G7 Desecrates Hiroshima A-Bomb Memory With Warmongering Summit

May 19, 2023

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The Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.

The United States-led “Group of Seven” cabal held one of their increasingly meaningless jamborees this weekend in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The posturing of solemnity by these warmongering elites in a place that represents the ultimate barbarity of American imperialism is not only sickening in its hypocrisy and profanity. The evident lack of awareness and shame of these charlatans is a sure sign that their privileged historical charade is coming to an end.

American President Joe Biden took time out from his nation’s collapsing economy and scandals over his rampant family corruption to attend the G7 summit in Japan. He was joined by so-called leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada as well as the premier of the host nation, Fumio Kishida. Joining the lackeys was the European Union’s chief ventriloquist doll, Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukrainian comedian-turned-arms-dealer, aka “president”, Vladimir Zelensky.

The proceedings began with a cynical and disingenuous “dedication” at the Hiroshima Peace Park whose centerpiece is the Genbaku Dome, the iconic spectral ruin caused by the U.S. atomic bombing in 1945. The very gathering of leaders at this sacred place is the same people who are criminally pushing the world toward another conflagration.

Biden and his cronies soon dispensed with hollow talk about “peace” and “nuclear disarmament” to make the G7 summit a rallying call for more hostility toward Russia and China. There were plans for more economic warfare (sanctions) against Moscow, which was vilified as usual for “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine. There were pledges of supplying more weapons to the powder keg that the U.S. and its NATO partners have created in Ukraine. There were high-handed dismissals of international diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, which have been proposed by China, and Latin American and African nations.

The U.S.-led G7 camarilla also made their hate fest a forum for drumming up more hostility toward China, accusing Beijing of building up nuclear arms and threatening the world.

In short, the Group of Seven held a de facto war summit in Hiroshima, a place that is synonymous with the horror and evil of war.

Seventy-eight years ago, on the morning of August 6, 1945, at 8.15 am, the US Air Force Enola Gay B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb on the city. The resulting death toll would be 140,000, mainly civilians, many of them instantly incinerated, others dying from horrendous burns and radiation poisoning. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

History has shown that there was no military need to use such weapons of mass destruction. Official American reasoning ostensibly about hastening the end of the Pacific War can now be seen as a flagrant lie. The bombs were deliberately used by the United States in a demonstration of state terrorism especially directed at its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Arguably, these grotesque genocidal crimes sealed the beginning of the Cold War. This horrific demarcation was how the U.S.-led Western imperialist system would try to control the postwar world.

The same deplorable and criminal Cold War mentality persists among the U.S. rulers and their Western minions. Washington needs wars and conflict to maintain its untenable hegemonic ambitions along with its Western satraps who are equally complicit. The barbarous power structure can only be sustained by “ideological projections” designating “enemies” and “threats” that, in turn, provide cover for the otherwise unacceptable barbarism and warmongering. The Soviet Union was the “enemy”, then it became “Islamic terrorists”, and now it’s Russia and China.

The ideological projection also casts a narcissistic image of America and its Western allies as benevolent, peace-loving, democratic, law-abiding, and so on. It’s an almost incredible feat of global gaslighting and inversion of reality; made possible largely by mass disinformation via the Western corporate media/propaganda system. Thankfully, that charade is becoming threadbare too.

One indicator this week was a study by the respected Brown University’s Cost of War project which estimated the number killed just over the past two decades from U.S.-led wars at 4.5 million. All told, since the end of World War Two estimates of deaths from American wars of aggression around the world are in the order of 20-30 million. No other nation in history comes close to the destructiveness of U.S. power, which laughably declares itself the “leader of the free world”, the “democratic upholder of rules-based order”.

The United States has devolved into a monstrous imperialist rogue state that is addicted to war, conflict, mass killing and even threats of annihilation in order to prop up its corporate capitalist economy. Its accumulated record $31 trillion of national debt speaks of the chronic disease and its moribund dollar lifeline.

Yet, Washington’s ideological pretensions – sustained and promulgated by a subservient corporate media/propaganda system – have the absurd audacity to paint Russia, China and other nations as “threats” to international peace.

The war in Ukraine has been at least nine years in the making. Even NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg brazenly admits the preparation for war against Russia since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The war is playing out now in a way that vividly manifests the psychopathic logic of the U.S. rulers and their Western lackeys. Britain has emerged as Uncle Sam’s righthand henchman for provoking escalation, the latest provocation to Russia being the supply of long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles capable of striking Crimea. Already, Russian civilians have been casualties from these British munitions. This is like Part Two of the slaughter-fest madness of Britain’s Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea War (1853-56). Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is another contemptible diversity cut-out figure. Dweebs like him, Biden, Scholz, Trudeau, Macron, Meloni and Von der Leyen should be marched off to the dock for war crimes.

The relentless logic of war compelled by American hegemonic ambitions means that the world is being pushed to the brink of world war again. The same imperialist tendencies that created two previous world wars are reaching fever-pitch again.

Hiroshima is an obscene reminder of war and in particular U.S.-led war. It is truly disturbing that an American president and his Western elite flunkies were paying homage to victims of an atomic holocaust while at the same insanely making plans for intensifying aggression toward Russia and China.

The arrogant American rulers have never even offered an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, they persist in claiming righteousness. Biden over the weekend added insult to travesty when he declared that Japan would be offered “protection” from America’s “nuclear umbrella” against alleged Chinese expansionism. This was stated by the leader of a nation that is ringing China with military bases, missile systems, naval firepower and nuclear-capable bombers. Japan’s abject premier Fumio Kishida actually thanked Biden and declared that the U.S. was a force for peace in the world.

In any case, the G7 is becoming a global irrelevance. It is a relic of former American imperial might. The “rich club” used to command half of the world’s economy, it is now down to 30 per cent and falling. The emerging multipolar world led by China, Russia, the Global South and many others, the BRICS, ASEAN, ALBA, EEA, SCO, are all testimony to the waning American Empire and its rapidly declining dollar dominance. The G7 doesn’t even make any pretence about helping the global economy and development. It has become a bellicose vehicle emitting desperate warmongering by a crumbling hegemonic system.

Only in the fairytale realm of Western media/propaganda could such a vile charade at Hiroshima be projected. To the rest of the world, it is utterly sickening.

Nord Stream Terror Attack: The Plot Thickens

February 14, 2023

by Pepe Escobar, widely posted on the Internet, reposted with the author’s permission

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.

As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

That elusive source

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”

So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.

And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.

This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

So welcome to PIAB: the President Intelligence Advisory Board. All members are appointed by the current POTUS, in this case Joe Biden. If we examine the list of current members of PIAB, we should, in theory, find Hersh’s source (see, for instance, “President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; and “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”.

Here are the members of PIAB appointed by Biden: Sandy Winnefeld; Gilman Louie; Janet Napolitano; Richard Verma; Evan Bayh; Anne Finucane; Mark Angelson; Margaret Hamburg; Kim Cobb; and Kneeland Youngblood.

Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.

Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.

In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.

Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.

Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.

So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.

And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.

The Road from Serfdom

December 20, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

Introduction: The Pathology

Just like Zionist Jews (and, as we have often said before, far from all Jews are Zionists), the Western elite suffers from a pathological superiority complex, which maintains that it has the right to play at God. Thus, the Western elite belittles Christ-God, proclaiming itself to be the Vicar of God, that is, the Substitute for God, on earth. As such, it resembles Judaism and even Islam, which also proclaim that they are unique Civilisations. However, they have not developed the practical technology of violence. Of Israelite origin, this complex has a theological name and a millennial history of self-justification, the details of which I will not bother readers with here. This ‘Holy and Roman’ Imperial complex was from the outset an ideology which says that the Western elite are the Chosen People and all their crimes are therefore justified. ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’), as the German Army used to proclaim or, more recently, as George Bush stated: ‘I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did. And then God would tell me George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq. And I did’. (1)

Cowboys and Indians

The Scottish-American historian, Niall Campbell Ferguson (yes, he would have to be a ‘cursed’ Campbell – ask a Scotsman what that means) is one of their most eloquent contemporary spokesmen, for whom the West is Best and the Rest is Messed (2). This pathology, because that is what it is, has become hereditary narcissism among a large portion, though not all, of Western people. These narcissists call the Non-West ‘backward’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘evil’ and ‘primitive’. This is because they have not yet ‘advanced’ to the depths of Western barbarism. The problem is that such Westerners view the world through the lens of cowboy films, quite appropriately called ‘Westerns’. In these there are white hats and black hats, good and bad, in other words, the West and the Rest. And the Rest are ‘Red Indians’, ‘natives’, ‘savages’ and must be scalped (the practice spread by Western settlers) and ‘cleared’ like wild animals or else sent to ‘reservations’ in deserts or on some other worthless land, so that ‘progress’ can take place and the natural resources of their stolen lands can be ‘developed’ for ‘civilised’ people to profit by.

