Lot’s of good stuff to share with you today. So let’s begin
First, the misunderstandings resulting from an absolutely terrible public information policy explaining the reality of what is being negotiated between the Ukraine and Russia has resulted in a massive “NIET!” from the Russian public opinion. There is a Russian saying “нет худа без добра” which can roughly be translated as “even a bad situation can have a silver lining”, in this case, the truly tremendous pressure put upon the Kremlin has resulted in a lot of damage control which, in turn, has strengthened the position of those who want to prosecute this war till its end and weakened those who dream about some kind of Minsk 3.0.
Second, General Shamanov, the former commander of the operation in Chechnia, Hero of Russia and Duma member has announced that Russian special forces have successfully snatched away the two Ukronazi soldiers which filmed themselves torturing Russian prisoners. Yes, that is only two out of many thousands, but this still sends a chilling message to the Nazis. The Russians have also publicly shown the photos and name of the Ukronazi who stuck a bayonet into a Russian POW eye to kill him. Here I want to remind everybody that the Russians ended up killing almost all the Wahabi terrorists which ruled over Chechnia during the civil war. It is now clear that the Russians will summarily execute any Nazis they find unless they present a public interest, in which case they will send in their special forces to capture them and judge them, à la Eichmann. Finally, some will simply be executed where found. Either way, the message here is clear: “we will not forget or forgive, we are coming for you“. God willing, this message will save the lives and limbs of the Russian POW currently held in Nazi captivity.
Fourth, maps. Here are two maps showing the exact same thing:
Remember the Russian “gesture of good will”? The idea was that Russia would dramatically DECREASE her combat activities around Kiev and Chernigov?
Okay, now read Ritter above and please understand that Russia had no intention of occupying either city or, at least, no intention of taking the city in street-to-street fighting.
Both Kiev and Chernikov are blocked, but evacuation corridors are opened on a regular basis, utilities all work and besides Ukie hallucinations about Russian reconnaissance-diversionary groups all over the city resulting in innumerable cases of Ukies security forces shooting each other, no Russians are to be found inside these cities. In fact, the point for the Russians is not to take Kiev or Chernigov, but only to prevent the Ukronazi forces from using these cities to resupply, rotate, reinforce or otherwise support other Nazi forces. Which ones? We will come to that in a second.
Here is the 2nd map I would like you to take a look at:
This maps shows the same area, but from a wider perspective. The most important thing here is that Mariupol has now been taken, at least from a purely military point of view. There STILL is an ongoing “mopping up” operation in and around the Azovstal industrial facilities, but this operation is executed by the Russian National Guard and not the military. So look at the 2nd map. What you will see is that forces from the north and the south are now moving to encircle the large Ukronazi force, which has already been cauldroned-off (see first map) into an even bigger cauldron.
So translated from diplomatese into plain English “we will dramatically reduce our military operations around Kiev and Chernigov as a sign of good will” would be “we are liberating a large force to go and finish off the Ukrainian military in the Donbass“.
Hopefully, this explanation will reassure those who assumed that what the Russians offered was a ceasefire. It was not. It was ONLY a REDUCTION of military activities around two cities which the Russians never planned to invade in the first place.
You might wonder what the Eurolemmings are up to these days. Simple! They are still waging a glorious and heroic battle against the letter “Z”: “Samsung drops letter ‘Z’ after Ukraine’s request“. This just makes me wonder what these hate-filled infantiles will come up next…
The hyena of Europe smells blood
As for our Polak friends, they have just made russophobia “mainstream”. What a surprise! Who would have ever thought…. They are also planning to attack, sorry, liberate the western Ukraine as soon as it looks like a safe thing to do, with minimal risk and maximal pomp.
Will they do it?
It all depends on one thing: will the Kremlin be able to convince them that Russia means business and that, if needed, Iskanders can also be landed on the other side of the Polish-Ukrainian border.
When I look at freaks like Morawiecki, Duda or Sksipchak, I see the, shall we call it, “more extreme version” of the garden variety hate-filled infantiles I see in most European capitals. That such people expect anybody to treat them with sincere respect absolutely amazes me.
Speaking of hating Russia, I want to share with you an example of the kind of things which now have been canceled by the Empire of Lies:
The Beast woke up in pitch darkness And the price was named to God. Everybody has caved in – even our brothers in Christ, Everything has caved in – but not my country. (translated lyrics from the song “Donbass is with us”)
First, the official version
First, here is a machine translated summary of events following one month of combat operations as posted by Boris Rozhin (aka Col. Cassad):
1. The offensive of the Russian troops disrupted the plans of the AFU offensive on the DPR and LPR using artillery, missile systems and aviation.
2. On January 22, Russian intelligence intercepted the order of General Balan on the need to complete preparations for offensive actions before February 28, so that the AFU could go on the offensive in March.
3. The operation is progressing according to plan. The main tasks of the first stage of the operation have already been completed.
4. The main priority remains the preservation of civilian lives. Hence the tactics of precision strikes on the military infrastructure and the armed forces of the enemy.
5. The blocking of large cities ensures the shackling of the AFU forces and does not allow the Ukrainian command to transfer reinforcements to the Donbass. The main operation at the moment is in the Donbas. 276 settlements have already been liberated in the DPR and LPR. 93% of the territory of the LPR and 54% of the territory of the DPR have been liberated. The group currently defending in Mariupol has more than 7,000 people.
6. Air supremacy was won by the Russian Aerospace Forces in the first two days of the operation. The organized air defense system, the Ukrainian Air Force and the Ukrainian Navy have virtually ceased to exist.
7. Up to 70% of all military stocks of Ukraine were destroyed as a result of systematic attacks on warehouses. 30 key facilities of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine were destroyed. 68% of enterprises where military equipment was repaired have already been destroyed. At the same time, since the beginning of the Special Military Operation, the Ukrainian army has already destroyed 127 bridges.
8. All the organized reserves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have already been put into operation, there are no new ones. Hence the bet on the mobilization of the untrained contingent. According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, 6595 foreign mercenaries are fighting in Ukraine.
9. Total losses of the AFU during the month of operation. About 14,000 killed and about 16,000 wounded (the total losses of the AFU group in the Donbas account for 26% of the personnel). Of the 2,416 combat-ready tanks and Armored Fighting Vehicles on February 24, 1,587 were destroyed in a month. 112 out of 152 military aircraft were destroyed, 75 out of 149 helicopters, 35 out of 36 Bayraktar TB2 drones were destroyed. Out of 180 S-300 and Buk M1 – 148, out of 300 radars for various purposes – 117. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation will promptly respond to any attempts to close the airspace of Ukraine for the Russian Aerospace Forces.
10. According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, at least 10 Ukrainian sea mines are now drifting uncontrollably in the Black Sea, posing a threat to navigation.
11. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation handed over captured weapons to the DPR and LPR. Among other things, 113 tanks and 138 ATGM “Javelin” were transferred. More than 23,000 applications have been received from citizens of 37 states wishing to fight for the DPR and LPR. There are also a lot of such applications from Russian citizens.
12. Official losses since the beginning of ITS. Killed – 1351. Wounded – 3825.
This above is very much the official version according to the Kremlin, so we might as well add the official Kremlin map while we are at it:
This very official map shows the parts of the Ukraine which Russia/LDNR officially control. Not only that, but it does not show which parts of the Ukrainian territory are not under real Russian/LDNR control, but which are under Russian/LDNR fire control. For both of these reasons this map very much UNDER-states the reality on the ground.
Here is another map which shows some of what the Kremlin does not want to confirm:
But what does all this really mean?
I find these maps moderately useful, they show us a general tendency, but they don’t really tell the full story. As for the briefings by the Russian military, they are not very helpful since they list numbers which are not really meaningful for most people and, worse, the same event X in location A would have a totally different meaning in location B.
Of course, Russia has her own official narrative: “ours is a counterforce operation, as a rule we bypass Nazi held cities, block them, open humanitarian corridors when possible and offer the civilians to evacuate and the Ukrainian soldiers a chance to lay down arms and avoid needless casualties“. And its all true, but there is a lot this narrative does not tell.
So let’s try to try to make some sense of all this
First, the good. It took the Russians just a few hours to breakup the united Ukrainian armed forces into many smaller chunks. This was achieved by basically taking out Ukie command and control capabilities.
Then, rather quickly, the Russian invaded from several directions, quickly bypassed the fortified Ukrainian defenses, blocked the units which refused to surrender and when further. As a result, cities such as Kharkov or Sumy found themselves deep inside the Russian rear, unable to be resupplied and no hope to evacuate. In a few special cases the order was given to gradually tighten the noose around Nazi concentrations while liberating the civilians neighborhoods, this is what is going in Mariupol.
Check out this fresh map from a correspondent, Konstantin Pegov, inside Mariupol
Sorry about the ugly “War Gonzo” watermark, this is Pegov’s way to get the credit.
Okay, so, the red zone is under Russian/LDNR control. The blue zone is considered lost to the Nazis, but not cleared yet, meaning that a slow building by building, apartment by apartment, mopping up operation has to be conducted before this zone becomes red too. Finally, the yellow zone is under the control of the notorious “Azov” Nazi battalion. Before I continue, a need to clarify one thing.
There were three locations in which the Nazis decided to place their very best forces before the Russian attack:
Facing the LOC in the LDNR, about 60-80-100(?) thousand best trained men, ready for a Blitzkrieg-style attack on the LDNR. This is the fighting core of the Ukrainian armed forces. They are composed of a number of brigades, and in each brigade there is a Nazi battalion (roughly) ready to execute any unit or commander willing to surrender, retreat or even negotiate.
Mariupol: a thoroughly pro-Russian city which was therefore handed by the Kiev regime to the tender care of the main Nazi force in the Ukraine: the Azov battalion. Please note that officially, all the Nazi battalions are part of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the locals always know who is who, as do the Russians. Mariupol is not only a strategic city but also a “sacred symbol of the heroic Ukrainian resistance”. More or less what the Donetsk airport was in the previous war. And, just to make things harder, the Nazis are based inside a huge and very strong industrial complex called “Azovstal”. There is a deluge of testimonies that the Nazis are using civilians as human shields. This is a true Nazi hellhole that had to be taken the hard way.
Kiev. Another special case, not only is it a large, multi-million inhabitants city, it is also the official center of power and capital of the Nazi regime. Kiev is very heavily fortified, the bridges over water have been blown up, and to liberate the city would require a major effort, especially if the Russians try to minimize the civilian casualties and to avoid destroying the civilian infrastructure.
Maps don’t really tell that story, hence they often appear not to make sense. In fact, they do, but to distinguish their real meaning, one needs to look deep into the micro-level and understand how all the different points on the map interact with each other (or not anymore!) or influence the outcomes elsewhere.
So what happens today around Mariupol is HUGELY important, but what happens in, say, Kharkov totally pales in comparison (unless you are in Kharkov, in which case the opposite is true).
I would like to add one more clarification here about the Chechen special forces.
In reality, there are no “Chechen special forces”, but a rather diverse lot of various Chechen forces which all come under the command of the Russian National Guard. This is important, because while these Chechen forces can, and have, participated in regular combat operations, the really crucial task is the mopping-up of urban areas, like the blue area in the Mariupol map above. Not only are the Chechens not sufficiently armed to conduct artillery duels or tank battles, but they are also trained in anti-terrorist and police operations, as is the entire Russian National Guard. These Chechen urban assault groups obviously interface with the Russian forces blocking the town or city the National Guard is tasked with securing and policing. Once that is done, humanitarian aid can come in while those who want can get evacuated.
That has worked pretty well.
But what has not worked at all, at least so far, is the next step: the installation of civilian authorities to restore more or less halfway decent civilian life. And here the Russians really failed to act (until today! see later).
Look at it from the point of view of a civilian in, say, Kharkov. You know that the Russians have bypassed and encircled the city. Maybe Russian forces even passed through your part of town and told you that from now on you were free. But then they all left!!! They went further to push the front even further west or south, which is their only real mission. And a few hours later, the Nazi gangs are right back where you live, and they wonder about you and how you felt about it all. And if the Russians shared some rations with you, you better hide them well, or eat them quickly and deny it all lest you be shot on the spot for “collaboration with the aggressor”.
So what went wrong here?
I will tell you what: in a “normal” war, the frontline units are always followed by 2nd line units whose task is to clear and secure the liberated areas. And I am not talking about a single cop car on patrol, I am talking about entire BRIGADES and DIVISIONS tasked with security in the rear. The truth is that the Russian special operation is NOT a “regular” combined arms offensive and that the force ratios are typically about 1:1 if not worse in favor of the Ukies. Why?
Because, except for a few very embarrassing screw-ups, Russia did not use conscripts. Russia’s war plan was to fight with small numbers of highly trained soldiers and to compensate for this numerical inferiority by having full air supremacy and using advanced standoff weapons.
Yes, even the Chechens who are now fighting in Mariupol (and some near Kiev) are all volunteers, not conscripts.
By the way, there was an initial wave of volunteers in Russia too, the MoD thanked them very much but declined to use them.
Contrast that with the Ukronazis who now only have their regular armed forces (armed to the teeth and trained by the Empire of Lies for 7 years!), they also have the real, pure, Nazi units like the “Azov” in Mariupol, they even have their own Volkssturm, about 200’000 clueless civilians, but all armed with small arms, maybe some machine guns and a few PRGs.
The simple truth is that to disarm such a large number of folks is going to take a long time, be dangerous, and deeply frustrating, even if the actual military threat posed by such armed clowns is zero – they can only threaten unarmed civilians.
By the way – look at the type of weapons the Empire of Lies is pumping into the Ukraine: small arms and ammo, but also short-range anti-tank weapons, explosives, mines, etc – this is all stuff that has almost no utility on the macro-level of this war but with is ideal when you want to create and arm a stay-behind insurgency type of force. I need to explain this a tad further.
NATO stay-behind forces
During the Cold War it was the conventional wisdom that NATO would not have the means to stop the advancing Soviet forces. So NATO came up with two options: one is called FOFA and implies attacks not on the FEBA, but one on the Soviet supply lines. The second concept was the so-called “stay behind forces”. What happened is this: in many/most European countries the US used their close ties with the local intelligence services to create totally illegal armies. Of course, not “real” armies, but a secret network for agents and hardware dumps to become the core of a future resistance against the future Soviet invasion. It was initially all very pious, of course. But when the agents of these secret mini-armies began engaging in false flag attacks (like the Bologna massacre in Italy), and when the local security services got wind of these weird activities, the scandal was hard to hide, and even though the Empire of Lies presstitutes did the all they could NOT to find out who created these terrorist organizations (the US), the scandal still came out. And, of course, the illegal creation of such stay behind sabotage units also involved some very creative accounting, so folks were jailed for corruption, illegal storage of military weapons, etc. etc. etc.
As somebody who was an analyst for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service (SND) I can tell you three things about this phenomenon:
Only fall-guys were punished, the real key figures all got promoted
There was a direct link between these illegal mini-armies and European Neo-Nazis
It was all run by the USA
Since these faraway days, this has all been buried, forgotten, forgiven, denied, obfuscated, declared a “thing of the past”, etc. etc. etc. Truly, nothing whitewashes darkness like the short attention span of the serfs living in Zone A.
But, back to the Ukraine now. See my three points above? I will repeat: the key figures never got punished, there was a clear neo-Nazi ideology in those secret units and the USA ran it all.
Forward to modern-day Ukraine with a simple question: can you guess what NATO is planning for the future Ukraine?
Past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior, is that not true?
Have the Russians made at least one major miscalculation?
In short – yes. Only one, but it was a bad mistake…
I believe that their major mistake was not to bring in new administrations to run the liberated towns and to secure law and order. Clearly, the Russians knew that only a minority (albeit a big one) of Ukrainians was truly brainwashed by the Nazis. But what the Russians failed to realize, is that people who live under 7 or 8 years of Nazi terror need PROTECTION above all. In most blocked towns, the Nazis are still in control, and since the Russians do not attack the civilian infrastructure, the Nazis are the ones in charge of food, electricity, security, etc.
And since the said Nazis know that the locals hate them, this means that the only people being protected, fed, heated or treated are the Nazis themselves, the rest of the population hides in basements and hope that they have enough water and heat to survive until the promised “liberation” applies to them too.
Finally, TODAY, the Kremlin has announced the start of a major program to bring in entire administrations with repair equipment, humanitarian aid and, let’s not kid ourselves, more security forces. Good! Now let’s hope that the Russian civilians, their EMERCOM and the Russian National Guard will finally either get the not-all-too-Nazi authorities to rebrand themselves and behave (unless they personally have committed war crimes, at which point all they will get is an interrogation, possibly a trial, or a bullet on the spot).
This is yet another reason why Mariupol is so important: there are major Russian National Guard forces involved in the mopping up of the last Nazi pockets of resistance there. But as soon as the blue and yellow zones turn red (this could take a while, several days, possibly a week) those National Guard forces will become available to denazify other cities, smaller ones, less well-fortified ones, and with a much smaller Nazi/normal person ratios.
Does the strategy chosen by the Russians make sense?
Only time will show, but I would argue that yes.
I would argue that the first phase of that war lasted about a day or so. That was the phase that turned unitary Ukrainian armed forces into many isolated groups unable to coordinate their actions or support each other in combat.
The second phase of the war lasted about 3 weeks. During that phase, the fronts did advance, the Russians had some successes, but that was not the point. During this phase of the war, the Russians secured air supremacy and then proceeded to methodically do two things:
Very precise counterforce attacks including strikes on defensive positions, moving columns, missile strikes on major force concentrations, etc. etc. etc.
A much less noticed but possibly even more important counter-logistics campaign
So first the Ukies were held incommunicado. Then they were isolated into many smaller groups. Then they were blocked and/or encircled. And now the Russians are basically waiting for the Ukrainians to either 1) surrender or 2) die. And this is important: while there have been numerous Ukrainian attacks and counter-attacks, none of them have had any tactical impact, not even locally. And in the few cases where the Ukrainians did advance, they were mostly destroyed with a combo of artillery and close air support.
Horrible as this may be, but the outcome of this phase depends on the following: which will run out first, the supplies of the Ukrainian forces or the water/heat for the trapped civilians?
If the Ukrainian supplies run out first, we will see a total collapse of the operational cauldron in the Donbass. In this case, it will require a major, huge, Russian humanitarian operation to save all those who are still alive.
If civilians begin to die en masse, the Russians will have no choice but to use their heavy weapons to kill as many Nazis as quickly as possible and then send in relief convoys.
That is the dilemma the Russian General Staff must tackle. I don’t envy them.
Mariupol is a done deal, really.
And since most of the residential areas have been freed, people are being treated and evacuated, there is no time pressure to clear the Nazis out, especially since the Nazis are now basically in one specific industrial area. However, the building by building, apartment by apartment mopping up operation must continue until the Russians are fairly sure that most civilians have been removed from the blue zone. After that, a few well-placed missiles into the Azovstal complex ought to finish off the last remaining Nazis.
So what could the next phase of the war look like?
Take a look at this Readovka map (as of yesterday):
I chose this map because it shows the current “fronts” (the colored squares).
What I added are the following three black areas:
Areas one: central Ukraine including major cities like Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhie, Poltava or Cherkassy. Even Kiev is still connected to that zone (albeit barely).
Area two: Odessa cauldron.
Area three: mini-Banderastan?
Here is the deal, at least as I see it: the Russians cannot deal with these three black zones before they *truly* liberate the red parts of the map. And by “truly” I mean that these regions, towns and cities have to be very substantially (albeit not totally) denazified, a new administration must take over and a semblance of civilization and law and order must be restored.
I also added a red line from roughly Kiev going south and another one, roughly from the south end of the Odessa cauldron in the general direction of Kiev. I made them meet about in the middle. This is purely conceptual. While I am sure that Russian reconnaissance units and Aerospace Forces are present in that area and that the Ukrainians must be trying to hide as best can be, this is NOT land Russia controls or even blocks (too big for that anyway).
You could think of it as a “hotly contested no-man’s land” with fortified areas scattered across it.
For these reasons, I do not currently see the Russians committing major forces towards this move, but as soon as Odessa is not only blocked but fully encircled and the Donbass cauldron collapses, a new major cauldron will form, this time including all the cities I listed above.
Conclusion: time and manpower
Question: why should the Russians choose to go fast? To save the civilians in blocked/encircled towns and cities? Yes, I would agree with that. Except that the Russian armed forces are not in the Ukraine to repair power stations. Which means that a substantial increase in manpower, including many civilians, is the only situation in which speed might be desirable. Like in Mariupol today. Or Kharkov.
