone: parents, grandparents, mothers and fathers, teachers and educators. Because gender propaganda is not just an entertaining caper, not just rainbow chatter, but the greatest threat stalking our children. We want our children to be left alone, because enough is enough! This kind of thing has no place in Hungary, and especially not in our schools. I am counting on you, we are counting on all Hungarian people of goodwill, so that we can do this job together, once and for all, in 2023.

God above us all, Hungary before all else! Go, Hungary, go Hungarians!

source: https://miniszterelnok.hu/en/prime-minister-viktor-orbans-state-of-the-nation-address-2023-02-18/

People Power in the Donbass Republics

January 09, 2023

Source

by Francis Lee

It is an open question as to why Putin and the Russian government tolerated the 2014 coup which was blatantly funded and organized by internal and external actors followed by the war in the Donbass. The coup was bought and paid for by the usual suspects – The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) the ubiquitous Mr. Soros (The Open Society Foundation – OSF) and Human Rights Watch (HRW); this in addition to Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt adding their input into the Maidan during the stage-managed ‘revolution’. The shock troops of the coup were bussed in from all points in the west Ukraine to Lviv, then on to the battleground of Kiev and the Maidan. These rightwing ultras were to openly flaunt and use their improvised weapons – usually Molotov cocktails and medieval studded clubs, last used at the battle of Agincourt – against the riot police. The legitimate president, at the time Viktor Yanukovych – was ousted by this illegal show of force and forced to flee Kiev for other places outside the reach of the mob. Poroshenko – one time finance minister of Yanukovych – was thus ‘elected’ as the new President.

The first thing on Poroshenko’s agenda was the war against the Eastern provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk. According to Poroshenko this was going to be a simple ‘police operation’ which would be over in a few hours. The initial phase of the conflict was a sortie by the Ukrainian Army which rolled into Mariupol and began to shoot up the place killing a number of Russian civilians. News of this Ukie incursion began to trickle through to Donetsk and Lugansk where hastily formed local militias began to be created.

However, the significance of the events in the Southeast extended far beyond Ukraine. No sooner than the Donetsk republic was proclaimed, official Moscow let it be understood, in no uncertain terms, that it made no claim to Ukraine’s rebellious provinces. This was neither diplomatic nor a concession to the West; the conflict was far greater than anything the Kremlin found convenient or manageable. Unlike Crimea – where the process was controlled and where, after two or three demonstrations, the transfer of power was carried out by the local elite. But the process in Donetsk and Lugansk had borne witness to the elemental force of a popular movement which simply could not be managed from outside. But this spontaneous political uprising did not go down too well inside the more conservative elements in the Russian political hierarchy and the financial clique whose interests largely lie outside of Russia.

The movement itself was decentralized and rapidly threw up hitherto unknown leaders (such as Alexander Zakharchenko – see below – a heroic figure and leader who was later assassinated in a restaurant off Lenin Square in Donetsk by an unknown assailant who set off the bomb. Born: June 26, 1976, Donetsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. Died: August 31, 2018, Pushkin Boulevard, Donetsk, Donetsk People’s Republic/Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine). Zakharchenko had since May 2014 worked as a mine electrician in 2011 to manage the Donetsk branch of the martial arts club and eventually Pan-Slavic nationalist current and militia organization Oplot. And he had remained in situ during the war period 2014-15 and was heavily involved in the conflict.

On the 14 August leadership changed hands in Lugansk, as skirmishes took place inside the city limits between the rebels and Ukrainian Army Units. Again, after a visit to Moscow ‘’Head of Republic’’ Valery Bolotov resigned due to war injuries. His replacement was former defence minister Igor Plonitsky. Locally born the 50-year-old Plonitsky had served as an officer in the Soviet Armed Forces before becoming a dealer in fuel and lubricants during the 1990s, and later, a consumer rights inspector for the provincial administration.

Another resignation at the same time was that of Igor Strelkov. As reported by TASS the DPR Council of Ministers avowed that the defence chief was leaving his post ‘’at his own request’’ and would take up another position. Strelkov, however, vanished from the Don Bass, only to reappear in Russia a few weeks later. His replacement as defence minister was Vladimir Kononov, a Donetsk-born judo instructor and mid-ranking militia commander described by the Interpretermag site ‘’as having a firm political position and organizational skills.’’ (1)

These organizational changes were seemingly made at the behest of Moscow. The goal was evidently to install leaders in the republics who were both more predictable and more attuned to the ways of Moscow officialdom than those they replaced. Whether or not these changes in organizational structures and practise made any difference to the eventual outcome of the war was of necessity a moot point.

It had formulated and developed its agenda as events became unfolded. Absorbing such an organized and active population at a time of growing crisis in Russia itself was hardly advisable. So, the rebel republics had to rely overwhelmingly on their own resources. To the extent permitted by popular support for their cause within Russia, increased by the governments own patriotic propaganda, official Russia surprisingly left them to their own fate – provisionally at least.

However, unofficial Russia had other ideas. Volunteers from Russia began to trickle into the rebel republics, as did arms and food were also smuggled into the two republics. Military training was becoming widespread among the population. It seems an open question as to whether Putin was behind the leadership of the rebel republics, but the ensuing events took on a momentum of their own. The Ukie army was stopped in its tracks at the airport and was then decisively halted at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo – this was 2015. But the shelling of the Donbass continued to this day.

See below: Ukrainian Prisoners of War (POWs) captured or surrendered at Debaltsevo 2015. They looked pretty miserable, but who wouldn’t? It’s better than being killed after all.

And so here we are in January 2023 at the present conjuncture. The local war has become global, but that was always going to be the final outcome. The half-finished job (farce) of the Minsk/Normandy format was ultimately to receive its demise from the German/French delegation and the final funeral rites when Frau Merkel spilled the beans. Now that chapter is over, the Republics have finally been brought into Russia proper, and have taken their legitimate position in Russia’s heroic struggle.

But things were not always as unified and expected between Moscow and Donetsk, at least in the early stages of the war. Russia was just emerging from the disastrous period of political, social, and economic collapse. This was due in large part to what was in fact a class struggle between – a fortiori – the domestic Russian globalist neo-liberal agenda which was just as pervasive as it was in the West, if not also more acute than in the western hinterland of the globalist elite. Following the usual period of class struggle the Russian and Liberal intelligentsia had only hatred and contempt for the protesting workers, deriding them as ‘lumpens’ ‘trash’ and ‘hooligans’ and worse of all – Vatniks.

These simple Russian folk were derided to suggest simpletons unswervingly loyal to the state authorities and completely taken in by government propaganda. However, in this sense of course it was the ‘intellectuals’ uncritically parroting even the most absurd Kiev propaganda who deserved to be most regarded as being – Vatnik. Whilst the propaganda services of both Kiev and Moscow lied, the latter did so more recklessly and inventively, showing not the slightest regard for the truth and not even whether the television they showed bore any relation to the commentary. Like all elites in a period of intensified class struggle they hung on to their money, property, political and social contacts.

It would appear that this social-political upheaval was taking on a political class structure – how could it have been otherwise? The open social and political anomalies had been fermenting and the dramatic deterioration of the conditions of life that followed the change of government in Kiev was the last straw. Steep increases in the price of gas and medicines followed the IMF agreement to become a member of the EU, and ultimately NATO, so much so that a political and economic explosion was inevitable. The use of nationalist rhetoric and anti-Russian propaganda in the West, had the reverse effect in the East. The pro-Russian sympathies of the local population nor even the Kiev’s intention to repeal the status of Russian as a ‘regional language’ triggered the revolt. These open social and political anomalies had been gradually fermenting and became dangerously unstable. The dye was caste: war was to follow.

Yegorov Voronov, a resident of Gorlovka wrote on the Ukrainian site: Liva – In English – ‘The Left’.

‘’I find it hard to believe the change in my compatriots. Only six months ago they were simple folk who watched TV and complained about the bad state of the roads and of the communal services. Now they are fighters. In several hours by the provincial administration building, I didn’t meet a single person who’d come from Russia. The people were from Mariupol, Gorlovka, Dzershinsk, Artemovsk, Krasnoarmeysk … those people with whom I ride every day on the bus, stand next to in the queues, and argue with when they leave the door to the stairwell open. They were not the supercilious Kiev middle-class, set aside from the people by their special circumstances but everyday workers. And there is no denying, there are plenty of unemployed in these parts. Here were all the people who for the past month and a half had been ’begged’ in the private offices and state enterprises to take a cut in their miserable wages. So here is another conclusion – the more the wages of the Donbass residents are cut or squeezed today, the more protesters would emerge in the East.’’ (Voronov 2014 translated from Russian)

It would appear that the Donbass peoples’ militias having taken up arms converted themselves into partisan units and actually put the Ukies to flight in 2015. But the war went on with Ukie artillery pounding the Donbass, a policy which was allowed to the present day. During this 8-year period the Donbass was mercilessly targeted by the ukie artillery and suffered some 14000 casualties during that period. It has to be said that Putin and his advisers were perhaps somewhat gradual and deliberative in terms of putting an end to what was basically a massacre from 2014 until 2022 ongoing. But the decision was finally made to enter the war which was forced upon Putin by external factors which needed urgent resolution. By April 2022 Putin had made his move and if the cosmopolitan conservative elements in the Moscow bureaucracy, as well as the financial oligarch high-rollers didn’t like it – well, hard cheese old chap, as we say in the UK.

As the whole drama of the Ukraine/Russia moves into its final stages it became apparent that Ukraine, under its present leadership, was desperately looking for an exit from the imbroglio that it had initially and unwisely set for itself. Ukrainian politicians were a pretty rum bunch: all kleptocrats that had imbibed the neo-liberal weltanschauung and the promise of a golden age to come. Alas it was not to be. Even the corrupt Yanukovych only really became an enemy of the West when he committed the unforgivable sin of refusing to implement an EU/US-counselled austerity programme. Had he acted more like the Romanian leader Nikolai Ceausescu in Romania (1980s) who unwisely eagerly implemented the dreaded IMF structural adjustment policies it seems likely that Yanukovych would have become one of the darlings of the West. Ukrainians looking to the EU for their salvation – even today – are looking back to what was and not what it has now become. What we are bearing witness to are the last remnants of a social model that has been sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. It would appear that those who wished to hitch their horses to the EU cart are always in for a disappointment, not even to say passe.

‘’The aim of the EU and the United States is to transfer public wealth into the hands of private individuals who will be steered by the ‘invisible hand’ (presumably the hand behind the ‘color revolutions’) to seek their gains by selling what they have taken to western investors. Finance is the new mode of warfare, as Michael Hudson notes. We are seeing a grab for finance that in earlier times was just a military option.’’

NOTES

(1) Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism. Edited by Boris Kargalitsky, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman. Passim.

(2) Seven Roads to Moscow – Lieutenant-Colonel – W.G.F.Jackson MC, BA, R.E. Instructor, Staff College, Camberley, 1948-50, Instructor, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, 1950-53

Reflections on the Coup in Ukraine – 2014-2022

October 25, 2022

Part I

Victor Yanukovich was elected President of the Ukraine in 2010 narrowly defeating Yulia Timoshenko with 49% of votes cast to Timoshenko’s 45%. The Ukrainian Presidential term of office lasts for five years. Yanukovich’s party, the Party of the Regions, together with its coalition partner, the Communist party of the Ukraine, also had a majority in the Ukrainian Parliament, with Mykola Azarov as Prime Minister. The membership of the European Union was one of the more salient issues during this time and was the trigger for subsequent upheavals.

Negotiations for Ukraine’s initial stage of eventual membership of the EU – the Association Agreement – had been dragging on since 2011, with both Yanukovich and Azarov favorably disposed, although the communist coalition partners were not.

This did not go down at all well in Moscow and Azarov tried to assuage Russian misgivings by urging Russia “to accept the reality of Ukraine signing the EU agreement”. The commitment of Yanukovich was eventually to be tested to destruction since he was being pulled in two directions: by Russia on the one hand, and the EU on the other. For their part the Russians offered the Ukraine a $15 billion loan, a discount on gas prices, and membership of the customs union of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. But the EU was having none of it: President of the Euro-pean Commission José Manuel Barroso stated that the EU will not tolerate “a veto of a third country” (Russia) in their negotiations on closer integration with Ukraine. Thus, Yanukovich was forced into a choice which would be certain to alienate and anger one of the powerful interested partners on his borders.

Negotiations dragged on into 2013. Yanukovich was invited to sign the Association Agreement, but there were a number of conditions. The most significant of these were those concerning an IMF loan. The conditions were very much in the tradition of IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes (the scourge of the developing world). This was enough to scupper the EU deal. Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov stating that ‘’the issue that blocked the signature of the EU deal were the conditions proposed by the IMF loan being negotiated at the same time as the Association Agreement, which would require large budget cuts and a 40% increase in gas bills. This, for a country already verging on bankruptcy. In store for the Ukraine was the usual neo-liberal IMF austerity package, deregulation, privatization, and liberalization. The Greek treatment. Yanukovich took the Russian offer instead.

This seemed like a normal business decision, but it was not perceived as such in the western Ukraine backed by the EU and US. The whole episode then kicked-off.

The battle in Kiev and the Interim Government

Immediately this became known as the mass protest in Kiev and the west was on the world’s TV screens, with demonstrators waving Ukrainian and EU flags (where they got all these EU flags is a mystery to this day). This seemed to be a mass popular protest and the demonstrators were to set up camps in Independence Square, but the carnival atmosphere was not to last.

Ultra-nationalist groups (inveterate fascists, in the shape of Right Sector and Svoboda and even more exotic neo-nazi grouplets) began to appear among the generally moderate majority and battles with the Berkut (riot police) began on a daily basis which the opposition forces finally won. A victory for democracy and ‘people’s power’ as stated in the Guardian editorial? Not quite. For nobody should be in any doubt about the political complexion of these ultra-nationalist groups who went on to hold six portfolios in the new government based in Kiev. Nor should anybody be in any doubt about both the overt and covert role played by both US and EU officials in the formation of the future interim ‘government’. Throughout this period the EU and high-ranking US officials were openly engaged in Ukraine’s internal affairs. The US Ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs – Victoria Nuland – were strolling around Independence square reassuring the protestors that America stood behind them. Also basking in the limelight were US NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Although in the case of NED it should be called a GO rather than an NGO since it was not officially funded by the US government. Also involved was Human Rights Watch (HRW); and of course, not forgetting the ineffable George Soros and the Open Society Foundation (OSF). US expenditure on this colour revolution amounted to some $5 billion. This was later made public at a talk given by Ms Nuland to the press club in Washington. These actions could never have taken place without being sanctioned at the highest level of the US government. Additionally, the EU representative – Catherine Ashton – a total nonentity and a complete airhead of the type which is the machine-produced by the British Labour party, carried out much the same function for the EU although at a more official level.

But other important things were taking shape in Ukraine itself.

The ultra-right Svoboda Party had scored six major cabinet ministries in the government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk approved by the Ukrainian parliament on Thursday. Svoboda is the Neo-Nazi, ultra-right, anti-Semitic, Russophobic party with its base of support in the Western Ukraine, with links to the Front Nationale in France and the BNP in the UK … The most important post was claimed by a co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Parubiy. He was named Secretary of the Security and National Defense Committee, which supervised the defense ministry and the armed forces. The Parubiy appointment to such an important post should, alone, be cause for international outrage. He led the masked Right Sector thugs who battled riot police in the Independence Maidan in Kiev.”

Dmitry Yarosh was Leader of Right Sector. The Ukraine’s own Ernst Roehm – one-time leader of German Brownshirt radicals – the (SA) Sturm Abteilung – Storm Troopers.

The Right Sector is an openly fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-Russian organization. Most of the snipers and bomb throwers in the crowds were connected with this group. Right Sector members have been participating in military training camps for the last two years or more in preparation for street activity of the kind witnessed in the Ukraine over the last events.

The Right Sector, as can be seen by the appointment of Parubiy, was now in a position to control major appointments to the provisional government and succeeded in achieving its long-term goal of legalizing discrimination against Russians. The new parliament has passed legislation that declared Russian speakers no longer have equal rights with Ukrainians.

He is also associated with Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s Fatherland Party and Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector delegation in parliament, was named Parubiy deputy. These appointments of those openly fascist groups to positions of control over the armed forces are particularly alarming given the possibility of provocations against the Russian naval base in Sevastopol.

Oleksandr Sych, a Svoboda parliamentarian from Ivano-Frankivsk best known for his attempts to ban all abortions in Ukraine, including those resulting from rape, was named deputy prime minister for economic affairs. Svoboda was also rewarded with the Education Ministry under Serhiy Kvit, as well as the Ecology Ministry and the Agriculture Ministry under Andriy Makhnyk and Ihor Shvaiko, respectively. Earlier in the week Svoboda Member of Parliament Oleh Makhnitsky was named prosecutor-general of the Ukraine.

(I hope I got those names right – FL!)

Others with ultra-right associations with the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defense (UNA-UNSO) also received cabinet posts. Tatyana Chernovol was portrayed in the Western press as a crusading investigative journalist without reference to her past involvement in the anti-semitic UNSO, was named chair of the government’s anti-corruption committee. Dmytro Bulanov known for his alleged kidnapping by police, but also with UNA-UNSO connections, was appointed minister of youth and sports.

Yatsenyuk’s Fatherland Party, and figures close to it, obtained ten cabinet posts, including deputy prime minister for EU integration, interior, justice, energy, infrastructure, defense, culture, social issues, and a minister without portfolio. Yegor Sobolev, leader of a civic group in Independence Maidan and politically close to Yatsenyuk, was appointed chair of the Lustration Committee, which was charged with purging followers of President Yanukovich from government and public life.

In a society where oligarchs play such an important political and economic role it is unsurprising that Volodymyr Groysman, mayor of Vinnytsia and close associate of oligarch Petro Poroshenko – one time finance minister in Yanukovich’s government – was chosen as deputy prime minister for regional affairs. Groysman was also close to former President Viktor Yushchenko. The new finance minister, Oleksander Shlapak, is a representative of oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy, the second wealthiest man in the Ukraine.

“The remaining cabinet posts went to technocrats, a doctor who organized medical services for the Maidan protestors, and a retired police general.’’

(Global Research 02/03/2014)

The interim cabinet matches exactly the government Victoria Nuland recommended in her intercepted call with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev where she revealed the U.S. plan for a coup in Ukraine. Vitali Klitschko and his UDAR party were excluded, likely because of their close relationship with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Yatseniuk’s Fatherland Party received the majority of portfolios. And as Nuland demanded, so long as Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok did not receive a major cabinet post, Svoboda could receive several ministries.

­FALLOUT

After the assumption of power by the new regime in Kiev the former government parties, namely the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party were both banned in 10 of the western regions of the Ukraine. Additionally party offices were burned down and former members of Yanukovich’s coalition and supporters were intimidated, verbally and physically assaulted by supporters of the new regime.

Then came the bombshell, though not entirely unexpected – and now a virtual coup – to be formalized in the referendum 16th March. This regarding the Crimea’s secession from the Ukraine, an event which stoked up an international crisis with the big beasts getting involved in geopolitical positioning and a propaganda war.

One can only speculate about the consequences –national, regional, and international – of the events in Kiev and the future reaction to these events in the Eastern and southern Oblasts of the Ukraine: an arc stretching from Odessa, through Crimea, East to Mariupol, on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, and east and north up to Donetsk, Lugansk and the old Ukrainian capital of Kharkov. This is about half the country where most of the industry was situated, particularly in the Don Bass area. Will they, the staunch and solid electoral base for Yanukovich, be willing to be governed by the new regime in Kiev? Or will they follow the Crimean secession?

We shall wait and we shall see. Well, we did see. What happens next one wonders!?

Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine 2014-2022

Part II

Francis Lee reports on the Crimean Referendum, the double-standards of western government & media reactions and the challenges facing the unelected Kiev regime

The ongoing crisis in the Ukraine has reached another point of (perhaps unexpected) development. It was obvious to most impartial observers that the parliament of the Crimea had staked its position very early – namely, that they were unwilling to accept the authority of the unelected Kiev regime. The first calls for a referendum came as early as February and March 2014. This seemed to chime with what the majority of Crimea’s population, mostly ethnic Russians, also seemed to think, and so it turned out. The arrival of Russian troops would probably not have made any difference to the eventual outcome, but just to make sure Putin sent his special forces to protect his military assets in Sevastopol. Under a prior arrangement with the Ukraine Russia held a 25-year lease on the Sevastopol naval base, for which it also paid a rental of US$500 million per annum. Moreover, the conditions of Russia’s leasehold also included the right to station up to 16,000.00 naval and military personnel in the Crimea.