However, the reality is that it is the Cowboys, not the Indians, who have caused all the planet’s major problems, from industrial exploitation to ecological catastrophe, from nuclear weapons to ‘World Wars’, or rather perhaps, to the World War. Let us recall that the cannibalism of the First World War was caused by the 1914 assassination by an atheist, employed by a masonic organisation, of a righteous couple who wanted to correct some terrible injustices. And it was that promised correction that brought them death (3). In turn, the Second World War was caused by the unjust outcome of that assassination, the outcome that had taken place in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1919. (What more appropriate place for narcissists than to look at one another in a Hall of Mirrors?) As for the Third World War, it began in Kiev in 2014, on the centenary of the First World War. Perhaps then we should more correctly call this Third World War, World War I, Part III. All this cannibalism is taking place because we have yet to undo the injustices that both caused and then ensued from World War I, Parts I and II.

The gaslighting elite claims that their Western Values (Anti-Values?) are the only ones that are ‘Universal’ and they preach ‘Human Rights’, ‘Freedom and Democracy’. Once weaponised, as they are, these self-proclaimed ‘Values’ mean that the Western world has every right to humiliate, destroy and deny (‘cancel’, as they say nowadays) and conquer, exploit and colonise all others, all Non-Western Civilisations. The latter range from Orthodox Christian to Jewish, from Muslim to Hindu, from Aztec to Zimbabwean, from Amazonian to Cahokian, from Buddhist to Confucian Civilisation. Any resistance to Western ‘Values’ must be crushed by organised violence, whether by arms, ‘sanctions’, or propaganda, whether in the eleventh century or in the twenty-first century, as is happening at this very moment in the Ukraine. Russia, having naively swallowed the Western delusion for over 300 years, both in its equally delusional Capitalist and Communist forms – it is exactly the same destructive materialism – has finally stood up to the delusional Western lie. This is a millennial turning-point in world history unfolding before us.

The Road From Serfdom

Today, the whole free (= Non-Western) world is looking on and anxiously watching, basically supportive of Russia, but not too visibly – just in case this millennial transformation goes wrong. Fundamentally, the free world knows that if Russia loses, then the cause of freedom and sovereignty in the world is finished, independent China India are finished. Then the Klaus Schwab-style nightmare of the World Dictatorship of Serfs, ceases to be fantasy and is put into practice. There will be no further point in human life and so the world will end in the Apocalypse. Alternatively, others proclaim another, equally catastrophic scenario. This is that the West will not back down in its war in the Ukraine and therefore will make the future nuclear through a false flag nuclear incident in the Ukraine, which it will pin on Russia, like Flight MH17. But the cold and hungry of the West do not want nuclear war and even if some of the elite are so crazy as to want it, not all. Crazy elitists could be replaced. As for the journalists who have continually lied to date, they would simply say that they had previously only reported what they had been told to report.

In other words, a nuclear war is not an inevitable scenario. In any case, how can Russia lose? We all believe that Russia will win, because treasonous regime change in Russia is not going to happen as it did in February 1917, and that was the only reason why, fully armed and ready for victory, Russia lost then (4). Even the arms merchants behind NATO are fearful of any official involvement or of the war spreading and Russia itself is careful to avoid any spread of war to a NATO country. They only want to fill their pockets, not the Apocalypse. It is precisely the loss of the war by the West that could provide the solution to the Western problem. The solution to reverse the situation in the West has to be radical because, as we have said, the Western delusion is millennial, the delusion lies at its very roots (5). Warnings have been given for centuries but nobody has ever listened. It is rather like a child who you tell not to play with matches, but who still insists on playing with matches to see what will happen if he lights a match and then sets fire to the whole house. And that is what has happened. The whole Western house is now on fire in an act of suicide.

The solution is regime change in the EU and the US/UK, that is, the changing of the elites. Now, all the Western countries of the world are run by elites with their many hangers-on. The elites provide bipartisan dictatorships. The ironic fact that it actually dares call these dictatorships, by the rich on behalf of the rich, ‘liberal democracies’ is irrelevant. I doubt if any regime change will come through some sort of armed uprising and I would not encourage that either. Rather governments – together with their fantastical, anti-Russian rhetoric – will collapse through the weight of their own lies, injustices and corruption, of protests, strikes and bankruptcies, of cold, poverty and hunger among people who have never been so cold, poor and hungry before. In other words, Western regimes will collapse under pressure from the grassroots, because they are so rotten on the inside. Which will collapse first, the EU or the US/UK, Eurosodom or Gomerica? We suspect the Eurozionists of the EU because those countries are bearing the brunt of their own elites’ suicide bid on the orders of the US/UK elite, and there are already splits among them.

Conclusion: When Death Has Perished, Hell is Overthrown

It is only the collapse of European countries in their narcissistic form that could allow Europeans to become real Europeans once more. Cold, poverty and hunger could destroy the illusions of the richer half (the poorer half has never really had them) that Europe is made up of superior beings with a right to global domination and that humanity is not in reality all in the same boat (6). Only then could Europeans understand that Europe’s only meaning is as a small part of the Afro-Eurasian landmass and that it has no Divine right to plunder everything outside, or even inside, their tip of the North-Western peninsula of that landmass. We are talking about Europe returning to its geographical and historical roots, and that is literally radical. The richer half of the Western world, the part that flew Ukrainian flags, not the poorer half, has been so sucked into its own self-delusion that it can only change once it has faced death. Only a visit to the doors of death can soften their proud hearts. Death, the enemy of life, looms. But so does Life after Death for those who do not want hell, where the devil keeps the laws. That is the Road from Serfdom.

17 December 2022

Notes:

1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/civilization-west-and-rest/about/

2. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8c7xri/did_george_w_bush_really_say_god_told_me_to/

3. The to-be-assassinated Germanic Franz-Ferdinand, married to a Slav in a marriage of love, consulted carefully about the future of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and offered its oppressed peoples a measure of justice. For this the opposition slandered him as ‘insane’. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trialism_in_Austria-Hungary

4. As even Churchill said on 5 November 1919: ‘The Bolsheviks robbed Russia at one stroke of two most precious things, peace and victory—the victory that was within her grasp and the peace which was her dearest desire’.

5. As St John the Baptist said: ‘And now also the axe is laid to the root of the trees: therefore every tree which does not produce good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire’ (Matthew 3:10).

6. The Indian Presidency of the G20 and its summit in New Delhi on September 9-10 2023, has as its slogan: ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’. This is what Russia is about, but not the West, which wants unceasing destruction, disunity and a future of unceasing war and division.

Putin: Russia has not even started its military campaign in Ukraine

7 Jul 2022

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen Net 

While the West cries invasion, Putin delivers a shocking remark: Russia has not even started.

Russian Defense Ministry Press Service handout released on Sunday, June 5, 2022, showing a Pion 203 mm artillery system of the Russian military fires at a target in an undisclosed location in Ukraine (Russian MoD)

On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin challenged the West to attempt to defeat Russia “on the battlefield” and said that the action by Moscow in Ukraine signaled the emergence of a “multi-polar world.”

Putin also spoke against “totalitarian liberalism,” which he said the West has tried to impose on the entire world, in one of his most powerful speeches since he sent troops to Ukraine on February 24.

Putin spoke to senior lawmakers on the 134th day of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine: “Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can you say here? Let them try.”

He asserted that “the collective West” was responsible for starting the “war” in Ukraine and that Russia’s intervention in the pro-Western nation signaled the transition to a “multi-polar world.”

He continued, “This process cannot be stopped.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Kiev and their Western allies that Moscow has not even started its military campaign in Ukraine “in earnest.”