But once the red zone is finally truly liberated and the basic signs of civilization return, should the Russians go fast elsewhere? Let’s look at our three black circles again:
Area one, central Ukraine: the Russians have total air superiority, the Nazis have no mobility, tenuous supply routes, and their stores have been depleted by weeks of bombing. I do not see any need for the Russian to hurry into this one, lest it becomes the problems the Russians ALREADY have experienced in their zones of putative “liberation”, scores of dead civilians, and substantial losses. Because no matter how large and populated that zone is, it has no future, it will be surrounded like all the other parts of the Ukraine during phase one of the operation. This also means that a political solution would be INFINITELY preferable to a hard storming of cities like in the first Chechen war.
Area two, Odessa: same deal, Odessa is almost totally blocked and sooner or later the city will be surrounded. It is, alas, quite possible that the city will have to be taken like Mariupol, because of the very same “ingredients”: a generally pro-Russian city run by Nazi thugs whose reign of terror gets worse with every day. I hope and pray that the city surrenders, but I am not holding my breath and IF it has to be taken like Mariupol then, again, by all means, the Russians should go as slow as possible.
Area three, mini-Banderastan: does Russia even need it? Some say that the only way to go is to get the Russian tanks nicely aligned along the Polish border. Other say to forget it, let the local Nazis create their Russenrein Banderastan and have fun. Such a mini Banderastan would be supervised by a Nazi Gauleiter (Polish or Ukie – same difference) on behalf of the USA Heimat and its Eurocolonies. This is really no big deal, because the entire EU has now been turned into a Nazi Reichsgau administrated by the Anglos, and that is the real danger for Russia.
Will the Empire of Lies intervene in the mini-Banderastan?
Yes, absolutely. The question is HOW. The options range from a Polish invasion of the Lvov region (which, after all, is historically Polish!) to the use of this mini-Banderastan the way the US used Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In theory, there could be even a deal made between the US and Russia: the USA take the mini-Banderastan, the central Ukraine is not invaded, but is verifiably disarmed and denazifed, it becomes neutral and gets on probation: “behave or Iskander”. The Odessa region joins the (now much expanded) LDNR, the entire Black Sea coast is liberated (*truly* liberated) and the LDNR then decides of its future by means of referendum.
[Sidebar: to those who say that you cannot verifiably disarm anybody I would reply that this is hogwash: there are many verification and confidence-building measuresa, including remote ones and intrusive, local ones. If that central Ukraine with or without the mini-Banderastan becomes disarmed, it will not be a challenge for the Russians to know what is going on or not. As I mentioned, one option would be to build a special military base to prevent the mini-Banderastan from infecting the rest of the Ukraine. Something like what the 201st Russian base in Tajikistan is currently doing]
But I have to admit that when I hear the verbiage from Zone A, I am not holding my breath. For the Poles, this is a historic opportunity to show their unbelievable military prowess, get some land, a cheap labor force, and the chance to pretend to be a “European leader”. And how different is the rest of Europe? Meh… As we say in Russian, “these folks have all been anointed with the same (Nazi) oil”. So it ain’t the stupid and, frankly, ridiculous Poles the Russians need to “convince”, it is all the NATO and the USA.
I hope that I am wrong, but I do not see any argument which Russia could use to “convince” our wonderful European neighbors than either an Iskander inside a NATO member state (I vote for Poland!) and/or a total disconnection from any Russian energy supplies.
Putin already did the second thing, but elegantly: by forcing payments in Rubles he forces each country in Europe to make its own choice. And those who will pay in Rubles, thereby bypassing THEIR OWN sanctions, won’t volunteer to attack Russia or the Ukraine.
Which leaves those who won’t. They are the ones who are so totally batshit crazy that they rather have their own population and economy suffer from cataclysmic consequences than negotiate *anything* at all with Putin’s Mordor. They are the ones who might need a “little extra argument” possibly in the form of a hypersonic missile.
I am not suggesting bombing Mons or London, not even Warsaw or even a major Polish military base. But something of real value to the Poles and with a minimal amount of victims. Ideally, a location “well-protected” by US air defenses (like the Saudi refineries, if you recall). Just ONE Iskander in the right location, and our western neighbors will tone down their verbiage, by a lot.
[Sidebar: did you know that after the Russian strike on the NATO “volunteers” and “peacekeepers” in eastern Ukraine there is now an OUTFLOW of mercenaries. Gee-whiz – it sure looks to me that the Zone A mercenaries did get a clear message from Russia, now they are running for their lives. Good!]
And here is the key point: the “convincing argument” will not be the landing of a Russian missile in Poland, no.
The real “argument” which might bring them back to reality is the NATO reaction AFTER that strike: a lot of hot air, threats, protests and various troop movements (like that hilarious EU rapid reaction force of 5’000 soldiers) and much more, but not a single Anglo or EU soldier taking the war to Russia! Why?
Because NATO has only two options:
Lose a war against Russia
Not fight that war
Which do you think “Biden”, Johnson or Macron will pick?
Small reminder: “Biden” already deals with major crises with the PRC, with Iran, with the KSA, not to mention the humongous economic crisis looming over the entire planet!
Do you see these leaders of the “indispensable civilization” take the war to the Russians? IF they do, Mons will be next, and they know that.
Which leaves us with the real, true, bona fide, certified demonic agents who are willing to do anything, including 9/11 or MH-17, to try to “cancel Russia”. Right now, that demonic choir is all singing the same tune: Russia is about to commit a chemical attack against innocent Ukrainian civilians.
Will that fly?
You betcha it will!
After Gouta, Skripal, MH-17 and Navalnyi, we know for a fact that most of people in Zone A are what is called shit-eaters (comemierdas) in Spanish: folks who, like baby-chicks in a nest, just can’t wait for mommy and poppy to feed them by puking up some “food” into the wide open mouths. And nevermind that, unlike the USA, Russia has verifiably destroyed all her chemical weapons (as had Syria!), and nevermind that such a terminally stupid atrocity would serve NO Russian interests whatsoever (but then, neither did the self-evident idiocy of the MH-17 narrative prevent the shiteaters to eat it all, and even ask for seconds!).
Right now the Empire of Lies is making noises about IF Russia uses chemical munitions, THEN we will do something totally terrible to Russia, like sending in the Polaks into Lvov under NATO aircover to “save the few remaining survivors” or something equally asinine.
Unless you have been living under a rock, or can only use one synapse at a time, you must at least know that the following are all true:
There is no limit to how evil, depraved and demonic the rulers of the Empire of Lies are.
There is no limit on who ignorant, stupid, gullible, and racist a very substantial portion of the population of Zone A is.
Then there is the bigger picture, the one which really matters:
The Empire of Lies feels that this is the very last chance to survive, they know that if the Russians, the Chinese the Iran and and, really, most of the planet prevails they are finished forever. This assumption is correct.
The goal of the Empire of Lies is to cancel Russia. Completely. This is a truly genocidal plan made stronger by the conviction by the leaders of this Empire that this is the only and last chance to finally find a “Final Solution” to the “Russian problem”.
The reaction of the West (total, terminal, genocidal “cancellation”) of everything Russian stunned most Russians who did know that there was no love lost between Russia and the West, but who were stunned to be singled out for total annihilation is something which 1) all Russians are intimately familiar with and 2) are now fully aware of.
That is why I wrote yesterday that Russia is in FULL WORLD WAR TWO MODE.
This is the kind of music video which now is very popular on the Russian social media:
Bravo leaders of the West, you have FINALLY convinced a majority of Russians that your hatred for us is total, that no matter how ugly, petty and useless, your actions are, you are so overwhelmed with hatred for us that even your serfs VOLUNTARILY engage in numerous acts of anti-Russian racism, discrimination and other expressions of hate.
This anti-Russian hate is so prevalent, that now expressing hatred for Russia and Russians has now become of virtue signaling! Even for musicians, athletes, students and even grade school kids (I personally know cases).
And, guess what? We heard and understood. Millions and millions of us.
Our biggest failure has always been our inability to imagine our enemy’s level of hatred.
Oh, we knew that the 3B+PU base their entire identity and (imagined) history on the hatred of everything and anything Russian. Of course, we knew that the 3B+PU were all artificial creations of the West, but we sort of assumed that their hateful insanity was limited to a few, small, freak countries, but that most “normal” Europeans were not AT ALL like that. Oh no! Eurolemmings are civilized and hate Nazis, right? RIGHT?
And that was stupid on our part: how could the West be any different from the 3B+PU when that same West is the one who created the 3B+PU in the first place!
Then, for 300 years or so we were ruled by a massively westernized class. And after 1917, one massively westernized class replaced another one. WWII opened our eyes to some degree, but by the time Khrushchev and his gang came to power, the West was gradually crushing the CPSU ideologically and, especially, the Soviet Nomenklatura who, I would argue, sold out to the West, as an entire class, between 1980 and 1991, then that self-same Nomenklatura rebranded itself and the nightmare of the 1990s began.
And in the “democratic” 90s, most Russian youth only wanted jeans and hamburgers. But even that exsanguinated, impoverished, and confused Russia was a threat. So the US ordered the Russian Parliament to be shelled by tanks and thousands murdered in the following days. Then came the Chechen war, and the satanic attack on the Serbian nation. And most of us still were dozing off, hoping for a good salary in dollars and many holidays in Antalia.
Crusader or Nazi – same difference
And then came Putin, who not only did a lot of things, he talked to the Russian people, often for hours in a row, convincing, convincing and convincing.
But even Putin, the Eurasian Sovereignists and the 6th columnists together could not achieve what the Empire of Lies finally did: truly and profoundly rekindle the memory of WWII, even amongst the Russian youth. Now instead of jeans, they want to go to the front!
I would call that a “Hezbollah moment”.
And now, we shall never surrender, least of all to a sorry gang of Nazi pigs and Crusaders!
So it is not the Ukraine that we plan to denazify. It’s the planet.
The Empire of Lies gave Russia absolutely no choice.
For eight terrible years Russia had to retreat on all fronts because we needed to develop the military and industrial “toolkit” to take you on frontally.
Now we have.
And, unlike you, we are fully prepared to die, if needed, in defense of our civilizational values, our faiths and our country.
Are you ready to die for your wokeness, diversity and Satan?
I guess that we will soon find out.
Andrei
PS: tomorrow and Sunday I will be on the road, attending my faraway parish, so while my team will run the blog, I don’t expect to have the time to post analyses or even comment until Monday, maybe Tuesday. The text above (over 5’700 words) is, I hope, controversial and relevant enough to keep the blog going until my return.
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.
All eyes are on Mariupol. As of Wednesday night, over 70% of residential areas were under control of Donetsk and Russian forces, while Russian Marines, Donetsk’s 107th batallion and Chechen Spetsnaz, led by the charismatic Adam Delimkhanov, had entered the Azov-Stal plant – the HQ of the neo-Nazi Azov batallion.
Azov was sent a last ultimatum: surrender until midnight – or else, as in a take no prisoners highway to hell.
That implies a major game-changer in the Ukrainian battlefield; Mariupol is finally about to be thoroughly denazified – as the Azov contingent long entrenched in the city and using civilians as human shields were their most hardened fighting force.
Meanwhile, echoes from the Empire of Lies all but gave the whole game away. There’s no intention whatsoever in Washington to facilitate a peace plan in Ukraine – and that explains Comedian Zelensky’s non-stop stalling tactics. The supreme target is regime change in Russia, and for that Totalen Krieg against Russia and all things Russian is warranted. Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.
This also means that the 14,000 deaths in Donbass for the past 8 years should be directly attributed to the Exceptionalists. As for Ukrainian neo-Nazis of all stripes, they are as expendable as “moderate rebels” in Syria, be they al-Qaeda or Daesh-linked. Those that may eventually survive can always join the budding CIA-sponsored Neo-Nazi Inc. – the tawdry remix of the 1980s Jihad Inc. in Afghanistan. They will be properly “Kalibrated”.
A quick neo-Nazi recap
By now only the brain dead across NATOstan – and there are hordes – are not aware of Maidan in 2014. Yet few know that it was then Ukrainian Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov, a former governor of Kharkov, who gave the green light for a 12,000 paramilitary outfit to materialize out of Sect 82 soccer hooligans who supported Dynamo Kiev. That was the birth of the Azov batallion, in May 2014, led by Andriy Biletsky, a.k.a. the White Fuhrer, and former leader of the neo-nazi gang Patriots of Ukraine.
Together with NATO stay-behind agent Dmitro Yarosh, Biletsky founded Pravy Sektor, financed by Ukrainian mafia godfather and Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky (later the benefactor of the meta-conversion of Zelensky from mediocre comedian to mediocre President.)
Pravy Sektor happened to be rabidly anti-EU – tell that to Ursula von der Lugen – and politically obsessed with linking Central Europe and the Baltics in a new, tawdry Intermarium. Crucially, Pravy Sektor and other nazi gangs were duly trained by NATO instructors.
Biletsky and Yarosh are of course disciples of notorious WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for whom pure Ukrainians are proto-Germanic or Scandinavian, and Slavs are untermenschen.
Azov ended up absorbing nearly all neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine and were dispatched to fight against Donbass – with their acolytes making more money than regular soldiers. Biletsky and another neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Petrenko, were elected to the Rada. The White Führer stood on his own. Petrenko decided to support then President Poroshenko. Soon the Azov battalion was incorporated as the Azov Regiment to the Ukrainian National Guard.
They went on a foreign mercenary recruiting drive – with people coming from Western Europe, Scandinavia and even South America.
That was strictly forbidden by the Minsk Agreements guaranteed by France and Germany (and now de facto defunct). Azov set up training camps for teenagers and soon reached 10,000 members. Erik “Blackwater” Prince, in 2020, struck a deal with the Ukrainian military that would enable his renamed outfit, Academi, to supervise Azov.
It was none other than sinister Maidan cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the EU” Nuland who suggested to Zelensky – both of them, by the way, Ukrainian Jews – to appoint avowed Nazi Yarosh as an adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The target: organize a blitzkrieg on Donbass and Crimea – the same blitzkrieg that SVR, Russian foreign intel, concluded would be launched on February 22, thus propelling the launch of Operation Z.
All of the above, in fact just a quick recap, shows that in Ukraine there’s no difference whatsoever between white neo-Nazis and brown-colored al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh, as much as neo-Nazis are just as “Christian” as takfiri Salafi-jihadis are “Muslim”.
When Putin denounced a “bunch of neo-Nazis” in power in Kiev, the Comedian replied that it was impossible because he was Jewish. Nonsense. Zelensky and his patron Kolomoysky, for all practical purposes, are Zio-Nazis.
Even as branches of the United States government admitted to neo-Nazis entrenched in the Kiev apparatus, the Exceptionalist machine made the daily shelling of Donbass for 8 years simply disappear. These thousands of civilian victims never existed.
U.S. mainstream media even ventured the odd piece or report on Azov and Aidar neo-Nazis. But then a neo-Orwellian narrative was set in stone: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. CIA offshoot NED even started deleting records about training members of Aidar. Recently a crappy news network duly promoted a video of a NATO-trained and weaponized Azov commander – complete with Nazi iconography.
Why “denazification” makes sense
The Banderastan ideology harks back to when this part of Ukraine was in fact controlled by the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire and Poland. Stepan Bandera was born in Austro-Hungary in 1909, near Ivano-Frankovsk, in the – then autonomous – Kingdom of Galicia.
WWI dismembered European empires into frequently non-viable small entities. In western Ukraine – an imperial intersection – that inevitably led to the proliferation of extremely intolerant ideologies.
Banderastan ideologues profited from the Nazi arrival in 1941 to try to proclaim an independent territory. But Berlin not only blocked it but sent them to concentration camps. In 1944 though the Nazis changed tactics: they liberated the Banderanistas and manipulated them into anti-Russian hate, thus creating a destabilization force in the Ukrainian USSR.
So Nazism is not exactly the same as Banderastan fanatics: they are in fact competing ideologies. What happened since Maidan is that the CIA kept a laser focus on inciting Russian hatred by whatever fringe groups it could instrumentalize. So Ukraine is not a case of “white nationalism” – to put it mildly – but of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism, for all practical purposes manifested via Nazi-style salutes and Nazi-style symbols.
So when Putin and the Russian leadership refer to Ukrainian Nazism, that may not be 100% correct, conceptually, but it strikes a chord with every Russian.
Russians viscerally reject Nazism – considering that virtually every Russian family has at least one ancestor killed during the Great Patriotic War. From the perspective of wartime psychology, it makes total sense to talk of “Ukro-nazism” or, straight to the point, a “denazification” campaign.
How the Anglos loved the Nazis
The United States government openly cheerleading neo-Nazis in Ukraine is hardly a novelty, considering how it supported Hitler alongside England in 1933 for balance of power reasons.
In 1933, Roosevelt lent Hitler one billion gold dollars while England lent him two billion gold dollars. That should be multiplied 200 times to arrive at today’s fiat dollars. The Anglo-Americans wanted to build up Germany as a bulwark against Russia. In 1941 Roosevelt wrote to Hitler that if he invaded Russia the U.S. would side with Russia, and wrote Stalin that if Stalin invaded Germany the U.S. would back Germany. Talk about a graphic illustration of Mackinderesque balance of power.
The Brits had become very concerned with the rise of Russian power under Stalin while observing that Germany was on its knees with 50% unemployment in 1933, if one counted unregistered itinerant Germans.
Even Lloyd George had misgivings about the Versailles Treaty, unbearably weakening Germany after its surrender in WWI. The purpose of WWI, in Lloyd George’s worldview, was to destroy Russia and Germany together. Germany was threatening England with the Kaiser building a fleet to take over the oceans, while the Tsar was too close to India for comfort. For a while Britannia won – and continued to rule the waves.
Then building up Germany to fight Russia became the number one priority – complete with rewriting of History. The uniting of Austrian Germans and Sudetenland Germans with Germany, for instance, was totally approved by the Brits.
But then came the Polish problem. When Germany invaded Poland, France and Britain stood on the sidelines. That placed Germany on the border of Russia, and Germany and Russia divided up Poland. That’s exactly what Britain and France wanted. Britain and France had promised Poland that they would invade Germany from the west while Poland fought Germany from the east.
In the end, the Poles were double-crossed. Churchill even praised Russia for invading Poland. Hitler was advised by MI6 that England and France would not invade Poland – as part of their plan for a German-Russian war. Hitler had been supported financially since the 1920s by MI6 for his favorable words about England in Mein Kampf. MI6 de facto encouraged Hitler to invade Russia.
Fast forward to 2022, and here we go again – as farce, with the Anglo-Americans “encouraging” Germany under feeble Scholz to put itself back together militarily, with 100 billion euros (that the Germans don’t have), and setting up in thesis a revamped European force to later go to war against Russia.
Cue to the Russophobic hysteria in Anglo-American media about the Russia-China strategic partnership. The mortal Anglo-American fear is Mackinder/Mahan/Spykman/Kissinger/Brzezinski all rolled into one: Russia-China as peer competitor twins take over the Eurasian land mass – the Belt and Road Initiative meets the Greater Eurasia Partnership – and thus rule the planet, with the U.S. relegated to inconsequential island status, as much as the previous “Rule Britannia”.
England, France and later the Americans had prevented it when Germany aspired to do the same, controlling Eurasia side by side with Japan, from the English Channel to the Pacific. Now it’s a completely different ball game.
So Ukraine, with its pathetic neo-Nazi gangs, is just an – expendable – pawn in the desperate drive to stop something that is beyond anathema, from Washington’s perspective: a totally peaceful German-Russian-Chinese New Silk Road.
Russophobia, massively imprinted in the West’s DNA, never really went away. Cultivated by the Brits since Catherine the Great – and then with The Great Game. By the French since Napoleon. By the Germans because the Red Army liberated Berlin. By the Americans because Stalin forced to them the mapping of Europe – and then it went on and on and on throughout the Cold War.
We are at just the early stages of the final push by the dying Empire to attempt arresting the flow of History. They are being outsmarted, they are already outgunned by the top military power in the world, and they will be checkmated. Existentially, they are not equipped to kill the Bear – and that hurts. Cosmically.
When it comes to the Ukraine crisis, US citizens are stressing: “We don’t have a dog in the fight.”
The crisis in Ukraine is raising considerable anxiety and rising global uncertainty. It appears that neither war nor heavy economic penalties would bring a sustainable solution to the current situation, which extends beyond Russia and Ukraine. The only way out is through diplomacy. That possibility was squandered when the US and NATO, in response to Russia’s concerns, limited NATO’s eastward expansion.
However, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The special military operation will strive to “denazify” Russia’s sovereign neighbor, its mission is to protect citizens who have been bullied and subjected to genocide for the past eight years. And to do this, Russia will work to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
Even as President Joe Biden imposes more sanctions and promises a greater response that could draw retaliation from Moscow, there is little interest among Americans for a US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. President Joe Biden has been criticized by a faction of the Republican Party for opposing Putin’s plans for Ukraine, with some even suggesting that Russia has the right to invade.
As history has shown, economic sanctions would only harm innocent civilians, particularly women and children. The rising oil costs owing to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the economic sanctions the West has imposed on Russia are affecting the entire world, particularly the poor nation-states.
With the general public’s memories of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent Taliban takeover still fresh, much of the worry on both the right and left is centered on the US avoiding military involvement in Europe. Members of the House Freedom Caucus have indeed been particularly loud in their opposition to US intervention in Ukraine, and stressed that “In the Ukraine conflict, we don’t have a dog in the fight”. There should not be a single American soldier killed there. There should not be a single American bullet fired there.
Significantly, Ukraine has no legitimate reason to be a member of NATO, and NATO, as a Cold War relic, may have no present purpose or goal. Getting involved in a military crisis is not in the best interests of the United States.
Similarly, many Americans prefer that the US stay out of the crisis, the escalating violence, and political ramifications are already hitting their budgets. As traders reacted to geopolitical tensions, the price of oil, which has been climbing for the past year, hit an eight-year high this week. According to experts, if US lawmakers pass another round of sanctions, gas prices will certainly rise considerably more.
Moreover, the restriction on wheat or metals, on the other hand, might push the worst spell of inflation in decades even higher. Consumers in the United States will pay more for gasoline and other necessities as commodity prices rise, leaving less money for discretionary expenditure. As costly as another European conflict would be inhuman and economic terms, the financial strain would fall disproportionately on the lower and middle classes in the United States.
Furthermore, the US economic growth could be cut by 1% as a result of tougher sanctions on Russia. Stock market turbulence can also have a psychological impact, undermining consumer confidence and reducing expenditure, thus, slowing down US economic growth. Sanctions implemented by the United States and other countries may worsen inflation in the United States, and stock prices in the United States have collapsed already.
Consumer pricing and consumer confidence in the United States are likely to be affected by the sanctions. Gas prices in the United States have reached new highs, and Biden warned that they will go up even more.
Notably, the issue of “who are they?” lies at the heart of much of the doubt about America’s intervention in Ukraine. Who are they to lecture about national sovereignty and international law when they have a significant history of invasions and interventions? Who are they to set themselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights, given the record of slavery and discrimination, their foreign record of supporting sympathetic tyrants, and the continued injustices of American life? People on the left frequently pose such concerns. Only about one out of every three Americans can locate Ukraine on a map of Europe.
Biden’s presidency is already on the verge of collapsing. His approval rating has dropped to 41%. His grip on the White House is already tightening. Therefore, Presidents in such dire trouble have a history of suffering crushing defeats in midterm elections during their first term.
The US and Europe have already become major victims of the crisis, both economically and geopolitically, and the worsening of the conflict could spell disaster for the continent and the world. Europe, as the continent that saw two previous World Wars erupt, must demonstrate greater foresight and courage in stepping up its efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine-Russia crisis.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
For four weeks now we have been discussing the Russian special military operation in the Ukraine and most of what we looked at was happening either in the Ukraine proper or near it. I did mention plenty of time that “this is not about the Ukraine, this is about the future collective security arrangement of Europe“, which is true. But even that does not show the full picture. So today I propose to widen the scope further and look at some absolutely crucial developments inside Russia. Beginning with the most amazing result, at least in my opinion:
The total failure of US PSYOPs inside Russia
I wrote many times already that the Russians got their collective asses handed to them by the massive propaganda machine of the Empire of Lies. But when I wrote that, I should have been more accurate and write that this is true OUTSIDE Russia. Inside, almost the polar opposite happened.
First, let’s remember the various existing movements inside Russia:
Putinists. My preferred term for them is Eurasian Sovereignists. These are the folks in/near power who see the future of Russia as a truly sovereign country fully integrated into the Eurasian landmass. They see the future of Russia in the South, East and North, and want nothing to do with the West anymore. They are opposed by those whom I call the
Atlantic Integrationists. These are the folks in/near power who want Russia to be accepted as an equal partner into the world order favored by the ruling elites of the United States. According to some, this faction does not exist. Yet we can very clearly see their immense influence, especially on the Russian economic financial sector.
The official, “systemic”, opposition. These are the parties which made it into the Duma and while they talk and protest a lot, they are a loyal opposition which supports the Kremlin every time that support is needed. I would call them all “uninspiringly acceptable”.
The 5th columnists. These are the self-declared “creative class” and gender-fluid “liberals” who dream of the day Russia becomes the next Poland (they think that Guadio or Tikhanovskaia are heroes). These folks are totally sold out to the Empire of Lies and are the voice of that Empire in Russia. Their incomes almost always depend on maintaining the political system created during the Eltsin years and which now the Kremlin has (FINALLY!) began to shut down.
The 6th columnists. Ruslan Ostashko calls them the “emo-Marxists”, which is a good expression which I shall adopt. These are also called “hurray patriots” or “turbo patriots”. They blame Putin for being weak, sold out to the West, corrupt and dishonest. They also oppose Putin’s ideology (patriotism instead of nationalism, and economic liberalism) and for decades now they are the ones who say 1) Putin has sold out or 2) Putin is about to sell out 3) all is lost. For them a “Putin victory” in the Ukraine would be way WORSE than the total defeat of Russia by the West. Thus they wrap themselves in the flag of patriotism, but in reality they are what Russians call “defeatists” (пораженцы).
Here is how the leaders of the Empire of Lies most likely relate to these groups:
Group
Relationship of the Empire to these groups
Eurasian Sovereignists (aka Putinists)
Putin is basically the devil incarnate and removing him is the single most important goal upon which the West has already spent many BILLIONS of dollars on. Yes, this is a Crusade, an anti-Putin Crusade by the self-same folks who waged all the crusades…
Atlantic Integrationists
They were extremely useful for decades (since the early 80s at least), but their shrinking influence makes them much less useful than in the past. Putin is responsible for that degradation of their influence. But they still have enough power to maintain agents of influence in the Russian ruling elites.
The official, systemic, opposition
Useful poodles, they give Russia all the “democratic trappings” needed, but they don’t threaten the Kremlin in any real way. Besides, they often hate the West even more than the official party of the government (United Russia).
5th columnists
They have become useless. They have zero traction and, at most, they can get less than 1000 people in the streets in multi-million cities. Also, their legal and IT “wings” have been clipped by various new laws. At best, they can now emigrate to the Zone A and pretend to be political refugees or “dissidents”. I recommend the UK or Israel.
6th columnists
They were the last and biggest hope of the western PSYOPs. Their mission: break the morale of the Russian society and, if at all possible, try to either overthrow Putin or force him to deal with mass protests. As we shall see below, they failed as miserably as the 5th columnists.
So what happened? Here is a quick list of factors which contributed to this outcome:
New laws were passed forcing foreign agents to publicly declare when they are getting money from abroad (irrespective from whom, CIA, MI6, NED, Soros, etc.).
Many western-run social media outlets, who were banning any non-russophobic voices, have now been banned in Russia, again, FINALLY! Telegram is booming, let’s hope the Empire does not bring Telegram to heel next.
Russian foreign policy successes forced the Atlantic Integrationists to keep a low profile because it is hard to criticize a regime which, for example, so successfully dealt with the pre-2022 sanctions while saving a country like Syria. Furthermore, the steady increase in hostility between the West and Russia made it hard for them to sing the virtues of that same West which now openly backs Nazis in the Ukraine with every resource the Empire of Lies has. This is why even Dmitri Medvedev has now quickly rebranded himself as a patriot!
The 6th columnists and their mantra “Putin is about to sellout the Donbass” now look totally stupid since far from selling out the Donbass, Putin has used the Donbass as a cover and pretext to change the entire collective security architecture of Europe and, really, the entire planet. Also, the 6th columnist made a HUGE mistake about the war in the Ukraine: their theses became increasingly indistinguishable from those of the 5th columnists. Keep in mind that in the Russian culture to wish or advocate for a defeat when Russia is at war is basically an act of treason (lots of new laws passed recently by the Duma, the 5th and 6th columnists better be careful with what they say and do next!).
The first week of the special military operation was by far the most difficult one not only for the Russian military, but especially for the Russian society which not only got truly HAMMERED by the most intense PSYOP in history coming from the West, via not only propaganda outlets like BBC or Deutsche Welle, but also western IT giants (Google, Meta, etc.) censuring and banning not only post perceived as “prop-Russian” but even entire domain names like .su and .ru. The HUGE mistake both the 5th and the 6th columnists did was to jump unto that “PSYOP horse” thereby revealing their true agenda.
In direct retaliation for the banning of all things Russian by the western-controlled social media, Russia finally began to slap on fines and, better, totally shut down all these vomit spewing sewers, at least in Russia.
The first week of the war went extremely well from a purely military point of view, but from a socio-political point of view, I know that a lot of Russian vacillated and really freaked out.
But then, the western PSYOPs made a huge mistake: they gave free reign to truly rabid and racist russophobia while, at the same time, openly proclaiming the Nazi regime in Kiev as “heroic” defenders of the West. It is one thing to hear that your dictator Putin and his Mordor will be sanctioned to smithereens and quite another to feel the overt, direct and targeted hatred against you and your people, that is something you perceive less with your mind and more, I would say, with you “skin” or “guts”. Once it became obvious that the West’s hate for Russia is absolute and total and that the “best” Russians can hope from our “western friends” is to be treated like Native Americans or the Boers by the Anglos, which is not different at all from how the Nazis treated Russians, most Russian figured out what this was really all about since Day 1 and even much before (I would argue since about 1000 years).
That was pretty much all it took to “switch over” the mode of many Russians from “of my God, what will happen next?” to “we shall never surrender” or, on the words of Molotov, “Ours is a righteous cause. The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours” (June 22, 1941).
To give you an idea of the magnitute of the defeat for the 5th and 6th columnist, I could mention that both Putin’s personal popularity and the popular support for the denazification and disarmament of the Nazi regime in the Ukraine is over 70%. Instead, I just want to share this short video with you:
“We, the multi-ethnic nation of the Russian Federation, united by common fate on our land…” These are the first words of our fundamental law, the Russian Constitution. Each word has deep meaning and enormous significance.
On our land, united by common fate. This is what the people of Crimea and Sevastopol must have been thinking as they went to the referendum on March 18, 2014. They lived and continue to live on their land, and they wanted to have a common fate with their historical motherland, Russia. They had every right to it and they achieved their goal. Let’s congratulate them first because it is their holiday. Happy anniversary!
Over these years, Russia has done a great deal to help Crimea and Sevastopol grow. There were things that needed to be done that were not immediately obvious to the unaided eye. These were essential things such as gas and power supply, utility infrastructure, restoring the road network, and construction of new roads, motorways and bridges.
We needed to drag Crimea out of that humiliating position and state that Crimea and Sevastopol had been pushed into when they were part of another state that had only provided leftover financing to these territories.
There is more to it. The fact is we know what needs to be done next, how it needs to be done, and at what cost – and we will fulfil all these plans, absolutely.
These decisions are not even as important as the fact that the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol made the right choice when they put up a firm barrier against neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists. What was and is still happening on other territories is the best indication that they did the right thing.
People who lived and live in Donbass did not agree with this coup d’état, either. Several punitive military operations were instantly staged against them; they were besieged and subjected to systemic shelling with artillery and bombing by aircraft – and this is actually what is called “genocide.”
The main goal and motive of the military operation that we launched in Donbass and Ukraine is to relieve these people of suffering, of this genocide. At this point, I recall the words from the Holy Scripture: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And we are seeing how heroically our military are fighting during this operation.
These words come from the Holy Scripture of Christianity, from what is cherished by those who profess this religion. But the bottom line is that this is a universal value for all nations and those of all religions in Russia, and primarily for our people. The best evidence of this is how our fellows are fighting and acting in this operation: shoulder to shoulder, helping and supporting each other. If they have to, they will cover each other with their bodies to protect their comrade from a bullet in the battlefield, as they would to save their brother. It has been a long time since we had such unity.
It so happened that, by sheer coincidence, the start of the operation was same day as the birthday of one of our outstanding military leaders who was canonised – Fedor Ushakov. He did not lose a single battle throughout his brilliant career. He once said that these thunderstorms would glorify Russia. This is how it was in his time; this is how it is today and will always be!
Thank you!
Of course, the 5th columnists and the 6th columnists dismiss any election in Russia (they are all faked!), any opinion poll (they are all faked too!) and even any such mass events (the people are bused in for money!).
Which is EXACTLY what the western PYSOPs say too (in those rare cases when the report about that at all). In French there is an expression “those who look alike gather together” (qui se ressemble s’assemble) and now that “stain” of “being with” the CIA/MI6/etc. and against your own President while your country is at war for its survival is a mark which neither the 5th nor the 6th columnists will ever be able to wash off, at least not in Russia.
I want to repeat here something which is crucial: truth is the first casualty of war, that is true, and lying on behalf of your side (whichever side you are on) is only morally wrong, but also effective only short term, in the mid to long term the truth begins to seep in through the cracks in the wall of lies.
Furthermore, criticism of a government, even during a war, is also fair and, in fact, needed. But when a full scale war is going on and people are dying (including your own people, whichever side you are on), you have to ask yourself that simple question: cui bono from what I just wrote?
Many “patriots” and “friends of Russia” clearly won’t. Okay.
I think that when your own arguments become indistinguishable from the talking points of the western letter soup’s PSYOPS and when the 5th and the 6th columns basically unite to try to overthrow the commander in chief, then we are not talking about honest criticism, but either treason (if you are Russian) or ignorance (if you are not).
Whatever may be the case, I would argue that the West’s PSYOPs triumph over Russia outside Russia has been more than compensated for by the Kremlin’s triumph over the West’s PSYOPs inside Russia. And since the serfs living in Zone A decide nothing, all they can do is talk, talk and talk even more, that western triumph over Russia in the societies which are under the dominion of Uncle Shmuel, I think that while in the short term the Kremlin rather lame efforts (RT & Co.) did get a bloody nose, that initial period of shock is over and far from demoralizing Russians, the western PSYOPS are now uniting them in the determination to prevail and survive, at any cost, bar absolutely none.
Russia is now in full WWII mode.
I know expect the 5th columnists to emigrate en masse and the 6th columnists to steadily melt into utter irrelevance.
What about the Atlantic Integrationists?
Alas, they are very much still there 😦
They keep a low profile and say the right words when needed. Yet the latest SNAFU with the Russian foreign currency and gold reserves places a direct spotlight on them. There are two crucial problems with these folks:
Putin is a liberal, at least in economic terms. Hate it or love it, but that is a fact. Or was until now. This gang was never popular in Russia, and that latest controversy has resulted in A LOT of angry accusations. Mind you, Putin has just re-nominated Elvira Nabiulina to head the Russian Central Bank and it shall be very interesting to see how the Duma will vote on this. I would just say that if I was a Duma member I would not vote for confirmation not only because I don’t like the Kremlin’s economic policies, but also because that might be a very politically costly move. So let’s wait and see. By the way, Putin has also appointed Sergei Glazyev to the position of Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Union. Interesting times…
The Atlantic Integrationists still wield a lot of power because they are not some secret society which meets in secret locations and exchanges some secret handshakes, but they are a socio-political class, I mean that in a fully Marxist sense, including the notion that these people have class interests and a class consciousness. Furthermore, a lot of regular Russians fully depend on the institutions created by the Atlantic Integrationists since the early 1990s. So to “simply eliminate” them sounds like a great idea until you realize that you are talking about an entire class of people.
[Sidebar: especially for those red-blooded US Americans who, if they were in charge of the Kremlin and Russia, would have easily solved that and all other Russian problems, by whatever means, they ought to remember that in the land of the free home of the brave you are ALSO all serfs of a political class – I call it the US Nomenklatura – which they have totally FAILED to remove and which crushed Trump in less than 30 days! So, how about “doctor, heal thyself” and “motes in other eyes?” First liberate YOUR OWN country – then give lessons to Russians! Ditto for the stupid claims that the Russian military is moving too slow. It took the US military SIX MONTHS to prepare for invasion during “Desert Shield” – in spite of huge prepositioned stores and a totally supportive KSA – and another MONTH to invade Bagdad which was basically undefended. In fact, the US has not won a single war since WWII and never waged an existential war in its entire history. Do you REALLY think that you are competent to teach Russians how to fight? At least, next time you prepare to give Russians lessons, try to remember this factoid: during WWII the Soviet Army liberated one thousand two hundered (1’200!!!) cities from Nazi occupation forces. As for civilians casualties, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and “500’000 dead Iraqi children as “worth it” – that all you. As is the vicious and genocidal bombing of the DPRK and Vietnam. So, remind me, who are you again to give us lessons???]
But yes, the Atlantic Integrationists are still there. If Putin decided to ignore Russian law and act like Stalin, he could fire all those Atlantic Integrationists we all know and love to hate (I do!), but that would NOT remove their power base. So, instead, what he needs to do is gradually (and legally!!!) weaken their power base, which is *exactly* what he has been doing since at least 2014 (and, in reality, even before; he is a slow, deliberately acting person, and he does wait as long as needed before striking).
Which brings me to my last topic: the super-pooper “sanctions from hell”
Okay, there is very little doubt that just as the post MH-17 sanctions, the current sanctions will hurt Russia and, more specifically, some sectors of the Russian economy. However, just like the post MH-17 sanctions forced Russia to FINALLY diversify and invest in such crucial sectors like agriculture, the current sanctions will simply FORCE Russia to completely remove herself from most of Zone A, especially in her political and economic activities. In other words
By committing economic suicide (which is what these sanctions will be for the West!) the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire FORCED the Russians to cut a lot of, shall we say, “umbilical cords” which still tied them to western controlled interests. I would even go as far as to say that ignorant imbeciles like “Trump” and “Biden” did more to destroy the 5th and 6th columns and to immensely weaken the Atlantic Integrationists than all the efforts of the FSB or the (very lame and weak) Russian counter-propaganda efforts.
The toxic 5th and 6th column abscesses have finally been punctured. Yeah, it stinks and yeah, a lot of “disinfection” will be needed, not “only” in the Ukraine, but also in Russia.
Oh, I know, the leaders of the West did not do all that out of some kind of love for Russia, they did that because their own class interest depends on doubling down over and over and over again. Add to this the entire “best military in the history of the galaxy” narrative, and lots of “WE will teach the Russian a lesson they will never forget!” (yeah, both of these idiots, and Obama too, see themselves as much scarier and tougher than the united Europe under Napoleon or the united Europe under Hitler, funny, no?).
As Andrei Martyanov very accurately described in his latest video, the West’s insane push to “Cancel Russia” has been received loud and clear by the Russian people, and now they are in the “existential war for survival” mode (well, at least most of them, no less than 70+ percent).
The result?
Russian caption: we will finish this war together spelled with a Latin “Z” rather than a Russian “З”.
I think that these two images illustrate the current dynamic very well: Woke-drones can think that when they display the unanimity of a lynch-mob they are scaring Russians.
To some degree, the Russians themselves are too blame, we accepted way too many plastic beads in exchange empty promises.
But not because we treasured these beads, but because until 2021 we simply did not have what we needed to stop accepting these beads.
Putin’s 2021 ultimatum to the entire united West was, in fact, the last concession Russia was willing to make.
As I wrote many many times, the difference between Russians and the West is that the West does not fear war but is not ready to fight one, whereas the Russians very much DO fear war, but they are also totally ready to fight. We have lived in this reality for 1000 years, and we know that war is always the ultimate evil. So now, far from being ashamed or unhappy about how the Kremlin did everything it could to avoid that war (which I was absolutely opposed to, if possible and if given an alternative choice, of course), but the West gave Russia no choice.
And, in doing so, it flipped the mental “we will unite to win this war” switch in the minds of most Russians.
You could say that the West has finally truly “canceled itself” in the mind of a vast majority of Russians.
I think that the Kremlin STILL would prefer a negotiated solution, not just to the war in the Ukraine, but even in the semi-covert (or even not so covert) war going on with NATO. But the recent strikes at ammo dumps and foreign mercenaries in the western Ukraine are a clear sign that 1) Russia will not accept any outside intervention and 2) that Russia will, if needed, strike Poland, Romania or whatever other self-prostituting state, and their membership in NATO will make no difference whatsoever.