Having said this, the results of the referendum – which did not come as any great surprise – was rather tarnished by the obvious presence of Russian soldiers at checkpoints, Simferopol airport, railway stations and other strategic locations. This caused the spokespersons for the western alliance – EUSA for short – to go into propaganda overdrive and drive its media sycophants into a state of near apoplexy. It was argued that the referendum was illegal since it violated the constitution of the Ukraine. However, whatever the legal position in the Crimea, the upholders of the Ukrainian constitution – the Kiev regime – were undoubtedly illegal, having come to power by mob violence, so that it was scarcely in a position to declare the Crimean referendum illegal. It has also been pointed out that the referendum in Kosovo resulted in a secession from the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia, took place in the presence of a foreign occupying force, as did the referendum in the Falkland Islands.

What the whole Ukrainian imbroglio was clearly demonstrating was the barefaced hypocrisy and double standards of the western media – including the soi-disant doyen of the liberal-left, the Guardian. No lie it seems is big enough as long as it serves the noble cause of the western alliance. Whether these neo-con foreign policies and neo-liberal economic policies are ‘noble’ remains something of a moot point, however.

UKRAINIAN DOMESTIC POLITICS

What next? The problems facing the Kiev regime are considerable. Firstly, there is the ongoing embarrassment of the neo-fascist element now entrenched in the government, and it’s all too ubiquitous presence on the streets, where Svoboda and Right Sector paramilitaries swagger around in Kiev as if they own the place, and in a certain sense they do. After all they spearheaded the revolution, notwithstanding the fact that they probably only represented a minority in the general protest movement. As has already been made clear they now hold six ministerial portfolios some in extremely sensitive areas. How far does the regime control these ultra-radicals?

It was all very reminiscent of Italy earlier in the 20th century and the emergence of the fasci (Blackshirts) under the leadership of Benito Mussolini which styled themselves as the united front against Bolshevism, and a little later in Germany in 1934, where the Nazi paramilitaries, the (SA)-Brownshirts under the command of the leader and notorious homosexual Ernst Roehm, were calling for a second revolution, which is exactly what Dmitry Yarosh, leader of Right Sector was also calling for. Moreover, he called for nationalization of selected industries – classic fascist economic policy – in the Ukraine and has gone on record that he will blow up the gas pipeline (sic!) from Russia to western Europe if Russia invades the Ukraine. This coming from a minister in a ‘government’ duly recognized by the west. Recent incidents have brought to light this acute PR problem for the new order not only for the head of the Kiev regime. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and also his western backers spilt the beans when one such incident is reported as follows:

“When state-owned Ukrainian TV broadcast celebrations of Russia’s annexation of Crimea on Moscow’s Red Square, a group of nationalist politicians cried betrayal. They burst into the office of the channel’s executive, accused him of being a Russian stooge, punched him and forced him to sign a resignation letter.

The assault, which prompted condemnation in the West presents an important test for Ukraine’s new pro-western government. … For Ihor Miroshnichenko, a lawmaker with the nationalist Svoboda party, those scenes of Russian domination were all too much. Moreover, the broadcast of Russian celebrations seemed to add insult to injury.

To vent his rage, he led a group of Svoboda colleagues in storming the office of the First National channel’s chief, Oleksandr Panteleymonov, used an insulting term used to describe Russians and punched him repeatedly, while an aide recorded the scene on video.

“His position is complicated by the fact that Svoboda, a vocal force in parliament that took part in the protests that ousted the pro-Russian government, received several key posts in the Cabinet – including prosecutor general, the very figure who will be in charge of investigating the TV station attack.’’

(Maria Danilova, Associated Press Kiev)

But they were the methods by which, whether by design or default, Yatsenyuk and his regime came to power. This is the problem with revolutions, they open a Pandora’s Box of unforeseen and unwelcome outcomes. And this particular incident is just one among many.

Of course Hitler had a short method of dealing with the SA paramilitaries: their leadership was wiped out by the SS during the infamous ‘’Night of the Long Knives’’ in June 1934 and the rank and file drafted into the army. Unfortunately for Yatsenyuk he doesn’t have an SS to do the requisite dirty work, even if he wanted.

The Upcoming election in May for the Ukrainian Parliament provided another litmus test for the Kiev regime. Given the fact that there has been a de facto ban on both the Communist Party and The Party of the Regions, Yanukovich’s party, in the western Ukraine, and a process of ratification to make the ban legal which is now before the Parliament, how fair and free is this forthcoming election likely to be? It would also be a good bet that parties favouring separatism in the past – the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine, for example – or openly separatist parties, will wish to contest the election. Noises coming from Kiev would seem to suggest that this will not be allowed. Thus, the whole swathes of the Ukrainian electorate will be effectively disenfranchised.

This last point brings up yet another problem: what will happen in the Eastern Oblasts. There have al- ready been mass demonstrations in Kharkov and Donetsk for a Crimean style referendum, and this has led to a number of arrests including one Pavel Gubarov, a leading separatist from the Donetsk region and member of the Progressive Socialist Party of the Ukraine. He is now awaiting trial in Kiev. This fissure in Ukrainian politics is not likely to go away any time soon and could lead to open conflict.

THE UKRAINIAN ECONOMY

Turning to the economics, the regime in Kiev has further deep-going problems to deal with; problems which look frankly intractable. Namely, the country is effectively bankrupt. It is now being bounced into a fast-tracked membership of the EU by a non-elected government in the belief that EU membership is, for some obscure reason, thought to be the deus ex machina. In fact, EU membership could simply exacerbate the situation as has been the case in the peripheral regions of western Europe. We need to pose the question as to why, a predominantly, poor, agricultural country, with an industrial base which is basically technologically obsolescent, and which could not compete with the industries of western Europe, wishes to join, and open its markets to the EU. This would be the right royal road to under-development, as local industries would simply disappear, or be subject to take-over by foreign multinationals. The Ukraine would join a long list of East European states which now form a low-wage, outsourcing hinterland for western multinationals.

Additionally, since Ukraine will need considerable credits and loans, it can expect a man from the IMF to come knocking on the door and insisting that the country ‘reforms’ its economic and financial structures before Ukraine gets any cash. – for ‘reforms’ read the dreaded Structural Adjustment Programme: cuts in public expenditure, devalue the currency, privatize state assets, end subsidies, deregulate, open the economy to financial flows (‘hot money’’) lower wage costs … the usual and devastating neo-liberal package which we have seen operationalized from Chile, to Thailand, to Greece.

This destabilization process of Ukraine will not be easily reversed. If only the protest movement had waited until the democratic presidential elections in 2015, much of this might have been avoided. But outside forces wished to force the issue and had no time for such fuddy-duddy notions such as democratic elections. These geopolitical issues will be dealt with in the next bulletin.

Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine

Part III

It’s the geopolitics stupid!

At an important meeting held in Paris to discuss the future of Ukraine, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov, were unable to find sufficient common ground to come to any firm decisions regarding the future of the country. Kerry rejected the legality of the referendum in the Crimea and, for his part, Lavrov, was firm in his stance on the dubious legality of the present regime in Kiev. It was always going to be tough for the two interlocutors to come to any productive outcomes in this diplomatic context.

Additionally, Lavrov insisted upon the virtual semi- detachment of Ukraine’s eastern oblasts which did not go down at all well in Kiev. The Russian plan was to essentially impose a political solution where Ukraine’s eastern and southern provinces have greater autonomy, the right to speak the Russian language and the ability to pursue much more independent policies from the central government. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say they worry such a formula could provide the Kremlin with a virtual veto over Kiev’s political system.

The plan was briefly outlined by Lavrov as follows:

“We are certain that Ukraine needs profound constitutional reform. In all, fairness, we can’t see any other way to ensure the stable development of Ukraine but to sign a federal agreement,” Mr. Lavrov said in an interview on Saturday (29/03/14) with Russian state media. “Some may know better and are, perhaps, capable of finding some magic spell to ensure living in a unitary state with people in the West, on the one hand, and the southeast, on the other.”

All of which illustrates the position of Ukraine as being on the geo-political fault-lines between the US and its EU allies and Russia. It seems that national sovereignty is now off the agenda for both sides as they jockey for position. It would now appear that the Ukraine which was, is no more, partition and separation are beginning to look inevitable. Had the Presidential elections in Ukraine taken place as they were scheduled, and which Yanukovich would probably have lost, the story might have been very different. Unfortunately, there were outside forces who had little patience with Presidential elections and were more interested in regime change.

Which brings me to one Ms. Victoria Jane ‘f**k the EU’ Nuland (born 1961) the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State. She who along with US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt were strolling around among the crowds at the Maidan offering cookies, doughnuts, as well as encouraging and comforting words. As I said at the time, this could have only taken place with clearance from the White House.

Why do I see fit to mention her and why is she of any importance? Well for one she was engaged in determining the personnel of the interim Ukrainian administration. In a bugged telephone conversation with Pyatt, Nuland argued that boxing champion Klitschko of the Udar (Punch in English) party was not to be included in any forthcoming administration but that the Deputy (and acting) leader of the Fatherland Party, Yatsenyuk (Timoshenko’s party) should be included. Apart from this faux pas there was the admission whereby Ms. Nuland that the US has invested $5 Billion in The development of Ukrainian, ‘Democratic Institutions’.

But perhaps most importantly is the fact that Ms Nuland is the wife of one Robert Kagan. Mr Kagan is an American historian and is important in as much as he was one of the co-founders of The Project for the New American Century, (PNAC) an international relations think-tank based in Washington DC, established in 1997 together with arch US foreign policy hawks, Richard Perle and William Kristol. Their stated goal was to ‘promote American global leader- ship’. Their position that ‘American leadership was both good for America and good for the world’ and that this should be vigorously asserted as a main plank of US foreign policy. Kagan himself was to state that ‘the US is an empire and should be an empire.’ The position of these neo-conservatives, or neo-cons as they became known, was frankly comparable to jihadist ambitions to reshape the world to conform to Sharia law. The neo-cons wanted to shape the world to the American way, which is presumably good in the sight of God. If this took regime change, then so be it. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the great crusade.

If these people had merely been some eccentric fringe group – of which there are many on the other side of the pond – it would not have much mattered. But it becomes clear that with its members in many key administrative positions in the department of State, that the PNAC has exerted influence on high level government officials in the administration of both Bush and Obama. This fact notwithstanding its organization was much reduced by 2006. The worldview had by now become embedded in American strategic thinking. The Westphalian doctrine that no state shall attack another state unless the other state directly threatened its interests, was now considered passé, and regime change, as we have seen in Iraq, Libya and possibly Syria, is now regarded as an acceptable instrument of foreign policy. As Guardian columnist George Monbiot was to write, ‘’to pretend that this battle begins and ends in Iraq requires a willful denial of the context in which it occurs. That context is a blunt attempt by a super-power to reshape the world to suit itself. (The Guardian 11 March 2003)

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in 1990/91 and the touted ending of the Cold War, saw the imposition of a virtual Treaty of Versailles on Russia under the puppet dictator and buffoon, Boris Yeltsin. Russia, like Germany in 1919, was to be kept down, humiliated, and have its nose rubbed into its new status at every opportunity. Moreover, its economy was almost destroyed by the economic shock therapy imposed by the IMF/World Bank, under the tutelage of one Jeffrey Sachs. The various ex-Warsaw Pact states – Poland, Hungary, DDR, the Baltics, Czech Republic – were drawn into the EU and then NATO. NATO itself was expanded rather than wound down.

This was an interesting development since the EU’s foreign policy orientation underwent a profound change (its economic policies had already changed – for the worse). Initially the EU was supposed to be a third force standing between American capitalism, and Soviet communism. This at least is how De Gaulle saw it: non-aligned with an independent foreign policy akin perhaps to Yugoslavia under Tito. Additionally, the policy outlined by Jacques Delors was one of managed capitalism of the Germany sozialemark- twirtschaft variety and French etatisme seemed more attractive than the deregulated, financialized systems of the US and UK.

As things unfolded, however, the Delors’ model was discarded, and a neo-liberal regime foisted upon European regardless. The drive to the east meant that EU widening prevented the type of EU deepening that De Gaulle and Delors had had in mind. But now foreign policy was also to become Americanized. The UK, of course had always been incorrigibly Atlanticist, but it would have been safe to assume that continental powers – particularly France – would be less so. After denouncing the Iraq War – along with Russia and Germany – France now (under a socialist government!) was actually front-running US imperialism (let’s call it what it is) and taking the initiative in regime change operations in Libya, Mali and almost Syria.

Thus, we now have a situation whereby the EU has effectively become the spearhead of US operations of subversion and regime change (in the name of enlargement) in driving east into Europe right up to the Russian frontier. In the case of Romania US missiles have already been installed, and the plan is for a broader deployment throughout Europe. Europe apparently has a neo-con foreign policy to complement its neo-liberal economic policy.

“… it is not only Great Britain that is Atlanticist. The continental European states are no less so, despite their seeming intention to construct a political Europe. Proof of this is given by the central position of NATO in this political construction. For some European countries (the ex-COMECON states) NATO’s protection, that is that of the US, against their ‘’Russian enemy’’ is more important than their adhesion to the European Union.’’

(The Implosion of Capitalism – Samir Amin – p.203)

And so, the great game continues. One of the principal things to emerge from this has been the absolute spinelessness of European leaders and their willingness to do the US’s dirty work. One wonders whether this EU is any longer worth belonging to – the Ukrainian imbroglio has been a great game-changer in this respect.

A Strange Thing Happened … with the development of a New Order

August 15, 2022

Source

By Francis Lee

‘’The best-known definition of financialization is that it involves the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies.’’ (1)

In this dungeon – All that glitters is gold. Bank of England Gold Vault

The massive shift in the global system of industry and finance which had been based upon the Bretton Woods institutions – viz., the IMF (International Monetary Fund) the World Bank (previously known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Agency) which carried on regardless at the ending of the gold standard in 1971. Both the World Bank and IMF were based in Washington. Additionally, another Bretton Woods Institution – The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was to become the World Trade Organization (WTO) in January 1995.

It was generally understood by all the actors that the objective was for firms to engage in the economy in order to produce goods and services with a view to further investment, growth, and profitability. This was the consensus of the time and raison d’etre of capitalism. However, this political unanimity began to change, quite fundamentally.

The massive shift as mentioned above was a step toward delinking the US$ with gold, when the US government guaranteed to exchange US$ for gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce. This effectively placed all the world’s currencies onto a gold standard backed by the US gold at Fort Knox. Many governments came to accept US$ as gold deposit certificates and chose to hold their international foreign exchange reserves in dollars rather than in gold.

The system worked reasonably well for more than 20 years until it became widely evident that the United States was creating far more dollars to finance its heavy military operations, firstly in Korea and then Indochina, and this combined with the domestic social spending which were part of Johnson’s Democratic party enmeshed in the ‘Great Society’ monetary splurge. What happened next was entirely predictable. Overseas holders of US$ began to take their dollars to the Fed’s bank window, but the Fed could not give them anything in return other than US Treasuries which are just a form of paper money! It was a French politician, Valery Giscard D’Estaing, who drew attention to this American ‘exorbitant privilege’. Pretty soon all the gold was beginning to fly out of Fort Knox to Europe and the Far East. The US government had to do something in order to stem the outward flow. On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared that the US would no longer redeem dollars on demand for gold. The dollar was ultimately nothing other than a piece of high-grade paper with a number and some intricate artwork issued by the US government. The world’s currencies were no longer linked to anything of real value and shared expectations that others would accept them in exchange for real goods and services.

It was a fantastic (and lucky) stroke for the Americans to pull this off. But this financial coup seemed like the opening shot in a long goodbye to the existing economic and political order. A strange thing was happening indeed. In the words of the Irish poet, W.B.Yeats, ‘All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.’ From the poem, ‘Easter 1916.’

A Terrible Beauty

Capitalism was clearly morphing into a different animal with a new financial-economic structure which emerged from the old-style capitalist mode; the old order of production and consumption in a traditional capitalist economy which was occasioned by the production of tangible wealth, as opposed extractive or more tangibly extracted ‘wealth’. Businesses once focused almost exclusively on producing the goods and services for which they had a competitive advantage, but in the economic conditions of the present time they became likely as much if not focused more on their share price, their dividends regime, and in addition, to their interest rates.

A new class and a new system were clearly emerging, if not actually fully emerged. At the present time a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets natural and created. Rentiers of all kinds are an unparalleled ascendancy, and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

The rentier class derive their income from ownership or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation, or financial investments, but other sources have grown, pari passu. These include the income lenders again from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (patents, copyrights, brands, and trademarks); capital gains from investments, ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge higher prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income from financial and other intermediaries derived from third party transactions. A political and economic structure began to emerge in the 1980’s. Once more quoting Yeats, ‘All has changed, changed utterly. A Terrible beauty is born.’ That terrible beauty is Neoliberalism. (2)

‘’Today’s corporations have become thoroughly financialized, with some looking more like banks than productive enterprises. This financialization of non-financial corporations has involved the transfer of societies resources from the employees to the share/stock’s shareholders. This transfer of wealth has resulted both from changes in the political and economic foundations of the global economy from the rise of a new ideology, which holds that corporations sole aim should be to maximize profitability via increasing returns to shareholders. Both ideas and power relations have to change to create any lasting economic change – and the 1980s was a period of transition of both.’’ (3)

Yes, those old enough of us who can remember the 1980s, a strange period of counter-revolution and – die Zeitgeist – yuppies, private equity, Thatcher and Reagan, The Big Bang, The Eurodollar market, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, ‘Greed is Good.’ Privatisation was all the rage. Heady stuff, but like all similar periods of ersatz golden ages the recent versions have crashed into the truths of economic realities. Like, you don’t get something for nothing, or booms lead to busts, or asset price inflation is not the same as growth. In order however … ‘’to maintain the semblance of vitality, western capitalism has become increasingly dependent on expanding levels of debt and of the expansion of the level of fictitious capital. This latter category is made up of financial assets which are only symbols of value, not real values.’’ (4)

Yes, indeed, company shares-stocks that are traded like goods and services do not in the same way embody value. They are tokens which represent part ownership of a company and the potential distribution of future profits in the form of dividends. The paper or electronic certificate itself is not a genuine value that can create more value. Rising share/stock prices are often presented as evidence of a healthy economy, but the amount money a share/stock charges hands says nothing definitive about the value of the company’s assets or about its productive capacity. On the contrary, it is when real capital stagnates that the amount of fictitious capital tends to expand.

The years roughly between the late 1970s to the present economic impasse have been unprecedented since the emerging and increasing instability of the present debacle of the 2020s. Prior to this each successive wave of crises followed a wave of credit bubbles, when the indebtedness of similarly placed group and groups of borrowers increased at a two of three times higher than the interest rate for three, four or more years which produced a series of credit bubbles in addition. These historical blow-outs have in fact become even more intractable and destructive with the passing of time. Something seems seriously amiss with the system’s dysfunctionalities which have become quite visibly failing. The economic situation in a country after several years of bubble-like behaviour resembles that of a young person on a bicycle – the rider needs to maintain the forward momentum of the bicycle, or it will become unstable. During the initial mania, asset prices will decline immediately after they stop increasing – there is no plateau or middle ground. The decline in the prices of some assets leads to a concern that asset prices will decline further and that the financial system will experience distress. The rush to sell these assets becomes self-fulfilling and so precipitous that it resembles a panic. The prices of commodities – houses, buildings, land, shares/stocks bonds – crash to levels that are just 30 or 40 percent of their prices at the peak. Bankruptcies surge, economic activity slows, and unemployment increases.

The features of these manias are never identical and yet there is a similar pattern. The increase in the prices of real estate and commodities or stocks is associated with euphoria; household wealth increases as does spending. There is a sense of ‘we have never had it so good.’ Then the asset prices peak and then begin to decline. The following implosion of the bubble leads to a decline in the prices of commodities, stocks, and real estate. Some financial crises were preceded by a rapid increase in the indebtedness of one or several groups of borrowers rather than by a rapid increase in the price of an asset or security. These deep-going changes in the world’s global economy were accompanied by political ramifications of a very significant order.