“Everyone should know that we have not started in earnest yet,” he told senior lawmakers. “At the same time we are not refusing to hold peace negotiations but those who are refusing should know that it will be harder to come to an agreement with us” at a later stage. 

The Russian President said that the majority of nations don’t wish to adopt the West’s “totalitarian liberalism” and “hypocritical double standards.”

“People in most countries do not want such a life and such a future,” he said.

“They are simply tired of kneeling, humiliating themselves in front of those who consider themselves exceptional.”

On Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the West continues to supply Kiev with weapons on a large scale, hoping to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, noting that the volume of military shipments supplied to Ukraine exceeded 28 thousand tons.

During a conference call, Shoigu said that the collective West, “hoping to prolong the conflict in Ukraine”, continues to supply weapons to Kiev on a large scale, noting that more than 28 thousand tons of military shipments have already been delivered to the country.

The Russian Defense Minister stressed that part of the weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine goes to the Middle East and the black market.

The Very Special Operation

June 07, 2022

Source

By Batiushka

The special operation in Ukraine has brought the confrontation between Russia and Western countries, led by the United States, to a climax. Battles are going on not only in the vast spaces of the Ukraine, but also in the economic, political and cultural spheres. The style of the Anglo-Saxons has not changed for centuries. And so today they continue to dictate their terms to the world, boorishly trampling on the sovereign rights of States.

Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation,

3 June 2022

What the Ukrainian crisis has shown us is that….the West is isolated from the rest of the world and this is an alarm call for the present and especially for the future.

Silvio Berlusconi, Il Giornale, 4 June 2022

Introduction

A Russian Orthodox priest and cultural historian, who has lived in several Western and Eastern European countries, including Russia and the Ukraine, I cannot fail to feel great sorrow at the events unfolding today. But I also feel great hope. The process of barbarous injustice that began in 1914 and ended the Old Europe and has been through all manner of fateful dates, 1917, 1929, 1939, 1945, 1968, 1989, 1991, 2014, to name but a few, is now further unfurling and reaching a global crescendo. As Nikolai Patrushev has stated, the Special Operation is not just a military event, it is far, far more profound than that, this is military, political, economic and cultural. This is why it took so long, eight years, to carry out the necessary painstaking preparations for the Operation, in view of the high probability that the West would refuse to get off its high horse of hubris and negotiate like reasonable people do.

Military Self-Destruction

Since the West did refuse to negotiate, the battleground is for now the ultra-militarised Eastern Ukraine. However, the War is not between brother Ukrainians and brother Russians, but between Washington with its NATO/EU vassals and Moscow with its Donbass Allies. There is no doubt that Russia will win in the Ukraine, as it has complete air and naval superiority. The Russian-speaking East and South of the Ukraine, Novorossija, part of Russia until 1922, is being liberated by a smallish expeditionary force of the Russian Army together with local troops. However, the Operation was never planned to be a short one, most knew that it would take months and perhaps, on account of possible NATO meddling, a year or more.

The War is longer because the Kiev Army has been preparing for it for eight long years. It has been building trenches and fortifications, arming itself with a huge amount of NATO training and weaponry, which the Russian Armed Forces are being forced to destroy, together with Ukrainian Nazis, Western mercenaries and NATO instructors. From this conflict a new Ukraine will be born. Perhaps it will once more be called Malorossija or perhaps it will keep its ‘Borderlands’ name. In any case it will be a smallish country, with a population of perhaps some 15 million, centred on Kiev. Whatever its name, it will effectively be the Kievan Protectorate, part of the Union State with the Russian Federation, Belarus and probably others.

Political Death

Those opposed to the Special Operation and its consequences have been revealed. The Russian and other traitors in our midst, of whom we have continually warned and not been heeded, have shown themselves. Many, though by no means all (though we will not here name names), have run away from Russia and elsewhere been removed. They did not understand the words that the struggle in the Ukraine is a ‘metaphysical one’. The oligarchs and all who treasure dollar bills and the approval of Western Establishments above all else will never understand this – that we have values that are higher than gold. Today the seven billion people of the Non-Western world are ranged against the one billion of the Western world. All the international foundations, the UN, IMF, WHO etc, are going to be remade. Why should some of them at least not be headquartered in Russia? Either in Saint Petersburg, or in Ekaterinburg, or in the Crimea.

The UN, perhaps to be renamed ‘The Union of the Peoples’ or something similar, should be supported by the greatest nations from all Continents and Civilisations: China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Egypt and Vietnam. Perhaps there would be other nations which have yet to be reformed from the relics of the present. For example, at the ultimate conclusion of this Special Operation, there is no reason why the USA or the EU should continue to exist. Once they have collapsed and been denazified and reformed, then a new nation or group from North America and Western Europe, for instance, a North American Confederation or a Gaullist-style Federation of the Sovereign Nations of Europe, could be allowed to join and take part in the new World Symphony of Nations. Its anthem could perhaps be taken appropriatey From the New World, the Ninth Symphony by Dvorak.

Economic Suicide

Apart from raw material extraction, technological corporations, weapons industries and vast service sectors (services servicing services), the Western world relies on ‘funny money’ in order to survive. In other words, it lives off printing presses that print banknotes. These create unpayable debt and systemic inflation. For decades the Western world has been living in a fool’s paradise of debt. However, it is now reaching a point when it can no longer even pay off the interest on that debt. Bankruptcy beckons.

On the other hand, the real world relies not on speculation in ‘derivatives’ and ‘futures’, but on solid things, commodities, food to eat (grain, maize and the fertilisers to grow them), oil and gas to power and heat, raw materials and minerals to manufacture with. In other words, for several decades the Western world has been living in a bubble. That bubble is now bursting: the chickens are coming home to roost, perhaps already this winter, if not before. Expect widespread protests throughout the Western world and against the Western world.

Cultural Nihilism

For several decades now, especially since the 1960s, the Western world appears to have abandoned its cultural foundations and educational systems. The signs then were hordes of young girls screaming about their hormones, as they listened to the musical sounds of longish-haired young men. However, the first signs of this cultural nihilism had already appeared long before, by 1914, in various artistic and literary isms, but they were esoteric, very limited in size and much-mocked by the general public. Yet by 1949 the renowned English artist, Sir Alfred Munnings, could excoriate members of the British Royal Academy for practising modern art, calling Picasso and Matisse ‘foolish daubers’.

The infantilisation of the Western educational system – the primary that has become the nursery, the secondary that has become the primary and the tertiary (university) that has become the secondary – reveals it. A doctorate is now really no longer very meaningful, for children are told that they are geniuses just for being able to recognise the letters of the Latin alphabet. This degeneration has produced an infantilised society, as is clearly visible from the level of politicians and journalists in particular, but it is everywhere visible in the illiteracy and innumeracy of contemporary Western societies. Little wonder that we have come to the Nazism of ‘Cancel Russia’, meaning cancel Pushkin, cancel Dostoyevsky, cancel Tchaikovsky, that is, cancel culture.

Conclusion

We are now at a turning-point, not just in European history, but in world history. The prophecies of saints are being realised. For example, the Russian saint Aristocleus, speaking in 1917, foretold: ‘The end will come through China. There will be some unusual outburst and a miracle of God will be revealed’. Only a few years ago that prophecy seemed meaningless. Now we can begin to think that perhaps he was referring to coronavirus, or else perhaps to the coming return of Taiwan to China? Or perhaps something else, which we have not at all foreseen. Time will show us, but here are curious possibilities.

Let us be honest. Either Russia is victorious in this Very Special Operation or else we shall enter a Dark Age, from which there will be no end because it will be an Orwellian One World Government. Such One World Dictatorship will brook no opposition, all who challenge it will be repressed. This is our last chance to resist and strike back against the aggression that began in 1914, aggression that was military, political, economic and cultural, a totalitarian aggression that leads to total death, the death of body and soul. But according to all the military reports, let alone the prophecies, Russia will be victorious.