Guys, one of the main reasons why Russia chose a low-manpower strategy is precisely because the bulk of the Russian military is ready for any type of war against NATO and the US, even a nuclear one if needed.
Yeah yeah, in the West they announce with a strait face that Russia is running out of bullets for her AKs. If that kind of nonsense makes some woke freak feel good – by all means, enjoy!
In Russia, it only strengthens the determination to cut all ties with the West whose true face all Russians have FINALLY seen again, for first time since WWII.
Conclusion – the “Great Coming Out”
This war, which I abhor and ENTIRELY blame on the Empire of Lies had at least one consequence which I welcome with all my heart: this war has triggered a massive “Great Coming Out” in which not only politicians, countries, societies or celebrities have shown their true face, this also applies to those I thought were my trusted and respected friends, family member and even clergy!
Sometimes these *true* faces turned out to be ugly and hypocritical, in other times they radiated kindness, compassion and love for all our fellow human beings. Yes, some of it was painful, even heartbreaking. But some of it was unexpected and deeply deeply touching.
I personally welcome this clarity with all my heart!
Now I know the answer(s) to this crucial question: with whom are you, whose side are you really on?
I hasten to add that I am not Dubya, I don’t need to tell the world “you are either with us or with the terrorists”. In reality, I very much welcome any neutral or indifferent position. After all, why should a Chilean fisherman or a coffee-shop owner in the Azores care about any of that?
My disgust is not with those who don’t care or don’t know – it is with those who either ought know better or, if not, ought to to shut-up and mind their business (especially if they are totally clueless about the nature of this conflict).
[Sidebar for doubleplusgoodthinking Orthodox Christians: Orthodox Christians, especially those who struggle to truly uphold the fullness faith “which the Lord gave, was preached by the Apostles, and was preserved by the Fathers” ought to realize two simple things: Orthodox Christians are the sole heirs of the East Roman Empire and it behooves us more than anybody else to recognize the modern day Franks and Crusaders for whom/what they are. To neutral or “opposed to aggression” is not only moral cowardice, it is a negation of our ethos and our collective memory. Christ told us “my Kingdom is not of this world“, and your manic determination to remain in harmony with the secular mainstream of our fallen world is really pathetic. If that is not yet another form of Neo-Sergianism then I don’t know what it is!]
Yet again, as during most of in my life I now again see what I have always seen: my own, personal, “good Samaritans” very rarely were Russian or Orthodox, and even less so Russian Orthodox. All my life I have see FAR more brotherly love, compassion and kindness from atheists, secular Jews and (non-Takfiri!) Muslims than from my putative “brothers”.
Yes, this hurts me deeply and shames me too. But that is a truth I am not willing to forget or remain silent about.
Finally, I owe it to my TRUE “good Samaritan” brothers/sisters to repeat this truth either until my last breath or until my fellow Orthodox Christians at least begin to show the moral probity so often shown to me by my heterodox brothers and sisters.
The same will prove true of Russia as a country: this war, bad as it is, will show all Russians who our real brothers, friends and allies are, and who are but the garden variety servants of the Empire.
This could be a fantastic opportunity for Russia, but that is a topic I will address in a future post.
For readers who missed the announcement of this new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values, please click here in order to see the short recap of what this book is about and why it’s not only the best French election primer you can find, but necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the Yellow Vests and modern France.
To recap that article – so that we can get started! – allow me just one reminding quote:
“Soon after starting this project I quickly realised: France doesn’t need an accurate rendering of the massive repression of progressive politics which began on November 17, 2018 – they need an accurate rendering of the massive repression of progressive politics which began in 1789. If they lied and misrepresented the Yellow Vests in 2018, wouldn’t they have also done the same in 1936, 1871, 1848, 1789 and in between?
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has just called the West an “empire of lies” – this book is an effort to dismantle those lies as regards to France from 1789 through the Yellow Vests. My previous books have dispelled the lies about modern China and modern Iran – after 13 years in France, I think I can do the same for the good people of France. ”
Now let’s truly begin!
Yellow Vest: “Yes, I am proud of the Yellow Vest movement. We are trying to fix France’s many fundamental problems, and we never stopped despite all the repression. What’s shameful is that we didn’t start sooner, and that our leaders totally ignore us.”
(Note: this book intersperses over 100 quotations taken from actual, marching Yellow Vests which were originally published in news reports on PressTV.)
The reasons for the Yellow Vests are historical in scope and complexity, but we can never agree on what the movement actually means without having a basic agreement and understanding of French and European history.
The second part of this book analyses the Yellow Vests in detail, but it necessarily rests upon the first part of this book, which is an analysis of the historical, economic and political context which existed up until the next nationwide Yellow Vest march (at the time of publication on Saturday March 19, 2022: today!). Therefore, this introduction chapter is needed to give the broad strokes of what has happened – with the eyes of a Yellow Vest – over the past several centuries.
Consider the brief following as a “quick glossary of revolution years”, to clarify where this particular writer is coming from, given that historical outlooks are both not universal and easy to incorrectly presume.
1492: Economic revolution: Victory over the Western hemisphere makes war/imperialism and trade newly hyper-profitable for Europe.
1688: England’s Glorious Revolution: The trading Whigs use these new types of profits to force in a foreign king, pass the English Bill of Rights, soon establish the prominence of parliament for the first time in English history – absolute monarchy is thus slightly widened into the creation of an aristocratic oligarchy. For modern Western conservatives this is the start and end of human and political rights.
1776: Victory of the new aboriginals (those born in the Western hemisphere) over all classes of Europe. Not a major revolution because no overturning of the social order was attempted. European imperialist/trade designs must begin to turn back to the Eastern hemisphere.
1789: Victory of the burghers, city workers and rural peasants over the clergy and noble classes. Noble class restored by 1815. The basis of human rights elaborated in the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen – first revolutionary attempt at overturning the social order.
1917: Victory of the city workers and rural peasants over the burghers, nobles and clergy.
1949: Victory of the rural peasants (confirmed during Cultural Revolution) over the city workers, burghers, nobles and clergy.
1979: Victory of workers and peasants in all areas and the clergy over the nobles and burghers.
1999: Economic debut (eurozone) of 1993 political revolution (European Union debut): Victory of burghers, nobles and new atheist/secular clergy over all workers.
In these eight dates are Europe’s most significant political-economic revolutions of the modern era.
The USSR, China and Iran must be included because they built upon the European ideas of 1789 – France was no longer able to. Via a class analysis we can see which class triumphed and what changed – which class fell, rose again or was completely altered. We also see that the European Union is as revolutionary a change – in a reactionary sense – as 1789 was, and why.
These eight dates are the simplest definition of what political-economic modernity is and what it became. A leftist-inspired view explains why, and I think this chronology extends deeper in time the Marxist view. Now a bit more detail, which I hope will be refreshing and informative:
In 1491 landed money dominated, as land was the primary source of wealth. Gold and silver was earned by trade and business. But the opening up of the New World was a staggering and revolutionary expansion of both commerce and war (imperialism). Europe is the part of Earth which profited the most, and we can fairly point to 1492 as the rise of the “bourgeoisie” in Europe because it represented an economic revolution as staggering as the industrial revolution: Just as Marx’s histories of 19th century France showed how landed, monarchical wealth “became bourgeois” (i.e. similar to and joined with the new forms of industrial-financial wealth), so we can show how imperialist-capitalist wealth “became bourgeois” much earlier. After all, this post-1492 trading class had just as much revolutionary power as 19th century industrial wealth: this is reflected by the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which forced in a foreign (Dutch) king to respect the very first (but still elitist) Bill of Rights.
The American Revolution initiated the first reversal of Europe’s staggering good fortune. In order to sustain their profits and New World investment/ponzi schemes, Europe’s trading/imperialist class was forced to soon attempt unprecedented colonisations of the Old World. The French occupation of Algeria in 1830 was the harbinger of EU neo-imperialism – Europe colonising Europe. (This will be explained further, but it’s rarely discussed today how France and Algeria were brothers in a culture much older than “Europe” – that of “Mediterranean Culture”. But I digress….) The American Revolution attempted no overturning of the social pyramid – it only heralded the continuation of more imperialism, which goes on until today.
The primary economic revolution of the French Revolution was not the killing of the king and the nationalisation of his lands but was actually produced by the nationalisation of the lands of the Roman Catholic Church. This produced the assignat, truly the wrongly-maligned Bitcoin of its day: It was a new type of paper money – paper which represented the value expected from the sale of the confiscated lands of the Roman church. Edmund Burke, a Whig, the nouveau riche trader-based group which rose to power to effectuate the 1688 English Revolution, is universally considered to be the father of modern Western conservatism in 2022 not only because he railed in favor of rule by an oligarchical bourgeois-aristocratic elite, but also because he railed against this new “paper money”, which would necessarily gain power at the expense of “proper, well-mannered” landed wealth and trader wealth, much as Bitcoin threatens the monetary status quo today.
During the Soviet Revolution of 1917 the nobility fell to never return. Also gutted, finally, was the trader/burgher class. This is the first sustained people’s revolution, and it reappropriated the expropriating power of the “bourgeois”, which by 1917 was the combination of the different classes of monarchist-landed wealth, trader-imperialist wealth and industrial-financial wealth. Explaining how the different “classes” of wealth combined to thwart the masses – and thus, “… because class warfare” – is one of Marx’s greatest contributions. I think, however, he made a mistake not to go back to 1492 and include my aforementioned economic revolution in trade/imperialism. Lenin and his cohorts did not make this mistake of underestimating imperialism.
The Chinese Revolution would go further than in 1917 in that the rural masses would no longer be the bottom of the pyramid, but be pushed onto the top. No longer were factory workers and urbanites considered to be the primary repository of and motivator for redistributions of economic and political power, but the average person – period – and that meant the average peasant. To elaborate on this point of view I recommend Dongping Han, or an 8-part series I wrote in 2019 on China’s Cultural Revolution.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 marks the return of the clergy class to power, but in a completely different context: Unlike in 1789 the clergy is not stocked by and for nobility, but here was firmly allied with all workers against the burghers and nobility, while also being totally conscious of Marxism, Leninism-Stalinism and Maoism.
1999 marks the lamentable return of both the nobles and the burghers, as well as an awful new type of clergy. It’s a “neoliberal empire”, but it’s merely a modern version of what the Whigs installed in 1688. The burghers and nobility/aristocracy/neo-aristocracy (whatever you prefer to call them) have restored their rule over all workers, urban or rural. It’s only “revolution” is to institute a secularism – latent and superficial Christianity combined with a strong atheism – which is fully allied with the burghers and elite and against all workers. It’s like the French Revolution never happened – oligarchy dominates. The Yellow Vests arrive in 2018 when Emmanuel Macron’s “neoliberal revolution” hits the birthplace of political modernity, France.
That is a class analysis which sums up the last 500 years of European history quite succinctly. This analysis correctly reduces the traditional socialist emphasis on the Industrial Revolution, which allows us to expand the importance of the imperialism which began in 1492 and continues into today. After all, reduced wages for factory workers gives the elite much riches, but not as much as imperialist domination and war! And it is not with the railroad but the increase in the power and reach of the ship which marked the true start of West European commerce’s ability to create an expanded and more politically-powerful trader class – Henry VIII of England (reign 1509-47) is known as the “father of the English navy”, and is one of many proofs I can give to buttress the above timeline and analysis which re-emphasises the power of 1492 and of imperialism’s longstanding political influence in Europe.
And for those who want only short aphorisms: The economic life of humanity can be summed up most easily as “slavery, wage-slavery, debt slavery” – Western Liberal Democracy is the desire of the elite for debt-slavery to persist, while Socialist Democracy desires to end both slavery and the elite.
These ideas are obviously both broad and condensed – fleshing them out with more detail is why the first part of a book on the Yellow Vests requires a historical overview which goes back further than just 2018.
Yellow Vest: “We have to understand the social misery which is the reason this movement was created. This also is the reason why there is so much social violence. But were the marches to stop now, that would be the movement has failed, and so they must keep marching.”
But there is the world to consider, and then there is just la belle France.
The need for a new leftist history of France which incorporates the EU and the Yellow Vests
It’s often said that the French are the intellectuals Europe – they are, but not in practice. What’s accurate to say is: The French are the ignored intellectuals of Europe.
The European Union is undoubtedly the combination of English parliamentarianism with Teutonic fiscal elitism. European history since 1789 is most easily defined as Anglo-Germanic monarchism fighting implacably against the political advances which arose in France.
Those last three words – “arose in France” – are so widely assumed to be true, ethnocentrically, that it requires many, many books to overcome this false arrogance of Europe’s sole ownership of political modernity. Therefore, I will spend only this one paragraph on it in this book about the Yellow Vests: The ideas of political freedom and equality obviously spread from the New World to the Old World, contrary to European claims. More accurately, all great cultural advances are the result of cultures inter-mixing. This idea of political equality passing from “west to east” across the Atlantic is proposed in the anthropological book1491, and the author’s coda is dedicated to calling for more examination of this idea. The truth of this couldn’t be more obvious when we realise how much it must have changed colonial Europeans, who were so inured to absolute monarchy, by coming into contact with thriving Native American egalitarianism. We cannot debate this point, though Europeans will, foolishly.
Concepts of political equality are thus not native to Europeans, but why did they sprout first in the French part of Europe? Clearly, geography destined Western Europe to make the first Old World contact with the New World, but why didn’t “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” arise in England, Spain or the Netherlands?
Again, another difficult question to which I will devote just this one paragraph in a book about the Yellow Vests: In my opinion, entirely too much precedence is given to the modern idea of “Europe” when for France the multi-millennia “Mediterranean Culture” has obviously had a longer and more profound influence on the French. France’s history is dominated by 2,500 years of contact with North Africa – Scandinavia and Slavs are but recent friends. In the long-thriving “Mediterranean Culture” France was a major power, but not a primary power: Unlike Greece, Rome or Egypt, France was always a runner-up and never a leader. Therefore they know what it is to be permanently denied empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty, etc. France is seemingly a perennial #2 or #3, even in the past two centuries of imperialism. Significantly, also, they were not re-shaped by Protestantism, which – as exemplified by English and American culture – is often synonymous with an arrogant idea of “bequeathed natural merit, outstanding personal exceptionalism and God’s chosen grace”. Thus the ever-losing French, with their Catholic (the word means “universal”) outlook, would be especially open among the European colonisers to the enlightened ideas of equality of Native Americans, I believe. This is more difficult to prove, but voila – I have laid out my theory, and now turn back to far more practical, knowable matters.
Whatever the reason for France’s enlightened political intellectualism, and no matter how much it was smothered by the Hapsburgs, Hanovers, Windsors (name change in 1917: formerly called the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), Bismarcks and Metterniches of Europe, the fact of it remains, as does today’s fact that they remain Europe’s ignored intellectuals.
Yellow Vest: “There isn’t democracy any more in France. Macron is a king who hasn’t given us anything – he is no different than the king of Morocco or Saudi Arabia – and that’s why we can’t stop until he leaves.”
The European Union is not based on the ideals of 1789 but the ideals of what is most often termed today as “neoliberalism”. But for neoliberalism to ignore 1789 across all of Europe we must realise that ideals of 1789 are suppressed in France today as well, just as much as the Yellow Vests are suppressed.
In the French book Le fond de l’air est jaune (There’s a Yellow in the Air) the French historian Sophie Wahnich wrote this about domestic teaching regarding the French Revolution: “It has practically disappeared from universities.” She attributes this, unsurprisingly, to the Mecca of neoliberalism, the University of Chicago. During the cultural coverage of the bicentennial of the French Revolution – essentially the very timeframe when “neoliberalism” was starting to emerge with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – French historian Francois Furet emerged as the most prominent (revisionist) historian of the Revolution’s bicentennial debates. Furet was a commonplace success: the former leftist who renounced leftism for reaction and was thus feted by a capitalist-imperialist mainstream media. Furet replaced the idea of popular action with great man-ism; deemed the French Revolution inherently totalitarian and anti-democratic; and rejected the classic Marxist interpretation. Essentially, the French elite silenced the average Frenchman’s pride in the French Revolution and forced them to adopt the view of the winners. Which is, as George Orwell wrote, “To the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.” To many young French students now as well, sadly, but not to the Yellow Vests, certainly.
France is more than just the French Revolution, but it is certainly the inescapable foundation of all modern politics. It is only historical nihilism which would insist that there is no differentiating between eras of human history – between caveman and pharaonic, feudal and modern, etc.
Therefore, just as I divided European political-economic history into just two handfuls of key events, we can reject the neoliberal, reactionary view of people like Furet and instead rely on a popular, Marxist-inspired view to help us succinctly update the history of France since 1788:
1788: Absolute autocracy exists across the European Continent, with the very mild exception of the United Kingdom’s oligarchy.
1789: The move away from autocracy begins – the beginnings for both Western Liberal Democracy and Socialist Democracy. In 1792 the 23-year “European War Against the French Revolution” begins. This era is usually divided into the “French Revolutionary Wars” and the “Napoleonic Wars” in order to distort history.
1794: The apex of Robespierre, wealth redistribution, democratisation and rights for the 99% with the Constitution of 1793 – it is never implemented.
1799: The overwhelming election of Napoleon Bonaparte, the “centrist revolutionary” as First Consul. He takes a middle path between Jacobinism and absolute monarchy.
1815: Restoration of Bourbon absolute monarchy – political failure of the French Revolution following 23 years of monarchical-led wars to topple it.
1830: Replacement of the land-based House of Bourbon monarchy with the House of Orleans monarchy, which had an industrial-financial base. Conquest of Algeria – a former part of the “Mediterranean Culture” which France has been a key part of since 600 BC – begins.
1848: European-wide revolution as the result of the ideals of 1789 finally being embraced in Germanic lands. Ends in total failure everywhere but France: Western Liberal Democracy begins here, implemented as the 2nd French Republic.
1851: Failure of Western Liberal Democracy provokes the self-coup of President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, which would be sanctioned by what was then the largest popular vote in history. He, too, is a “centrist revolutionary” – against both the despised and ineffectual first attempt at Western Liberal Democracy and the absolute monarchs which reign across Europe, still.
1871: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is deposed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Paris Commune occurs in response to the popular rejection of monarchy, Bonapartism and Western Liberal Democracy: Socialist Democracy begins here. Collusion of French Western Liberal Democrats with Germanic & French monarchists in the four-month siege of Paris results in the forced restoration of Western Liberal Democracy, implemented as the Third French Republic: “Neoliberalism” begins here. To quote Marx on The Paris Commune: “The republic has not subverted the throne, only taken its place; become vacant.”
1914: “World War to Forestall Socialism” begins.
1936: Last legislative election of the Third Republic sees French leftists win nearly 60% majority following Western Liberal Democracy’s bloodletting, popularly called World War I, and subsequent economic mismanagement, popularly known as the Great Depression.
1940: “Second World War to Forestall Socialism” begins, aka World War II. Majority of France occupied by Germanic National Socialists, who reject both Socialist Democracy and Western Liberal Democracy.
1945-75: Era of Social Democracy begins, greatly influenced by Socialist Democracy’s victory across Eastern Europe. Following the second great bloodletting and economic collapse, both of which were caused by the perpetual failure of Western Liberal Democracy, some economic and political concessions are wrested from the 1%. Known in France as the “30 Glorious Years” due to the economic stability the average French person enjoyed.
1976-99: In the Anglophone world Liberalism gets fully restored – Social Democracy’s gains were always few there. Liberalism re-wins over the French elite but the French masses fight to maintain the gains of Social Democracy. French popular rejection of neoliberalism and the European Union evidenced in successful mass protests, referendums, etc.
2009: Socialism’s “20 Years In the Wilderness” ends – a similar era is called the “Special Period in the Time of Peace” in Cuba. Socialism With Chinese Characteristics explodes past Western Liberal Democracy, which has been crippled by the “Great Recession”, the anti-democratic methods and aims of European Union & Eurozone, and the wasteful warmongering of the United States.
2010: For the first time in the postwar era France’s elite refuses to heed massive French protests after Brussels orders retirement age to be raised. (Ramin Mazaheri reports from major French socioeconomic protests!) Era of Social Democracy ends, replaced with “Neoliberal Empire” of European Union.
2018: One year after “neoliberal revolutionary” Emmanuel Macron takes office, completing the historic re-conquest of Liberalism, the Yellow Vests appear. Massive repression guts the credibility of Western Liberal Democracy. Final victory of Liberalism in France if Yellow Vests fully repressed?