The economic shocks of the post-war period gave rise to the political shocks which if anything were more visible than what was apparent in the economies of the advanced world. Since 1945 everything had after the post-war reconstruction been regarded as L’Age Dor, (Golden Age) as the French had called it. This was a period from the early 1950s characterized by high levels of growth, low and falling unemployment, rising level wages and investment, where in the UK we were informed that ‘we had never had it so good’’ as the Conservative government proudly boasted. The Labour party had held the reins of government from 1945-1951. But things began to change during the 1970s, namely that the political/economic pivot changed definitively in the late 70s and early 80s. The Thatcher/Reagan duo grabbed the bull by the horns and established the new order.

This political/economic dispensation was to last from the early 1980s and through to what was to be the supposed blossoming of the Clinton years of growth and enrichment, the apex of the Anglo-American moment. To be sure: “Pippa’s Song.’’ See Below.

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven –
All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Yes, if only it could always be like this. But of course, it seldom or never is, as was to be witnessed in due course.

Consolidation of the New Order

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Dynamic Duo!

The intellectual theorists of the new order – the Mount Perelin Society – an emergent think-tank and intellectual movement behind the Thatcher-Reagan populism. In a both internally coherent framework and an ideology used to promote the power of the owners of capital in general and finance capital in particular. The work of Hayek, Von Mises, and others constituted a serious intellectual exercise grounded in a particular set of values (including Milton Friedman albeit a junior member) namely, a commitment to human freedom, defined by control over one’s property. The fact that this justified for shrinking the size of the state, removing capital controls, and reducing taxes is what led several prominent international financiers (George Soros comes to mind for some reason) to cover a large portion of the costs for the first meeting. So, the party (in terms of both political activity and organization) was calling nearly all the shots.

Another significant event has been the intellectual collapse of Labour and Social-Democratic parties in Europe and possibly even included the left-wing of the US Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders. These were clearly the most significant political events in both Europe and North America during the 1980s. We can list them – all late converts to the neo-liberal paradigm – in France (PS Party Socialist France) (Germany SPD) (Greece PASOK) (Spain PODEMOS) (UK Labour Party) the list goes on. Moreover, having given up on any notion of socialism and equality, these ex-parties metamorphosed into centre-right outfits indistinguishable from the militant conservatives. The leaders of these counterrevolutions were the ineffable bought duo – Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

The privatization programme was to sweep all before it including on a massive scale the expropriation of public land with little analysis or oversight. The programme of what was once the public sector and which had included, the National Health Service, Education, Transport, Road and Rail, Electricity, Water … was a policy based upon ideological rather than practical considerations; moreover, the list was extensive. Perhaps an example of this policy was education, particularly higher education which was provided and subsidized by educational opportunities in the elite universities. As a British national I was subsidized by generous government grant in 1979/82. I then finished my higher education as a post-graduate in 1986 – again free of charge. It is of course inconceivable that I would have been able to do this today.

The economic system – that is to say the present financialized system prevalent in the Western world – seems to be reaching its crisis point. Quack remedies for the ailing western economic structures, include Central Bank Digital Currencies, CBDCs, and/or the black hole of ever-increasing debt, which apparently will be overcome by issuing more debt (sic) and which are touted as a ‘solution’ to an intensifying structural problem, but which merely intensify the crisis.

According to Marx: ‘’In France and England, the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the death-knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient, or inexpedient, politically dangerous, or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of the apologetic.’’ (Capital, Volume 1, Afterword to the Second German Edition – London 1873).

The present deep economic crisis is, at bottom, a class issue. The residual elements of the old aristocracy survived the initial assault of the political economists of the 17/18/19^th centuries who included Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Karl Marx (1818-1883)/(Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). The ruling class saw the above group as being an assemblage of dangerous radicals who posed an alarming threat to the social and political order. Thus, from their perspective the powers-that-be saw fit to enlist a group of academics called the ‘marginalists’ in 1870. These were the counter-revolutionary mathematicians and included Leon Walras (Frenchman) William Stanley Jevons (Englishman) and Carl Menger (German). Whether or not the repudiation of classical political economy achieved by this counter-group was sustainable is a moot point (see above). But suffice it to say these gentlemen were the ideological foot-soldiers, or, in Marx’s words ‘hired Prize Fighters’ for the rentier classes. Unfortunately, their frozen economic theories survived to the present day and continue to dominate school and university curricula and represent the timeless (and tedious) axioms of micro-economics.

I’ll leave the last word to Michael Hudson.

‘’Real estate, stocks and bonds constitute the bulk of wealth in today’s economies, because most wealth is obtained by rent-seeking – land rent, monopoly rent, and financial charges for special privileges – and even more by capitalizing rentier revenues into financialized assets, all supported by tax favoritism. In contrast to industrial capitalism’s drive to minimize rentier charges to create a lower cost economy with less overhead costs, finance capitalism increases this burden. Regardless of how financiers and billionaire rentier make their fortunes, this rise in rentier wealth is counted as an addition to GDP, subtracted as an exploitive transfer payment …Much as the land and England’s Commons were privatized in the Enclosure movements from 15^th to 19^th centuries by a combination of force, legal stealth and corruption, today’s post-1980 privatization wave aims at appropriating basic public infrastructure to create opportunities for charging monopoly rent, along with bank lending to privatizers. Privatization and financialization tend to go together – at the economies expense.’’ (5)

Italy: La Lotta Continua! (Ongoing Struggle)

NOTES:

(1) Stolen: How to save the world from financialization by Grace Blakeley. (2) The Corruption of Capitalism – Guy Standing – (Ibid. p. 3)

(3) Grace Blakeley – (Ibid. p.62)

(4) Creative Destruction – Phillip Mullan – (p.22)

(5) The Destiny of Civilization – Michael Hudson – (p.25)

More

• An Alternative Open Letter to Western Politicians
• We will come after you! Message for the Ukronazi terrorists
• Guo Xi and the Great Emptiness – in Times of the Collapse of the West

Ideologies are no longer the way we know them and this means that the world is being reconfigured

July 17, 2022

Source

By Guilherme Wilbert

I try to bring a reflection in most of my texts about what competes for the international diplomatic and monetary future after Operation Z in Ukraine, but also, I always try to bring the ideological part into the discussion because this still makes many people’s heads spin. Or are Ukrainian flag-wavers not ideologized?

Capitalism and communism have always been enemies at their core, especially in their own archetypes, since communism is internationalist, while pure capitalism is just the simplest way of doing business: you give me money for what it is worth, and I give you the product.

It turns out that along with the collapse of communism after the Soviet collapse in 1991, capitalism has also spiraled, and its most vile forms are found in meta-capitalists and monopolizing companies, which distort the real meaning of free markets, open competition and more.

What happens is that some businessmen behave like communists with money because they use their companies to carry out monopolies and cartels around the world, with the simplest case being that of Brazil, which has a nation of 200 million people to more and only has 5 banks in Brazilian territory operating, these being: Banco do Brasil (created by D. João VI of Portugal during the Brazilian Empire), Caixa Econômica Federal (which is a kind of banking autarchy of the Brazilian Federal Government), Itaú, Santander and Bradesco.  Even HSBC was strong in the country, but could not stand it and closed its operation last decade.

The case of Brazil is a clear example of a country that fell victim to the metacapitalists, even though it had a leftist government like the Workers Party led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of the country.

And this proves how even orthodox socialism, which is the case of the ideology-north of the Workers Party of Brazil, can be eroded by metacapitalism and its bad ways of doing business.

The point is that cartels, monopolies, oligopolies are distorted forms of capitalism, which look very much like a communist quasi-statist economy because the monopolizer behaves like a communist strong state. And this destroys the sense that is used to identify a communist or capitalist militancy in some countries because the real goals of the ideologies cited here are not made explicit up front. This makes for a dumb and innocuous militancy that sometimes is fighting for the same things without realizing it.

While the communist militant likes a strong State that monopolizes natural resources or not, the meta-capitalist also likes the State because it helps him to make and maintain his monopoly. That is why it is not rare to see people like George Soros, prominent bankers, supporting wealth taxes, for example, because it would be a way for them to continue using the state territory to carry out their monopolies and cartels.

Another practical example coming from Brazil are telephone lines: the country has only 4 cell phone companies, with one (Oi Telecomunicações) in receivership because it is in bad shape.

During Lula’s communist government in the country, the banks had the highest profits, several newspapers reported at the time.  This is a clear proof of the distortion of the communist discourse that usually carries the popular feeling but sometimes only makes its leaders richer and more powerful and more brutal.

Fidel Castro, who died richer than Queen Elizabeth II, it is said.

And a global international reconfiguration is happening right now, with the various economic blocs of countries in the Global South becoming closer together.

This is also because of the ideological capitalist exhaustion due to monopolizing meta-capitalism, or communism, when the exacerbated statization and planned economy is proving wrong again in the countries, making the real economy of production take over the discourse and making smarter heads.

Wars still happen because of ideologies, but they can be stopped by them too

When the clash of civilizations happened in 2019, with the world distrusting China for being bad at preserving Covid-19 cases, as well as trying lockdowns recently that destroyed the global supply chain of production, a lot of bad thought was given to a strong and sovereign state like China’s, especially the more ideologized ones, who blamed the country’s trademark hammer and sickle as the cause of the problems plaguing the world at the time. Except that today, 3 years later, China, which is clearly totally ideologized, may be guiding some parts of the Global South towards an inter-country integration that involves the monetary, diplomatic and trade issues. In other words, the China that would have caused the Covid-19 problem for some ideologues, may be the same country that can save the global economy when the dollar collapses. And it will collapse. It is just a matter of time.

While NATO, which carries an air of the cold war because it still exists even after the end of the Warsaw Pact, is trying to emulate a kind of international police force, going against the very name of the military organization, which in theory would only be in the North Atlantic Sea, today it is already in Asia and Oceania. In what is seen as the opposite thinking of the leaders of Eurasia and the Global South.

Some diplomats from within NATO have even talked about “Global NATO”. What is this if not a trace of colonialism ingrained in the Atlanticist organization to stand up to the enthusiasts of multipolarity, who have sometimes ended up being characterized by the flags with sickle and hammer?

The clearest point I try to make is that ideologies have been eroded by the mistakes or successes of their own leaders, distorting the orthodox common sense of centuries-old doctrines like communism for example. This was seen when the US opened the international market to China, which made them the second global economy today.

But there was also no good interpretation from the West towards Russia for example, which today is a totally different country from the Soviet Union, and could have become an ally. Which would totally change the scenario we are living today.

So ideologies can stop or make wars, either by capitalism or by communists.

Capitalism at war means monopolies arising, while communists at war means massive genocides arising.

Corroded ideology is not necessarily a bad thing, but it shows a breakdown in thinking in society

Ideologies arise as a way of trying to organize models of government, and several of them have even been criminalized around the world due to the massacres they have carried out. But at the same time, this does not mean that they will cease to exist.

When a society thinks 50% one thing and another half thinks 50% another thing, this means that there is a polarity of thoughts that can only lead to chaos and barbarism, because the people, hungry or in difficulty, are not able to come to a consensus, and then authoritarianism and popular uprisings arise.

The corrosion of ideologies, be they capitalist or communist, was something that would happen naturally because time goes on proving some points that have always been pushed by the enthusiasts of such as absolute truths, which are lies.

Several are the cases of communist countries that collapsed and several are the countries that collapse because of meta-capitalism. This is why we must abandon ideologies and simple ways of thinking when it comes to a nation, a homeland.

A homeland is much bigger than a 19th-century German writing. A nation is much bigger and means much more than a Politburo.

Capitalism and communism behave today as different sides of the same coin, with their owners and enthusiasts having the same origins.  Instead of studying the end result, look for the cause. Many coincidences can arise.

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Guilherme Wilbert is a Brazilian law graduate interested in geopolitics and international law.

“That’s nonsense” – Douglas MacGregor

June 26, 2022

Nikolai Patrushev: Truth Is on Our Side – About the Timing of the Special Operation

June 03, 2022

Source

Translated by Leo V.

Original Link: https://aif.ru/politics/world/pravda_na_nashey_storone_nikolay_patrushev_o_srokah_specoperacii

The special operation in Ukraine brought to a climax the confrontation between Russia and Western countries led by the United States. The battles are going on not only in the vastness of Ukraine, but also in the economic, political and cultural planes.

What threats are facing Russia and how long can the special operation continue, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev told AiF.

What Is the West Trying to Do?

– Gleb Ivanov, AiF.ru: Nikolai Platonovich, the United States and other Western states are openly demonizing Russia, switching to direct insults. What is it connected with?

– Nikolai Patrushev: The style of the Anglo-Saxons has not changed for centuries. And so today they continue to dictate their terms to the world, boorishly trampling on the sovereign rights of states. Covering their actions with words about the struggle for human rights, freedom and democracy, they are actually implementing the doctrine of the “golden billion”, which suggests that a limited number of people can flourish in this world. The destiny of the rest, as they believe, is to bend their backs in the name of their goal.

In order to increase the welfare of a handful of magnates in the City of London and Wall Street, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom, controlled by big capital, are creating an economic crisis in the world, dooming millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to starvation, limiting their access to grain, fertilizers and energy resources. By their actions they are provoking unemployment and a migration catastrophe in Europe. Uninterested in the prosperity of European states, they are doing everything to make them disappear from the pedestal of economically developed countries. And for unconditional control over this region, the Europeans were put on a chair with two legs called NATO and the EU, disdainfully watching how they balance.

– Today, it is increasingly being said that Western pharmaceutical companies are interested in the spread of dangerous diseases and in the daily dependence of mankind on drugs…

– Some experts express an opinion about the man-made coronavirus infection, believing that it could have been created in the Pentagon laboratories with the assistance of a number of major multinational pharmaceutical companies. Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros and Biden funds were involved in this work under state guarantees. Instead of caring for the health of mankind, Washington spends billions on the study of new pathogens. In addition, Western medicine is increasingly practicing genetic engineering, synthetic biology methods, thereby blurring the line between artificial and natural.

– Washington is hatching plans to recognize Russia as a terrorist country, some countries like Lithuania are already officially assigning such a status to Russia…

– As they say, a thief’s hat is on fire. Today it is easier to say which of the largest international terrorist organizations did not arise with American assistance. The United States widely uses them as an instrument of geopolitical confrontation, including with our country. Back in the mid-1980s, under the control of American intelligence services, Al-Qaeda was created on Afghan soil to counter the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the United States created the Taliban movement to influence Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Guided by their supposedly “national interests”, the United States overthrew objectionable regimes in Libya, Iraq by force of arms, and tried to do it in Syria. And the main striking force in all cases is radical groups, the further unification of which led to the creation of a terrorist monster called the Islamic State, following Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which got out of control of the Americans.

It is also known about Washington’s warm relations with neo-Nazi thugs in Ukraine.

What Does Denazification Mean?

– There is still a lot of controversy about neo-Nazis in Ukraine. In the West, they unanimously repeat that they are not there. President Biden, asking Congress for billions of dollars in arms supplies to Ukraine, calls this country the front line of the struggle for freedom…

– It’s likely that Westerners will not take off their rose-colored glasses until the brutalized Ukrainian thugs start to rage on their streets. By the way, not only in Europe. Remember the recent shooting in America’s city of Buffalo. I would like to ask the Americans what is the difference between a neo-Nazi who shoots people in a supermarket and the Azov militants, who humiliated and destroyed the civilian population of Donbass every day, year after year?

What is meant by denazification? There has been a lot of talk about it in recent months, but not everyone understands this term.

Everything will become clear if you remember the history. During the Potsdam Conference, the USSR, the USA and Britain signed an agreement on the eradication of German militarism and Nazism.

Denazification meant a number of measures. In addition to punishing Nazi criminals, the laws of the Third Reich were repealed, which legalized discrimination based on race, nationality, language, religion, and political beliefs. Nazi and militaristic doctrines were eliminated from school education.

Our country set such goals in 1945, and we are setting the same goals now, freeing Ukraine from neo-Nazism. However, at that time England and the USA were with us. Today, these countries have taken a different position, supporting Nazism and acting aggressively against most countries of the world.

What Will Happen to Ukraine?

– Some of our readers sometimes express concern, as they write, about “the delay in the timing of the special operation in Ukraine.”

– We are not chasing deadlines. Nazism must either be 100% eradicated, or it will rear its head in a few years, and in an even uglier form.

– How do you assess the chances of a successful completion of the special operation?

– All the goals set by the President of Russia will be fulfilled. It cannot be otherwise, since truth, including historical truth, is on our side. Not for nothing that General Skobelev once said that only our country can afford such a luxury as to fight out of a sense of compassion. Compassion, justice, dignity are powerful unifying ideas that we have always put and will put at the forefront.

– And what fate awaits Ukraine? Will it survive as a state?

– The fate of Ukraine will be determined by the people living on its territory. I would like to remind you that our country has never controlled the fate of sovereign powers. On the contrary, we helped them to defend their statehood. We supported the US during their civil war. France was given repeated assistance. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, they did not allow it to be humiliated, and during the First World War they saved Paris twice. It was the USSR that did not allow the British and Americans in 1945 to divide Germany into many states. It is well known about the decisive role of Moscow in the unification of Germany, which was most opposed by the French and the British. Russia played an equally important role in the history of Polish statehood. At the same time, today the West in every possible way obscures the contribution of our country to the preservation of other states.

– By the way, Finland, which now wants to join NATO, also formed as state inside the Russian Empire?

– You’re right. Moreover, Finland emerged from the Second World War, despite it participating on the side of Germany, with minimal damage to itself thanks to the position of Moscow. Now, together with Sweden, Finland has been persuaded to join NATO, ostensibly for their own security. Turkey and Croatia, however, object, but, I think, all the same, Helsinki and Stockholm will be accepted into the bloc, because Washington decided so, as well as Brussels which is controlled by them. The will of other peoples is not of interest to the leadership of the United States, although, I believe, many of the inhabitants of these countries understand what kind of adventure they are being pushed into.

NATO is not a defensive, but a purely aggressive offensive military bloc, joining it implies the automatic transfer of a significant part of its sovereignty to Washington. If the military infrastructure of the alliance expands on the territory of Finland and Sweden, Russia will perceive this as a direct threat to its own security and will be obliged to respond.

– NATO members persistently nod to the Finns and Swedes at Ukraine…

– But the logic here is the opposite. It was the actual leadership of the NATO members by the Kiev authorities that led to the catastrophic scenario. If Ukraine had remained independent, and not controlled by the current puppet regime, obsessed with the idea of joining NATO and the EU, then it would have long ago expelled all Nazi evil spirits from its land. Meanwhile, an endlessly smoldering conflict in this country is seen as an ideal scenario for the entire North Atlantic alliance led by the United States. The West needs Ukraine as a counterbalance to Russia, and also as a testing ground for the disposal of obsolete weapons. By fueling hostilities, the United States is pumping money into its military-industrial complex, again, as in the wars of the 20th century, remaining on the winning side. At the same time, the United States considers the inhabitants of Ukraine as a consumable material, which has no place in the very “golden billion”.

Forgotten History

– Speaking of billions. Zelensky says Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine…

– It is Russia that has the right to demand reparations from the countries that sponsored the Nazis in Ukraine, and the criminal Kiev regime. The DPR and LPR should demand compensation from them for all material damage for 8 years of aggression. And the Ukrainian people themselves deserve reparations from the main instigators of the conflict, i.e. the United States and United Kingdom, which force Ukrainians to fight, support neo-Nazis, supply them with weapons, send their military advisers and mercenaries.

Many Ukrainians, unfortunately, still believe what the West and the Kiev regime tell them. Sobering up will come sooner or later. They have yet to open their eyes and see that the country actually does not exist, that the gene pool of the people, its cultural memory are being destroyed by Westerners and replaced by rabid gender concepts and empty liberal values.

– Forgetting history and abandoning their values, apparently, the trouble is not only for Ukrainians?

– Of course. Last year I visited the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk. The guide shared with me her impressions of the visit of a group of students from the United States, who throughout the entire tour doubted whether they were being told the truth in the museum, because they naively believed that it was America that defeated Nazi Germany.

Unfortunately, some school teachers in our country adhere to such a false version of fateful events. Distort the facts and many training guides. The subject of the heroism of the Soviet people during the years of the Great Patriotic War is given little time in history lessons, and in textbooks it is often described superficially. As a result, only a few high school students can name the names of those who won the Victory in 1945 at the cost of their own lives, and almost no one heard about the heroes of the First World War or the Patriotic War of 1812.