6 June 2022, 78^th Anniversary of D-Day

NATO´s new world

May 04, 2022

Source

by Jorge Vilche

UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss recently experienced her 15 minutes of glory with a blatant hissy-fit rant policy speech at a London´s Mansion House banquet. She posited that the collective West now needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew. Publically, Ms Liz Truss tapped her well-known Rule Britannia Anglo-Saxon exceptionalistic mind-set which now would badly require a much larger “lebensraum”. By the way, the Rule Britannia lyrics ´clearly clearly clearly´ let the world know that “…at heaven’s command…Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”. No way, slaves will exist, but Britons should make sure it´s the other way around, see ? So beware… With an AUKUS core, the strategic concept is “all for one, and one for all” just like ´The Three Musketeers´ except that the world´s livelihood is for real, not a novel. Liz Truss is not a cartoon character either, she is today´s United Kingdom Foreign Secretary.

Ukraine & oil + Nazis & Russians

Lebensraum Ukraine would only be the starting point says Truss very proud of British colonial history. Actually it´d have to be even far larger than what Adolf Hitler originally foresaw with his Nazi foreign policy dictum left on record in “Mein Kampf”. Unbelievably, and per the Führer´s own description, such lebensraum was to be found – oh coincidence — “in the Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe”… Mind you readers this is a historical certainty, unfortunately not fiction. Curiously enough, WW2 ended when Germany´s dictator shot his lover and himself in the temple only four years after the Wehrmacht had invaded Ukraine pursuing its much-needed Caucasus´ oil. So paraphrasing Mark Twain, and relating Nazis to Ukraine and oil …with the Russians defending and finally winning… history doesn´t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Ref# 1 https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lebensraum

Ref# 2 https://www.rt.com/news/554646-liz-truss-nato-ukraine-taiwan/

Ref #3 https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/uk-news/2022/04/27/britain-to-go-further-and-faster-in-supplying-ukraine-heavy-weapons/

global NATO

But no Sir, what Adolf Hitler conceived 90 years ago today is not large enough at all for NATO, sorry. Per Liz Truss (more on her later) it´d be a flashing new “Network of Liberty” yet global in nature, understand ? The time and place of this new “Global NATO” setting Ms Truss says is (1) right now and (2) throughout the whole world, okay ?

war not trade

Furthermore, in the meantime and so as not to waste valuable time and resources, Liz Truss urges current (limited) “European” NATO to send more “heavy weapons, tanks, and also airplanes” to Ukraine ASAP “digging deep into our inventories and ramping up production”. Her obvious Russo-Europhobic objective is to split Eurasia into fractions according to the very British well-proven ´divide and conquer´ philosophy. Actually, Rule Britannia history indicates that the more fractions and pieces the better it´d be. And per the UK Foreign Secretary eventually the idea is to rebuild the area “along the lines of a new Super Marshall Plan” pretty much like an extension of President´s Joe Biden current print-print-print-and-then-print-some-more “Build-Back-Better” ideology… yet definetly in a far far far grander scale. Of course, amongst the job description tasks included within the UK´s role is worldwide public communications or NATO Press Secretary of sorts. To complete her ignorant nonsense Ms Truss stated that “ Europe must immediately cut itself completely off from Russian energy supplies oil, gas and coal”. Un-believable.

NATO´s Indo-Pacific

Liz Truss added that China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules”. Whose rules may we ask ? Probably she means by the AUKUS 5%-of-the-world-rules-over-the-remaining-95% rules we should guess. The war in Ukraine is “our war” she says because Ukraine’s victory is a “strategic imperative for all of us”. Yeah, we bet it is. But clear enough her stated ambitions go beyond Europe though, as Ms Truss denounced the “false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security.” “We need to pre-empt threats in the Indo-Pacific, working with allies like Japan and Australia to ensure that the Pacific is protected.”

“In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO,” she said. “And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves” you hear ? Also, there is this new US strategy seeking to arm Japan against China, also consistent with NATO´s 4^th Reich. Ref #4 https://www.rt.com/news/554925-missile-study-pacific-rand/

funny Lizzie

Funny enough, as UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss should actually be very well versed in diplomacy, history and geography. But, on the contrary, she is ill-prepared and confuses high school concepts very easily. For example, she loves to explain geographical details of areas of the world she fully ignores, already being TV famous for making multiple gaffes on the matter. She first mistook the Baltic for the Black Sea in a glorious BBC interview providing unheard of intellectual entertainment to a very large world audience, and then fell for a tricky question insisting that London would “never recognize Russia’s sovereignty” over Rostov and Voronezh – Russian regions she mistook for the Donbass Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

race to the bottom

I mean Russian is a complicated language and we can´t expect a refined Westerner such as Ms Truss to do much better than that. Still, I´m afraid that my old time high school teachers would have declared her to be “unfit for purpose” to avoid calling her a “dunce” I guess. At the very least Liz Truss firmly competes with US Vice-President Kamala Harris for being the least intellectual and most unprepared female Western politician ever. Maybe it´s a draw, who knows. Starting her cabinet career as under-secretary for education and childcare in 2012, Liz has proven to be highly versatile by holding the Environmental Affairs, Justice, Treasury, and International Trade portfolios also. So she must be either a UK very smart kookie or, possibly, very a smart a**.

no-one left behind

In addition, Truss emphasized that the West “must ensure that, alongside Ukraine, the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom”. And according to the top UK diplomat, NATO should integrate Finland and Sweden “as soon as possible” if the two Nordic nations choose to join the military alliance something which they are both definitely pressured to do. Adding insult to injury, British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Thames Radio on Wednesday it would be “completely legitimate” for Ukraine to use UK-supplied weapons (of course) to strike deep into Russian territory. Can´t make this stuff up folks. Ms Truss said it was “time for courage, not caution”, making it necessary for the West to send warplanes to Kyiv to defeat Moscow sounding much like the US State Department´s London office. Furthermore, German lawmakers have overwhelmingly voted to send ‘heavy & complex weapons’ to Ukraine, thus making Germany the easiest, shortest and most probable first strike in the event that thermonuclear warfare with Russia is provoked. Germany could not have picked a better way to most unnecessarily place itself in harm´s way.

Ref #5 https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/german-lawmakers-vote-overwhelmingly-send-heavy-complex-weapons-ukraine

Simultaneously Poland announced massive military drills while Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergey Naryshkin accused Warsaw of getting ready to occupy the western part of Ukraine which Poland considers as “historically belonging” to it. Such potential “reunification” will come by pretending to deploy a “peacekeeping” mission into the country under the pretext of protecting Kiev from “Russian aggression” while supposedly being complicit with the US.

Ref # 6 https://www.rt.com/russia/554683-poland-major-military-drills/

proxy wars worldwide

So nobody should doubt that NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through proxy wars, while it is actively arming Russia’s enemies as its Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated last Monday. So we already have a global US policing the world… but that´s not enough. And as the UK lost most of its colonies in the twentieth century and the US outsourced most of its manufacturing base, then both should join forces and improve NATO making it global. And thus the UK can finally reclaim its universal influence and justify Brexit to “take back control” and refresh its unquestionable right to run ´an Empire on which the sun never sets´. But as the UK is not anywhere near that, and actually risking to become extinct without a healthy Europe next to it, the UK just plays the “me too” role in the US world game.

To complete the scheme Australia steps into the act to keep the “special relationship” cozy amongst Anglo-Saxons. Thus, the AUKUS-led Global NATO´s 4^th Reich is born.

Ref# 7 https://www.rt.com/news/554705-uk-europe-drills-ukraine/

British troops are getting ready for one of their largest deployments in Europe since the cold war, the Defence Ministry (MoD) has said. Thousands of UK soldiers are going to be sent to countries ranging from North Macedonia to Finland in the coming months to take part in joint drills with their counterparts from NATO, Finland, and Sweden.

The British soldiers have also been training together with US forces in Poland, the MoD said. It also announced that troops from the Queen’s Royal Hussars have just been deployed to Finland, which shares a 1,300-km-long border with Russia, to be embedded in an armored brigade.Convened by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, and at the behest of US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, representatives from 40 countries gathered last Tuesday at Ramstein Air Base to set the game plan with the rest of the world as pawns.

Ref # 8 http://thesaker.is/queen-and-king-set-out-on-the-chessboard/

The Great Western Wall vs Snow Niggers

January 29, 2022

You know about the Great Wall of China, right?  But have you ever heard of the Great Western Wall?