Yellow Vest: “We are in a dictatorship, and Macron is the dictator. This tyranny existed in France before, but Macron has been arrogant enough to make it obvious to the whole world. Our president is now the enemy of the French people.”
Thus we see the reason why the second part of this book is needed: If the Yellow Vests fail it is possible that “neoliberalism” – i.e. the elite-loving Western Liberal Democracy which was voted down (in 1852) after just three years in power — has prevailed in France as fully as in England or the United States. How important it is to understand and appreciate the Yellow Vests!
The Yellow Vests: Are the torchbearers of 1789, the West’s last hope against liberalism’s complete restoration?
There are those (like me) who constantly decry “fake leftism”, which is centrism/rightism posing as leftism. It would be a huge, unforgivable error not to shout eureka when real leftism shows itself – and it does with the Yellow Vests.
What the above quick-histories should indicate is that France’s model for the past 70 years – a type of Social Democracy which is as strong as any on the Continent, including the often-cited “Scandinavian model” – has been wilfully dismantled despite spectacular popular disapproval, and thanks to foreign elite domination aided by domestic collusion from French elites. The goal of this unwanted breakdown of Social Democracy is to implement a return to the first post-feudal order (the feudal order died in 1789) – that of Western Liberal Democracy (born in 1848) – which has been ideologically defeated by Socialist Democracy (which began in 1871).
To re-paraphrase Marx for 2022: A throne of autocracy still exists, even in Western constitutional republics like France – the people do not sit on it, but an oligarchy. The UK – the only country to fight against the French Revolution in all seven Coalition Wars against it, from 1792-1815 – is thrilled about that. The Yellow Vests may or may not be revolutionaries for Socialist Democracy, but they are – undoubtedly – fighting to maintain the hard-won postwar concessions which Western Liberal Democrats were forced to temporarily give.
Call this restoration of Western Liberal Democracy “neoliberalism” if you insist, but a soiled rose always smells unsweet: Western Liberal Democracy joins together landed monarchical money, commercial money, imperialist money, and bourgeois financial-industrial money to put the state at the service of this economic elite and not at the service of the people. To maintain their supremacy this economic elite engages in constant, global class war, with the goal of making no concessions at all to the political and economic redistributions championed by Socialist Democracy.
The above analysis is needed because it precisely explains why the oppression of the Yellow Vests is on a scope which has not been seen in France in nearly a century:
The imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Syria and elsewhere – all of which were raging in 2018 – were not nearly as important to the Western ruling class as the crushing of the Yellow Vest rebellion, which threatened “neoliberalism’s” victory over both Social Democratic and Socialist Democratic ideas. Such a victory would entail a redistribution of wealth and power which far exceeds the loss of cheap African uranium, weapons sales to the Middle East or client regimes in paltry Third World economies. Ask yourself if Marx would disagree – that the oppression of the Yellow Vests, which threaten the entire “bourgeois order” of the 5th Republic, wouldn’t be more important to French and Western elite than Tuareg rebellions to wrest control of the sandy northern part of Mali, Assad’s ageing Baathists or the Taliban’s control of one the world’s poorest countries?
Yellow Vest: “There has been enormous repression never seen before in France. Even in 1968 it was not as bad as this. But this has been the policy chosen by the president in order to break the movement. We will keep improvising new solutions to win our demands.”
There’s a reason their success was so stunning and threatening: The Yellow Vests achieved a 75% approval rating despite a massive police, media and state propaganda war against them and, crucially, despite the reigning context of total rejection of all political actors (unions, media, political parties, political personalities, religious leaders, etc.). They miraculously united a French populace which was seemingly impossible to unite – their only opponent was a 20% “Bourgeois Bloc”, headed by Emmanuel Macron, which is the direct legacy of absolute monarchy, industrial-financial-imperialist wealth and aristocratic/oligarchical elitism.
From November 2018 until June 2019 France was undoubtedly in a pre-revolutionary situation, in which the mass of the pyramid completely rejected the governance style and governors of the elite. It was only via a nationwide brawl every Saturday, then legalised by a raft of repressive anti-Yellow Vest laws, which frightened an already-apathetic populace back into apathy. No Western imperialist country has ever seen the police brutality, lockdowns, assaults, preemptive arrests, laws designed to revoke the most dearly held rights of Western Liberalists, propaganda campaigns and everything else heaped on top of the Yellow Vests in order to to scare French citizens from expressing publicly their dissatisfaction with public policy.
The “spectre” of Yellow Vest rebellion thus became synonymous with the “spectre” of the French Revolution and the “spectre” of socialism – i.e. an Anglophone and Teutonic bias against any change in Europe from what is the barest improvement from absolute monarchy: parliamentary monarchism/presidentialism.
This book places the Yellow Vests in this historical context: Yes we can understand these political, economic and social trends. Yes we can understand our own – the people’s own – history. Yes we will remember yesterday. Yes we do know the Yellow Vests will be out there next Saturday March 26, 2022.
At the heart of the gradual reformism which underpins Western Liberal Democracy is the insistence that we must wait for equality. Why? Why must we wait for the enjoyment of political rights, and for social and economic policies which promote equality? Why should we listen to orders which are issued by those who have the most of the pie to lose and their sycophants?
The Yellow Vests are not the first to ask these questions, but you must agree that they have asked it the most insistently and courageously seemingly anywhere in the West – and certainly in France – in nearly a century. That alone makes this book necessary reading.
In 2022 two things are certain:
Europe’s theocratic absolute monarchs – who were truly the first “globalist 1%” – and their ideology of autocracy and elitism have been subsumed by, not opposed by, Western Liberal Democracy.
Despite all the repression, maiming, prison sentences, court cases, smearing, return of apathy and general climate of fear, at countless traffic roundabouts and demonstrations every Saturday the Yellow Vests are essentially doing what Lenin has said the dictatorship of the working classes should do: “Teach every cook to govern the state.” They are talking about politics, and they are getting more and more ready to govern.
The Yellow Vests victories are real and must be understood, as they are a potentially international answer to the historic problem of how to progress towards Socialist Democracy, equality and peace. Certainly, as my chapter list shows, they have already abolished Western Liberal Democratic totems both old and recent.
We now have a necessary historic overview to begin discussing modern France. Let’s begin to break with the Western Liberal Democracy’s arch-conservative stranglehold with the next chapter: Burke’s endless reaction: 1789 & feudalism’s end creates modern conservatism
<—>
Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value! Publication date: June 1, 2022.
Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.
What is fascism? With the Russian ‘de-Nazification operation’ in the Ukraine entering its fourth week and “Black Lives Matter” replaced with “I Stand With Ukraine” as the virtue-signal de jour, now seems like a good time to define it.
While I’m a big fan of the Iranian journalist Ramin Mazaheri, I have to disagree with his latest article on The Vineyard of the Saker. Mazaheri says Russia misinterprets Nazism as simply Russophobia. I fear he underestimates the intellect of the nation which did three-quarters of the fighting and dying to defeat fascism 77 years ago.
Rather than trying to suck the meaning of the word ‘fascism’ out of our thumbs, let us instead compare two well-known definitions by Georgi Dimitrov and Umberto Eco, a Marxist and a Liberal.
Eco, the Italian author of the historical whodunnit The Name Of the Rose, listed 14 different features in his 1995 essay Eternal Fascism. The problem is, none of them individually are proof that we’re living in a fascist state.
Eco admits at the start: “These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.”
But he claims: “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The first item on Eco’s list, ‘the cult of tradition’, is common to most ‘small-c’ social conservatives. The syncretism that Eco speaks of here is found in his own eclectic list.
Points three to five, ‘action for action’s sake’, ‘disagreement is treason’ and ‘fear of difference’ are true of the dozens of Trotskyite and anarchist sects jumping on the Ukraine bandwagon.
Points six to eight, ‘appeal to a frustrated middle class’, an ‘obsession with a plot’ and the belief that their ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’ describe the US ‘Never Trumpers’ and British liberals still desperate to rejoin the European Union (EU).
Nine and 11, ‘ life is lived for struggle’ and ‘everybody is educated to become a hero’ apply to the ‘woke’ millennials obsessed with their own perceived victimhood.
Dimitrov, the Bulgarian general secretary of the Communist (Third) International, characterised fascism in a speech to the 7th Comintern congress in 1935 as: “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”
“Fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital,” he elaborated.
“Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.”
Thus, fascism is the form of government which the capitalist class resorts to when revolt by the toiling classes means it can no longer rule by consent under democracy, as it prefers to.
“The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries,” Dimitrov stressed. His clear implication is that fascism could take a new form without the open racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia of the German Nazi regime. Fascism could come waving the rainbow flag and preaching “human rights”. I think it already has.
And Dimitrov highlights the fascists’ imperative for violent and oppressive anti-communism, something which Eco, who grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, fails to mention at all in his glib listicle.
My mother was born a year before the Second World War. Her parents were communists. At a very young age she was aware that a Nazi invasion would mean she and her family would be murdered, just as communists in the fascist-ruled and occupied countries had already been.
Eco has no excuse for ignoring or forgetting this, just as Western pseudo-leftists have no excuse for overlooking how the regime that took over in Kiev after the 2014 Maidan Square coup banned the Communist Party of Ukraine and others, or how its thugs burnt down the Odessa Trade Union House while the police looked on, murdering some 50 working people.
Modern Russia is not the USSR, but it never ceased to be the target of imperialism despite embracing the so-called ‘free market’. Ordinary Russians know that, and their leaders have in the past few weeks denounced the “Empire of Lies” with a clarity that Lenin — who literally wrote the book on it — would applaud.
To answer those who equate fascism with nationalism: If Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo had been nationalists, their armies would never have set foot outside their countries’ borders and 50 million lives would not have been needlessly lost. Fascism is imperialist, and imperialism is the antithesis of nationalism.
It’s easy to see why some prefer Eco’s definition to Dimitrov’s. Dimitrov avoids the easy path of condemning historical fascism for its bigotry and para-militarism, but instead marks out the common ground between Nazis and liberals: anti-communism. Eco explicitly panders to those who think the holocaust was what happens when we stray from the modern liberal path.
But if one believes, as a majority of British voters did in 2016, that the EU is an undemocratic, corporatist supra-national state which rules the continent on behalf of finance capital, It follows that the burnished liberal utopia is fascism here and now.
The stated goal of the US antifa rioters in 2020 was to bring down President Donald Trump and ensure victory for Joe Biden, who helped bring the genuine fascist government to power in Kiev in 2014. Biden has now prodded the Ukraine into a disastrous showdown with Russia that threatens to escalate to nuclear Armageddon.
There was no revolution in the US in 2020, just as there was none in Ukraine in 2014. The Never-Trumpers posed no alternative but business as usual under the Democratic Party, which came bundled with a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt. That has torn down the façade of liberal democracy and left only the naked tyranny of big business, pushing the world inexorably towards war. Nice work, anarchists.
Russia is taking a stand against fascism, and imperialism. What are you going to do about it?
Question: The sanctions that are currently imposed on Russia are of course unprecedented. And they are really negatively affecting the lives of ordinary Russians, even though Washington is saying that it’s not targeting Russians. What can you say about what the goals of these sanctions are and who the target really is?
Sergey Lavrov:
I believe the goal of the sanctions is much more strategic than just Ukraine. I think what we witness in Ukraine is the quintessence of the western course, strategic course to marginalise Russia, to contain Russia, to stop Russia’s development and to reduce Russia to a zero role in world politics and world economy, world trade, world sports, art, science, education
And we observe unprecedented steps our Western colleagues are taking. One of the underlying trends is the United States’ desire – which has been much more manifested by the Biden administration – to come back to a unipolar world. And, if you wish, they are trying to take the melting pot concept from the United States soil and make a melting pot from the entire world, and they would be the smelters. The European Union already, I think 99 percent, stopped trying to be independent. President Macron, of course, keeps repeating that strategic autonomy for the European Union is his goal and he would be fighting for it, but my guess is that he would not succeed. Germany is already absolutely ready to obey instructions from the United State. The situation with North Stream 2 clearly indicated what exact place in world politics Germany occupies now, when the Americans in fact have “persuaded” the Germans and others that they, the Americans, know much better what Europe needs for its energy security than Europeans themselves. And there are many examples like this. So the sanctions drive is going to continue, they are threatening the fifth wave, maybe there would be another wave, but we’re used to it. I will recall that, long before the Ukrainian crisis erupted because of the illegal anti-constitutional coup d’etat, the sanctions were already imposed on us. It was, you know, when the Jackson–Vanik amendment was repealed, the Magnitsky Act was immediately introduced and the sanctions, in one way or another, stayed. And then there was a series of sanctions, as you mentioned, to punish us, basically, for supporting the legitimate cause of Russians in Ukraine, Russians in Crimea, you know this story, I wouldn’t rehearse the events and the sequence of events.
The latest sanctions wave was really unprecedented and, as President Putin recalled, we are now champions in the number of sanctions introduced against the Russian Federation – more than 5,000 individual acts, almost twice as many as was introduced against Iran and North Korea. But sanctions, or all of this, made us stronger. After the sanctions were announced in 2014, when the West could not accept the free vote of Crimeans to rejoin the Russian Federation, when the West basically supported the illegitimate and unconstitutional coup d’etat. You know what was very interesting to me when I talked about those events to my Western colleagues? They very often use the tactic of cutting off an unwanted historical period. The situation in Ukraine they start discussing only with what they call annexation of Crimea. If you remind them that it all started with the European Union being unable to insist on the implementation of the deal, which they guaranteed, by the opposition, and then the opposition just threw away the deal signed and guaranteed by the European Union, and then the leaders of the opposition and of the so-called Maidan, the radicals, like Dmitry Yarosh were saying “We stand for a Ukraine without Russkis and katsaps” (which means Muscovites), and he publicly stated that if the Russians – well, he said the Russians in Crimea would never think Ukrainian, would never speak Ukrainian, would never glorify the heroes, meaning Bandera and Shukhevich and other collaborators of Hitler – and that’s why Russians must be swiped out of Crimea. Actually, this was said a couple of weeks before the Crimeans eventually decided to go to referendum. And these words were accompanied by deeds. They sent armed groups to take control of the Crimean parliament, and that’s how it all started. Not to mention the initiative – immediately, on the first day of this coup d’etat, the putschists introduced an initiative to do away with the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, which was in the Ukrainian Constitution. So all these instincts were immediately translated into very Russophobic policies.
The idea that Russians should get out of Ukraine is still very much on the minds of politicians in this country. Oleg Tyagnibok, the leader of the ultra-radical party, Svoboda (“Freedom”), has repeatedly said that “we must have de-Russification”, as he calls it. And de-Russification means that ethnic Russians must not have their own language, history and identity in Ukraine and so many similar things. But what is more important for us to understand in the current state of play are these statements by Zelensky himself. So I said that the ultra-radicals called for Russians to be wiped out of Crimea, and President Zelensky, in September last year, said, if you believe you’re a Russian, if you believe you want to be a Russian and if you want to be friendly with Russia, go to Russia. He said this just a few months ago.
So, coming back to sanctions: sanctions we will survive. The measures which the president and the government are developing, elaborating, are being announced. This is only the beginning of our economy getting adjusted to the new situation. After 2014, as I started to say, we did gain experience to rely upon ourselves. And the biggest lesson from this particular historical period is, unlike what we saw after 2014, that now,
… if there was any illusion that we can one day rely on our Western partners, this illusion is no longer there.
We will have to rely only on ourselves and on our allies who would stay with us. This is the main conclusion for Russia in the context of geopolitics.
Question: I think it’s safe to say that Russian culture specifically has become accustomed to being part of, you might say, a global village of countries that share deep economic ties and enjoy travelling between each other. How do you think these sanctions are going to influence the everyday life of Russians in the long term in relation to that?
Sergey Lavrov: Well, as I said, the assessment of what is going on, in my view, clearly indicates that what America wants is a unipolar world, which would be not like a global village, which would be like an American village and maybe American saloon where who is strongest is calling the shots. And they said they are succeeding to mobilize behind themselves and, on the basis of their own interests, the entire Western world, which is indicative of how independent NATO members and European Union members are and which is indicative of what place the European Union, as I said, would have in the future configuration of the world situation and the world system.
There are players who would never accept the global village under the American sheriff …
and
China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico – I am sure these countries do not want to be just in the position where Uncle Sam orders them something and they say “Yes, sir.” And of course, Russia is not in the category of countries who would be ready to do so. Actually, when people say – when the Americans and Western Europeans and others say that Russia was defeated in the General Assembly because the vast majority of countries voted against the Russian action in Ukraine, it’s misleading because, if you take the population represented by the countries who were not voting against Russia, and especially if you take the number of countries who introduce sanctions against Russia, a majority of those who voted against us did so under huge pressure, under blackmail, including – I know this for sure – including threats to individual delegates regarding their assets in the United States, bank accounts, children studying in universities and so on and so forth. It’s absolutely unprecedented blackmail and pressure without any scruples. So a majority of those countries who voted with the West, they did not and they would not introduce sanctions against Russia. They believe that it’s, you know, not a very big price to pay for their own practical cooperation with Russia, just to vote on something which is needed for the West for entirely propagandistic purposes. So we will be, as always, open to cooperation with anyone who is ready to do so on the equal basis, on the basis of mutual respect and searching for balance of interests, and the countries to the east of Russia are much more disposed to act on this basis, and we will certainly reciprocate for the benefit of both us and our partners. We are not closing the door on the West. They are doing so. But when they come back to their senses and when this door is reopened, we will be looking at proposed projects of cooperation with a very important thing in mind to which I alluded to already – that we will be going into cooperation with them knowing very well that we cannot be sure that they are reliable and that they are credible as long-term partners.
Question: Well, I’d like to take the discussion now to a sort of different topic: these US-sponsored biolabs in Ukraine. I mean, for years already, Russia has been trying to bring the world’s attention to them. And the latest piece of evidence connected to them the Russian military just put forward not too long ago, with documents signed by US officials in connection to them. Why do you think is the world not paying so much attention to these biolabs? And will Washington and its allies be held accountable for what they’re doing there?
Sergey Lavrov: Actually, it’s interesting that the special military operation launched by the president of the Russian Federation helped discover many things which are very important for understanding what is going on. Recently, the military of Russia, together with Donetsk and Lugansk forces, discovered documents of the Ukrainian general staff indicating clearly that they were preparing a massive attack against the Donetsk and Lugansk republics. So the operation, which was launched by Russia, in fact, preempted this threat and did not allow them to implement what they wanted to do, and they wanted to do exactly what they failed to do implementing the Minsk agreements. They were trying to use what they called Plan B and to take these territories by force with bloodshed on an unbelievable scale, in addition to what they have been doing to civilians for the last eight years.
But another set of documents which was discovered – as you said, documents related to military biological activity of the United States in Ukraine – documents with signatures of Ukrainian officials, US military.
Those laboratories have been created by the United States all over the world. More than 300 laboratories in various countries, many of them on the perimeter of the Russian Federation – in the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. Ukraine is probably the biggest project for the Pentagon, who is running this show.
The special Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Pentagon is in charge of this biological activity, and they are developing very dangerous pathogens, including plague, brucellosis, anthrax and many others, which are really very dangerous. And we know that they were experimenting on potential infections, which could be related to the ethnic groups living in the east of Ukraine and in neighboring regions of Russia.
We have been raising this issue in international organizations for a while, I would say almost more than 20 years. In 2001, we suggested that the countries participating in the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons should develop a verification mechanism which would be transparent, which would be understood by everybody and applied to everybody because the convention itself provides for consultations if any participating state has some suspicions or some information which the state would like to clarify. And if these consultations indicate that there is a good reason for some kind of investigation, then an investigation is supposed to be launched. But there is no mechanism to investigate, and there is no mechanism which would require each and every country, in response to an address, to provide information and to guarantee transparency of its biological activity anywhere, be it on your own territory or abroad.
By the way,
… the Americans some years ago decided that it is too dangerous to do these things on their own soil. So they moved all these threatening and dangerous activities to other countries,
and more and more they concentrate their research and experiments around the borders of the Russian Federation and China. So we will be insisting on this issue to be picked up by the Biological Weapons Convention, but also by the Security Council, because it’s a clear threat to international peace and security. We will be again emphasising the importance of negotiating a legally binding protocol to the Convention on Biological Weapons, which would require obligatory transparency measures by any participating state. The Americans, I have no slightest doubt, would be against it, but this position of theirs is not defendable. I am convinced that more and more countries understand how dangerous these plans are, and we will continue to fight them.