Battle For Memory

– What do you see as the reason?

– First of all, we need to look at the training of teaching staff. It’s time to recall the thoughts of Ushinsky and Makarenko that the teacher shapes the personality of the student, and his vocation should not be the provision of services, but enlightenment, education and upbringing. Specialized universities should prepare future teachers as high-class masters, and not stamp them on the assembly line.

Teachers occupy a special place in the life of every citizen, therefore, arbitrary interpretation by individual teachers of world and national history, which undermines the authority of our country and programs the minds of children on the basis of false facts and myths, is unacceptable. The psychological manipulation of youth, the gap between generations, the distortion of historical truth – all this is incompatible with the professional vocation of a teacher.

– I recall the catchphrase attributed to Bismarck that “battles are won by teachers.”

– In my opinion, the idea is certainly true. Especially in the conditions of the hybrid war, which is now deployed against Russia. And in it, teachers are at the forefront. There is a need for personal responsibility of the heads of educational institutions, whose graduates did not hold books on the heroism of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War, or have a vague idea of the exploits of those who fought for the Motherland.

It is impossible to push the issues of patriotic education of youth into extracurricular activities. In the reports, all this is described beautifully, but there is no result. In some schools, including private schools, the word ‘patriotism’ is considered obsolete.

– How do you propose to change this situation?

– It is necessary to raise the authority of teachers who are faithful to their profession, devoting their lives to educating true patriots. The most important task today is the revival of historical traditions, as well as the protection of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. To solve it, a systematic approach to upbringing and education is needed. There is a need to implement the state program in this area at all stages of a person’s maturation and his formation as a citizen. A comprehensive model of this process should be developed.

At present, our students and teachers are actually squeezed out of the Western scientific and educational sphere. I believe it is advisable to abandon the so-called Bologna Process system of education and return to the experience of the world’s best domestic educational model.

In addition, it is necessary to provide for a significant increase in the scale of the state order for the creation of works of literature and art, filmhttp://(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process)s and television programs aimed at preserving historical memory, instilling pride in our country and forming a mature civil society, clearly aware of the responsibility for its development and prosperity.

Only in this case, we will be able to successfully counter the threats and challenges that are formed by the collective West to influence the individual, group and public consciousness.

Andrei Martyanov: Davos “news”, real resources, Operational Art-2

May 26, 2022

Please visit Andrei’s website: https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
and support him here: https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=60459185

Attached article about COFM

Sitrep Operation Z: + consequences = petty Tabaquis howling

May 26, 2022

by Saker Staff

After the Russian forces took POPASNA, the pace increased. There are still battles, but the Russians are now rolling over everything else in the Donbas. The Ukrainians are being annihilated, more and more soldiers are refusing to fight, reports of mass surrenders pour in, and the Russian strategy of cauldrons and partial cauldrons is proving incredibly effective. It is a bloody war in that area exacerbated by the Ukrainian leaders because orders for a sensible retreat are not forthcoming.

Two videos today – both quite detailed:

This first video from Military Summary on Rumble, describes the logjam against sensible retreat.

This second video describes some of the very recent battles and how these brought the Ukraine to this point.  Very detailed and he draws his maps on the fly as he talks.

A few hours ago reports started filtering in of huge forces of the Russian Aerospace Forces passing over Lugansk towards the front, and powerful explosions thundered everywhere. The correspondent of “Russian Spring” rusvesna.su from the capital of the LPR reports that he sees this for the first time, a lot of combat aircraft and helicopters swept over the city in several waves. Of course we do not know yet the what, why and where of this, excepting the Russian MoD report of this morning tells the story of the increased pace.

Take a look at the numbers:

💥High-precision air-based missiles have hit 48 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 artillery batteries, and 2 ammunition depots near Nikolaevka and Berestovoe in Donetsk People’s Republic during the day.

▫️1 Ukrainian electronic reconnaissance centre near Dneprovskoe, Nikolaev Region, has been destroyed, including 11 servicemen from the combat unit, as well as 15 foreign engineering specialists who arrived with security guards.

▫️In addition, 1 Osa-AKM anti-aircraft missile system launcher has been destroyed near Nikolaevka in Donetsk People’s Republic, and 1 radar of the Ukrainian S-300 anti-aircraft missile system near Chuhuev in Kharkov region.

✈️💥Operational-tactical and army aviation have hit 49 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 2 mortar crews, as well as 1 depot of missile and artillery weapons and ammunition.

▫️The attacks have resulted in the elimination of more than 350 nationalists and up to 96 armoured and motor vehicles.

💥Russian air defence means have shot down 1 Ukrainian Mi-24 helicopter over Husarovka, Kharkov Region. 1 Ukrainian Air Force military transport aircraft delivering ammunition and weapons has been also shot down in mid-air near Kremidovka, Odessa Region.

▫️In addition, 13 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have been shot down near Zelenyi Gai in Kherson Region, Bolshie and Malye Prokhody, Gavrilovka, Veseloe in Kharkov Region, and Epifanovka and Kirovsk in Lugansk People’s Republic, including 2 Soviet-made Tu-143 Reis jets near Melovatka in Lugansk People’s Republic.

💥Missile troops and artillery have hit 62 command posts, 407 areas of AFU manpower and military equipment concentration, 47 artillery and mortar units at firing positions, as well as 3 ammunition depots.

▫️Units and military equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ 10th Mountain Assault Brigade, which arrived to reinforce the Ukrainian grouping in Donbass, have been destroyed during unloading near Pokrovsk railway station in Donetsk People’s Republic.

……………

Ukrainian General Staff says “The invaders are actively advancing in several directions at once.” — Specifically, the Russians are advancing simultaneously in Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdeevsky, Novopavlovsk and Liman directions.

……………

We also had a short explanation of why the perceived slow down in the Russian operation. The slowdown of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is intentional with a view to evacuating the population and avoiding casualties among civilians, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said.  Russia’s Armed Forces are creating humanitarian corridors and announcing ceasefires to ensure the safe evacuation of residents from encircled settlements, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained, despite this approach stalling the progress of the country’s forces.  “Of course, this slows down the pace of the offensive, but it is being done deliberately to avoid civilian casualties,” he explained at a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) Council of Defense Ministers.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke on the Ukraine specifically and geopolitics:

▪️All the goals set by the President of the Russian Federation during the special military operation will be achieved, it cannot be otherwise. Russia is not chasing deadlines in the course of a special military operation in Ukraine.

The ideal scenario for US-led NATO is an endlessly smoldering conflict in Ukraine.

▪️Nazism must either be eradicated by 100%, or it will raise its head in a few years, and in an even uglier form.

▪️Ukraine, if it had remained an independent country, and not controlled from outside, “would have long ago expelled all Nazi evil spirits from its land.”

▪️Moscow will be obliged to respond to the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO, which is a direct security threat to Russia. Finland and Sweden will be accepted into NATO, despite the objections of Turkey and Croatia, “because Washington decided so.”

▪️The West is today obscuring Russia’s contribution to the preservation of other states in different historical periods with all its might.

……………

The political and geopolitical situation is heating up and at the same time becoming more surreal.

They’re even dusting off Kissinger at Davos.  (Note Pepe Escobar’s ascerbic entry to his telegram channel at the end.)**

There is a small window of opportunity to wind down the armed conflict in Ukraine and find a peace settlement, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has told a gathering of Western elites in Davos, Switzerland. Beyond that, Russia may break from, the rest of, Europe for good and become a permanent ally of China, he said on Monday during a speech at the World Economic Forum.

“Negotiations on peace need to begin in the next two months or so, [before the conflict] creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” the 98-year-old veteran diplomat said of the crisis. The outcome will determine the rest of Europe’s relationships with Russia and Ukraine alike, he said. “Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” he said.

“I believe pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it not into a war about the freedom of Ukraine, which had been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but into a war against Russia itself,” he added.

There are more voices from Europe asking for a peace process to start but first, the Ukrainian response:

Ukrainian presidential advisor Alexey Arestovich resorted to obscene language to criticize those in the West urging Kiev to cede part of the country’s territory to Russia for the sake of peace.

“Go f**k yourselves with such proposals, you dumb f**ks, to trade Ukrainian territory a little bit! Are you f**king crazy? Our children are dying, soldiers are stopping shells with their own bodies, and they are telling us how to sacrifice our territories. This will never happen,” Arestovich said in an interview on Wednesday.

Soros calls for Putin’s defeat:  George Soros told the World Economic Forum in Davos the West needs a quick victory over Russia in Ukraine so it can focus on climate change

The process of ‘disowning’ the Ukraine has started.

Gen. Milley notes that the US has reopened military-to-military level talks with the Russians. His call to his Russian counterpart last week was “important” and it was “purposeful”

Of course, the talk of another peace plan is not born of care for people or human rights or democracy or deep held care for the Ukrainian people.  It is driven by desperation and is a desperate grasp at avoiding a psychological defeat bigger than Afghanistan.

TASS/ Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin took to his Telegram channel to highlight that the US and its partners do not plan to provide real assistance to Ukraine.

• Ukraine will only get 15% of the $40 billion promised by the US, he said.
• “Washington and Brussels do not really intend to help Ukraine, or solve its economic and social issues. They only need Ukraine to fight Russia till the last Ukrainian,” Volodin said.
• According to the recent aid to Ukraine legislation signed by President Joe Biden, 35% of the $40 billion is going to finance the US Armed Forces, he explained. Meanwhile, 45.2% of that amount is set to be spent on other countries, not Ukraine, while another 4.8% will be earmarked to support refugees, and restore the US diplomatic mission in Ukraine. “Ukraine will only receive 15% of the allotted sum,” the speaker revealed.
• But Ukrainians will have to pay off the whole sum, he said. The US is aware that Kiev will not be able to service the debt in the future. “That is why they are seizing Ukraine’s last reserves, including grain, which is what we are seeing right now”.

Quo Vadis Ukraine?

A list of those that want a piece of the pie is shaping up. Of course, Poland is not suddenly in love with the Ukraine without a reason.  They want their piece of the land pie. I suspect Hungary is also not innocent in this matter. Will the Ukraine be apportioned? Or will it lose its nation-state status completely, and cease to exist? Nobody knows because nobody knows the Russian plan. In Europe and the US/NATO, fear is taking hold. Nobody knows where Russia plans to stop after liberating the two new Republics, Donesk and Luhansk. Is this the moment that they will choose to push NATO back to its agreed borders?

Maria Zakharova noted that these peace proposals that are appearing (talking about the Italian one specifically) could show that Rome is perhaps “beginning to think about the depressing consequences of the military psychosis that was caused by the reaction of the West to the special military operation of Russia in Ukraine” – and the supposed plan could be an attempt “to offer some alternatives to the current escalation, which threatens to develop into a full-scale military conflict between Russia and NATO.”

The deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said that “any peace proposal built purely in the interest of NATO and the Western world order should simply be ignored.”

“Or rather, their authors should be told to go in a certain direction,” Medvedev said.

Russia is ‘building back better’ and major reconstruction is starting as well as President Putin signed a decree relaxing rules for granting Russian citizenship to residents of Ukraine’s Zaporozhye and Kherson Region.

The amendments are added to the decree that previously introduced a similar procedure for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).

Russia continues to do business.  Delegations from over 90 countries have confirmed their participation in the 25th edition of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) scheduled for June.  Russia and Iran also agreed to implement the MIR payment card system in Iran.

That is it for today. Enjoy your discussion and careful on the Ukie propaganda. It is still everywhere.

**Escobar Telegram Channel:

THE PLIGHT OF DR. K – IN ONE MINUTE

War criminal Kissinger’s performance at Davos should be summed up as yet another massive failure of his master’s trademark Divide and Rule.

Ukraine/404 has always been a sort of Rubicon in terms of downsizing Russia (think Brzezinski).

It consumed A LOT of capital – physical and political. It was THE red line – success or failure – setting the stage for the triumph of the NWO and its top secretion, The Great Reset.

Kissinger – even as a mere Rockefeller messenger boy – was at the center of this racket for DECADES. It was Kissinger, under Rockefeller’s orders, that groomed cypto Dr. Evil Klaus Schwab to build the WEF and the Davos ethos.

Even if Davos is a mere outlet for the people who really run the show, the WEF remains the premier Influence Scoundrels club on the planet bent on forcing their agenda all across the spectrum. Still toxic after all these years. Yet now even Kissinger knows it’s bound to fail.

Sitrep: Operation Z

April 08, 2022

The biggest news of today’s cycle is the wild admission by the Pentagon, U.S. media, etc., that the U.S. has in fact employed a “strategy” of outright lying and making up fake intelligence to ‘combat Russia’.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-using-declassified-intel-fight-info-war-russia-even-intel-isnt-rock-rcna23014

Astounding quote from article: “President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.”

They also admitted that most of the intelligence surrounding the conflict, such as the infamous ‘China is providing Russia with equipment’ was complete ‘malarky’, as the demented zombie-in-chief would say. How any reasonable and self-respecting country or people could trust the U.S.’s ongoing claims from this point on are beyond me. How could you possibly take in this announcement, and yet still believe the U.S. side of the story about the ‘Bucha massacre’ amongst other things?

This amazing feat of neuro-linguistic-programming must be seen to be believed: 

The reporters here celebrate the ‘novelty’ of this method of utilizing intelligence (as if the amazing technique of ‘lying’ has only just been discovered by them). They dance around the real description of the concept as basically being “lying”, by continually describing it in fancy ways to frill it up and legitimize the “technique” as something other than what it is on its bare-faced surface: outright lies and propaganda meant to control the narrative of the conflict favorably.

And by the way, the reporter in the video is this guy:

And was actually fired by the LA Times for how deeply in bed he was with the CIA

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/la-times-disowns-reporter_b_5770388

After these admissions how can ANYTHING from the U.S. be believed? Russian “casualties” of 30,000+? Bucha massacre? Chemical weapons usage? Russia’s “failed objectives” and “failing campaign”? These are all individual claims that fall under the purview of this ‘new’ and ‘amazing’ technique called complete b.s. from the CIA.

Obviously this has been U.S.’s chief tactic for decades. But the full admission brings up a starker reality. That behind the curtains, the CIA has in recent times shifted to conducting its Ops “in the open”, but presenting them in a way that makes them seem acceptable. For instance we know during the last election, a remarkable series of articles came out in the MSM detailing the entire deep-state covert ops, how various apparatuses of the democratic party came together with corporate assets, Facebook, NGOs, etc., to take control of the 2020 election. They even fully admit to it being a secretive “shadow campaign”, but rebranded as a ‘good cause’.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

In previous times this would have been an unprecedented scandal but now, rebranded and ‘in the open’, it’s given the cachet of legitimacy. The reason for the method shift is obvious: in today’s integrated online/social media environment, it’s pretty much impossible for the western intel agencies to operate in pure secrecy anymore. That era is over with. And so they’ve shifted to a strategy of conducting their Ops in full view but utilizing their media arm to repackage them to look justified in a certain light.

It’s akin to this – Hannity proudly and openly wearing a CIA pin (the Mockingbird is no longer caged, as you can see, it can fly freely and proudly in the open now) while decrying that, “Vladimir Putin has forfeited his right to live.”

Why does @seanhannity wear a CIA flag pin every night? https://t.co/iUW4hjwGJ1 pic.twitter.com/psPm4V1Dii

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) April 7, 2022

Onto other things:

The U.S. has admitted to training Ukrainian saboteur groups to operate the new Switchblade kamikaze drones. Reportedly they are being trained on U.S. soil, in secret. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3260827-u-s-training-small-number-of-ukrainian-troops-on-switchblade-drones/amp/

“The “very small number” of Ukrainian soldiers, who have been in the U.S. since last fall for military training, were taught to use the drone with the expectation that they would soon return to their country to train others on the equipment, press secretary John Kirby told reporters.

“We took the opportunity — having them still in the country — to give them a couple of days’ worth of training on the Switchblade so that they can go back — and they will be going back soon, back home — to train others in the Ukrainian military,” Kirby said.”

More confirmation of how deeply invested and entrenched the U.S. is in this war. But no different than the billions spent on training Syrian rebels and ‘moderate terrorists’ to fight against Russians and Assad in Syria.

The U.S. has even reactivated the Lend Lease program for the first time since WW2 to massively arm Ukraine: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/06/senate-unanimously-approves-lend-lease-00023668

And also:

“U.S. For 1st Time Publicly Announces Transfer Of Intelligence To Ukraine’s Armed Forces For Donbas Operations”

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/pentagon-reveals-it-giving-ukraine-intelligence-donbas-operations-201709

Here’s today’s print-up from the Pentagon itself. I can’t stress enough how massive the scale of this operation by the west to fund/supply Ukraine is. It dwarfs anything in history. When you consider that less than ~2000 Stingers were provided to the Taliban in the 80’s war, and that was considered an unprecedented scale operation at the time, then look at the above list and realize we’re only at the very earliest stages of what the West will be supplying to Ukraine (tanks, jets, etc likely all incoming eventually). There are some unconfirmed reports that even British Harpoons are already delivered and placed in Odessa. This is orders of magnitude more powerful/dangerous than the ‘Sea Skuas’ they were talking about, but this rumor may be fake propaganda from the Ukrop side.

More and more each day the scale of this operation is revealed and how deeply invested the west is, and it is breathtaking. New videos appear daily of large groups of foreign fighters, Georgian, etc., being heavily equipped and sent into the Ukraine.

And this list above is only from the U.S., there is much more from the other western ‘allies’ as well. Planes from North Macedonia landed in Reznow airfield in Poland today, likely bringing goodies as every other European country has. And add that to the billions already allotted recently in general aid and the billions spent on achieving Euromaidan, as admitted by Nuland when she said over $5 billion had been spent by the U.S.

The entire project has been in development for a very long time and it is the culmination of the western empire’s attempts to destroy Russia. Just listen here how Soros himself explains his involvement in the events of Ukraine dating back to the late 80’s and early 90’s. And how Adam Schiff admits that “the U.S. is fighting Russia over there so it doesn’t have to do it over here.”

On frontline news: As the big showdown in Donbass looms, a lot of forces are pouring in on both sides. Russia has shifted strategies and is now striking railway stations and reinforcement hubs / corridors, as many have hoped it would do. Overnight there were several reports of important railway hubs being hit by missiles. One near Zhytomir, which is possibly the single most important reinforcement hub to the frontlines in all of western Ukraine. Reinforcements being sent to frontlines were reportedly destroyed in the strike, though there’s no visual confirmation. And another in Kharkov region – just south, in Lozovaya – which evoked a video message plea from the Kharkov mayor who said railways were hit, oil has run out, but pleaded for people not to flee (presumably because the militants who control him need citizens to use as hostages / human shields just like in Mariupol).

“#KHARKOV Region—#Lozovaya—#Russia|n forces conduct precision missile strikes at a major supply/logistics centre of #Ukraine|ian forces in Lozovaya, which boast a key intersection of rail tracks enabling the supply and reinforcement of the #Donbass grouping of #UA military.”

As can be seen on this map, the Lozovaya junction is a critical resupply / reinforcement route for the Ukrop Donbass cauldron and specifically their stronghold of Kramatorsk, which had been the central headquarters of the entire JFO for some time. And other reports said a railway bridge was hit leading to that junction as well.

Just north of there, Russia continues to progress around Izyum. Our forces are now fighting at Sulihyvka/Suligovka on the way to Dovhen’ke in the direction towards Slavyansk.

Not only does this photo below show the progress downward from Izyum, but you can start seeing how this salient is now beginning to create the opening pincer that will enclose the ‘Great Cauldron’.

The battle for Kam’yanka, directly south of Izyum was quite destructive for the UAF, they suffered many losses and there are fields littered with their dead, as well as many trophies taken. https://www.bitchute.com/video/2qjB8t89mK2a/

Reports indicate that UAF forces are now amassing a huge force in the Kramatorsk / Druzhkovka region in preparation for RF’s advances. But they continue putting up stiff resistance along the road towards Slavyansk as well. The highways from Horlivka towards Kramatorsk are said to be filled with UAF troops. This appears to be their single largest agglomeration of the cauldron.