That is the immense wall which was built around the minds of the people of the West for the past 1000 or so years.  I will try to describe it using a few salient examples, but what I want to clearly state here is that these examples are only some I chose, but in reality, there are millions of them and they constitute a kind of “mental force field” which has (almost) no holes in it.  Until now.  But let’s first start with a few examples of what that wall looks like and how those enclosed by it think:

• Say what you wish, or don’t say it, but everybody knows and understands that the so-called Western civilization (which in this narrative was not born from the Middle-Ages, but from Antiquity) is superior to all others.  Oh sure, we will pay lip service to the liberal ideas of Rousseau or the Woke insanity, but deep inside, we are the best, we will eventually prevail, and nobody can match, nevermind, beat us.
• Russians are racially and culturally inferior.  Oh sure, they are mostly white, but they act like Mongols (something quite terrible in the average western mind which knows *nothing* about the Mongol Empire, this is even true on the UK Ministerial level!!!).  They are either soaking their brains with vodka, or they are planning devious and bloody attacks on the irenic and noble people of the West.  The term I suggest for them would be Russians are “Snow Niggers“.
• The Snow Niggers control way too much land and resources.  We need to bring them true democracy.
• Russians have never known democracy, so they don’t even have the concept of “freedom”: true, we don’t really understand the distinction they make between “svoboda” and “volia” anymore than we understand the distinction between “pravda” and “istina” – but who cares, they don’t think like we do, therefore their concepts are irrelevant.
• Russians cannot be trusted.  Ever.  Ask any of the people who neighbor Russia and they will tell you how horrible it was to live under Russian rule.  The fact that Russians (unlike the West) never committed genocide and that there are still 193 ethnic groups and over 100 languages in Russia herself is irrelevant.  The fact that not a single successor republic to the USSR became stable and viable – except Russia, that is – is also irrelevant.  All that Russian do is murder, rape, pillage and persecute everybody else, especially “gays”!
• Russians have always used stupid tactics, they always throw a huge amount of poorly trained soldiers but animalistically stubborn/courageous at any enemy.  During WWII, the German military was vastly superior to the Soviet one and the German generals eons ahead of the rather dull Soviet ones, especially in tactics and operational warfare.  Germany only lost WWII thanks to the US and UK and their superb military academies.  Any Soviet victory is explained by “Stalin’s terror”, of course.  Then these brutes went on a raping spree and created a giant Gulag while US forces only delivered chocolate and cool music to the poor Europeans, including the Germans.  Then the US generously rebuilt western Europe.  End of story.
• We have the best military in the world, with the best equipment and training.  The fact that we spend more on defense than the entire planet is the proof of that.  We also have the best intelligence community in the world, the fact that we have 17 “intelligence” agencies while others typically do with just a few (2-4 is typical) just further proves our infinite superiority (by some estimates, the total “peace budget” of the USA, combining military, intelligence and contractors is over a TRILLION per year!).
• The entire world envies us – that is why we are the #1 destination for immigrants from all over the world.  Even the fact that we have by far the biggest penitentiary network on the planet, and one of the most barbarically brutal ones at that, does not deter these immigrants.  Clearly, the world loves us!

Trust me, I could go on for pages and pages.  I lived my entire life in the West, I was born in the middle of Europe (in Switzerland) and I lived about half of my life in Europe and half in the USA.  I am fluent in 5 western languages and understand quite a few more others (related ones, of course).  I have two US graduate degrees.  I know the West.  Most westerners who met me initially did not know of my origins, so they treated me like “one of them” until I mentioned my Russian roots, at which point their attitude immediately changed: “careful, he is one of them” was written all over their faces.

And, OF COURSE, there were (plenty) of exceptions to what I describe above.  But these exceptions were never numerous or influential enough to make a difference: Western countries always elect rabid russophobes: they all equally hate and fear Russia, they just express it in different manners.  So those westerners who do not live behind the Great Western Wall have made no difference, especially no difference to us, the Asiatic Snow Niggers.

Again, all this has been going on for close to a thousand years, but something has changed recently and stuff like this began to happen:

And by “this” I don’t mean an F-35 missing its landing on a carrier and splashing into the water.  No, that F-35 is a perfect metaphor for the entire western civilization.

• Official version: the F-35 is the most amazing military aircraft ever designed
• True version: the F-35 is the most overpriced piece of semi-airborne shit in world history

Notice, corruption plays THE key role here.

Say what you want, but a country which designed and produced the F-16, the F-5, the A-10 or the breathtakingly beautiful Boeing 747 can produce superb aircraft.  And while all the US ‘stealth’ aircraft are overpriced and over-hyped, the F-35 is truly a masterpiece of corruption.  There is nothing the many extremely talented US scientists and engineers could do to beat the most corrupt people on the planet: the US ruling elites.  And, for the latter, the F-35 is a total, absolute, success.  I would even call it a triumph.

A personal recollection now: while a student in the USA, I had military force planning classes, taught by a VERY sharp USAF Colonel (who also worked for the Northrop YF-23 program).  His classes were a masterpiece each time.  One day, we did something funny.  We made a graph with, on one hand, the average cost of each new US fighter aircraft and, on the other, the money allocated for their acquisition.  Then we projected both curves and the result was quite hilarious, but also unforgettable: we saw that there would come a time when the entire US military budget would be just enough to produce only ONE, but very super dooper bestest of the bestest in the history of the galaxy fighter!  One!  Sadly, I do not remember what date we came up with, but I would argue that the F-35 is the real-world illustration of what our (tongue in cheek) graphic showed (BTW – the Lockheed YF-22 was inferior in design to the Northrop YF-23, the choice for the Lockheed candidate was made solely on political grounds: not to give it all the kickbacks to Northrop basically).

The year 1990 was the year when the YF-22/YF-23 made their first flight.  That same year, the Snow Niggers flew a modified version of the Soviet Su-27, called the SU-34, for the first time.  In my strictly personal opinion, the Su-34 is the single most formidable all-weather supersonic medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft ever produced in Russia or elsewhere.  The fact that this design (originally based on a Soviet-era Su-27 interceptor) not only survived the horrific 90s when Russia was “democratic”, but has now fully matured to the absolutely amazing Su-34M version, shows how truly superb Soviet designers and engineers were even in the years of “Commie stagnation” under Brezhnev & Co.  This is what this true masterpiece looks like:

Original version of the Su-34

You can read about its capabilities here or, better, watch this video.  Check out its actual characteristics, and it will blow your mind!

No, it ain’t “stealth”, but its formidable EW, avionics, missiles and radar negate the need for any F-22 like RCS.  And it sure is a big aircraft (think range and payload here).  But its capabilities are absolutely formidable, no other aircraft comes even close, not even current 5th generation ones, especially to the (much improved) current Su-34M version (which is still very much a 4th generation aircraft, but which does not need the full 5th generation capabilities to execute its missions, that is where the 4++ generation Su-30M2 and Su-35S would be used, or, if needed, the 5th generation Su-57.

I do not intend this post to be a comparison of the YF-22/YF-23/F-35 with the Su-34 or any other aircraft.

But I will ask a rhetorical question: why is it that the USA, the sole world superpower (especially after 1991 and the fall of the USSR) and world leader in everything produced such a piece of shit (aka “flying brick”) as the F-35, while the vodka soaked Asiatic Snow Niggers, while undergoing a truly apocalyptic phase like the 90s (TWO civil wars in Chechnia, one in Moscow in 93) produced a masterpiece like the Su-34?

And here we see the formidable power of The Great Western Wall!  That rhetorical question will be treated in any combination of the following ways:

• Dismissed as “Putin propaganda”
• Dismissed as factually incorrect (the correct version being: ours is SO MUCH better)
• Simply ignored, blocked from anybody’s awareness
• Explained by “the Russians steal all our secrets” whereas we invent real things (since the F-35 is actually largely based on the (much better!) Russian Yak-141, this is an especially funny argument to make).
• “Specialists” will declare that the Su-34 is based on primitive and old technologies while the F-35 is the bleeding edge of aeronautics (which is false, but if it was true, these idiots are too stupid to realize what this statement implies about the intelligence and experience of actual warfare of each party!)
• The same pseudo-experts will also fail to realize (or, at least, admit) that while the US MIC produced that abomination which the F-35 is, the Russians have just produced a similar aircraft, the Su-75, which has none of the flaws of the F-35, has broadly similar capabilities and for a small fraction of the F-35 criminally obscene price tag.