Question: What can you say on the topic of Washington’s role in all of this? President Zelensky called for weapons to come to his country from the West. He’s talked about a demand for establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and this is something that Joe Biden just recently again said is not going to happen because that would lead, no doubt, to outright war between Russia and NATO and the United States. Why do you think is Ukraine so desperately trying to make some sort of scenario like that happen?
Sergey Lavrov: Whatever you think of some of Joe Biden’s statements, he is a very experienced politician and he understands that it is absolutely inadmissible to establish something like a no-fly zone, to provide planes to Ukraine and to do other things which will bring the risk of direct confrontation between NATO and Russia just, you know, immediately. But Zelensky also understands that there are much less responsible politicians in the United States who are being agitated by the Ukrainian lobby and just driven by Russophobic feelings, and many of them are in Congress. They adopt every now and then resolutions condemning Russia, threatening Russia. I believe Zelensky is counting on them pushing the president in the direction of a more confrontational approach.
We clearly said that any cargo moving into Ukrainian territory which we would believe is carrying weapons would be fair game. This is clear because we are implementing the operation the goal of which is to remove any threat to the Russian Federation coming from Ukrainian soil. This was part of our proposal in December last year when we suggested that we negotiate with NATO security guarantees – the way which would be codifying the old agreement reached at the highest level that no one, no country should increase its security at the expense of the security of others. So they know what it is all about.
They also speak about missile defense. Kiev authorities think of asking NATO members who possess Soviet air defense systems to share this with them.
I would like to remind the countries who might be playing with this idea that …
the Soviet and Russian-made systems of missile defense or of any other purpose are there on the basis of intergovernmental agreements and contracts, which includes an end user certificate. The end user certificate does not allow them to send these weapons to any third country without our consent. This is a legal obligation.
I understand that legality and legal obligations is not something which our Western colleagues respect these days. They’ve already thrown away the presumption of innocence, private property being sacred and many other “pillars” on which the “liberal values” have been resting for so many centuries and decades.
But this is a serious matter, and I can assure you that we would not allow these risks to be materialised. The purpose of our operation is to protect civilians, who have been bombed and shelled and murdered for eight years, and to demilitarise Ukraine so that it does not pose a serious threat to the Russian territory, and to find security guarantees, which would be based on this equal, indivisible security principle for Ukraine, for Russia, for all European countries. We have been proposing this for many years. Denazification is an absolute must. And that includes not only canceling laws encouraging Nazist ideology and practices, but it also includes withdrawing any legislation which discriminates the Russian language and other national minority languages and, in general, national minority rights in Ukraine which have been hugely discriminated and offended.
Question: Well, we’ve talked a lot about the kinetic war, but I wanted to ask another question about the information war actually. A few days ago, the White House had a briefing with several popular TikTokers in the United States, and they were basically briefed on a new anti-Russian narrative that Washington wants to put forward. What do you think about such sort of underhanded propaganda technique when it’s usually Russia that they’re accusing of misinformation and underhanded tactics?
Sergay Lavrov: Well, we are a very, very small player in the international information war. It’s the information… World information is dominated by media belonging to the Americans, the Brits, and also the Germans, the French and others. It’s another matter, what the quality of those information outlets is. If you take CNN, they prefer to avoid analytical materials and they more and more concentrate on some reports which would be made of slogans “Russia is an aggressor,” “Russia is murdering civilians,” “Russia is abusing sports” and so on and so forth.
When they concentrate on TikTok and other resources like this and other platforms and when they target kids because TikTok is about young boys and girls, I believe this is an attempt to brainwash them for the rest of their lives. And this is indecent and not fair.
If you want information and competition, if you want competition among media outlets, then there at must be some rules.
I would remind you and your viewers that in 1990, when the Soviet Union was living under this “new thinking” concept and the human values, common values for humankind, the Western colleagues in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were pushing very actively, and finding support on the Soviet side, a series of documents of the OSCE on freedom of speech and on access to information. Such documents were endorsed by consensus in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. These days, when your channel and Sputnik many years ago were banned from attending, for example, press conferences and briefings in Élysée in Paris, and when we were drawing the attention of the French colleagues that this was against the commitment in the OSCE, they were saying, “No, no, no, no, no. Access to information is applicable only to mass media and RT and Sputnik are not mass media, they are propaganda tools.”
Another example of abusing the commitments and obligations – when a couple of years ago in London there was a conference on freedom of media in the modern world, no Russian media were invited.
So we know the manners and the tricks which are being used by the Western countries to manipulate media. We understood long ago that there was no such thing as an independent Western media. If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative points of view. But when you watch other channels and when you read social networks and internet platforms, when the acting president was blocked, as you know, and this censorship continues in a very big way and the substitution of notions. Whenever something is happening by the way of mass protest, mass demonstrations, which they don’t like, they immediately call it domestic terrorism. So it’s a war, and it’s a war which involves the methods of information terrorism. There is no doubt about this.
A very interesting example was yesterday, when the Bild newspaper in Germany published a piece saying that myself on the evening of March 16 left Moscow by plane to go to China, but in the area of Novosibirsk, the plane turned back because either Putin told me to come back or the Chinese said, “We don’t want to talk to you.” It was published by, yes, a tabloid, but with millions of copies. And it’s a shame that we have these habits being introduced into the information world by our “friends.
”It is not by incident that President Putin said about the existence of the Empire of Lies.
Question: Well, just one more question for you, Mr. Lavrov. Of course, this conflict in Ukraine is not going to go on forever. When it does come to an end, what do you foresee as the main challenges in future Russia–Ukraine relations?
Sergay Lavrov: Well, we never had any issues with the Ukrainian people. I have many Ukrainian friends, the two peoples are very close culturally. Practically all of them speak, and those who don’t, they understand the Russian language. Culture, common history, way of life, attitude to life, traditions of families and communities. So I hope that when this anomaly is over, this will gradually come back. It will have to be gradual.
It cannot come back fast because the efforts of our Western colleagues to make Ukraine a Russophobic and anti-Russian instrument – anti-Russia, as President Putin called it – they started long ago, and they are already rather deeply rooted in Ukrainian mentality, especially the young generation which was born after the demise of the Soviet Union. They have been indoctrinated in a very, very heavy way.
The efforts were taken systemically to train military officers on the basis of radical Bandera and Shukhevich-style methodology. The purpose being – to make sure that they would not become friendly to Russia again and that they would build their nationalism, nationalistic feelings as the means to strengthen the statehood of their country.
The purpose was always to make sure that Russia does not have Ukraine as a friend. It’s like Zbigniew Brzezinski in the late 1990s said, “Russia with Ukraine, a friendly Ukraine next to it, is a superpower. Russia with Ukraine which is not friendly to Russia, is just a regional player.” This concept is very deeply rooted in the minds of American policymakers, and it will take time to get rid of these negative legacies.
Even now, when the armed forces of Ukraine are fighting, trying to procrastinate the crisis. The leaders of Ukraine with the help of American and other Western advisors have reformed the army in the way which puts these radicals, Bandera-like trained officers, to lead all more or less meaningful units in the Ukrainian army. And these people radicalise and terrorise others, especially those who don’t believe that this should be the fate of their country.
Their actions in Mariupol is an example of that. The refugees coming from Mariupol to Russia in dozens of thousands tell such stories. It’s really threatening how this kind of people command armed men and women.
But I am sure, at the end of the day, the historic closeness of two fraternal nations will certainly prevail.
The “rules-based international order” – as in “our way or the highway” – is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.
The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system.
Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan.
India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism.
Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.
Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.”
Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake “summit” in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.
Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the “rules-based international order” in place since the early Cold War years: “After the end of this war [in Ukraine], ‘money’ will never be the same.” Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its “rules” by encroaching on other people’s money.
And that configures the central tenet of 21st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether “money” is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world – U.S. dollar vs. yuan – is at hand.
There’s no surefire evidence – yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia’s foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as “money” – according to Poznar – is absolutely untrustworthy.
If that’s the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.
It’s gold robbery time
As I outlined the emergence of the new paradigm, from the new monetary system to be designed by a cooperation between the EAEU and China to the advent of the petroyuan, a serious informed discussion erupted about a crucial part of the puzzle: the fate of the Russian gold reserves.
Doubts swirled around the Russian Central Bank’s arguably suicidal policy of keeping assets in foreign securities or in banks vulnerable to Western sanctions.
Of course there’s always the possibility Moscow calculated that nations holding Russian reserves – such as Germany and France – have assets in Russia that can be easily nationalized. And that the total debt of the state plus Russian companies even exceeds the amount of frozen reserves.
But what about the gold?
As of February 1, three weeks before the start of Operation Z, the Russian Central Bank held $630.2 billion in reserves. Almost half – $311.2 billion – were placed in foreign securities, and a quarter – $151.9 billion – on deposits with foreign commercial and Central Banks. Not exactly a brilliant strategy. As of June last year, strategic partner China held 13.8% of Russia’s reserves, in gold and foreign currency.
As for the physical gold, $132.2 billion – 21% of total reserves – remains in vaults in Moscow (two-thirds) and St. Petersburg (one-third).
So no Russian gold has been frozen? Well, it’s complicated.
The key problem is that more than 75% of Russian Central Bank reserves are in foreign currency. Half of these are securities, like government bonds: they never leave the nation that issued them. Roughly 25% of the reserves are linked to foreign banks, mostly private, as well as the BIS and the IMF.
Once again it’s essential to remember Sergei Glazyev in his groundbreaking essay Sanctions and Sovereignty: “It is necessary to complete the de-dollarization of our foreign exchange reserves, replacing the dollar, euro and pound with gold. In the current conditions of the expected explosive growth in the price of gold, its mass export abroad is akin to treason and it is high time for the regulator to stop it.”
This is a powerful indictment of the Russian Central Bank – which was borrowing against gold and exporting it. For all practical purposes, the Central Bank could be accused of perpetrating an inside job. And subsequently they were caught flat-footed by the devastating American sanctions.
As a Moscow analyst puts it, the Central Bank “had delivered some volumes of gold to London in 2020-2021. This decision was motivated by a high price of gold at that time (near $2000 per ounce) and could hardly be initiated by Putin. If so, this decision can be qualified as very stupid, or even part of a diversionist tactic (…) Most of the gold delivered to London was not stored but sold and transferred into foreign currency reserves (in euro or pounds) which were frozen later.”
No wonder a lot of people in Russia are livid. A quick flashback is in order. In June last year, Putin signed a law canceling requirements for the repatriation of foreign exchange earnings from gold exports. Five months later, Russia’s gold miners were exporting like crazy. A month later, the Duma wanted to know why the Central Bank had stopped buying gold. No wonder Russia media erupted with accusations of “an unprecedented [gold] robbery”.
Now it’s way more dramatic: RIA Novosti described the American-dictated freeze as – what else – a “robbery” and duly predicted global economic chaos. As for the Central Bank, it’s back on the gold buying business.
None of the above though explains some “missing” gold that de facto is not under the possession of the Russian Central Bank. And that’s where a somewhat shady character such as Herman Gref comes in.
“This process has been going on for the past year. Exported, according to some estimates, 600 tons. [Head of Russian Central Bank] Nabiullina said – whoever wants to sell gold to get cash, or if you mine gold and trade it, keep in mind that the state, in my person, will not buy gold from you at a market price. We will take it at a big discount. If you want to get honest money for it, please export it. The world center of gold trading is London. Accordingly, everyone began to export and sell gold there. Including Mr. [Herman] Gref. The head of the formally state-owned Sberbank sold a huge part of his gold reserves.”
Look here for fascinating details about Sberbank’s Gref shenanigans.
Watch for the gold-backed ruble
It may be a case of too little too late, but at least the Kremlin has now established a committee – with authority over the Central Bank nerds – to handle the serious stuff.
It boggles the mind that the Russian Central Bank does not answer to the Russian constitution as well as to the judicial system, but in fact is subordinated to the IMF. A case can be made that this cartel-designed financial system – implying zero sovereignty – simply cannot be tackled head on by any nation on the planet, and Putin has been trying to undermine it step by step. That includes, of course, keeping Elvira Nabiullina on the job even as she duly follows the Washington consensus to the letter.
And that brings us back to the ultra high stakes possibility that the Kremlin may have wanted from the start to go no holds barred, forcing the Atlanticists to reveal their true hand, and exposing their system in a “The King is Naked” spectacular for a worldwide audience.
And that’s where the EAEU/China new monetary/financial system comes in, under Glazyev supervision. We can certainly envision Russia, China and vast swathes of Eurasia progressively divorcing from casino capitalism; the ruble reconverted to a gold-backed currency; and Russia focused on self-sufficiency, productive domestic investment and trade connectivity with most of the Global South.
Way beyond its confiscated foreign reserves and tons of gold sold in London, what matters is that Russia remains the ultimate natural resource powerhouse. Shortages? A little austerity for a little while will take care of it: nothing as dramatic as the national impoverishment under the neoliberal 1990s. And extra boost would come from exporting natural resources at premium discount prices to other BRICS and most of Eurasia and the Global South.
The collective West has just fabricated a new, tawdry East-West divide. Russia is turning it upside down, to its own profit: after all the multipolar world is rising in the East.
The Empire of Lies won’t back down, because it does not have a Plan B. Plan A is to “cancel” Russia across the – Western – spectrum. So what? Russophobia, racism, 24/7 psyops, propaganda overdrive, cancel culture online mobs, that don’t mean a thing.
Facts matter: the Bear has enough nuclear/hypersonic hardware to shatter NATO in a few minutes before breakfast and teach a lesson to the collective West before pre-dinner cocktails. There will come a time when some exceptionalist with a decent IQ will finally understand the meaning of “indivisibility of security”.
Putin made an important speech today which the Russians officials are in no hurry to translate. So here is a machine translation from Boris Rozhin (aka Colonel Cassad): (only partial extracts from the full transcript, emphasis added by me, Andrei)
The operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine is developing successfully, strictly in accordance with plans.
The tactics of the Russian Defense Ministry in Ukraine have fully justified themselves, everything is being done to avoid civilian casualties. Before the operation began, Moscow offered Kiev to withdraw troops from Donbass, but they refused. All the tasks set will certainly be solved.
If Russian troops had stopped at the borders of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, this would not have been the final solution, it would not have removed the threat to Russia.
Russia is not going to occupy Ukraine.
There was no task to storm major cities.
The strike on Donetsk on March 14 is a bloody terrorist attack.
Russia will not allow Ukraine to remain a springboard for anti-Russian actions.
The whole planet has to pay for the ambitions of the West, the myth of the “golden billion” is collapsing.
The West is trying to convince its citizens that their difficulties are the result of Russia’s actions, but this is a lie.
Sanctions against the Russian Federation are hitting the Europeans and Americans themselves, “it is not necessary to shift from a sick head to a healthy one.”
The US and the EU actually defaulted on their obligations to Russia, freezing its reserves – now everyone knows that the state’s reserves can simply be stolen.
Russia – unlike Western countries – will respect the right of ownership.
Arrests of foreign assets of the Russian Federation and business – a lesson for Russian entrepreneurs, there is nothing more reliable than investments at home
We now know who cowardly betrayed their partners and failed to fulfill their obligations to employees.
Trying to “cancel” Russia, the West has torn off all the masks of decency.
I am sure that after blocking the accounts of the Russian Federation in the West, many countries will convert their reserves into goods, which will increase the deficit.
It is obvious that the current events draw a line under the global dominance of Western countries both in politics and in the economy.
Moreover, they themselves question the economic model that has been imposed on developing countries in recent decades. Yes, in general, the whole world.
I emphasize that the sanctions obsession of the United States and its supporters is not shared by countries where more than half of the world’s population lives. It is these states that represent the fastest growing, most promising part of the global economy, including Russia.
The “empire of lies” of the West is powerless against truth and justice, Russia will continue to bring its position to the whole world
The West relies on the fifth column, national traitors, such mentally are there, in the West, and not in Russia. The West is trying to split our society, speculating on combat losses, on the consequences of sanctions. The people will be able to distinguish patriots from scum and traitors and just spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew in. The natural self-purification of society will strengthen our country.
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.
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?
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.
The big news of the day is that the Russian forces finally decided to, shall we say, change pace, and by all account the intensity of the artillery, aerial bombing and missile barrage which hit the Ukie forces in the town of Avdeevka was absolutely unprecedented and following this barrage the LDNR forces broke through 8 kilometers of just about the most heavily defended sectors in the entire theater or operations. The Ukrainian 95th Airmobile Brigade (one of the most combat capable unit of the Ukrainian Army!) was defending this sector. According to reports, this entire brigade was basically wiped out.
Here is what you need to know about Avdeevka: this is the very heavily defended location from which the Ukronazis could unleash their terror against the civilians in Donetsk. Now that this entire town has been flattened, the people of Donetsk can now finally hope to live in relative (Ukie Smerch MLRS and Tochka-U missiles can still reach Donetsk!) peace.
So, not only did Russian encircle the entire Ukrainian forces in an operational cauldron, she then proceeded to cut that single force into two smaller cauldrons (but both still contained in the bigger, operational, cauldron) and now as a show of force, she destroyed the most combat capable Ukrainian unit in the most heavily defended town.
The “message” here is clear: we strongly encourage you to lay down arms or else…
One Ukrainian blogger even believes that there will soon be (or already are!) three mini-cauldrons (see map with cauldrons in blue).
However, as I mentioned before, we should not make too much of these or any other maps. We can use them to get a general sense of what is going on, but we should not use any of them to substantiate a conclusion, especially if that conclusion clashes with what we otherwise also know.
In the case of this map, what we see is a concerted effort to close down the entire Donbass cauldron and then move westward.
I won’t discuss what is happening on other part of the “front” (not an appropriate term for this type of conflict) but I might post one more map tonight if I come across an interesting one.
What about the informational war?
Well, inside Russia it is going rather well. Check out this (machine) translation of a recent article about public opinion by two different organizations:
TheVTsIOM and FOM published regular surveys that demonstrate a confident increase in the support of all power institutions. Indicators of the approval of the activities of the President, the Government and the United Russia and confidence in them go to the transcendental subsidiaries. Since the starting point for the growth of optimism is in February 24, it can be said that military special operation in Ukraine continued within Russia in special operation of sociological. And the dynamics of its implementation is so great that the goal should be understood quite quickly. In the surveys of the VTsIOM, the level of approval of the actions of Vladimir Putin, last week rose highly, and therefore in a new study digit moderate – just 74.2%. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishutin has grown up to 48%, but the government’s rating took off immediately almost 50%. The direct question about the trust brought these results: the president has exceeded 77%, the head of the Cabinet of Ministers approached 60%. the party United Russia, according to the VTsIOM, now has a rating of 39.4%, which is 3.4% more than the previous value.
Modern Germany’s hero: a Nazi Jew (got to love that!)
So it appears that at least INSIDE Russia the Empire of Lies has lost the first PSYOP battles, but there will be many more to come, and the objective reality the government is dealing with (The Empire of Lies wants to totally “cancel” Russia by any and all means) is tough. The economic decisions of the government in particular (we will have a translation about that soon) leaves a lot of very unpleasant questions, at least in my mind. But more about that later.
Outside Russia, the PSYOPs of the Empire of Lies did to Russia what the Russian military did to the Ukies in Avdeevka: comprehensively beat the crap out of Russia’s rather clumsy PR efforts. As a direct result, we now have Ze on the cover of magazines and 100’000 Brits volunteering to house Ukrainian refugees.
How noble indeed!
Too bad that the same generosity was never shown to the Russian people in many centuries of anti-Russian warfare…
I do not recall such noble feelings from ANYBODY when the Nazis were shelling the LDNR and when Poroshenko PUBLICLY promised that the kids of the Donbass would go to school not in Kindergartens, but in the bomb shelters. No, for some reason those 100’000 Brits did not offer to house them.
Clearly, Russian lives do not matter one bit. Not one.
I have to share with you that I am convinced that most people in Zone A truly and sincerely couldn’t care less about Russian lives, even innocent civilians can be murdered, tortured and otherwise disappears but that triggers no “teary eyes” in the West, not even from many Orthodox Christians.
As I have mentioned several times, this war has been a HUGE “coming out” for the West which now has shown its true face.
Putin put it best when he called it the Empire of Lies. But it is even more than that, it is also an Empire of Indifference. And, finally, the Empire is truly and really an Empire of Hypocrisy.
That is what Russia and all those Russians who refuse to condemn their President, country and people (who were forced into this war!) need to accept: while Russians have had no hostility towards the West until now, at least: this is now quickly changing according my my contacts in Russia. Even when the Soviet Communist system was battling AngloZionist imperialism worldwide, the Russian people always knew that the enemy is a ruling cast, an ideology, and some specific segments of society.