In the south, RF have blockaded Ugledar and Novomikhailovka, and begun storming the latter. Also, Basurin has estimated 3,000 to 3,500 enemy fighters remain in Mariupol. And the map there looks something like this:

With that said, most of the ‘weak’ ones have surrendered and only the most hardened Azov fanatics remain, so there is some possibility that the fighting can still go on for a decently long time. With that said, the more they retreat towards the ports, the more they are running out of residential areas with civilians to use as human shields, which allows allied forces to use increasingly heavy-handed tactics and strikes against them. I reported last time how for the first time heavy duty artillery units like 2S3 and 2S4s were brought in, such as those you can see in the latest Wargonzo video 

So it’s difficult to guess – the fight could take another two weeks, or it can suddenly collapse in the next day or two if the remaining Azov abruptly surrender. Unfortunately cities take a long time to siege, many of us remember following the events of Aleppo or Sarajevo, and the years it took. Even in the final stages of Aleppo when rebel forces were already collapsing and SAA had the upper hand, it was weeks for every neighborhood, and months to clear districts.

But right now things are advancing according to plan. Large Russian reinforcements have poured into the Kharkov area to head to the Izyum front, and meanwhile Ukrop reinforcements/resupplies are finally being hit in their train stations and railyards by the RuAF, so the stage is being favorably set for our forces.

And for those that continue to doubt that the RF has vastly destroyed the Ukrainian military in terms of armor and capabilities. New videos continue to show the total lack of Ukrainian armor or vehicles. Here is one showing a large Ukrainian force, all on foot, not a vehicle among them – forced to use a civilian truck to evacuate their wounded – whom, by the way, have obvious swastikas on their person.

A force this large should always be supported with mechanized units and some sort of infantry fighting vehicle at the minimum, yet here they are taking lots of casualties in the video, no armor in sight.

And here, we see Ukrainian soldiers forced to ride bicycles to get to where they’re going. https://www.bitchute.com/video/ULjN5yH3IcJn/

A week or so ago, the American mercenary James Vasquez bragged on twitter how him and his squad “commandeered” (read: stole) a Lexus in Kiev so they can get to the frontline, such is their lack of military transport vehicles or APCs.

The U.S. by the way says that Russia has not responded to any calls from the Pentagon since February: https://www.rt.com/news/553500-pentagon-russia-phone-silent/

General Milley keeps calling, and Russia is not answering.

A quick note on the topic of Russian ‘traitors’ and 5^th columnists, it’s interesting how many of them are fleeing to Israel specifically.

https://www.rt.com/business/553285-russian-billionaire-prokhorov-israel-citizenship/

Prokhorov was once a Russian presidential candidate and one of Russia’s richest and most powerful oligarchs.

And now the CEO of Yandex https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/yandex-ceo-relocates-to-israel-cannot-work-for-a-country-at-war-1.10722163

Lastly, the Ruble is now in the mid 70’s to the USD.

 To the utter bewilderment of the West, it just keeps gaining in strength against the dollar.

I’ll leave you with this last video: to those that still question the Russian air power, or say Russia is not utilizing it, or doesn’t have air supremacy, etc. Here’s what a Ukrainian soldier said when asked what he fears most in this war: https://www.bitchute.com/video/xbWbfp7v5nJH/

The Curious History of American Exceptionalism

March 31, 2022

Source

by Jimmie Moglia

Francois Mitterrand, the longest serving president of France (1981-1985), not long before he died (1996), he made this quite extraordinary statement:

“France does not know it, but she is at war with America. A permanent, vital, economic war, and only apparently a victimless war.

Yes, the Americans are inexorable, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world… It is an unknown war, a permanent war, a war without apparent deaths and yet a war to the death.”

Such sentiments from a modern French president seem extraordinary – after all, France was and still is a historic American ally.

To test the truth of Mitterrand’s words we have, as usual, to remove the dust of history and return to the time of America’s birth. No intent here of re-writing history, but to subject to reason certain opinions that custom or prejudice have exempted from scrutiny or alternative interpretation.

Immediately we face perhaps the hardest task of any historian or of anyone attempting to make sense of history. I calculated that the average human has about 21 million minutes available in his life to make decisions.

A historian has then the task to decide which among the compounded millions of decision made by many individuals involved in the politics of a nation are historically important. Which means that any choice or selection a historian makes is arbitrary.

While admitting these limitations I will extract out of the chronicles and legends surrounding the history of the United States some less known but relevant events, which in the view of some have historical significance and portend of things to come at large.

Starting with the American declaration of independence, the conventional line about the grievances of the American colonists against England, their mother country, is that the Americans wanted political representation in England and England refused. This has been condensed in the punch line, “No taxation without representation.” Which is not entirely true but let’s not discuss it.

Suffice to say that, then as now, propaganda likes punch-lines, which have greater appeal than subjecting facts to scrutiny. On the other side of the Atlantic and typical of a certain British counter-spirit was the famous assertion by Dr. Johnson about the Americans, “They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them, short of hanging.” Even so, many colonists continued to read and admire Dr. Johnson. Both George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson owned a copy.

The tipping point, the grievance triggering the war for independence had to do with the tax the British government decided to apply to imported tea – tea having become a popular drink in America. Whereupon the Americans rebelled and threw the tea carried by a British ship, into Boston harbor.

This is only partially true, because the London-based East India company had accumulated a large surplus. The idea was to apply the tax, but to reduce the original price so that the cost at retail would be less than that paid for smuggled tea. And smuggling tea had grown into a flourishing business.

It may be a coincidence, but the first financier of the war of independence was John Hancock, whose family had amassed a fortune with smuggling.

The elites of Boston and the other colonies wanted to ensure that their profits remained in their own pockets. It was then necessary to use the masses, being careful that their anger could be properly directed.

During the riots against the earlier stamp tax, promptly abolished, the commander of the British military forces in America had observed:

“The masses of Boston, fomented by certain influential people, and attracted by the idea of being able to plunder … destroyed several houses… the promoters of the riot began to be terrified by the spirit they had fomented, since the popular fury was out of control. And they, too, were afraid of being the next victims of the rapacity of the people.”

Anyway, the independentists converted the artfully fomented winter of discontent into a quest for independence. Or rather, they convince the multitudes that choose by show (then like now), that the already rampant social inequality was the fault of English rather than of local exploiters. Today NGOs in foreign lands, with suitable adaptation, carry an equivalent responsibility. The US government finances them via its overseas embassies, or via even darker entities with equal or more nefarious motives (e.g. Soros et alia).

In America it was the classic case of catching two birds with one stone. The elite already relished the “freedom” to seize new western lands ad libitum and to do away with the various standing Indian treaties established by England – while wresting political power from the historic establishment. At the same time, anger, bitterness and popular resentment had to find an outlet that would safeguard the elite.

Consequently, the desire for a more even social structure, ready to break out into revolution, was converted into a struggle for independence. The elite could not predict the outcome of the war of independence, but it averted the danger of an internal revolution.

The Declaration of Independence is a document with almost the status of a Gospel. I find it therefore necessary to insist that I, an atom in the universe, have no right to impugn the value of such a legendary document. This is a critique, which does not imply rejection or disrespect. But it is possible to find in the declaration the seeds of much that followed in American history, including American exceptionalism.

“We hold that these truths are self-evident: that all men are created equal…” – is the famous beginning. To which we may add – purely for the sake of logical consistency – less the Negroes, because they did not count, the Indians, because they were not white, the women, because they were not men, and the poor, because they were not rich – and therefore couldn’t vote.”

It could be argued that applying logic to history is unhistorical. Agreed, except that even in the history written today, notorious states use or pretend to use logic even in their most murderous enterprises. The reader will no doubt recall many examples of ill-weaved western ambition turned deadly.

Back to the declaration. Apart from the limitations of applicability, those to whom the opening statement applied were endowed by the Creator with “certain inalienable rights,” and among these rights were life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.

None would disagree but a related anecdote is meaningful. One draft of the declaration, instead of “the pursuit of happiness” had “the right of property,” which no reasoning mind would object to. Why then the substitution with the somewhat vague pursuit of happiness? ‘Pursuit of happiness’ is an abstraction and turning an abstraction into a right compares with discovering that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun. It is a pearl of meaninglessness. Not even Genghis Khan, that I know of, forbade his Mongols to pursue happiness.

Yet better safe than sorry. If you want the poor to fight on behalf of the rich, proclaiming the preservation of property as a means to reduce inequality may perhaps raise some questions even among the distracted multitude, who like not in their judgment but their eyes.

In practice, the Declaration of Independence replaced the old with a new authority, the monarchical with a new Republican ruling class, founded on property, class distinction and inheritance, just as in the previous regime.

The great difference – and here lies the crux of the unresolved American question – is that Americans could not admit distinctions of class and heritage. Distinctions that were the foundation of the new society as they were, indeed, of the old one, which they had detached themselves from.

This paradox created a chasm between practice and theory – between the theory of egalitarianism, used to create the new nation, and the practice of competition that necessarily creates winners and losers.

The whole further reinforced by a mental attitude condensed into the very Yankee expression, “Winner takes All.” A sentence extracted from the rules of a game that expresses both an aspiration and an acceptable and recognized mode of thought and way of life.

But this tension between theory and practice, between egalitarianism and antagonism could not be officially admitted. Therefore it remained not only unresolved, but even concealed. And the frauds, hypocrisies, and illusions necessary to conceal the tension between words and deeds were and have become part of America’s history.

Some may argue that this subterfuge is necessary to create a ‘great’ nation. Someone else may say that the tension between theory and practice is not America’s exclusive legacy. Certainly, but America is the one country in the world that – from birth – has officially pretended that the problem does not exist.

One other key element of the American political psyche – not sufficiently acknowledged, I think – is that the authority that fixes the rules of foreign trade and foreign exchange is also the authority that fixes all others.

Therefore, we have a commercial interpretation of liberty and a perception of international trade quite different, for comparison, from another revolution, the French revolution that followed not long later, based on liberte’, fraternite’, egalite’ – however difficult it may have been to convert that vision into practice. Still, one of the first actions of the French revolutionaries – usually unknown to most – was to abolish slavery, in 1792.

And now let’s examine another symbolic but actual and important cornerstone of the American worldview since 1776. Or rather, to have an idea of how the American collective political psyche views the world, we may focus our observation on the famous US dollar bill.

The front features the portrait of George Washington, himself the owner of 300 slaves.

But in France, in 2005, the 200^th anniversary of the legendary victory of Napoleon at Austerlitz, against the Russians and the Austrians, was not celebrated because Napoleon had re-introduced slavery. A small detail in the immense cauldron of history, but sufficient, I think, to perceive one significant difference between the political psychologies of peoples.

When we then examine the back of the one-dollar bill, we find the statement, “In God we Trust”. In different ways we may all do so. But we know that money can be the ‘worse poison to men’s souls…, ‘that too much of which will make black white, foul fair, wrong right, base noble, old young, etc.’ Therefore that “In God we Trust” sounds like a virtual jarring note. It almost equates to printing “we trust in virginity” on the door of a brothel.

Furthermore for Christians thus directly associating God with money has the sound of blasphemy. For it contrasts dramatically with the famous answer given by Jesus to those who tried to trick him by asking him if citizens should pay taxes.

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”, replied Jesus.

Another item on the back of the dollar bill is the Great Seal, a masonic symbol carrying the date 1776. This is historically congruent, because masonic societies have been largely responsible for revolutions both in the United States and in France. And masonry is considered the antithesis of God, being based on the Cabal, arcane symbolisms etc.

Equally meaningful is the banner below the Great Seal, “Novo Ordo Seclorum,” a Latin sentence meaning “The New Order of Centuries” –the new eternal order of the world. In corporate lingo this would be a veritable mission statement. It suggests the objective for America to establish a new timeless world order. It proposes and promises an imperial mission – which became dramatically evident for the first time in 1812, the first imperial war to annex Canada, under the presidency of James Madison.

Andrew Jackson, who was a general in the war of 1812 and later a president, made a prophetic statement: “We will make prevail our right to free-market exchange, and open the market for the products of our soil so as to duplicate the exploits of ancient Rome.”

A remarkable declaration, especially given the then small number of US inhabitants, about 7 million, mostly dedicated to agriculture. Yet a statement foreshadowing the intent or mission to become a Roman-style empire.

The Americans did not win the Canadian war – even if, in population they outnumbered the Canadians by a ratio of 25 to one.

During their first attempt to invade Canada the Americans crossed the Detroit river to meet a joint force of Canadian and Indian armies. Leading the Indians was the legendary Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, the Canadians were led by Isaac Brock, who, by choice of chance, was born in the island of Guernsey, where I lived for 5 years. Incidentally, Tecumseh had witnessed the massacre of his people and the invasion of Shawnee land by the Americans.

Leading the Americans was General William Hull, who, after crossing the border, issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Canada. I quote it in full because of the startling implications it contains.

“Inhabitants of Canada!

The Army under my command has invaded your country, and the standard of the United States now waves over the territory of Canada.

“To the peaceable, unoffending inhabitant it brings neither danger nor difficulty. (subtext, if you surrender we will allow you to live). I come to find enemies, not to make them. I come to protect you not to injure you… I tender to you the invaluable blessings of civil, political, and religious liberty… That liberty which has raised us to an elevated rank among the nations of the world (we can read here the seeds of the ‘exceptional nation’).

Remain at your homes, pursue your peaceful and customary avocations, raise not your hands against your brethren… I have a force that will look down on all opposition, and that force is the vanguard of a much greater. If, contrary to your own interests and the just expectation of my country (notice that ‘just expectation’), you should take part in the approaching contest, you would be considered and treated as enemies, and the horrors and calamities of war will stalk before you. If… the savages be let loose to murder our citizens and butcher our women and children, this would be a war of extermination. The first stroke of the tomahawk, the first attempt with the scalping knife, would be the signal of one indiscriminate scene of desolation. No white man found fighting by the side of an Indian would be taken prisoner; instant destruction would be his lot.”

Having the war ended without a winner, a peace treaty was signed in the city of Ghent, Belgium in 1814.

Incidentally and anecdotally, to the 1812 Canadian war is directly attributable the reason why the White House is called the white house. During the war, an attack by British naval forces that had sailed up Chesapeake Bay, overpowered the American resistance, reached Washington and literally burned up the seat of government. The fire blackened the building, which had to be refurbished and repainted in white. Hence the name White House, now sealed in history.

However, the efforts to annex Canada did not end in 1814. I will skip the history of failed subsequent attempts. More interesting are the snares used to achieve the desired results, on the part of the United States. Strategy and snares still successfully applied today.

In 1854 – 40 years after the treaty of Ghent, the backers of the annexation movement succeeded in pushing the British government to negotiate, on behalf of the five eastern Canadian colonies, a so-called ‘reciprocity agreement’. Which meant free trade in natural products, opening Canadian waterways to US shipping, and free access by the United States to the Canadian maritime fishery.

The interesting part of the ‘Reciprocity Agreement’ is how it was achieved. The US government sent a secret agent named Israel D. Andrews to influence the course of events. He used means, or rather a new strategy that, though distant in time, is quite similar to events occurring during our historical present.

Of agent Israel Andrews, by a quirk of fate, his related expense account is extant and it tells us more than many books. To push the annexation and free-trade agreement he paid, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick,

$5,000.00 to an editor – read corrupting the Canadian press

$5,000.00 to the attorney general – read corrupting the justice system

$5,000.00 to an inspector of trade – read corrupting the administration

$15,000.00 to a member of the New Brunswick assembly – read corrupting a politician.

Today, in refined Orwellian language, the procedure is called of course lobbying. Incidentally, we owe the term lobbying to President Ulysses S. Grant who so described the action of people accosting him in the lobby of the Willard Hotel sometime in the 1860s.

On May 14, 1854 Andrews wrote to the Department of State as follows,

“… I have therefore taken such measures, as the circumstances of the case required in New Brunswick, to moderate the opposition and keep the public mind in a quiet state… I was able to reach Fredericton before the New Brunswick legislature adjourned, and prevent any discussion of the proposition now under consideration, or any legislative action of a character adverse to our interests.”

In other words, in this new type of war it was/is important to disorient public opinion guided by media paid-for pied pipers. Besides, in the mind of the Americans the free-trade agreement was the equivalent of, or the prelude to, annexation.

In all Andrews spent more than $100,000 – equivalent to several millions today – trying to persuade prominent individuals in Canada to support either annexation or, as a second choice, free trade with the United States. But the amount was a mere trifle, he wrote, “in comparison with the immensely valuable privileges to be gained permanently, and the power and influence that will be given forever to our Confederacy.” (meaning the Americans).

And this describes perfectly the undeclared war that caused French President Mitterand to say what I quoted earlier on. And, as shown in the recent posture towards Ukraine, the EU is, or behaves as, a US colony.

Unbeknown to most, contrary to conventional history, but supported by ample documentation, the primary promoters and pushers of the European Union were not European men, cosmetically turned into prophets of peace and prosperity, but the Americans, starting with Eisenhower et alia.

Back to the attempts at Canadian annexation. The ‘reciprocity agreement’ ran from 1854 until 1866. After six years from its implementation, the American consul in Montréal reported to the secretary of state of the time, Lewis Cass, that the treaty was “quietly but effectually transforming those five provinces into States of the Union,” meaning American.

Some in Canada viewed things differently. For example a Canadian lumber man, in 1862 said as follows, ”… as regards lumber Canada lost millions by the treaty… The raw material which now will be worth millions of dollars… never returned a farthing to the operators of this country … Labor expended in manufacturing added to the wealth of our neighbors across the line… They and they only were the gainers by reciprocity in lumber, while nearly all on this side engaged in supplying their wants were ruined.”

This sequence of events finds echoes in the process whereby the American Midwest was converted into the properly named ‘Rust Belt’ via the comprehensive shutting down of the industrial powerhouse of America and its transfer to China or elsewhere where labor was cheaper.

Which may be considered as an interesting twist and application of the “In God we trust” principle applied to money at work. For now, to “duplicate the exploits of ancient Rome” – as per Andrew Jackson’s mission statement previously quoted – the time had come to further broaden the horizon, behind the conquest/annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines.

China would be a somewhat larger bite to swallow, but if there is a will there is a way. That the process did not entirely go to plan (until now) is due to temporary setbacks, for the web of life is of a mingled yarn, where good and ill go together.

Returning to history, the issue of Canada’s annexation became entangled with the American Civil War, when it appeared that Britain, and therefore Canada sided with the South. Incidentally, Canada had abolished slavery in 1793, 72 years before the US did. Anyway, it was the threat of forced annexation by the United States that prompted the leaders of the Canadian colonies to join forces and create what is today the Confederation of Canada.

But as late as 1888, the vice secretary of state John Sherman said, “The annexation of Canada will not be achieved through hostile measures but by making amicable propositions. This annexation is a historic inevitability.” There are echoes here of Obama’s reference to the US as the ‘indispensable nation’)

Sherman’s war, with methods not used before, can be called war by enticement, or even better, making an offer that cannot be refused.

In 1948 the US pushed again for a free-trade agreement, but in the parliament of Ottawa John Deutsch responsible for these negotiations stated, “The price to pay for a custom union with the United States is the loss of our political independence – because we will not have any longer control on our political decisions, which will be made in Washington.”

If we abandon the ballast of bias and use the telescope of reason, the parallel between US efforts to annex Canada and the creation of the European Union and NATO is inevitable. Where the European Union, as current events show to all but those who refuse to see, is but the political annex of the United States, and NATO a branch of the US military.

That the empire-building enterprise treats citizens as expendable fodder and contemptible fools should not surprise. For understanding is the child of reason and the powers-that-be have refined the means to surprise the unawareness of the thoughtless, and taught them to believe anything provided it is quite incredible. The artists of lying censure those who don’t believe the lie, and propaganda is a machine that has little care to preserve probability in its narrative.

With Russia, at least for now, the same powers have bitten more than they could chew. But malignity never sleeps and can easily inflict wounds not easily to be cured. And hoping for a cleansing of evil would be to transgress the bounds of probability.

أزمة أوكرانيا ومؤامرة كورونا هل تمرّ بدون عقاب…؟!