Western kids can peacefully sleep at night knowing that they are still part of the Master Race and that they are defended by Captain Murica style hyper-warriors with hyper-gadgets who can, and will, kick any Snow Niggers’ ass if needed!  Yeah!

Sweet dreams 🙂

***

But, seriously, why did I post all this stuff about US vs Soviet/Russian aircraft?

Just to illustrate the huge, immense, breathtaking difference between what I call Zone A and Zone B, the Great Western Wall being the monumental propagandist masterpiece which, at least so far, has kept the two Zones apart (the Zones themselves were originally a geographical category, but this is now changing, so let’s think of them as also a mental category).

(Truism alert!!)  We live in the age of the Internet, the ubiquitous smartphones (with excellent cameras!), the social media and too many ways to connect for any wall to stand, including the Great Western Wall!  Reality is now slowly seeping under, over, and even through this mental Great Wall and that has two main effects:

1. It puts the western ruling classes into a total, abject, panic mode
2. It stirs up doubts about the veracity of the Western propaganda machine in the heads of the western people (which only doubles the panic felt by the western ruling classes).

What recently happened in Kabul is just about the perfect illustration of how the Western Great Wall is collapsing before our eyes.

***

What about Putin and his ultimatum in all this?

In truth, the Russian ultimatum’s main goal was never to get the western Master Race to agree to negotiate with the drunken Snow Niggers, it was to bring down a major segment of the Western Great Wall: the West’s arrogant sense of axiomatic military superiority and narcissistic sense of impunity.  For decades we were fed a diet about how totally incredible the US and even NATO militaries were (forget about Iraq or Afghanistan!) and how the Russian bear was really only a paper tiger.  Just like the F-35 is the “bestest of the bestest” and the Su-34 “primitive” (we could also build it, we just don’t wanna).

Then why are the Snow Niggers not terrified of our “sanctions from hell” or “bestest militaries in the world”??

Why are our beloved (or maybe not so beloved) leaders so freaked out and clueless about what to do?

Could it be that reality is gradually achieving what scientists call “first contact” with the Western rulers and the serfs they rule over?

I will conclude with a question: what will it take to totally bring down that Western Great Wall?

The Su-34 sure did not do it.

How about the Su-34 as just one example, a tip of a huge iceberg if you wish, of what has happened in the entire Russian armed forces?

Nope.  99% of folks in the West still have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER that Russia can defeat both the US and NATO, even together, and that China is catching up at a phenomenal rate.

How about the total collapse of the western economies which have nowhere to “grow into” (by that they mean: “occupy a defenseless country and enslave them by trading valuable resources for worthless plastic beads”)?

Nope, not yet.  Not while much of the world still purchase dollars.

Now about the total collapse of the EU’s energy hallucinations (aka Greta Tunberg)?

Nope!  EU officials want to, I kid you not, sanction *Russia* by committing energetic and, therefore, economic suicide.  In Russia, we call that “scaring a hedgehog with a naked butt“.

So what about this Russian saying “those who refuse to talk to Lavrov will have to talk to Shoigu“.

Will anybody pay attention and realize what is going on?

Maybe.

But I am afraid that the drunken Snow Niggers will have to bring down that damned Western Great Wall, brick by brick, dollar by dollar, and even bullet by bullet (missile by missile would be more accurate).

But, don’t worry.  The drunken Snow Niggers won’t genocide you.  They are too “primitive” and “Asiatic” for that.

But neither will they pay much attention to you or take you seriously until you finally wake up from your 1000 years of self-delusion based on murderous ideologies and violence.

Russia’s future is on her south (Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle-East, Indian Sub.) east (Far East Asia) and north (Arctic).

I have no idea where the future of the West is.

Do you?

Andrei

Le Monde’s circus invite: ‘France is a leftist country which votes right’

January 27, 2022

By Ramin Mazaheri

In less than three months France will have a presidential vote, and I haven’t written much about it because I’ve been too occupied with what I humbly hope will be the authoritative book on the Yellow Vest movement. The working title is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values.

It will be published for free in serialised form, like my books on Chinese socialism and Iranian Islamic socialism (but buy a copy anyway!), and it should start getting published soon. As I’ve worked on it I’ve realised how interesting it is to determine the Yellow Vests place in French and global political history, and especially when the alternative is to analyse April’s elections.

In fact, the election is interesting, but not at all in the ways described by the Mainstream Media. After all, Emmanuel Macron is 100% a revolutionist – the 2016 book which laid out his campaign platform was titled (quite unironically) Revolution – but he’s the type of revolutionist only a royalist could love.

And France has many royalists, still. And with guns, money, lawyers and spin doctors the French government certainly supports many hardly-working royals worldwide. But this is mixing too many complicated matters for the Mainstream Media, so rather than using just a bit of logic – such as making actual political structures, slogans and policies the basis for which one can define a country to be “leftist” – let’s play along with their tortured illogic by looking at a new column from France’s paper of record titled, “France is a leftist country which votes right”.

It’s a self-flattering idea which explains less than it confuses, and is only useful for how we can examine it to show that “Western leftism” truly is rather rightist. Let’s look at how Le Monde defines what a “leftist country” is:

“… : a right-wing France, tempted by its extremes, which doubts democracy. We need to take a closer look. And do not confuse the sociological reality of the French with its polling, media and political representations. There is no shortage of visible signs of the progress of democratic values: LGBT tolerance, homosexual marriages, record of inter-ethnic marriages and assimilation of foreigners, feminist movements, increased sensitivity to inequalities and injustices, attachment to the republican motto, etc.”

Le ugh….

After covering the US 2020 election I can say this: For two countries which loudly insist on their exceptionalism the political lives of both nations are so very, very boringly similar. I wouldn’t doubt that the mainstream media of both nations are owned by the very same people (or investment management firms), such is the similarity between their mainstream political discussions.

I am analysing this Le Monde article because I assume you don’t speak French, but Anglophones will easily recognise that the French are describing (or their media owners compel them to describe) the exact same problems:

“democratic fatigue”, “crisis of representation”, “society of individuals”, “refusal to vote or a vote of refusal” (well-put!), “society of communication”, “the verticality of institutions” (“verticality” may be too complicated a concept for the US media), “an openly xenophobic media group”, “menace to democracy”, “climate (change)”, “how to reconcile civil society with (Western-style) representative politics”, and with the same exact Salafist answer, merely “return to our forgotten origins”, in the French case Rousseau instead of America’s Founding Prophets-Fathers.

I respond with the ultimate dagger one can thrust in French society: It’s not interesting.

Yet France’s election matters, even if it will be a lesser Cirque du Soleil to America’s 2020 election circus extravaganza, which was truly The Greatest Show on Earth.

Le Monde and the other French MSM are basically pushing quiet-yet-prideful acceptance of the fact that the four leading presidential candidates are all on not just the right but essentially the far-right on either political, economic or cultural issues (or on all three).

This is even though the country saw massive support for a Yellow Vest movement whose essential list of demands was quickly recognised to be traditional West European leftist, and remarkably similar to the platform of the leftist party La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon. Now that is something which we would like to see the French MSM explain rather than confuse, for a change!

Allow me to skip to the end as quickly and painlessly as possible:

Just like with America, we’d be wrong to accuse the average Frenchman of being an intractable reactionary… even though polls show that leftist voters are outnumbered here 2 to 1 by rightists and equalled in number by independents (who to actual leftists would be called right-wing). Leftism rests upon a fundamentally positive and loving view of humanity: The People have long been denied honest education and instead have been spoon-fed elitist-supporting nonsense, and this historical fact is what leftism must methodically work to overcome.

“We too often forget that democracy is born from the recognition of the individual released from the community shackles.”

“No longer the equality of individuals through similarity and having, but a more-demanding equality through the singularity of being particular. Beyond any condition, belonging or identity, everyone feels more and more the equal of the other by their own ‘originality’.”

What we see here is the replacement of both class politics (“having”) and even mere fake-leftist identity politics (“similarity”) with the Western Liberal Democratic emphasis on hyper-individuality, adored by their self-adoring elite.

However, historically and politically the aim of both democracy and leftism was to reduce the power of the monarch, i.e. to place some shackles on the over-empowered individual, both monarch and noble. This is what produced the calls for constitutions and votes and ends seigneurial (feudal) rights, after all.