“Some people in the foreign press say that the Red Army aims to exterminate the German people and destroy the German state. This, of course, is stupid nonsense and stupid slander against the Red Army. The Red Army does not and cannot have such idiotic goals. The Red Army has its own the goal of expelling the German occupiers from our country and liberating the Soviet land from the German fascist invaders. It is very likely that the war for the liberation of the Soviet land will lead to the expulsion or destruction of the Hitler clique. We would welcome such an outcome. But it would be ridiculous to identify the Hitler clique with the German people. The experience of history tells us that the Hitlers come and go, but the German people, but the German state remains“.
And that was, again, the hyper-villain and Uber-butcher Stalin! He said that in an official order dated February 23, 1942, while the German forces were engaged in truly genocidal mass murder all over the Nazi occupied Soviet Union.
In contrast, the Nazis not only wanted some areas to be declared Judenfrei/Judenrein while their modern-day heirs clearly want the world to be Russenfrei/Russenrein. And its not only the Poles who like to say “Poland up to the Urals, after that – China”, this profound acceptance of the total lack of value of any Russian life is now something very common in Zone A, and it will only get worse since “Biden” will now explain away all his (long list) of failures on Russia, Russians and personally Putin (the “new Hitler”, of course!).
In other words, Russians everywhere should fully expect to be shown less mercy by their western neighbors than the mercy the German people could expect from Stalin during WWII.
To give you an idea, here is what a red-blooded Romanian warrior tried to post in the comments section:
What can one add to such a lyrical statement?
Maybe that Romanians left a “truly unforgettable legacy” in the Ukraine during WWII and the same spirit lives on in modern Romania? Or maybe that folks coming from a country with exactly ZERO agency would do well not to try to roar like a lion, but maybe squeaking like a mouse would make a better fit?
As for Russia and Russians, we will survive modern Nazis just like we survived their previous iteration. By then Russians will hopefully be a little more mature and a little bit less naive about our Urkonazi “brothers” or their masters from the Empire of Lies.
And, no, we will never surrender. Ever 🙂
Speaking of surrender, here is a nice photo of some Russian soldiers with lots of western weaponry:
Finally, the “obligatory” maps! Today I won’t wait for Readovka, so here is an animation of the move of the frontline from RIA Novosti. Again, it is just a map which should NOT be trusted, but I think that it shows us something of value: how the front moved from day 1 to today, day 19.
What about the Nazi volunteers?
Turns out that one of them, something of a hero in Zone A, died within 20 mins of his first contact with the Russian forces (see here and here for details). The fact that Russia destroyed the NATO base in Iarovov probably does not help.
As the journalist – in English or French – who has covered more Yellow Vest demonstrations than any other, I thought it was my responsibility to give them something I can’t find anywhere: an objective, accurate and complete history. I am publishing here, in a chapter-by-chapter serialised format, my new book – France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values.
Soon after starting this project I quickly realised: France doesn’t need an accurate rendering of the massive repression of progressive politics which began on November 17, 2018 – they need an accurate rendering of the massive repression of progressive politics which began in 1789. If they lied and misrepresented the Yellow Vests in 2018, wouldn’t they have also done the same in 1936, 1871, 1848, 1789 and in between?
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has just called the West an “empire of lies” – this book is an effort to dismantle those lies as regards to France from 1789 through the Yellow Vests. My previous books have dispelled the lies about modern China and modern Iran – after 13 years in France, I think I can do the same for the good people of France. Check out the chapter list below – this is new and interesting stuff that will reshape your perceptions of the entire West. Send Putin a copy.
Look below to pre-order a copy in e-book and paperback form. The book will be available in French as well. The publication date is June 1.
I’m publishing here for free because – of course – relating the true ideas and experiences of the Yellow Vests is what is most important. But leftist journalism doesn’t pay at all, and we have bills, too. If you like it, please support it with a purchase if you have the ability. It’s cheaper during this pre-order period. Something to keep in mind: Most public libraries want donations but their absolute priority is new books – wouldn’t this book be a great donation or gift? You know it’s an empire of lies regarding French history since 1789, but do others?
This is going to be the most comprehensive book on the Yellow Vests you can find, and from the journalist who knows them best; who got gassed and harassed right alongside them; who wore out shoes on their weekly, 15km+ races across Paris chased by riot police. This will also be the book with the most space devoted to the actual words of the Yellow Vests, as I’ll soon explain.
France has a historic vote coming up next month, and I thought this book would talk much about that vote but then I realised: How much more vital and interesting is a Yellow Vest-fuelled rethinking of two centuries of French and global politics than one election featuring not one but four far-right candidates? Even the French have been tuning out this election in record numbers. I will have to write some columns on the election, but the 2022 vote deserves only the final coda in this book. Please enjoy this series as you also follow France’s upcoming election, and I promise you will have a totally different view of France when it is all finished.
Right in 1789, right in 2019 – why don’t Western historians admit France keeps being right?
When it comes to reading Western commentary on French political history from 1789 into the 21st century what always baffles me is: they are so terribly critical of France and its revolutionaries, even though by the 1970s much of what they fought for would be absolutely insisted upon by the average European. I think the Yellow Vests will continue this trend of being ahead of the curve.
The book is divided into two broad sections: the first is French history from 1789-2018, and the second is an analysis of who, how, why and what the Yellow Vests are for.
What’s certain is that it’s a necessary book: The English-language books on the Yellow Vests (less than a handful) are analyses from overseas and not worth mentioning. The leading French-language books on the Yellow Vests were seemingly all published by spring 2019: they give the whys but not the actual history of the Yellow Vest movement, which this book will; they were published too soon to grasp the depth of their victories, as this book does; they include a fraction of actual Yellow Vest words, crucially.
This book is not detached analysis: I have interviewed hundreds of Yellow Vests in my work for Iran’s PressTV and their quotations will be interspersed throughout every chapter – you’ll see how long-running the fight for progressive politics truly is.
I can promise you that the first part of this book is not some boring leftist genuflecting at the 1794 glories of Robespierre, Danton and Marat – they are not analysed at all. Simply scroll down to the bottom and look at the chapter list – I think you’ll see chapters with analyses that have hardly ever, or never, been broached. “The Paris Commune as the birth of the ‘neoliberal empire’ of the European Union, really? Napoleon was actually a true leftist, is that right? Reclaiming Trotsky’s analysis of turbulent 1930s France from the Trotskyists – well, they are usually wrong these days. I guess the English really do declare war on everyone else’s revolution….” Etc.
As an immigrant journalist to France I have been forced to try and make sense of French history from 1789 until today. In the same way that historians like to sum up centuries of history from the Achaemenid or Safavid eras in Iran – it can be done, after all – I’m looking for patterns and threads, and I think the Yellow Vest phenomenon has either capped or sparked an absolutely major part of French history.
I have covered France for 13 years, but it’s a special 13 years: This is the era when the recently born “neoliberal empire” – the European Union – made its Age of Austerity power plays to become entrenched and obeyed. These are not spur of the moment creations – the European Union, and also the eurozone, are institutions which are centuries in the making. They might last centuries, but only upon the broken bones of the truly once-in-a-century, undemocratic repression of the Yellow Vests.
The Yellow Vests provide us with a new mountain ledge in history – thanks to them the patterns and threads from 1936, 1871, 1848 and 1789 become much clearer. Thanks to the Yellow Vests we can better grasp what today’s establishment institutions truly want; we have been reminded of the episodes of bloody repression from times incorrectly thought to be bygone. Thus, by incorporating the Yellow Vest experience we can give a more “scientific” historical analysis of French history and – because of France’s unusually prominent role in modern political thought – even global political history.
The second most important thread which emerges from 1789 to the Yellow Vests is this: The failure of Western Liberal Democracy as a system which can produce broad security for the average person and not just the elite. The Yellow Vests remind that, still, Western Liberal Democracy can only be imposed by force and without democracy – it is not chosen by popular mandate in a democratic “marketplace of ideas”.
In the 21st century I think it may take someone who is personally familiar with the evils of monarchy and shah-dom to realise that the French had it right long ago: Monarchy, and its ideological partners and inbred ideas, are not from some bygone era but are still in force today. Macron means autocracy. That is a fair and common judgment of his five-year tenure. Autocracy is still a problem, the Yellow Vests gorily remind us.
The Iranian Revolution, which in 2022 is still the great revolution of the contemporary era and which was waged against the “king of kings”, also reminds us that the shortest summation of the progressive goal of human political efforts is this: To move away from autocracy.
Autocracy – opposition to popular democracy of any sort – is the spring from which all political evil flows, and we saw it in the Yellow Vests, and in the method of governance from Brussels and Paris which provoked the Yellow Vests.
For the Englishmen who insist wizened Queen Elizabeth II could never hurt a fly, unfairly collude with a bank/landlord or covertly join in suppressing opposition to her royal brethren in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – they must also necessarily fail to see that the oligarchy produced by Western Liberal Democracy represents only the barest broadening of the spoils of autocracy. The Yellow Vest grasp this: the “rubber bullet liberalism” of Macron needs no prefix – liberalism has always been violence in support of government policies by and for a tiny elite instead of by and for the people.
This book combines understanding of politics today with an understanding of the autocrats who insist on the politics of yesterday
You know about the Yellow Vests, and thus you know what repression Western Liberal Democracy will wage to preserve itself, and you likely know what a “neoliberal empire” is. But, and forgive me if I am presumptuous, do you know how Western Liberal Democracy truly got here?
It’s not easy, because they don’t give an accurate accounting of their own history any more than they do for the Yellow Vests.
I am always amazed at how much the history of the 19th century in the US, France and UK is so very ignored by those countries when this era saw the very formation of the Western Liberal Democracies which their leaders champion so violently today? The reason for this is because this era is full of elitist nonsense, unpatriotic treasons, violence and ever-repeated repressions of the average person. Continuing ignorance about this has only produced an “empire of lies”. Abroad, these countries literally created the disparities which we now refer to as the “Third World”, but domestically they were just as awful to their very own people. This is, “… because class warfare” but also, and Karl Marx himself doesn’t stress this enough, “… because monarchy”, which is autocracy by and for elites; which is perfectly acceptable to Western Liberal “Democracy”.
Many peers of mine (and analysts who are far more learned and vital than myself) often talk about a “neo-feudal” model because, I believe, of the widespread misunderstanding of the actual history of Western Liberal Democracy, which began in 1789 and this fight against monarchy. But the failure to see Western Liberal Democracy also as international 1%er collusion against the masses implies the failure to see Western Liberal Democracy as autocratic, too.
Make that mistake and you misunderstand the political foundations of the modern world since 1789, and thus the class struggle, modern imperialism and today’s Bankocracy – which is to say the entire factual foundation for the sensible and successful choice of Socialist Democracy.
Make that mistake and you’ll ask: Why are the French told to have a conflicted and even negative view of Napoleon Bonaparte, even though he was the most influential figure of the 19th century? How can Adolphe Thiers treasonously and openly collude with Bismarck and still be a president and a Western Liberal Democratic hero? Why do 21st century Westerners call people “neo-nazis” even when such people have zero socialism in their platforms and seemingly no familiarity with the Marxist view of 19th century history? Why are they the “Revolutions of 1848” when they only succeeded in one place (France)? If the French Revolution is done and dusted then why is modern Western conservatism based around the ideas of Irish-Anglo Edmund Burke and his knee-jerk Reflections on Revolution in France from 1790? The first part of this book about the Yellow Vests answers these vitally important questions.
Burke, Karl Marx – the leading historian of the 19th century -, and Leon Trotsky – the leading historian of first decades of the 20th century: this book relies on them heavily to help us understand the 2020s. Why am I employing philosophical leaders from the far-right to the far-left? Because this is an interesting book you should buy and read, of course! Because the Yellow Vests are historic! Because, mostly, all three were aware that Western Liberal Democracy was a sham democracy and doomed to failure for everyone but a most unmeritorious elite. They thought these things for different reasons but, just like the Yellow Vests, they are all the most trenchant critics of Western Liberal Democracy.If the repression of the Yellow Vests doesn’t merit a new and serious criticism of Western Liberal Democratic history… then I guess one is avoiding such objective and honest talk until the aftermath of World War III?
So while I may be painted as a naive leftist, an Islamic Socialist, a communist, an apologist, a reactionary, a fake-journalist – I have heard all these things, LOL – we still need a cogent critique of modern French history which seeks to explain the lies on which an “empire of lies” shakily rests.
This book rests upon the voices of the Yellow Vests: I am simply the facilitator – the one who was on the daily hard-news job when it became clear what “neoliberalism” and “neo-imperialism” means for 21st century France, Europe and beyond.
I hope you enjoy the book and that you comment freely. It sure would be nice if you could buy a copy, but – please – only if your finances allow it.
<—>
Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value! Publication date: June 1, 2022.
Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.
First, as the entire western press is clamoring in impotent range, Russia has fire 8 Kalibr missiles at a major NATO base in western Ukraine. The base is utterly destroyed and there are many (well over 180+) dead mercenaries and even more wounded ones. The base was near the Polish border which, of course, triggered even more hysterics.
What is important about this strike is this: Russia has just proven to the world that she can “reach” as far as she wants and that her conventional strikes can be truly crippling. That, of course, also means that as soon as any western mercenary crosses the Ukrainian border he will have a crosshairs painted on him.
Ever since the first Ukie civil war, the Nazis have been organizing what they called “safaris” where wealthy western Nazis could pay a lump sum to then travel to the Donbass and shoot some Snow Niggers. Of course, the problem with this concept that sometimes you could mistakenly hit a soldier rather than a civilian and that this Snow Nigger would shoot back.
So now, instead of asking Nazis to pay to kill Snow Niggers, now the Ukies (and their US masters, of course) are willing to pay Nazis to come a fight the Snow Niggers. And Iavorov in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the LOC must have felt extremely safe and cozy. This is now this facility is described in an interview of the Mayor of Lvov by the Israeli website Ynet:
Those who were there a week ago said that some 100,000 men, some of them are new recruits, were at the base, undergoing a fast-track army training before going into battle. It appears the Russian intelligence received a tip on the actions in the base, before deciding to bomb it.
True, in the same interview, the said mayor claimed “at least 35”!
This is what this major NATO facility looks like today, judge for yourself:
It should be noted that this base was also a huge weapons depot for weapons brought in by land, from Poland, and that all this western kit is now reduced to a gigantic Lego pieces dump.
By the way, there are many more such facilities in the Ukraine!
The base on the far left indicated as “International Center for Peacekeeping and Security”,Iaworow, Lvov oblast” (международный центр миротворчества и безопасности, Яворов, Львовская обл.) is the one the Russian destroyed! yes, it was labeled “Peacekeeping and Security”, I kid you not!
I don’t know who taught whom to lie like that – NATO and Nazis are both specialists in that field, really – but to call a military base which was supposed to bring a full brigade (several thousand!!) of Nazi volunteers a “peacekeeping security center” is truly precious, even by the rather lax standards of the Empire of Lies.
Then there was this strike, also in the Ukraine:
What you see here is the result of a Ukie strike on the Donetsk city center today.
The Ukies fired a Tochka-U missile precisely at downtown Donetsk.
Military value from this strike? Zero.
Feelgood value from this strike? Immense!
And no, this is NOT a war crime! This is how the glorious glorious armed forces of the Nazi Ukraine take just revenge against Russia and the “separs” who dare to support her.
Russia exposed to the world’s contempt
You cannot compare the innocent mercenaries to those criminal civilians, because the former act in the name of humanity civilization and progress whereas the latter are russki brutes, Mongols really, who represent a threat for the wonderful White and Christian European civilization.
In fact, when the western doubleplusgoodthinkers proclaim with indignation that the Ukrainian civil war (well, the two Ukie civil wars really) killed 14’000 people, they “forget” to mention that the vast majority of those killed where civilians from the LDNR and that for YEARS the LDNR forces did not reply to Ukie attacks, not just sniper or mortar fire, but also heavy artillery strikes and major terrorist attacks, including the President of the DNR.
But that matters nothing to the Empire of Lies.
But now that a sad and ugly group of bona fide Nazi volunteers got hit on a military base (a legitimate target under international law and the laws of war specifically!) we hear a massive “oy veh!!!” rising to the heavens and demanding that Russia be severely punished for daring to shoot at those wannabe Kulturträgers!
I think that it would be fair to summarize The Rule as follows: we get to kill as many Snow Niggers as we want, but Snow Niggers dare not kill any of our White and Christian Kulturträgers.
Speaking of niggers, here is another important missile strike.
The Iranian Sand Niggers used their (very accurate) missiles to obliterate a Mossad base in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now that, what shall we call it? maybe a “Jewish Cultural Center” or maybe a “Iraqi Law Center against Antisemitism” has been turned into this:
Interestingly, the IRGC indicated that the operation was in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capital of Damascus last Monday, in which two IRGC officers were killed. Apparently, the Iranian Snow Niggers do not believe that the Jewish Kulturträgers get to kill them without retaliation.
Most interestingly, following this strike the Israelis have copied the US “counter-attack philosophy” and… …done exactly nothing about this! The story is mostly buried deep in the Israeli media, which doesn’t deny or cover it up, it just mentions them en passant and then goes on to other topics (including lots of anti-Russian pro-Ukie coverage of the Russian’s special operation in the Ukraine).
Here is the simple truth: the Empire of Lies cannot afford a full-scale with against Russia and China: that we already knew, but it can’t even take on Iran, in spite of that country being much smaller and comparatively weaker. But what the Iranians do have truly formidable weapons, and I am not referring to their (actually quite formidable) missiles, but by their political will and courage to use their missiles against *any* enemy.
An often-repeated story is that the Iranian hero and martyr General Soleimani personally visited Moscow and convinced the Russians to launch their military intervention in Syria. This inspires two hopes in me:
I hope to see Moscow at least once more before my time down here is up and that day I hope to be able to bring flowers to a large statue of General Soleimani somewhere in Moscow, maybe in the place were the Pushkin Square McDonalds (due to close today, not a day too soon, thank you sanctions!!!) stood all these years? Or maybe right in front of the US Embassy in Moscow which, by then, I hope to see vacated by the servants of the Empire of Lies and, maybe, replaced by a US Music Center (Jazz, Blues, Country, Gospel, Appalachian and many other kinds of beautiful US music.) or, maybe, an exhibit like the one the Iranians did with the CIA station in Tehran? Something beautiful and inspiring for sure.
By the time I see Russia, maybe for a last time, I hope that the spirit and ethos of General Soleimani will “infect” all the Russian ruling elites and give them the morality and courage they currently so clearly lack.
God willing, God willing!
It is too early for any maps right now (dragon-first-1 was told by persons in high positions to stop making and posting his while Radovka is slow), but if I see something interesting, I will post it here.
First let’s begin with a map of how the situation was yesterday evening:
The main news missing from here is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet conducted strikes on the Ukrainian coast southwest of Odessa. The other big news I already mentioned, the Russian safely took control of the Zaporozhie nuclear plant. Earlier the Ukronazis wanted a no fly zone above it to prevent another Chernobyl, only much worse.
That fake story died today.
Speaking of dying fake stories, there ought to be somewhere in the virtual space a “fake story cemetery” were all the fakes of western PSYOPs would be held in one place with videos, audio, texts, maps, etc.
Putin is quite right, the West is the Empire of Lies. It ought to be “honored” as such.
Speaking of honor.
I am getting emails from many friends in Europe. They all report the same: Russians are being expelled and otherwise “canceled” all over Europe. And here is what I find the most amazing: most of these bans, expulsions and “cancellation” are VOLUNTARY, that is to say, that the institutions which impose them are NOT forced to do this by any law or Gestapo. Nope. Europeans do that VOLUNTARILY.
Pure racist hatred and persecution, sometimes with violence. Here is the ugly truth
The people of the West want to “cancel Russia”
First, good luck with that!
Second, actually, I am grateful.
This war has fully shown the true face of the West to the rest of the planet.
NOW we really see what “western values” are, and that is a MUCH NEEDED “vaccine” for the Russia nation.
Speaking of Russia, my contact there tell me that the initial shock is wearing off and that all the fearmongering of the first days has been debunked ad nauseam and that the number of Russians who support that special operation in the Ukraine has actually risen to above 70%! I cannot confirm that, but it seems likely to me considering the outcome from 1 week of fantastically intensive “informational warfare” which began by a crushing and very effective attack by western PSYOPs but which, as is always the case, eventually peters out over time (Iraqi WMD anybody?).