الثلاثاء 29 آذار 2022

د. جمال زهران

يعتبر نشر فيروس كورونا، على مدار عامين، كان عمدياً وليس فجائياً أو صدفة. ولذلك منذ بداية سلسلة مقالاتنا، حتى آخر مقال بعد انفجار الأزمة الأوكرانية، كنا نؤكد أنّ هناك مؤامرة وراء نشر (كوفيد/ 19)، دون إنكار لوجود الوباء، ودون معرفة بالتفاصيل التي تعتبر سرية بطبيعة الحال. ولكن عملاً والتزاماً بقواعد البحث العلمي، وبالمنهج الاستنباطي، الذي من خلاله يتمّ اكتشاف ما وراء الأحداث الظاهرية، تمكنا من كشف أنّ هناك مؤامرة عالمية وراء نشر الوباء. وبالتعمّق في الخطب السياسية للمسؤولين، وقراءة ما بين السطور، فضلاً عن قراءة وتحليل الاتهامات الموجهة من أطراف دولية إلى أطراف أخرى، ومقاصد هذه الاتهامات، تمكنا أيضاً من تأكيد وجود المؤامرة، وأنّ صانعتها الأولى هي الولايات المتحدة. ولذلك سارعَت إلى توجيه الاتهام إلى الصين، باعتبارها الدولة المخيفة لها، حسب تقديرها وأنه يجب عزلها عن العالم، وضرب اقتصادها الذي بدأ في الوصول إلى الموقع الأول عالمياً من خلال المؤشرات المستقرة في عرف الاقتصادات المتقدّمة وقياساتها، مثلما حدث مع دول جنوب شرق آسيا، والمجرم (سوروس) الملياردير اليهودي الأميركي، الذي يتمّ توجيهه لتحطيم أيّ اقتصاد يبدو منافساً للاقتصاد الأميركي والرأسمالي عموماً. ومن ثم تأكدت المؤامرة، وأن صانعة هذه المؤامرة، هي أميركا، ولكن دون معرفة التفاصيل. وقد أوضحنا في المقال السابق دواعي التركيز على أنّ أميركا هي صانعة المؤامرة، من خلال التحليل الاستنباطي.

وكان للتدخل الروسي في أوكرانيا، أن اكتشف الروس معاملَ بيولوجية لتصنيع الفيروسات ومنها فيروس كورونا، ووضعت يدها، على أوراق رسمية تكشف المؤامرة الأميركية على العالم بتصنيع فيروس كورونا، ونشره في العالم لتحقيق أهداف سياسية. وفوجئ العالم بإعلان روسيا عن ذلك رسمياً. ولم تكتف بذلك، بل تقدمت بطلب لمجلس الأمن لعقد جلسة رسمية لمناقشة جريمة الحرب البيولوجية التي خططت لها الولايات المتحدة، وجعلت أراضي أوكرانيا هي المكان المناسب لشن حرب بيولوجية عالمية ضد أعدائها وضد البشرية عموماً.

وعقد مجلس الأمن جلستين في يومين متتاليين، شرح فيهما المندوب الروسي أبعاد الجريمة وأطرافها، وفي المقابل أنكرت أميركا ورفضت الاتهام ومعها بريطانيا. فما كان من روسيا أن طلبت جلسة ثانية بشأن تطوير أميركا لأسلحة بيولوجية على حدودها داخل أوكرانيا، وقام السفير الروسي بالأمم المتحدة، بتسليم وثائق وأدلة في مضبطة الجلسة، تؤكد:

ـ تمويل البنتاغون الرسمي لبرنامج أسلحة بيولوجية واضحة في أوكرانيا.

ـ أسماء الأشخاص والشركات الأميركية المتخصصة بالأدلة والوثائق المشتركة في هذا البرنامج.

ـ أماكن المختبرات في أوكرانيا، وما يتمّ حتى الآن من محاولات لإخفاء الأدلة.

ـ إعلان مفاجأة أخرى من مندوب روسيا، بأماكن المختبرات الأميركية، التي تعمل في تصنيع واختبار الأسلحة البيولوجية في (36) دولة حول العالم، بزيادة (12) دولة عن الجلسة السابقة.

ـ تحديد الأمراض والأوبئة ووسائل إطلاقها والدول التي تتمّ فيها تجربتها، ومتى وأين تمّت التجارب، وبعلم الحكومات في هذه الدول أو بدون علمها.

ـ تأكيد المندوب الروسي، علانية أنّ من ضمن التجارب والآثار، هو الفيروس المسؤول عن الجائحة الحالية، وكم هائل من الخفافيش المستخدمة في نقل هذا الفيروس.

ـ اكتشفت روسيا ضمن حملتها العسكرية في أوكرانيا، أنّ هناك طيوراً مرقمة أنتجتها المختبرات البيولوجية والجرثومية في أوكرانيا، التي تموّلها وتشرف عليها أميركا.

ـ أن هذه الطيور المرقمة، تتحدّد في ضوء دراسة هجرة الطيور، بعد مراقبتها طوال المواسم، ليصبح بمقدور الاخصائيين البيئيين وعلم الحيوان، معرفة خطوط السير التي تسلكها هذه الطيور كلّ سنة في رحلتها الموسمية، ومنها من يسافر من بلد إلى بلد، ومن قارة إلى أخرى. وهنا يأتي دور المخابرات أو التي تحمل خطة شريرة، فيتمّ القبض على مجموعة من هذه الطيور المهاجرة، ويتمّ العمل على ترقيمها وتزويدها بكبسولة جراثيم تحمل شريحة ليتمّ التحكم فيها عن بُعد، عبر كمبيوترات، ثم يعاد إطلاق سراحها لتنضمّ إلى الطيور المهاجرة إلى البلاد التي يتمّ التخطيط للضرر بها. وخلال طيرانها الطويل، يتمّ التقاط مسارها خطوة بخطوة عبر الأقمار الاصطناعية، ويتمّ تحديد مكانها بالضبط، فإنْ أرادوا مثلاً الضرر ببلد معيّن، يتمّ تدمير الشريحة عندما يصبح الطائر في سماء هذا البلد، فتقتل الطائر، ويسقط حاملاً الوباء، فتنتشر الأمراض في تلك البلاد المُراد الضرر بها، وهكذا يكون قد تمّت هزيمة البلد الخصم، من دون أية تكلفة عسكرية أو اقتصادية أو سياسية!!

ولا شك في أنّ هذه جريمة دولية، رفضت منظمة الصحة العالمية، معرفتها بذلك، كما أنّ الصين طالبت بالتحقيق في ذلك، أمام مجلس الأمن.

وبعيداً عن التفاصيل المريرة، فإنه قد تأكد أنّ نشر فيروس كورونا، كان مخططاً له، وعمدياً. ومن ثم فإنّ من ارتكبت هذه الجريمة هي الولايات المتحدة ومعها (36) دولة شاركتها في ذلك لا بدّ من الإفصاح عنها وفضحها، وإخضاع الجميع للمحاكمات جزاءً لما فعلوا، وفي المقدمة أميركا الظالمة، التي تمارس عملاً إجرامياً دولياً. ولا يجب أن تمرّ مؤامرة كورونا بدون جزاء أو عقاب. ومنذ الكشف عن المؤامرة، بدأ الجميع يتراجع عن الالتزام بالإجراءات الاحترازية، سواء الدول أو الأفراد، في أنحاء العالم.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

*أستاذ العلوم السياسية والعلاقات الدولية، والأمين العام المساعد للتجمع العالمي لدعم خيار المقاومة، ورئيس الجمعية العربية للعلوم السياسية.

Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts

March 22, 2022

By Dan Cohen

WASHINGTON DC — Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.

The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.

Behind Ukraine’s public relations effort is an army of foreign political strategists, Washington DC lobbyists, and a network of intelligence-linked media outlets.

Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”

Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare.

According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm.

“From the first hour of war, we decided to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them distribute the official sources to show the truth,” the nameless figure told PR Week. “This is a hybrid war: the mix of bloodily struggling fight with a huge disinformation and fake campaign lead by Russia [sic].”

According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.

The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingraham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.

“We’ve been privileged to help coordinate efforts to support the Ukrainian Government in the last few days, “ Ingham told PRovoke Media. “Agencies have offered up entire teams to support Kyiv in the communications war. Our support for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is unwavering and will continue for as long as needed.”

With an anonymous Ukrainian figure joining two of the top public relations figures in the Kiev government’s propaganda blitz, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs distributed a dossier folder (archived)  with materials instructing public relations agencies on “key messages,” approved language, content for debunked propaganda constructs, far-right and Neo-Nazi propaganda.

The folder is run by Yaroslav Turbil, described on his LinkedIn page as “Head of Ukraine.ua — Ukraine’s digital ecosystem for global communications. Strategic Communications & Country Brand Promotion.” Turbil has worked at multiple “civil society” organizations closely linked to the U.S. government and interned at Internews, a U.S. intelligence-linked organization that operates under the guise of promoting press freedom.

Among the propaganda constructs distributed in the dossier, is a video of the Snake Island incident, which was quickly proven false, in which Ukrainian border guards stationed on a small island were reported to have been killed after they told an approaching Russian warship that had urged them to surrender to “Go f*** yourself.” President Zelensky held a press conference announcing he would award the men the Hero of Ukraine medal as mainstream media spread the story widely. However, the supposedly-dead soldiers quickly turned up alive and well, proving their heroic stand to be a farce.

Despite the story being proven as fake, the dossier contains a propaganda video promoting it.

Another folder in the dossier is run by Ukrainian MFA graphic artist Dasha Podoltseva and contains hundreds of propaganda graphics submitted by artists in Europe and the United States.

Some feature generic “no war” messages, while dozens of other images celebrate “The Ghost of Kiev” – a heroic Ukrainian pilot who turns out to be non-existent – and the phony “Snake Island 13” incident.

Many use xenophobic and racist language, and some are explicit in their praise of prominent Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, including C14 leader Yevhen Karas, the Right Sector fascist paramilitary, and the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Multiple images call for “Banderite smoothies” – a reference to Molotov cocktails named for the late OUN-B commander Stephan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews and ethnic Poles during World War II. Another image depicts a book titled the: ”Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases,” listing Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, and Eritrea.

“I love NLAW” – Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapon, provided by western governments to the Ukrainian military

Graphic implying fertilizing the fields with bodies reads, “Grandma advice to Moskovites: Hide in the fields, When you die in hands of our army, Sunflowers will grow better”’

“Thank You Ukrainian Army” with an Azov Battalion Wolfsengel patch emblazoned on the sleeve”

“The Encyclopedia of Incurable Disease: Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea”

“Against Moscovian Occupation.” Moscovian is a xenophobic term used to describe Russians

Graphic calling Czar Nicholas, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Vladimir Putin incarnations of the same “Mental Moskovian Dragon”

“Putin’s orcs got whipped” – Orc is a xenophobic term for Russian used by Ukrainian nationalists

Flag of Neo-Nazi paramilitary Right Sector. Red represents “blood” and black represents “soil”

Ukraine or Valhalla – a reference to the where heroes of Norse mythological go after death, a theme commonly appropriated by neo-Nazis

A call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine with an image of a building used by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that Russia bombed

A call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine with an image of a building used by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion that Russia bombed

Foreign extremists flock to Ukraine

The dossier also contains a link to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs page called “Fight for Ukraine,” which provides instructions for foreigners who wish to join Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi-infested armed forces – termed the “International Defense Legion of Ukraine.”

Following Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters to form a brigade, fighters from all over the world, including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and more have traveled to face Russian forces. Others with no combat training or experience have arrived for “war tourism” – what one British soldier called “bullet-catchers.”

Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

While the Ukrainian government says tens of thousands have answered their call, some commentators expressed doubt at those figures, calling it a “PR exercise.”

However, the foreigners who have traveled to Ukraine have encountered a much more severe reality than they anticipated.

Russia’s air force bombed military installations adjacent to where the foreign fighters were sleeping. Having fled to neighboring Poland, a Spanish fighter described the bombing as a “message” that could have killed thousands.

Similarly, an American fighter who hid in an ambulance to escape the frontlines warned that Ukrainian authorities were killing foreigners who decided not to fight, calling it a “trap.”

Correct wording

One document inside the dossier delineates acceptable language on the conflict with Russia as determined by the Ukrainian government.

“Such Russian clichés like ‘referendum in Crimea’ or ‘will of the people of Crimea’ are absolutely unacceptable,” the document states, in reference to the 2014 overwhelmingly successful referendum to separate from Ukraine.

The document deems unacceptable the terms “Civil war in Donbass,” “Internal conflict,” “Conflict in Ukraine” and “Ukrainian crisis” to describe the Ukrainian military’s war with the breakaway republics of the Donbass region. This, despite the fact that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 14,200 people, including 3,404 civilians, have been killed in internal fighting in Ukraine since 2014.

In place of these phrases, the document calls for the use of the terms “Armed aggression by the Russian Federation in Donbass, international armed conflict, Russian war against Ukraine, Russian-Ukrainian conflict armed conflict.”

Key Messages

Another document titled “Key Messages” contains specific propaganda claims that were widely disseminated in mainstream western media, but which have since been discredited. One section claims the “entire Europe was put on the brink of nuclear disaster, when the Russian troops began shelling the largest in Europe Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”

However, International Atomic Energy Agency’s director-general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said that the building hit by a Russian “projectile” at the Zaporizhzhia plant was “not part of the reactor” but instead a training center. Russian troops also left Ukrainian workers to continue operating the plant.

“If I were a Russian worried about the potential of Nazi extremists coming up with a dirty bomb, I’d need to take control of this very facility” – @realscottritter deconstructs the Ukrainian nuclear plant takeover

With @dancohen3000

Full Interview: https://t.co/KOMDd6018Y pic.twitter.com/lpANwW2rt4

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) March 8, 2022

Another section thanks Turkey for the decision “to block the access of Russian warships to the Black Sea.”

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to all military vessels, preventing both NATO and Russian vessels from accessing the Black Sea.

Among the document’s key messages is a statement of gratitude to the “Anti-war demonstrations held by citizens of many nations throughout the world demonstrate strong support to Ukraine in defending against Russia.”

This refers to large pro-Ukraine demonstrations in Europe which have featured calls for the U.S. and NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine and shoot down Russian military aircraft, potentially transforming the conflict into a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

The NED published video of its CEO, Damon Wilson, at a rally outside the White House, declaring "Glory to Ukraine" – the salute used by Nazi collaborator Stephan Bandera's OUN-B, which carried out mass murder of Jews and Poles during World War 2. pic.twitter.com/a5hWSn9txo

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) March 7, 2022

“Despite Russia’s propaganda, there is no discrimination based on the race or nationality, including when it comes to the crossing of the state border by foreign citizens,” claims the Ukrainian document.

However, numerous videos and reports have documented Ukrainian authorities preventing Africans from fleeing the fighting. Even the New York Times – hardly a bastion of Kremlin propaganda – published a report documenting these racist practices.

One message says that “On 16 March, the Russian forces dropped a bomb on a drama theatre where up to 1300 civilians were being sheltered. The number of casualties is still unknown.”

However, as Max Blumenthal reported the explosion appears to be the result of a false flag operation designed by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and aimed at triggering a NATO intervention.

NATO-backed troll farms

Another anonymously-penned investigation shows how Ukrainian public relations firms have used targeted advertisements to astroturf Russian internet and social media networks with messaging calling to economically isolate Moscow and “stop the war.” This effort is led by Bezlepkin Evgeny Vitalievich, who uses the alias Evgeny Korolev, along with Pavel Antonov of the Targetorium organization. From behind his Korolev pseudonym, the Ukrainian information warrior composed a post on his Facebook page (now private) boasting that his firm’s Facebook ads achieved 30 million hits in three days.

At the same time, Facebook has blocked Russian state-owned media outlets from running ads and monetizing content. Several fake accounts for media outlets like Russia 24 have sprung up, burying the authentic account under a series of impostors. Facebook has also marked statements from Russian officials, including the Ministry of Defense, as “false.”

This campaign has reportedly been carried out upon recommendation from StopFake, a self-described “fact checking” outlet that is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, Atlantic Council, Czech and UK foreign ministries, and the International Renaissance Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent Neo-Nazis. The journalist who co-authored the exposé received death threats and ultimately fled Ukraine.

Those revelations have apparently not prevented Facebook from relying on the organization for censorship guidance.

Meanwhile, Russian hackers located a public Google document (since made private, uploaded here) detailing the propaganda operation, which has been distributed in Telegram channels of “creative farms.”

“Here you can find links to Ukrainian media that need promotion, bot accounts with logins and passwords from which anti-war messages and messages with fakes about the Ministry of Defense were sent to users, theses and specific instructions on which posts and which audiences to embroider,” the investigation reads.

Another campaign is run by Nataliya Popovych, the founder of the public relations agency, One Philosophy, in Kiev. Popovych’s LinkedIn profile shows she has worked with the U.S. State Department and advised former President Petro Poroshenko. She is also co-founder and board member of Ukraine Crisis Media Center, a propaganda arm funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Embassy, and NATO, among many others.

A Campaign Asia article profiles several public relations firms involved in the effort. Among them is Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR. Edelman is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors and the World Economic Forum.

“Geopolitics has become the new test for trust. We saw this with the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the war between Ukraine and Russia has only reinforced it,” he said, linking the U.S. propaganda campaign surrounding China’s deradicalization campaign for Uyghur Muslims.

PR approved media outlets

An article in PRWeek profiles several figures partaking in what they describe as a “PR army” that is “fighting on the informational frontline” against Russia’s “barbaric genocide of Ukrainians.”

“Propaganda is the same as real lethal weapons,” declares Marta Dzhumaha, PR manager at healthcare company BetterMe.

Julia Petryk, head of public relations at MacPaw, offers a list of approved media outlets, authored by her colleague Tetiana Bronistka, a former employee of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The list includes Russian and English language sources, as well as Telegram channels. However, these “verified sources that objectively cover what is happening in Ukraine” are anything but independent. Most of them are tied to the U.S. and European governments and billionaire foundations.

She also lists several Russian-language websites:

• Novaya Gazeta – Tied to and reportedly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy
• Meduza – Funded by the government of Latvia, OAK Foundation, Open Society Foundation ​​oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorovsky, and Sweden
• Dozhd – SREDA foundation, European Commission
• Holod Media – Offshoot of Meduza – praised in PBS and CNN as “independent media”
• Proposed that Leningrad should have been surrendered to the Nazis in World War 2 and has complained that they are called a “fifth column” for being funded by western powers
• BBC Russia – British government media
• Current Time TV – Created by CIA-founded propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in collaboration with Voice of America
• Censor – funded by, editor in chief Yuri Butusov, former advisor to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine
• 200RF – A Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that claims to publish publishes photos and documents of the Russian soldiers captured and killed in action

Among the Telegram channels listed are:

• Radio Svoboda – CIA-founded propaganda organ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
• Espresso TV, largely owned by the wife of former Ukrainian member of parliament Mykola Knyazhytsky
• Censor.net, formerly the largest media site in Ukraine, whose motto is “To bring down Russia”, and whose owner operates a “parade of international trolls.”

Intelligence operations

While the public relations firms distribute content, CIA cutouts and billionaire foundations run the media outlets they derive it from. At the core of this operation is a project called the Russian Language News Exchange that was the product of a network of opposition media outlets founded in 2016 that operate in post-Soviet countries, as revealed by an investigation by the Russian media agency, RIA FAN.

In July 2021, a group of journalists flew to Warsaw for media training after being exempted from coronavirus-related restrictions and quarantine orders by Poland’s top medical authorities.

Among the six journalists were Andrey Lipsky, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, and Yuliia Fediv, CEO of Hromadske TV media, one of the most-watched networks in Ukraine.

Hromadske’s financial reports show it is funded by numerous governments and foundations, including the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the European Endowment for Democracy, and Free Press Unlimited. Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidary was also involved in creating the outlet.

Hromadske recently hosted a commentator demanding genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbass, saying it is populated with 1.5 “superfluous” people that “must be exterminated.”

The training, held behind closed doors from July 19 to July 21, was titled “Media Network 2021+” and closely tied to Mediaset, also known as the Russian Language News Exchange, a network founded in 2015. Russian Language News Exchange’s website is sparse, with little available information on its activities – apparently made private since the publication of RIA FAN’s investigation.

While it claims to be independent, Russian Language News Exchange is a project of Free Press Unlimited, funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission.

Today, it includes 14 media outlets that act as “nodes,” cross-publishing each other’s articles in various countries.

The website’s introductory video is hosted by Maxim Eristavi, a former Radio Free Europe reporter and founder of Hromadske. Today, he heads the Millennium Leadership Program at the NATO and arms industry-backed think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Since its inception, Mediaset has coordinated between outlets in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. In March 2021, Mediaset expanded with the Colab Medios Project, created through the Free Press Unlimited Viable Media for Empowered Societies (VIMES) program. This program created training for journalists and saw articles from the El Salvadoran outlet El Faro published in Euroradio (Belarus), Coda (Georgia), and Ziarul de Garda (Moldova).