But in Western Liberal Democracy – or democracy with Western characteristics – “democracy” means protecting what we can call the “over-rights” of the elite – whether you want to call that elite the 1%, the neo-aristocracy, the bourgeois or maybe les seigneurs. Whatever you call it the point is that in a fundamentally disunited “society of individuals” the modern-day lords will always win the maintenance of the current status quo due to their superior resources. The entire point of Western Liberal Democracy’s war on Socialist Democracy has been (and will be) to keep it this way.

There isn’t much more to say than that. I need not quote you the second half of the column, which is a litany of Western grievances with “this way”, i.e. their own system, i.e. that list of societal logjams I bomb-dropped 12 paragraphs above.

They all amount to an admission that Western Liberal Democracy fundamentally rejects class-equitable representation in the halls of political power, and that this power imbalance is brutally enforced by “liberal strongmen” like Macron in “rubber bullet democracies”. Western civil society and the middle and lower classes are thus rendered apathetic, wary of cooperating and de-politicised, and even in a formerly-revolutionary culture like France.

Socialist democracy – i.e., the evolutions in politics represented by the advances from 1917 onwards – are certainly not permitted as an option for discussion in Le Monde, thus the author can only suggest France re-study Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That’s a fine idea, but not if we don’t also study the histories, lessons and ideas around Marx and Mao, Castro and Khomeini, Sankara and Sandinista.

A far more interesting article, by a journalist and not a sociologist, can be found in the current issue of the long-form monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, which has total editorial autonomy from Le Monde (and it shows): “If the working classes were listened to”. A quick recap of the surprising things their interviews with the working class found:

• They don’t care about rising salaries because the cost of goods will just rise commensurately. Who says you need to be an economist to understand how capitalist economics works, LOL? What they want is price controls on essential goods, which France ended in 1987.
• Public debate on education is centred around austerity cuts to government budgets, but what’s driving the average person crazy is the multiplying costs centered around school or outside of school: nurseries, camps, after-school programs, cafeteria food, school supplies, etc.
• The price of entertainment, or should everyone just study/work all the time? Leisure expenses are so high there’s only room in the budget to watch Netflix again. So all three are purchasing power, which has been the number one complaint of French voters since I’ve been here, but – hey – prior to corona the Eurozone’s problem was not enough inflation, right? Sure.
• The alignment of salaries between manual labor and intellectual labor, of which there is zero public discussion in this “leftist” country. It’s another case of unions and other working-class representatives pushing so-called solutions which are fundamentally right-wing. For tough jobs, one worker noted, what’s the point of union discussions of lowering the retirement to 60 – one’s body is already wrecked at 50. Try explaining that to your average French sociologist.
• Getting social welfare deposited directly into the bank accounts of those deemed to deserve it. Tortuous paperwork leads to unclaimed sums for 1 in 3 French families totalling €10 billion, or the total monetary concessions of 2018’s failed effort to buy off the Yellow Vests.

Now that’s a good article, and unlike the Le Monde column it doesn’t totally ignore the biggest development in French politics in decades – the Yellow Vests.

But to a committed Western conservative human politics are based on natural, unregulatable laws, and not on a science of history or reason. Thus your average French voter – which insisted to me prior to 2017’s round 2 that Macron was a “centrist” – gave up on me long ago! “Our top four candidates essentially on the far-right? Ramin, you misunderstand modern Western conservatism!”

Save that for the book – I promise such political explorations will be far more fruitful than this Le Monde column.

********************************************************

List of articles covering the 2022 French elections

Catastrophe since 2017: How to cover France’s presidential election? – November 22, 2021

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Very telling admission from EU High Representative Josep Borrell

November 24, 2021

The EU High Representative Josep Borrell has just made a very telling admission, check out this video. 

The EU High Representative Josep Borrell and the former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took part in the ‘UNited for’ conference “An opportunity for global change”, held on 17 November 2021.

Here is the interesting quote (at about timestamp 29:00, stress added): “And we western people, US and EU, we have been ruling the world because we were the standard setters, we were fixing the standards, we are the masters of how technology was working. And from steel-mills to trains, railways to everything warfare, we were the standard setting. If we are no longer the standard setting, we will not rule the 21^st century.”

Ahhh, finally!!!  You heard it from a top level and very official representative of the West: the current tensions are about maintaining the western hegemony over the world.   Back to the (1930s) future… QED.

Dr. Roland Chrisjohn on the barbaric “residential schools” & Canada’s coverup of murder & torture within

July 26, 2021 

Eva Bartlett

After I wrote about media finally covering the horrific issue of “residential schools”, I was contacted by Roland Chrisjohn, who is Onyota’a:ka of the Haudenaushaunee (Oneida of the Six Nations Confederacy), originally from the Oneida of the Thames reserve in southern Ontario and now living/working in New Brunswick.Chrisjohn is a clinical psychologist and a university Professor. He heads the Native Studies department at St. Thomas University in Fredericton.

He author of numerous studies and books, notably “The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada.”

Related:

–“The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada.” (also here)

-Media is FINALLY covering immense crimes against indigenous peoples in Canada that were known about DECADES ago. So why now?

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/528360-crimes-indigenous-canada-children/

The Chinese Miracle, Revisited

June 30, 2021

Western exceptionalists may continue to throw a fit 24/7 ad infinitum: that will not change the course of history.

By Pepe Escobar with permission and widely distributed

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) centennial takes place this week at the heart of an incandescent geopolitical equation.

China, the emerging superpower, is back to the global prominence it enjoyed throughout centuries of recorded history, while the declining Hegemon is paralyzed by the “existential challenge” posed to its fleeting, unilateral dominance.

A mindset of full spectrum confrontation already sketched in the 2017 U.S. National Security Review is sliding fast into fear, loathing and relentless Sinophobia.

Add to it the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership graphically exposing the ultimate Mackinderian nightmare of Anglo-American elites jaded by “ruling the world” – for only two centuries at best.

The Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping may have coined the ultimate formula for what many in the West defined as the Chinese miracle:

“To seek truth from facts, not from dogmas, whether from East or West”.

So this was never about divine intervention, but planning, hard work, and learning by trial and error.

The recent session of the National People’s Congress provides a stark example. Not only it approved a new Five-Year Plan, but in fact a full road map for China’s development up to 2035: three plans in one.

What the whole world saw, in practice, was the manifest efficiency of the Chinese governance system, capable of designing and implementing extremely complex geoeconomic strategies after plenty of local and regional debate on a vast range of policy initiatives.

Compare it to the endless bickering and gridlock in Western liberal democracies, which are incapable of planning for the next quarter, not to mention fifteen years.

The best and the brightest in China actually do their Deng; they couldn’t care less about the politicizing of governance systems. What matters is what they define as a very effective system to make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) development plans, and put them in practice.

The 85% popular vote

At the start of 2021, before the onset of the Year of the Metal Ox, President Xi Jinping emphasized that  “favorable social conditions” should be in place for the CCP centennial celebrations.

Oblivious to waves of demonization coming from the West, for Chinese public opinion what matters is whether the CCP delivered. And deliver it did (over 85% popular approval). China controlled Covid-19 in record time; economic growth is back; poverty alleviation was achieved; and the civilization-state became a “moderately prosperous society” – right on schedule for the CCP centennial.

Since 1949, the size of the Chinese economy soared by a whopping 189 times. Over the past two decades, China’s GDP grew 11-fold. Since 2010, it more than doubled, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion, and now accounts for 17% of global economic output.

No wonder Western grumbling is irrelevant. Shanghai Capital investment boss Eric Li succinctly describes the governance gap; in the U.S., government changes but not policy. In China, government doesn’t change; policy does.

This is the background for the next development stage – where the CCP will in fact double down on its unique hybrid model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

The key point is that the Chinese leadership, via non-stop policy adjustments (trial and error, always) has evolved a model of “peaceful rise” – their own terminology – that essentially respects China’s immense historical and cultural experiences.

In this case, Chinese exceptionalism means respecting Confucianism – which privileges harmony and abhors conflict – as well as Daoism – which privileges balance – over the boisterous, warring, hegemonic Western model.

This is reflected in major policy adjustments such as the new “dual circulation” drive, which places greater emphasis on the domestic market compared to China as the “factory of the world”.