I think that the informational tide will begin to slowly turn now. Not a picosecond too soon…
One Duma Deputy recently mentioned that besides organizing a Nuremberg like Tribunal or Ukronazi warcrime and human rights violations, there could be another tribunal which would compile, present and characterize the lies which the Ukies and their western patrons have covered the entire infospace with.
Interesting idea for sure…
The western media has now shown that it has sunk way, waaaaay below the level of such rags as Trud or Völkischer Beobachter.
First, let’s begin with a pretty decent map of the situation today:
Here is a small commentary on what we see in this map:
In red the most recent Russian movements today. The only major progress is inside the purpose square when Russian forces have penetrated deep in the rear of both Odessa and Kiev. So I have to wonder – are the planning a strategic cauldron??? Dunno, but I decided to add a black bar to show where we might want to look closer in the coming days.
Mariupol is, as already mentioned, totally closed off and heavy fighting is taking place. This city will be forcibly denazified in the next couple of days.
The (much awaited) operational cauldron in the east is still not physically closed by Russian forces. But, as I already mentioned, the no man’s land between the two Russian prongs is completely “shot through” (to use a Russian expression) which means that while small groups can still make it out, it’s over for the heavy Ukie armor, artillery and Nazi death-squads who are STILL shelling Donetsk which, of course, nobody reports about in the Empire of Lies.
I suppose that they want to kill as many Russians before the inevitable outcome…
On this topic, I got an email from a Chinese friend today, and he made a very astute observation. Here is what he wrote:
——- Have you noticed how many Battle of Berlin style Wehrmacht tactics are being used by the Kiev regime? We’re less than a week into the war, & so far we’re already seeing:
1. Volkssturm in Kiev (granted an even more half-assed version thereof); 2. Preventing civilians from leaving the warzone (see https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/03/01/greek-in-mariupol-fascist-ukrainian/); 3. Holding festungs down to the last man (e.g. Kharkov, Mariupol, etc.); 4. Forced conscription of military aged men; 5. Strafbattalion
Am I missing anything else? 😀 ——-
He *does* have a point, doesn’t he?
But he did miss one thing: The Ukie “Wunderwaffe” of course!
Possible candidates include:
Javelins!!!
Bayraktars!!!
NLAWs!!!
Western fighter aircraft!!!
ISIS fighters!!!
Wooden Kalashnikovs!!!
Assorted Soviet era weapons with new names!!!
Nazi volunteers from all over Europe!!!
Polish, British and Estonian special forces!!! and, of course,
Ze’s “nuke!!!!
So not one, but TEN Wunderwaffen for the Ukies.
Kiev 2022?
Will “Ze” end like Adolf did or will he run?
I bet you he will run.
They mostly already have…
One more thing.
The Ukie Volkssturm is turning into a very serious disaster which might get much worse in the near future. Here is what is happening.
In some cities the local authorities were contacted by Russian forces and an orderly change of command took place. The civilians authorities are working (almost?) as normal and law and order is (mostly?) secured.
The problem are the hardcore Nazi volunteer death-squads who distributed military weapons to anybody and everybody, including convicted felons and criminals. These gangs are now mostly fighting each other because they are taken over by paranoid hallucinations about “Russian Spetsnaz” everywhere, and since most Ukies speak Russian, unless on video, even the hardcore ones, they have a MAJOR “IFF” (Identification Friend or Foe) problem.
They are also more getting desperate and even more violent than usual: Russian POWs are being tortured to death as a matter of course (Russian special services are tracking down all their names, there will be a big Nuremberg like trial when this war ends).
I have heard of only one instance were the Ukie Volkssturm engaged a column of Russian national guard troops. They were all killed in minutes.
But here are two very real dangers:
Ukrainian civilians are now at risk all over Banderastan
Ukie Volkssturm atrocities will be filmed by the western presstitutes and blamed on Russia
Frankly, this could turn into another MH-17, but at a much, much bigger scale.
I hope and pray that any and all Ukrainians who are not Nazis now (finally!) stop waiting for Russia to clean house in their country (yet again!) and do something to disarm the marauding Ukie Volkssturm gangs. May God help all those who are innocent and preserve them by His Might.
This question was asked by some pressitute while Biden was walking to his helicopter today: Mr President, is Ukraine winning the war?
Wow, just wow. Either she fully believes it, and then WOW or she doesn’t and then WOW again.
This is a “Let’s Go Brandon” on a geostrategic level! 🙂
By the way, she followed up with a question about whether he worried about a nuclear war.
I think that this exchange sums of the entire and total delusion which folks in the West are holding on. The inevitable wake up phase will be painful, very painful.
Clearly, “Biden” is winning this one. Not 🙂
Then there is this (see graph) to keep in mind. Biden is down in the proverbial shits and, worse, pretty much anything he does next will only make things worse. The fact that this is an entirely self-inflicted wound makes no difference as to how hard it bleeds…
In other news from the “back to reality” corner: the UK and Poland have had to announce that, no, after careful thought and all things considered, they won’t be sending fighter aircraft into the Ukraine.
What a surprise to everybody in Kiev (and to nobody in Moscow)!
As for Uncle Shmuel, he declared that (trying to) imposing a no-fly would mean “shooting down Russian aircraft” which, for some unfathomable reason, the USA did not want to do. That might have something to do with Putin’s very blunt warning yesterday.
Maybe the western leaders are very slowly coming to realize that while Russians don’t threaten, they don’t bluff either. That is a “new normal” which is going to cause a lot of buttaches to the narcissists ruling the West…
The Eurorodents in all heroically walk out of the room when Lavrov addressed them by video. If the intention of the Eurorodents was to convey to the Russians that “we won’t ever listen to a single word you have to say” then I am confident that the Russians heard that message and will keep that factoid in mind in planning future unilateral Russians actions (of which there are plenty more to come, that is quite obvious now).
A few good news now: the nuclear plant at Zaporozhie is safely in Russian hands. Thank God for that.
So what has been the triumphant President “Ze” up to?
He signed an application to be immediately accepted into the EU. The new Europeans loved it. The old ones, not so much.
The Eurorodents are also forming what I would call “internationalist Nazi brigades” of volunteers who can go and fight for Banderastan. No visa needed – show up, declare your willingness to kill Russians, and, voila, you are shipped to…
… to the almost closed operational cauldron in the Donbass!
In fact, I suppose that by now getting in is about as hard and dangerous as getting out. Yes, technically, there is a no man’s land between the two Russian prongs (the one from the north and the one from the south), but it is now a Russian “free fire zone” which, considering both the presence of very heavy weapons systems (MLRS and TOS-1A) and the sharp increase in Russian air operations would be a very very dangerous attempt indeed.
Speaking of cauldrons, Russia has cut off the entire Ukrainian coast from the Sea of Azov and Mariupol is the first “cauldron” to be officially locked.
The civilized and winning West is showing that it really knows the score: Russian students are expelled from EU colleges (a similar idea is now floated in the USA), even neutral countries like Switzerland have closed their airspace to Russian carriers (which Switzerland really did not have to do since all the countries neighboring Switzerland already did that), and Russian citizens can’t even fly across Canadian airspace on their way home to the EU from the USA (just happened to a friend of mine). I fully expect “Russian Standard” vodka to disappear from US stores (we bought all the last ones we could).
Maybe we will soon be treated to YouTube videos showing (US or Ukie) Nazis machine-gunning Russian “matrioshka” dolls followed by thunderous cries of “Glory to the Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!“?
Russians are being expelled from sports clubs, musical events, cultural events and pretty much from everywhere where something “Russian” can be treated with hate and contempt.
These are Orwell’s two minutes of hate, but drawn out over days.
This is an russophobic Kristallnacht, but officially organized and praised.
I want to add one more thing about all this: nobody, absolutely NOBODY, is forcing the folks in the West to act the way they are. No Gestapo, no SA/SS patrols – nothing. Just the US PSYOPs and the eager willingness of these folks to “show Russia” in some way.
And since there are practically NO voices denouncing all this, this is also an important “message” from the people of Europe to the people of Russia.
And,
This is EXACTLY what the Russian nation needs to understand the world it lives in.
THAT is the reality, not their smiles or promises.
Yesterday, Putin used the expression “Empire of lies” – and he is spot on. I will adopt that expression alongside my two favorites “AngloZionist Empire” and “the Axis of Kindness”.
In other “rodent news” – the OSCE is leaving the Donbass. Not that these fake humanitarians ever made a difference, but now that they are gone, it also sends a very clear message to the Russian people.
Remember how Woke-thugs approached white people in restaurants and demanded that the white “take a knee” or see “black lives matter”? The same is being done to Russians (and even non-Russians thought to be Russians) all over the democratic and civilized West.
“Cancel Russia” might be the unifying slogan (and goal) of the entire Zone A.
I have an idea: I think that western dictionaries should remove the word “Russian” and western maps should, from now on, just write “here be bears” on the map of Russia. THAT would show ’em accursed russkies 🙂
And it is all repeated ad nauseam on Russian TV channels and on the Runet.
That will be neither forgotten nor forgiven.
The West is very much “talking to us” and “sending us a strong message”. We all need to hear and carefully record it all. For our children and for posterity.
I have to say that in Zone A the US PSYOPs gave Russia a massive thrashing and soundly defeated all the Russian counter-propaganda efforts. The Russian PR people got a black eye and lost this one.
Inside Russia, it is more complicated. As I mentioned, the Atlantic Integrationists (in power), the 5th column (liberal) and the 6th column (emo-Marxists) all joined forces and tried has hard as can be to inject a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubts (FUD) in the Russian society, from rumors of a NATO invasion to hallucinations about how the “sanctions from hell” will result in hunger, abject poverty and chaos.
The good thing is that by working hand in hand, they showed their true face and agenda. Their ideology can be summed up as follows “we cannot allow Putin to win this one”.
This is a very positive development as the disgust and anger against them is clearly on the rise while the latest polls show that:
68% of Russian approve of this military intervention
22% oppose it
10% are unsure
Of course, the Atlantic Integrationists, and the two columns (from now on I will refer to them all together AI+5+6) will quickly dismiss these polls because, as all AI+5+6 know, “Russian polls are as fake as Russian elections”. I am confident that there is going to be legal action taken by the Duma and the Kremlin to, no, not “crush free speech” or anything like that, but to further unmask the real goals of this AI+5+6 coalition.
What about the situation on the ground?
Mariupol cauldron confirmed locked (a very large number of hardcore Nazis are surrounded)
Operational cauldron in the Donbass closing but not physically closed yet
Kiev blocked on all directions except the humanitarian corridor
In plain English this means:
Several days, difficult and violent combats to denazify Mariupol. The outcome is not in doubt, but all the ingredients are here to indicate a truly intense urban assault operation.
Donbass. Again, the outcome is not in doubt, I will announce it here as soon as I get enough convergent info to confirm the closure of this operational cauldron
Kiev – here I really don’t know. I get the need to resolve the Kiev situation in some way, but I remain deeply concerned by any Russian operation to liberate the city. Kiev is not Mariupol and while in Mariupol there are no other options than to kill all the Nazis, I will keep hoping for some negotiated solution similar to what is happening in a lot of (admittedly much smaller) towns in recently liberated eastern Ukraine.
Then there is the issue of Odessa. Honestly, there are a lot of rumors on the Runet that Russia intends to liberate the entire Ukrainian coast, including Odessa, and open a land corridor to the Russian forces in Transnistria. Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov are infinitely smarter than me and they have the real info, which I don’t.
But I don’t want Russia to occupy in the mid-to-long-term a single inch of legally 404 land (outside the official borders of the LDNR, of course!). But then, I was also very concerned when Putin ordered the Syrian military operation, and he proved me wrong, so all I can do is try to not worry too much, hope that if there are any such plans, they will be similar to the 08.08.08 format: quick in, disarm, quick out.
I am encouraged by all the statements by Russian officials and analysts that Russia has no intention of holding on to any Ukrainian territory and that as soon as the Ukraine is disarmed and denazified, all the Russian forces will be pulled back. God willing, that is exactly what will happen soon.
Lastly, the Black Sea fleet. It seems to have cut off Ukie port from shipping and several ships have been stopped and turned back (not simply stolen like the French just did!). I am quite sure that before this is all over, we will see the Black Sea Fleet in action, possibly as part of an operation to liberate Odessa, here I defer to Andrei Maryanov and his expertise.
That’s it for now. Over the past 6 days I have been posting two, sometimes three, updates. Now since the situation on the ground is pretty clear, I will wait for a major development before posting a commentary. That could happen as soon as later today, but tomorrow seems more realistic to me. We shall see.
The US and EU are over-reaching on Russian sanctions. The end result could be the de-dollarization of the global economy and massive commodity shortages worldwide.
So a congregation of NATO’s top brass ensconced in their echo chambers target the Russian Central Bank with sanctions and expect what? Cookies?
What they got instead was Russia’s deterrence forces bumped up to “a special regime of duty” – which means the Northern and Pacific fleets, the Long-Range Aviation Command, strategic bombers and the entire Russian nuclear apparatus on maximum alert.
One Pentagon general very quickly did the basic math on that, and mere minutes later, a Ukrainian delegation was dispatched to conduct negotiations with Russia in an undisclosed location in Gomel, Belarus.
Meanwhile, in the vassal realms, the German government was busy “setting limits to warmongers like Putin” – quite a rich undertaking considering that Berlin never set any such limits for western warmongers who bombed Yugoslavia, invaded Iraq, or destroyed Libya in complete violation of international law.
While openly proclaiming their desire to “stop the development of Russian industry,” damage its economy, and “ruin Russia” – echoing American edicts on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela and others in the Global South – the Germans could not possibly recognize a new categorical imperative.
They were finally liberated from their WWII culpability complex by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany is finally free to support and weaponize neo-Nazis out in the open all over again – now of the Ukrainian Azov battalion variety.
To get the hang of how these NATO sanctions will “ruin Russia,” I asked for the succinct analysis of one of the most competent economic minds on the planet, Michael Hudson, author, among others, of a revised edition of the must-read Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.
Hudson remarked how he is “simply numbed over the near-atomic escalation of the US.” On the confiscation of Russian foreign reserves and cut-off from SWIFT, the main point is “it will take some time for Russia to put in a new system, with China. The result will end dollarization for good, as countries threatened with ‘democracy’ or displaying diplomatic independence will be afraid to use US banks.”
This, Hudson says, leads us to “the great question: whether Europe and the Dollar Bloc can buy Russian raw materials – cobalt, palladium, etc, and whether China will join Russia in a minerals boycott.”
Hudson is adamant that “Russia’s Central Bank, of course, has foreign bank assets in order to intervene in exchange markets to defend its currency from fluctuations. The ruble has plunged. There will be new exchange rates. Yet it’s up to Russia to decide whether to sell its wheat to West Asia, that needs it; or to stop selling gas to Europe via Ukraine, now that the US can grab it.”
About the possible introduction of a new Russia-China payment system bypassing SWIFT, and combining the Russian SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) with the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), Hudson has no doubts “the Russian-China system will be implemented. The Global South will seek to join and at the same time keep SWIFT – moving their reserves into the new system.”
I’m going to de-dollarize myself
So the US itself, in another massive strategic blunder, will speed up de-dollarization. As the managing director of Bocom International Hong Hao told the Global Times, with energy trade between Europe and Russia de-dollarized, “that will be the beginning of the disintegration of dollar hegemony.”
It’s a refrain the US administration was quietly hearing last week from some of its own largest multinational banks, including notables like JPMorgan and Citigroup.
A Bloomberg article sums up their collective fears:
“Booting Russia from the critical global system – which handles 42 million messages a day and serves as a lifeline to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions – could backfire, sending inflation higher, pushing Russia closer to China, and shielding financial transactions from scrutiny by the west. It might also encourage the development of a SWIFT alternative that could eventually damage the supremacy of the US dollar.”
Those with IQs over 50 in the European Union (EU) must have understood that Russia simply could not be totally excluded from SWIFT, but maybe only a few of its banks: after all, European traders depend on Russian energy.
From Moscow’s point of view, that’s a minor issue. A number of Russian banks are already connected to China’s CIPS system. For instance, if someone wants to buy Russian oil and gas with CIPS, payment must be in the Chinese yuan currency. CIPS is independent of SWIFT.
Additionally, Moscow already linked its SPFS payment system not only to China but also to India and member nations of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). SPFS already links to approximately 400 banks.
With more Russian companies using SPFS and CIPS, even before they merge, and other maneuvers to bypass SWIFT, such as barter trade – largely used by sanctioned Iran – and agent banks, Russia could make up for at least 50 percent in trade losses.
The key fact is that the flight from the US-dominated western financial system is now irreversible across Eurasia – and that will proceed in tandem with the internationalization of the yuan.
Russia has its own bag of tricks
Meanwhile, we’re not even talking yet about Russian retaliation for these sanctions. Former President Dmitry Medvedev already gave a hint: everything, from exiting all nuclear arms deals with the US to freezing the assets of western companies in Russia, is on the table.
So what does the “Empire of Lies” want? (Putin terminology, on Monday’s meeting in Moscow to discuss the response to sanctions.)
In an essay published this morning, deliciously titled America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: the MIC, OGAM and FIRE conquer NATO, Michael Hudson makes a series of crucial points, starting with how “NATO has become Europe’s foreign policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.”
He outlines the three oligarchies in control of US foreign policy:
First is the military-industrial complex, which Ray McGovern memorably coined as MICIMATT (military industrial Congressional intelligence media academia think tank).
Hudson defines their economy base as “monopoly rent, obtained above all from its arms sales to NATO, to West Asian oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus.”
Second is the oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM). Their aim is “to maximize the price of energy and raw materials so as to maximize natural resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major US priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany threatened to link the western European and Russian economies together.”
Third is the “symbiotic” Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which Hudson defines as “the counterpart to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents.”
As he describes these three rentier sectors that completely dominate post-industrial finance capitalism at the heart of the western system, Hudson notes how “Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (namely, the Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).”
Hudson shows how “the most pressing US strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In addition to creating profits and stock market gains for US companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy.”
He warns how food prices will rise “headed by wheat.” (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) From a Global South perspective, that’s a disaster: “This will squeeze many West Asian and Global South food-deficient countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.”
As for blocking Russian raw materials exports, “this threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel, aluminum.”
And that leads us, once again, to the heart of the matter: “The long-term dream of the US new Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its managerial kleptocracy seeking to cash in their privatizations in western stock markets.”
That’s not going to happen. Hudson clearly sees how “the most enormous unintended consequence of US foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and countries along the Belt and Road initiative.”
Let’s confiscate some technology
Now compare all of the above with the perspective of a central European business tycoon with vast interests, east and west, and who treasures his discretion.
In an email exchange, the business tycoon posed serious questions about the Russian Central Bank support for its national currency, the ruble, “which according to US planning is being destroyed by the west through sanctions and currency wolf packs who are exposing themselves by selling rubles short. There is really almost no amount of money that can beat the dollar manipulators against the ruble. A 20 percent interest rate will kill the Russian economy unnecessarily.”
The businessman argues that the chief effect of the rate hike “would be to support imports that should not be imported. The fall of the ruble is thus favorable to Russia in terms of self-sufficiency. As import prices rise, these goods should start to be produced domestically. I would just let the ruble fall to find its own level which will for a while be lower than natural forces would permit as the US will be driving it lower through sanctions and short selling manipulation in this form of economic war against Russia.”
But that seems to tell only part of the story. Arguably, the lethal weapon in Russia’s arsenal of responses has been identified by the head of the Center for Economic Research of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO), Vasily Koltashov: the key is to confiscate technology – as in Russia ceasing to recognize US rights to patents.
In what he qualifies as “liberating American intellectual property,” Koltashov calls for passing a Russian law on “friendly and unfriendly states. If a country turns out to be on the unfriendly list, then we can start copying its technologies in pharmaceuticals, industry, manufacturing, electronics, medicine. It can be anything – from simple details to chemical compositions.” This would require amendments to the Russian constitution.
Koltashov maintains that “one of the foundations of success of American industry was copying of foreign patents for inventions.” Now, Russia could use “China’s extensive know-how with its latest technological production processes for copying western products: the release of American intellectual property will cause damage to the United States to the amount of $10 trillion, only in the first stage. It will be a disaster for them.”
As it stands, the strategic stupidity of the EU beggars belief. China is ready to grab all Russian natural resources – with Europe left as a pitiful hostage of the oceans and of wild speculators. It looks like a total EU-Russia split is ahead – with little trade left and zero diplomacy.
Now listen to the sound of champagne popping all across the MICIMATT.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 