On March 4, several days after Russia launched its military offensive, a new project called the Media Lifeline Ukraine was created.

The next day, Free Press Unlimited held an emergency conference for Ukraine featuring Hromadske co-founders Maxim Eristavi and Nataliya Gumenyuk. The meeting called to raise 2 million euros for the project. “Only with ongoing external support, will local media entities be able to continue to do their work,” its introductory page asks.

Days later, Free Press Unlimited announced a partnership to support a new joint project of  Reporters Without Borders and its Ukrainian partner, the Institute for Mass Information, called The Lviv Press Freedom Center. The Institute for Mass Information is headed by USAID communications officer Oksana Romaniuk and funded by USAID and the UK government.

Washington DC lobbyists wag the dog

While public relations firms and intelligence-linked propaganda operations target the public, Washington DC lobbyists are agitating in Congress to extend the war in Ukraine

Daniel Vajdich, a registered foreign agent and lobbyist for the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, the largest in Ukraine, is working on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky to lobby members of Congress to approve more weapons shipments to Ukraine. Now the head of Yorktown Solutions, he previously advised Ted Cruz and Scott Walker’s campaigns and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Stingers, Javelins, and let’s figure out the fighter aircraft issue,” he told Politico, claiming Russia is attempting to carry out a “genocide” and “depopulate certain areas of Ukraine.”

Vajdich also wrote Zelenskyy’s March 16 speech to U.S. Congress, in which he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Ukrainian Permanent Representative at the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya’s February 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly was written by DC lobbying firm SKDKnickerbocker Managing Director Stephen Krupin, a former senior speechwriter to President Barack Obama who worked extensively on Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Most prominent among the registered lobbyists promoting Ukrainian government and business interests is Andrew Mac, who also contributed to writing Zeleneksyy’s speech to Congress. Mac registered as a lobbyist for Zelensky in 2019 and runs the Washington DC office of Ukrainian law firm Asters Law.

The lobbying firm Your Global Strategy, founded by Shai Franklin, who has been affiliated with numerous Zionist organizations including the World Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League, is also using its influence with local officials in the U.S. Franklin has set up meetings between Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov and U.S. mayors, including Eric Adams in New York City, Michelle Wu in Boston and Lori Lightfoot in Chicago. He is also attempting to set up a meeting between U.S. officials and the mayors of Odessa and Kiev. A media outlet owned by the mayor of Kiev’s wife recently featured a presenter calling for genocide against Russians, beginning with children.

Franklin said he’s working with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration to help set up virtual meetings between mayors of Odessa and Kiev and U.S. counterparts.

Maryland-based lawyer Lukas Jan Kaczmarek is also working on behalf of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to increase U.S. weapons shipments, specifically seeking to arrange shipments of guns from Kel-Tec CNC Industries based in Cocoa, Florida, to the city of Odessa, Ukraine.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described the network of public relations professionals and lobbyists surrounding Zelenskyy. “These are people around Mr. Zelenskyy who are like the intermediaries and interlocutors. They’ve been interacting with the American elites and American media for a long time,” he said.

McFaul and John E. Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, act as informal advisors to Zelenskyy. McFaul told Politico that he speaks to Ukrainian government officials “probably everyday,” and “has helped them make connections with NBC or MSNBC producers.”

McFaul recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “Hitler did not kill German-speaking people, facing accusations of Holocaust denial.

Zelenskyy also held a “strategic video call” with McFaul before he spoke to House democrats.

With a powerful Russian military fighting alongside DPR and LPR forces, the Ukrainian military’s defeat seems to be imminent unless the United States and NATO directly confront Russian forces, a scenario President Biden has already ruled out. Lobbyists nevertheless persist in their campaign to portray the Ukrainian military as underdogs scoring blow after blow against Russian hordes. In doing so, they help extend the war and continue the carnage.

Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets at @DanCohen3000.

Say hello to Russian gold and Chinese petroyuan

The Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union and China just agreed to design the mechanism for an independent financial and monetary system that would bypass dollar transactions.

March 15 2022

By Pepe Escobar

Russia says half its gold assets were frozen – is this for real or a slick play by Moscow?

Photo Credit: The Cradle

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

Glazyev’s central role in devising the new Russian and Eurasian economic/financial strategy has been examined here. He saw the western financial squeeze on Moscow coming light-years before others.

Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”

Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, and they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.

The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. The first draft will be already discussed by the end of the month.

The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI (Kazakhstan, for instance, is a member of both) but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.

In the medium to long term, the spread of the new system will translate into the weakening of the Bretton Woods system, which even serious US market players/strategists admit is rotten from the inside. The US dollar and imperial hegemony are facing stormy seas.

Show me that frozen gold

Meanwhile, Russia has a serious problem to tackle. This past weekend, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that half of Russia’s gold and foreign reserves have been frozen by unilateral sanctions. It boggles the mind that Russian financial experts have placed a great deal of the nation’s wealth where it can be easily accessed – and even confiscated – by the ‘Empire of Lies’ (copyright Putin).

At first, it was not exactly clear what Siluanov had meant. How could the Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiulina and her team let half of foreign reserves and even gold be stored in Western banks and/or vaults? Or is this some sneaky diversionist tactic by Siluanov?

No one is better equipped to answer these questions than the inestimable Michael Hudson, author of the recent revised edition of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of the American Empire.

Hudson was quite frank: “When I first heard the word ‘frozen,’ I thought that this meant that Russia was not going to expend its precious gold reserves on supporting the ruble, trying to fight against a Soros-style raid from the west. But now the word ‘frozen’ seems to have meant that Russia had sent it abroad, outside of its control.”

“It looks like at least as of last June, all Russian gold was kept in Russia itself. At the same time, it would have been natural to have kept securities and bank deposits in the United States and Britain, because that is where most intervention in world foreign exchange markets occurs,” Hudson added.

Essentially, it’s all still up in the air: “My first reading assumed that Russia must be doing something smart. If it was smart to move gold abroad, perhaps it was doing what other central banks do: ‘lend” it to speculators, for an interest payment or fee. Until Russia tells the world where its gold was put, and why, we can’t fathom it. Was it in the Bank of England – even after England confiscated Venezuela’s gold? Was it in the New York Fed – even after the Fed confiscated Afghanistan’s reserves?”

So far, there has been no extra clarification either from Siluanov or Nabiulina. Scenarios swirl about a string of deportations to northern  Siberia for national treason. Hudson adds important elements to the puzzle:

“If [the reserves] are frozen, why is Russia paying interest on its foreign debt falling due? It can direct the “freezer’ to pay, to shift the blame for default. It can talk about Chase Manhattan’s freezing of Iran’s bank account from which Iran sought to pay interest on its dollar-denominated debt. It can insist that any payments by NATO countries be settled in advance by physical gold. Or it can land paratroopers on the Bank of England, and recover gold – sort of like Goldfinger at Fort Knox. What is important is for Russia to explain what happened and how it was attacked, as a warning to other countries.”

As a clincher, Hudson could not but wink at Glazyev: “Maybe Russia should appoint a non-pro-westerner at the Central Bank.”

The petrodollar game-changer

It’s tempting to read into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s words at the diplomatic summit in Antalya last Thursday as a veiled admission that Moscow may not have been totally prepared for the heavy financial artillery deployed by the Americans:

“We will solve the problem – and the solution will be to no longer depend on our western partners, be it governments or companies that are acting as tools of western political aggression against Russia instead of pursuing the interests of their businesses. We will make sure that we never again find ourselves in a similar situation and that neither some Uncle Sam nor anybody else can make decisions aimed at destroying our economy. We will find a way to eliminate this dependence. We should have done it long ago.”

So, ‘long ago’ starts now. And one of its planks will be the Eurasian financial system. Meanwhile, ‘the market’ (as in, the American speculative casino) has ‘judged’ (according to its self-made oracles) that Russian gold reserves – the ones that stayed in Russia – cannot support the ruble.

That’s not the issue – on several levels. The self-made oracles, brainwashed for decades, believe that the Hegemon dictates what ‘the market’ does. That’s mere propaganda. The crucial fact is that in the new, emerging paradigm, NATO nations amount to at best 15 percent of the world’s population. Russia won’t be forced to practice autarky because it does not need to: most of the world – as we’ve seen represented in the hefty non-sanctioning nation list – is ready to do business with Moscow.

Iran has shown how to do it. Persian Gulf traders confirmed to The Cradle that Iran is selling no less than 3 million barrels of oil a day even now, with no signed JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, currently under negotiation in Vienna). Oil is re-labeled, smuggled, and transferred from tankers in the dead of night.

Another example: the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a huge refiner, just bought 3 million barrels of Russian Urals from trader Vitol for delivery in May. There are no sanctions on Russian oil – at least not yet.

Washington’s reductionist, Mackinderesque plan is to manipulate Ukraine as a disposable pawn to go scorched-earth on Russia, and then hit China. Essentially, divide-and-rule to smash not only one but two peer competitors in Eurasia who are advancing in lockstep as comprehensive strategic partners.

As Hudson sees it: “China is in the cross-hairs, and what happened to Russia is a dress rehearsal for what can happen to China. Best to break sooner than later under these conditions. Because the leverage is highest now.”

All the blather about “crashing Russian markets,” ending foreign investment, destroying the ruble, a “full trade embargo,” expelling Russia from “the community of nations,” and so forth – that’s for the zombified galleries. Iran has been dealing with the same thing for four decades, and survived.

Historical poetic justice, as Lavrov intimated, now happens to rule that Russia and Iran are about to sign a very important agreement, which may likely be an equivalent of the Iran-China strategic partnership. The three main nodes of Eurasia integration are perfecting their interaction on the go, and sooner rather than later, may be utilizing a new, independent monetary and financial system.

But there’s more poetic justice on the way, revolving around the ultimate game-changer. And it came much sooner than we all thought.

Saudi Arabia is considering accepting Chinese yuan – and not US dollars – for selling oil to China. Translation: Beijing told Riyadh this is the new groove. The end of the petrodollar is at hand – and that is the certified nail in the coffin of the indispensable Hegemon.

Meanwhile, there’s a mystery to be solved: where is that frozen Russian gold?

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Ukraine: Nuclear and Biochemical Nightmare. SBU or NeoNazi “False-Flag” Attack Warning

February 25, 2022

Ukraine: Nuclear and Biochemical Nightmare. SBU or NeoNazi “False-Flag” Attack Warning

by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio for Vt Europe

As the hours go by, the massive invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine in search of “sensitive targets” is taking on a meaning that is as clear as it is disturbing.

It began with the destruction of the Kiev aviation air bases carried out by Russia at dawn on Thursday 24 February with surface-to-air ballistic missiles to avoid retaliatory bombing in the breakaway Donbass republics of which President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the independence on the evening of Monday 21 February.

UKRAINE ATTACKED! Putin Destroyed Kiev’s Air Defense. To protect Donbass Bombed in the Last Days

It continued with the ground-based invasion of the tanks that left Belarus with determination and speed on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, conquered in a few hours. For a moment the world held its breath fearing that the Tsar of Moscow had really lost his sense and in a mad thirst for revenge he wanted to cause irreparable damage to Ukraine and its population.

The Russian tanks in the Chernobyl plant

Russia, on the second day of the war in Ukraine after the invasion began, controls the area of the Chernobyl power plant. “Yesterday units of the Russian airborne forces took full control of the territory in the area of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” Russian general Igor Konashenkov said in statements reported this morning by Sputnik in which he spoke of an “agreement with a distinct battalion in defense of the nuclear plant of Ukraine on the joint security of the units and the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant “.

But his special operation to “demilitarize and de-Nazify the country” wanted instead to ensure the protection of the nuclear plant precisely to avoid suicidal maneuvers by the Kiev regime.

BIOCHEMICAL NIGHTMARE

That is why he would make the numerous bacteriological centers in Ukraine that have come under the control of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) among the priorities to be conquered.

A recent US bolas map in Ukraine

It is the agency of the US Department of Defense that controls, under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency, at least 25 laboratories around the world including the very famous Lugar Center in Georgia, near Tbilisi, suspected of having had some role in the construction of the laboratory virus SARS-Cov-2 as the contractor Gilead, producer of the Remdesivir antiviral, in which the Hungarian-born Plutarch George Soros, financier of the Revolution of the Rose in the Georgian nation.

CoronaVirus – 1. “IT’S BIO-WEAPON”. Us Expert blames China but forgets 25 Pentagon’s Secret Labs for “Ethnic Attacks”

That is why the alarm raised by the American geopolitical newspaper Veterans Today must be taken very seriously, which took up a nightmare article published by SouthFront, a counter-information Analysis and Intelligence site among the best in the world on war fronts.

VT is publishing this only after receiving confirmations. Please note that SouthFront is considered by the FBI to be tied to the Russian government. VT has seen evidence that special operations forces of the Kiev regime, aided by Nazi militias, have begun murdering Ukrainian civilians in hopes of getting the West to step in… reads Veterans Today.

Really disconcerting as reported by SouthFront even with a video: «Developments on the ground demonstrate that the command structure of Kiev forces was effectively neutralized as Ukrainian troops do not demonstrate effective resistance. In these conditions, the Kiev regime has already turned to the strategy of terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure».

Above all, a somewhat circumstantial reference is disconcerting: According to reports, SBU operatives planted bombs in the Adveevka Coke and Chemical Plant. The special service probably plans to blow it up causing an ecological catastrophe in the region with the goal to blame Russia.

Kiev Regime Turns on Ukrainian People as False Flag Warfare Rages Forward

The Ukrainian Secret Service (Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrayiny or Служба безпеки України) can count on 29 thousand men including managers, employees, analysts, and operatives.

Therefore he certainly has the possibility of organizing a “false flag” explosion to hit the opponent as already happened in the case of the ambiguous and alleged bombing of an asylum in the Donbass which resulted in the retaliation of the Kiev army and therefore Putin’s decision to recognize and protect the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics.

JIHADISTS AND NAZI MILITAMEN’s THREAT

It is equally true that the special services can rely on many ferocious neo-Nazi militiamen such as the components of the Azov Battalion, the most violent formation of the Ukrainian National Guard in which all the operational activists of the Right Sector deployment are channeled.

Alongside the Azov guerrillas, also denounced for war crimes by Amnesty International, they also supply the Chechen jihadists of the Sheik Mansur Battalion, some of whom trained in Iraq and Syria by ISIS, to whom we dedicated a previous report after Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), had reported the presence in the Donbass of “multinational detachments of jihadist militants”.

Ukraine: Bomb(?) on Kindergarten, Nato False-Flag & Jihadists. Sheikh Mansur Battalion Shielded by Soros-Us’ Media

The head of the Kremlin’s counter-intelligence, in fact, has expressed the fear that Islamic extremists may act “in the manner of the false” White Helmets in Syria, or the self-styled rescuers of the Syria Civil Defense trained by the former British military secret agent James Le Mesurier (died under very mysterious circumstances in Istanbul when Turkey decided to invade the Syrian North East in autumn 2019) that Russia has reported to the UN a terrorist formation for organ trafficking and who are suspected of having helped Al Nusra’s Qaedists to build the chemical attack in Douma to blame Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

Human Organs’ Traffic in Syria ignored by UN: Sana and CBS videos on White Helmets, Al Qaeda & Turkey Crimes

THE CHEMICAL PLANT IN THE SIGHT

Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant (AKHZ) in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, is the largest coke producer in Ukraine and is owned by the company Metinvest, which is in turn owned by Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian oligarch. AKHZ also produces a variety of chemicals including benzene, coal tar, coal oil ammonium sulfate, and coke gas. At present Avdiivka Coke plant consists of 13 main and 30 auxiliary workshops as well as service structural divisions.

Avdiivka Coke and Chemical Plant in Donetsk

Before the war in Ukraine, production was 12,000 tons of coke per day, worth $2.4m. However, this has fallen by two-thirds due to the conflict. Avdiivka Coke is one of the top-five coke producers in Europe and the largest coke producer in Ukraine. Currently, AKHZ produces about 40 types of products and the share of the plant exceeds 20% of gross coke output in Ukraine. The plant is considered important to steel production in Ukraine.

Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio
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George Soros on China, Xi Jinping, and the Threat from Within

February 01, 2022

This guy truly would have been the *ideal* actor to play the role of Satan in any movie.

Instead, he chose to play the role of Satan in real life.

Check him out, this is truly priceless!

Andrei

Color revolution in Kazakhastan

January 05, 2022

Dear friends

Today I am driving all day, but since there is a very serious color revolution that seems to be taking place in Kazakhstan,  I am therefore creating an open thread.  Please feel free to share any decent information and commentaries below.  According to Russian sources, the usual US-controlled disinformation resources (including Ukie ones!) are out in full force to support the insurrection.  The levels of violence are very high, even ambulances are attacked, cops are beaten up, disarmed, undressed, and humiliated, weapons stores have been emptied.  The Internet has been disconnected, as has power in many parts of Almaty and Nursultan.  This is a repeat of what the US tried in Belarus and in Kyrgyzstan, and the next couple of days will be crucial.  Many government buildings have been seized and burned, some have been re-taken by the authorities.  Law and order have broken down and groups of thugs are controlling the streets in many locations.  There are reports of organized armed groups engaging in firefights with police, security, and military forces.  One source reports that Kazakh Airborne Forces are also engaged.  There are also reports of Takfiri elements using these riots (officially triggered by an increase in the cost of gas).

Official sources report 8 dead and 317 wounded among the police forces.  The authorities lost control over several cities (including Alma-Ata) and 3 airports (part of which were torched). Astana and Pavlodar remain under the control of authorities.

President Tokaev has mentioned that he might request the assistance of the Collective Security Treaty Organization.  So far the offices of the CSTO say that they have received no such official request.

Martial law has been decreed for the entire country.

These events are a direct threat to both Russia and China.  Turkey seems to be pushing its pan-Turkic agenda.  The CIA supported Uighur Takfiris also seemed to be involved.  This is all taken straight out of the CIA playbook: Twitter, Telegram channels (including NEXTA), Soros-funded organizations, etc. are all deeply involved (including Ukie PSYOPs units).

It is absolutely crucial for the Kazakh authorities to restore law and order ASAP.  Will they have the needed resolve and resources? I don’t know.  Opinions?

Kind regards

Andrei

UPDATE: it appears that President Tokaev has claimed that his country was under foreign intervention and has requested the aid of the CSTO.  You can click here for machine-translated news from Sputnik Kazakstan.

Sitrep: Kazakhstan

January 05, 2022

This is a machine translation from https://vz.ru/world/2022/1/5/1137412.html

Original text by Andrey Rezchikov

Note:  Kindly use this thread for dissemination of information as well, as we have done before with crises such as this.

Paid conspirators found behind riots in Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan, mass protests provoked by a sharp increase in gas prices do not subside. Protesters in Alama Ata attack the police, smash and seize administrative buildings. A state of emergency has been introduced in several regions, including the capital Nur-Sultan. What is the peculiarity of the local protest and how serious is the threat of the “color revolution”?

Mass protests that broke out earlier this year in the Mangistau region on the border with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan resumed with renewed vigor in Kazakhstan on Wednesday. The reason was a 100% increase in gas prices for drivers in several regions – from 60 to 120 tenge (up to 20.56 rubles) per liter. The unrest spread to other neighboring regions. In addition to social justice, the protesters demanded the resignation from politics of the first president of the republic, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is officially assigned the status of Elbasy-the national leader and whose name is the capital of the country.

In the middle of the day, protesters broke into the city hall in Alma-Ata, the southern capital, where cars burned all night and Rosgvardiya employees sprayed tear gas. On the first two floors of the building, a fire broke out, automatic bursts were heard. Law enforcement officers used special equipment. It was also reported about the seizure of military special equipment, which the authorities had previously pulled into the city center. Later, there was information about the arson of the local prosecutor’s office building and the storming of the presidential residence. Hundreds of people applied to the city’s hospitals for medical assistance. As reported byTASS with reference to the local information department of public health of the city, more than a hundred law enforcement officers were among the victims.

A similar scenario was followed in Aktobe, where the Mayor’s Office (akimat) building was also seized by protesters. Attempts to storm akimats were made in Shymkent and Taraz.

President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has declared a state of emergency in Nur-Sultan, Almaty, Almaty and Mangistau regions until January 19. The state of emergency involves a curfew from 23.00 to 7.00. In these regions, entry and movement within them are restricted. The Internet temporarily stopped working across the country. Additionally, a ban on mass events and strikes has been introduced, as well as the seizure of weapons and ammunition from the population. The decree of the head of state states that the state of emergency is introduced to ensure public safety, restore law and order, and protect the rights and freedoms of citizens.

In addition, Tokayev dismissed the government, which, according to him, is “particularly guilty” for allowing a protest situation in connection with the increase in prices for liquefied gas. Ministers continue to serve in office until a new Cabinet is appointed. At the same time, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Antimonopoly Agency were instructed to investigate possible price collusion. In addition, the President conducted state regulation of prices for gas and gasoline and socially significant products for a period of 180 days. The implementation of the fuel e-commerce program has been postponed for a year.

Later in the evening, Tokayev promised to stay in the capital and act”as harshly as possible against offenders during the protests.” Tokayev noted that he will soon come out with a new package of proposals. He also said that during the confrontations in the country, law enforcement officers were killed. According to him, “financially motivated conspirators” are behind the riots.

“Attention is drawn to the high organization of hooliganism elements. This indicates a carefully thought-out plan of action of the conspirators, who are financially motivated. It is the conspirators”,

 

– said President Tokayev.

Experts believe that a sharp jump in fuel prices was one of the reasons for the beginning of the riots. In general, people have long been dissatisfied with the social policy of the state and the sharp stratification of income between different regions. “The government’s rating is 23%, and in 2017 it was 63%. This is an indicator of inability to work. Such a disapproval rating sooner or later leads to something, ” says Kazakh political analyst Marat Shibutov.

The riots that broke out do not look “spontaneous enough” and could have been organized by someone, the expert suggested. However, whether there were organizers, “the investigation will show.” According to Strana, the protests are being coordinated by opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov from his headquarters in Kiev. In the 1990s, he was the Minister of Energy and Trade of Kazakhstan, but went into opposition after a conflict with Nazarbayev. On his Facebook page, Ablyazov, who founded the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan movement in 2017, called on the protesters to “coordinate actions” and gave their Ukrainian phone numbers for communication.

“On the other hand, we do not see the core of the protest and the issued demands. In other words, there is virtually no one to conduct a dialogue with. So far, there are only mass riots, not rallies. Therefore, only the power measures that are currently being implemented remain, ” Shibutov adds.

However, on Wednesday, the akim (head of administration) Kostanay Kairat Akhmetov went out to the townspeople to listen to their demands. The protesters told him that people were tired of the difficult economic situation in the country.

Shibutov stressed that clashes occur mainly in Alma-Ata and Aktau, so there is no need to talk about the risk of a “color revolution”. “There is no threat of overthrowing the government, there is a threat of pressure through riots. There are no external stakeholders involved. On the contrary, the countries that invested in Kazakhstan may demand stabilization of the situation and their participation in it, ” the expert suggested.

Russia is ready to provide non-military assistance to Kazakhstan, First Deputy Head of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council Vladimir Dzhabarov told Interfax. However, the senator believes in the ability of local authorities to handle the situation on their own. “They are actively working to relieve tension in society,” Jabarov said.

According to Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Kazakhstan has not yet addressed Moscow. But the Kremlin believes that the country’s authorities will cope with internal problems on their own, and interference from outside is unacceptable.

From an economic point of view, Shibutov explained, the local authorities made a mistake, because in many regions of the country the price of gas for motor vehicles increased gradually.

“A sharp increase in prices was stupid from a technical point of view, but from an economic point of view it was justified, because gas prices are rising. The difference between the domestic and export prices has increased almost five to six times. Here, of course, we had to raise domestic prices, because gas was sold below the cost price, ” the expert stressed.

As Stanislav Pritchin, a senior researcher at the IMEMO RAS Center for Post-Soviet Studies, explained, there are only four refineries in the country, but due to territorial peculiarities, the supply of fuel and lubricants is uneven. As a result, the quality of products and their price are different in each region. “It is difficult to say what was the logic behind the doubling of gas prices, but the fact that the first protests took place in Mangystau region is not accidental, because this is the most active region in political and rally terms. But in general, there is a demand for social justice in the country. Kazakhstan is one of the leaders of the post-Soviet space in terms of development, with oil production approaching 100 million tons per year. But the success model is limited to a narrow group of people who are close to the authorities, the main recipients of funds are Nur-Sultan and Alma-Ata, ” says Pritchin.

The rest of Kazakhstan, the political scientist added, “has an internal protest.” Discontent is caused by low salaries and the level of infrastructure development. The officially issued image does not correspond to the real one. “The demand for social justice has resulted in mass protests,” the source said.

According to the expert, in Alma-Ata, the protest leaders, who initially articulated requests from the street, lost control of the situation, and the seizure of administrative buildings began.

“The protest goes beyond that and looks like a violent seizure of power and looting. In such conditions, it is difficult to conduct a dialogue and negotiate”,

Pritchin is convinced.

As for the prospects for the development of the situation, it is necessary to take into account local specifics. Kazakhstan is the tenth largest country in the world by area, and the population is less than 20 million people. That is why the protests are local in nature. In 2011, strikes of oil workers and mass riots due to social inequality in Zhanaozen, Mangystau region, did not spread to other regions. “Cities are separated by thousands of kilometers. Accordingly, if the protesters can take control of the administration in a certain city, it will be half a victory. All political institutions are concentrated in Nur-Sultan, and there it is not so easy to gather a crowd that could seize state institutions, ” Pritchin is sure.

---

It is interesting to note the demands of the protestors.

Demands of the Protesters in #Kazakhstan

1. Immediate release of all political prisoners

2. Full resignation of president and government

3. Political reforms:
Creation of a Provisional Government of reputable and public citizens. Withdrawal from all alliances with #Russia pic.twitter.com/wNAi47Mspg

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 5, 2022

Ambassadors “Persona Non-Grata”: Turkey’s National Interests, Foreign Policy or Political Considerations?

Source: Al Mayadeen

26 OCTOBER 2021

Ruqiya Anwar

Turkish businessman Kavala has been in prison for four years for his suspected role in the Gezi Park protests and his involvement in a failed coup attempt in 2016.

Osman Kavala

This research note discusses that the Turkish businessman Kavala has been in prison for four years for his suspected role in the Gezi Park protests and his involvement in a failed coup attempt in 2016. Kavala is one of Turkey’s most well-known civil society figures. Since the early 1980s, the billionaire has helped to establish multiple publishing enterprises in Turkey, and a decade later, he has supported numerous civil society organizations. 

Osman Kavala was one of Turkey’s most prominent activists. He has been held in pre-trial imprisonment in Silivri Prison since October 2017. Authorities in Turkey accuse him of initiating the Gezi Park demonstrations in 2013.

Significantly, President Erdogan has accused him of being the Turkish leg of billionaire US philanthropist George Soros, whom he claims is behind insurgencies in several nations. He has been held in detention pending the outcome of his latest trial, and he has rejected the charges. 

Whereas, the indictment of September 2020, according to Kavala’s lawyers, was nothing more than a presumed fantasy based on no real evidence. Human rights organizations around the world have slammed Kavala’s arrest, claiming the charges are politically motivated. Additionally, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Kavala’s arrest was politically motivated and it was carried out with the goal of “bringing other human rights defenders, to the political prisoners.” (DW, 2021).

Following a similar line, the Council of Europe has given a warning to Turkey to comply with a European Court of Human Rights ruling to free Kavala pending trial, which was issued in 2019. Otherwise, it will file an infringement complaint against Turkey.

The ambassadors of the ten nations issued a unified statement urging Turkey to abide by the Council of Europe’s judgments. Germany, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States all requested a “fair and swift” settlement to Kavala’s case (DW, 2021).

They further stressed, “The ongoing delays in Kaval’s trial, which include the merging of many cases and the establishment of new ones following a prior acquittal, throw a pall over Turkish court respect for democracy, the rule of law, and transparency. In light of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment, they requested Turkey to release it as soon as possible. These ambassadors  demanded a fair and expeditious settlement to his case under Turkey’s international responsibilities and domestic legislation.”

Most importantly, Kavala who has been imprisoned since 2017, has been frequently demanded their release by international observers and human rights organizations. They claim that the detention is due to political concerns. While the officials deny the allegations and maintain that Turkish courts are independent.

While the Turkish government views the ambassadors’ declaration as direct involvement in domestic politics. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the diplomats’ behavior and threatened to expel them from the country. In an intensifying disagreement with the countries, who intervened in the case of a detained businessman by demanding his release.

After their statement demanding the release of Osman Kavala, President Erdogan authorized the Turkish foreign minister to proclaim the ambassadors of ten nations to Turkey “persona non grata”. Notably, when a diplomat is declared persona non grata, they are banned in their host country and they are now just one step away from expulsion.

In a speech, Erdogan remarked, “I have directed our foreign minister to expedite the declaration of these ten ambassadors,” These ten ambassadors must be declared persona non grata. They will be familiar with and understand Turkey”. He went on to say that these ambassadors would not release “terrorists” in their nations if they did not know and understand them (Arab News, 2021).

For this reason, tensions between Ankara and the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and New Zealand soared over  Turkey’s president proclaimed the envoys “persona non grata.”

Moreover, the ambassadors had been instructed to “keep within the responsibilities of their duties after an insincere and double-standard approach and It was highlighted in our constitution that Turkey is a democratic state of law that protects human rights, and it was reminded that such reckless utterances would not affect the Turkish court”.

The government further noted that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments are frequently disregarded and not followed, claiming that focusing solely on Turkish cases to keep the Kavala case on the table at all times is ineffective (DW, 2021).

Whereas, former Turkish ambassador to Azerbaijan and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, Alper Coskun, tweeted, “Expelling ambassadors is not a good strategy to protect national interests. Turkey’s isolation has been exacerbated by its rash foreign policy aimed at domestic politics” (Arab News, 2021).The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Turkey’s Planned Expulsion Of 10 Western Ambassadors Is A Huge Diplomatic Move

25 OCTOBER 2021

By Andrew Korybko

American political analyst

Simply denouncing them but declining to take any tangible action would have made President Erdogan look weak in everyone’s eyes unless they recanted their joint statement and apologized. He couldn’t afford to do that even though he must also have expected that Western pressure against him personally and his country more broadly will soon intensify as a result.

Turkish President Erdogan announced over the weekend that he instructed his Foreign Minister to declare 10 Western ambassadors persona non grata after they meddled in his country’s foreign affairs by releasing a joint statement demanding the release of a jailed businessman who they consider to be a “political prisoner”. This is a huge diplomatic move that will reverberate for some time to come. It shows that Turkey has zero tolerance for such high-profile foreign meddling and is ready to accept the potential political consequences for expelling the Canadian, Danish, Dutch, Finish, French, German, New Zealander, Norwegian, Swedish, and US Ambassadors.

Those diplomats must have predicted that the Turkish President would react in a similar way to how he ultimately did. This implies that they planned their joint statement as a political provocation intended to catalyze a self-sustaining cycle of escalations between their countries and Turkey. The purpose of doing so is to prompt the pretext for intensifying their information warfare against him and potentially threatening sanctions, whether on that basis or a different one.

Those diplomats’ countries probably also wanted to manipulate their people’s perceptions about Turkey by making it seem like it’s “anti-Western” and “despotic”. The planned expulsion of so many ambassadors of such influential countries will certainly provoke a diplomatic crisis. It’ll likely generate incredibly hostile coverage by the Western Mainstream Media too. In other words, all of this is part of the US-led Hybrid War on Turkey which aims to punish the country for its increasingly independent foreign policy in recent years.

From the Turkish perspective, it’s unacceptable to let those diplomats meddle in such a blatant way, especially regarding a jailed figure who they consider to be a “political prisoner”. Simply denouncing them but declining to take any tangible action would have made President Erdogan look weak in everyone’s eyes unless they recanted their joint statement and apologized. He couldn’t afford to do that even though he must also have expected that Western pressure against him personally and his country more broadly will soon intensify as a result.

From a larger viewpoint, Turkey is setting an example for other non-Western nations to follow. Not all of them are as confident as that country is nor might they have the “Democratic Security” capabilities to adequately defend themselves from the predicted intensification of US-led Hybrid Wars against them under such pretexts, but they might still be inspired by this huge diplomatic move. After all, a pivotal pillar of Turkish foreign policy is to present itself as a model for others to emulate, especially in the Global South and most recently in Africa.

Looking forward, Turkish-Western relations will likely continue to deteriorate. There’s a chance that the ambassadors who Turkey plans to expel might eventually return or be replaced after some time, but that probably won’t happen in the near future if the country does indeed go through with what its leader just threatened. The overall impact of this trend will be to accelerate Turkey’s proactive engagement with its new non-Western partners, with a priority given to Russia and China.

That development could be manipulated through information warfare means to reinforce the false narrative that Turkey is “anti-Western” even though it would just be pragmatically reacting to Western political provocations. Nevertheless, closer Turkish ties with Russia and China could fuel the intensification of the US-led Hybrid War against it through geopolitical fearmongering about that country’s grand strategic intentions. For this reason, Ankara must brace itself for myriad destabilization attempts ahead of the summer 2023 elections.

It’s impossible to predict the exact forms that they could take at this moment, but they’ll likely be comprehensive and thus involve economic, information, political, and perhaps even security plots. President Erdogan is increasingly portrayed by the Western Mainstream Media as a so-called “rogue” leader, the misleading perception of which will be exploited to intensify the US-led Hybrid War. He’s unlikely to capitulate to their political demands related to his foreign policy but he’s likely still interested in bargaining with them.

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OCTOBER 26, 2021

From Bonnie Faulkner at Guns and Butter with Guest Andrei Martyanov

The Transcaucasia region, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea is discussed; Baku, capitol of Azerbaijan, oil region and birthplace of Andrei Martyanov; Nagorno-Karabakh, semi-autonomous region within Azerbaijan; political and ethnic dynamics of the Azeri/Armenian conflict; two wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan; Armenia’s Velvet Revolution; Soros sponsored NGOs in Armenia; Turkey’s involvement; Dashnaks; Armenian diaspora; second largest US embassy in Yerevan; Caucasus strategic geopolitical location spanning Europe and Asia; US recognition of WWI Armenian genocide; Russian Federation involvement; largest US export is dollar inflation; Russophobia; MAKS 2021 Russian Air Show, international exhibition of new civilian and military aircraft. Visit Martyanov’s website at: smoothiex12.blogspot.com/.

Guns and Butter · The Caucasus Conflict and Global Trends – Andrei Martyanov, #435

الخاسرون في بحر الشام ينحرون خليفتهم في أنقرة

25.10,2021

 محمد صادق الحسيني

قرن من الحروب الفاشلة بكلّ مآسيها يقترب من محطته الأخيرة من النقطة التي انطلق منها بمعادلاته الظالمة!

كان ذلك مع نهاية الحرب الكونية الأولى، ثم تبعتها الحرب الكونية الثانية والطغاة لم يتعلموا الدرس.

إنها أقرب ما تكون إلى الحرب العالمية الثالثة تلك التي أعلن عنها الغرب بقيادة الولايات المتحدة الأميركية ضد كل العالم الآخر في عام 2001 على خلفية سيناريو مهاجمة البرجين في ما سُمّي وقتها بأحداث سبتمبر/ أيلول، والتي وظفت في غزو أفغانستان ثم العراق ثم سورية وها هي تقترب من نهاياتها مع بدء موسم دفع الأثمان من قبل الخاسرين!

 آخر مشاهد المنكسرين الذين هزموا في تلك الحرب والذين بات عليهم دفع ثمن خسارتهم لها هي تركيا بقيادة أردوغان.

فأردوغان الذي تمّ تسليمه حكم تركيا في عام 2003 في ترتيب مع قيادات حكومة العالم الخفية وبشكل أكثر تحديداً مع واحد من أبرز رموز الماسونية العالمية جورج سوروس، ها هو يقترب من خط دفاعه الأخير كما فعل هتلر في برلين ليترك المسرح لآخرين في عام 1923 مع استحقاق الانتخابات الرئاسية التي يقول كثيرون إنه قد لا يدركها إما بسبب موته بالسرطان أو قتلاً أو بانقلاب عسكري جديد..!

هذا الكابوس الذي يعيشه ويدركه أردوغان جيداً هو الذي دفعه أخيراً لتصعيد استفزازه للجميع بمن فيهم واشنطن ومعها 9 دول أوروبية على خلفية مطالبتهم إياه بإطلاق سراح المعارض التركي المعتقل رجل الأعمال «المدني» العميل بربطة عنق أنيقة.

دفاع الغرب المستميت في إطار حملة دولية شرسة عن عثمان كافالا هذا، مقابل حنق أردوغان وغضبه من شركائه في الناتو الذين يريدونه مغادرة المسرح كجزء من أثمان خسارتهم للحرب العالمية ستكون هي المحطة الأكثر حماسة للمتابعة في سيناريو انسحاب الغرب من بلادنا وانتقال مركز ثقل العالم من الغرب إلى الشرق!

اللافت في استنفار أردوغان تجاه عميل الغرب عثمان كافالا المتهم بارتباطه الوثيق مع الغرب ومع جورج سوروس، هو أنّ معلمهما واحد، وأنّ ما يحصل اليوم من انقلاب السفارات ضده ومن نزاع داخلي بينه وبين سائر رجال الغرب الذين قرر حبسهم بذريعة التآمر عليه إنما هو تبلور للمثل القائل :

النار تأكل بعضها إن لم تجد ما تأكله.

أردوغان تربع على عرش السلطة في أنقرة بالتوازي مع موجة صعود الفاشية العالمية الجديدة، فحاول أن يبلور مشروعه الطموح باستعادة ما خسرته الدولة العثمانية في اتفاقية لوزان في تموز 1923، ليكون خليفة لعثمانية جديدة بلباس طوراني متجدد..!

لم يحالفه الحظ في مشروعه الإمبراطوري، وها هي أحلامه تغور عميقاً في مياه بحر الشام (المتوسط)، ولم يسعفه في ذلك كلّ إقداماته المغامرة، منذ مقامرته الأولى في بحر الشام ومن ثم العراق ومرة من الباب الليبي الذي خلع عنه لصالح الإيطاليين في تلك الاتفاقية، وأخرى من باب تحشيد قومي ضد اليونان التي تنفّست من خلال قبرص الهدية البريطانية لها، ولا أخيراً تجاه عودة الشيخ إلى صباه من باب آسيا الوسطى والقوقاز!

آخر ما تبقى له هو الظهور بمظهر المسكين المعتدى عليه من خلال مزاعم الكراهية ضدّ الأتراك في أوروبا على الرغم من أنّ كلّ الدراسات تفيد بأنّ الأكثر مظلومية في هذا السياق هم الشعب الأرمني الشقيق ومن ثم السوريون واليونانيون.

لا يختلف اثنان الآن في أنّ ما يعاني منه أردوغان المتقهقر داخلياً وإقليمياً ودولياً، إنما هو وقوعه تحت وطأة ضرورة دفع الثمن غالياً من جيب الدولة التركية مع تفاقم منحنى الهبوط المدوي لليرة التركية.

والمعروف لكلّ المتبحّرين بالشأن التركي بأنّ البنية التجارية والصناعية التركية التي بين يديه أنما هي من فعل استثمارات عالمية، أميركية في الغالب، بنسب تتراوح بين 60 الى 70 في المئة، يقترب الغرب حالياً من اتخاذ قراره النهائي بسحب هذه التغطية عنها بعد فشل حصانه التركي في مهمة حارس مرمى الناتو الجنوبي أو المخلب الذي راهنوا عليه طوال العقدين الماضيين.

إنها ساعة الحساب القاسية التي يحاول أردوغان أن يوقف دورانها يائساً، فتراه يتخبّط يميناً وشمالاً لعلّ الدهر العاثر يفتح له ثغرة في جدار الكراهية الذي بناه بنفسه بينه وبين شعبه وبينه وبين كل شعوب المنطقة!

لكن الأهم من أردوغان هو أنّ أرباب البيت الغربي برمته الذي حاول ملّاكه وأسياد أردوغان أن يسمّوا القرن الواحد والعشرين باسمهم، هم الآن بصدد كتابة الفصل الأخير من خسارتهم للحرب الكبرى، فتراهم يمضون قدماً في تخبّطهم على غير هدىً بل ببصيرة عمياء.

إنها السنن الكونية التي لا تقبل التبدّل على رغم تغيّر الأحوال والحالات وتنوّعها!

يهلك ملوكاً ويستخلف آخرين.

بعدنا طيبين قولوا الله…

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