Past and future are totally intertwined in China; what was done in previous dynasties echoes in the future. The best contemporary example is the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for the foreseeable future.

As detailed by Renmin University Professor Wang Yiwei, BRI is about to reshape geopolitics, “bringing Eurasia back to its historical place at the center of human civilization.” Wang has shown how “the two great civilizations of the East and the West were linked until the rise of the Ottoman Empire cut off the Ancient Silk Road”.

Europe moving seaward led to “globalization through colonization”; the decline of the Silk Road; the world’s center shifting to the West; the rise of the U.S.; and the decline of Europe. Now, Wang argues, “Europe is faced with a historic opportunity to return to the world center through the revival of Eurasia.”

And that’s exactly what the Hegemon will go no holds barred to prevent.

Zhu and Xi

It’s fair to argue that Xi’s historical counterpart is the Hongwu emperor Zhu, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The emperor was keen to present his dynasty as a Chinese renewal after Mongol domination via the Yuan dynasty.

Xi frames it as “Chinese rejuvenation”: “China used to be a world economic power. However, it missed its chance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent dramatic changes, and was thus left behind and suffered humiliation under foreign invasion …we must not let this tragic history repeat itself.”

The difference is that 21^st century China under Xi will not retreat inward as it did under the Ming. The parallel for the near future would rather be with the Tang dynasty (618-907), which privileged trade and interactions with the world at large.

To comment on the torrent of Western misinterpretations of China is a waste of time. For the Chinese, the overwhelming majority of Asia, and for the Global South, much more relevant is to register how the American imperial narrative – “we are the liberators of Asia-Pacific” – has now been totally debunked.

In fact Chairman Mao may end up having the last laugh. As he wrote in 1957, “if the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse.”

Martin Jacques, one of the very few Westerners who actually studied China in depth, correctly pointed out how “China has enjoyed five separate periods when it has enjoyed a position of pre-eminence – or shared pre-eminence – in the world: part of the Han, the Tang, arguably the Song, the early Ming, and the early Qing.”

So China, historically, does represent continuous renewal and “rejuvenation” (Xi). We’re right in the middle of another one of these phases – now conducted by a CCP dynasty that, incidentally, does not believe in miracles, but in hardcore planning. Western exceptionalists may continue to throw a fit 24/7 ad infinitum: that will not change the course of history.

US National Security Strategy Guide دليل استراتيجيّة الأمن القوميّ الأميركيّ

**English Machine translation Please scroll down for the Arabic original version **

Buthaina Shaaban,

Source: Al-Mayadeen Net,

March 22, 15:00

On the threshold of reality produced by the new U.S. administration, we see that the world is heading for a hot cold war of a new kind, because one side, the capitalist West, considers it a battle of existence.

The rule in China has been described as autocratic, and in Russia as an aggressor.

This March, signed by President Joseph Biden, the U.S. National Security Strategy for the current phase was issued in 23 pages covering all the key issues that are a priority in U.S. policy.

On the other hand, the strategy emphasizes the focus on cooperation and partnership with transatlantic allies, on expanding NATO’s base and inviting all countries that believe in this path to join it in the face of China and Russia. The NATO group has been considered to be democratic states and promoters of good governance and human rights, while those who do not join this pat. The ruling in China has been described as autocratic, and in Russia as an aggressor, before using descriptions that are unworthy of any diplomat or politician to describe the President.

The study confirmed that it would support Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang in the face of China, under the pretext of supporting democracies and democratic orientations in the world.

It also becomes clear to the observant reader that the West feels a real threat to this hegemonic system, and is trying in this strategy to seek ways and means that curb its rivals and ensure its continuity on the same rules and foundations that it has been used to for decades, meaning that this strategy is to some extent a search for a path of salvation. From a reality that has become a real threat to the West’s exceptionalism and supremacy in many areas after centuries of plundering the world’s wealth and using it to fuel its hegemony and power over states and countries all over the globe, but this reading of the course of history is a misreading, because the Western capitalist system has lost its prestige after the exposure of the real foundations on which it is based, namely, to fuel war and create chaos, to control the capabilities of peoples and use them to strengthen this capitalist system.

In addition, especially in recent years, the truth of the statements made by Western regimes, from freedom of the media to human rights to good governance, has also been revealed. The reality of the situation has shown that the media in the West is a mouthpiece for the ruling companies and their interests, and that human rights are a slogan used as needed, without any real concern for the human being and his rights.

The terrorist war on Syria, with all its Western hypocrisy and the inability of the West to match China or Russia in the face of the epidemic, contributed to the detection of the truth of Western regimes that use the media in a thoughtful and generous way to inflate their capabilities and dwarf the capabilities of others.

As the media in Russia and China began to gain access to the West, the Platforms of the United Nations and the world, it began to reveal the truth of the falsification that the Western media had adopted for centuries in order to continue to control the bag of money and opinion throughout the world. Therefore, In the face of this thunderous and dangerous exposure, Western countries resorted to using their tools, from locals in different countries buying their consciences with money, to followers who were fascinated by the West and its model, and unable to break free from this illusion, so they continued to encourage and serve the Western model, thinking that it is the best in the world, because colonialism had entered their minds and not only occupied the land. And when colonialism is gone, it left colonized minds ready to carry out orders, because they see in the colonialism a master good in thinking and performance and does not make mistakes, and its a great honor submit and obey orders.

On the threshold of this reality produced by the new U.S. administration, we see that the world is heading for a hot cold war of a new kind, because one of the parties, the capitalist West, considers it a battle of existence, and the rise of China and the expansion of Russia are an existential threat to it, and it is necessary to gather forces, alliances and partners to change the direction of this new reality.

Since the West will not be able to change the direction of the Chinese dragon, and it will not be able to turn back the clock, the international arena is likely to engage in dangerous confrontations, and no one knows yet the serious prices that will be paid as a result, but these prices will be paid by all of humanity, because we are we all share a life on this planet,

It is clear that the U.S. strategy leading a transatlantic bloc and NATO considers itself exceptional in visions, strength and thinking, and that anyone who disagrees with it is an autocracy or aggressor who has no other choice but to return to the path of guidance or to be killed or out of the conflict. These are dangerous concepts for the whole world, and they must be understood with awareness and patience, in order to be addressed with wisdom, composure, cooperation and alliance, to save all humanity from any real and potential dangers.

دليل استراتيجيّة الأمن القوميّ الأميركيّ

بثينة شعبان

المصدر: الميادين نت 22 آذار 15:00

على عتبة الواقع الذي أفرزته الإدارة الأميركية الجديدة، نرى أنّ العالم يتّجه إلى حرب باردة ساخنة من نوع جديد، لأنّ أحد الطرفين، وهو الغرب الرأسمالي، يعتبر أنها معركة وجود.

تمّ وصف الحكم في الصين بأنّه أوتوقراطيّ، وفي روسيا بأنّه معتدٍ

صدرت في شهر آذار/مارس الحالي، وبتوقيع من الرئيس جوزيف بايدن، استراتيجية الأمن القومي الأميركي للمرحلة الحالية، وذلك في 23 صفحة شملت كلّ المسائل الأساسية التي تحظى بالأولوية في سياسة الولايات المتحدة. وبعد قراءة النصّ أكثر من مرة، والتوقّف عند التكرار والتأكيد من فقرة إلى أخرى، لا يُخطئ القارئ المهتمّ بالاستنتاج إذا وجد أنّ الصين تشكّل الهاجس الأكبر لهذه الإدارة، وأنّ سياستها يمكن تلخيصها بمعاداة روسيا ومحاولة كبح جماح تقدّم الصين في النموّ، وخصوصاً في مجال التكنولوجيا والتقدّم العلميّ. 

من جهة أخرى، تؤكّد الاستراتيجيّة التركيز على التعاون والشراكة مع الحلفاء عبر الأطلسي، وعلى توسيع قاعدة الناتو ودعوة كلّ الدول المؤمنة بهذا المسار للانضمام إليه في وجه الصين وروسيا. وقد تمّ اعتبار أن مجموعة “الناتو” هي الدول الديمقراطية والمروّجة للحكم الرشيد وحقوق الإنسان، بينما يعتبر كلّ من لا ينضمّ إلى هذا المسار أوتوقراطياً ومعتدياً. وقد تمّ وصف الحكم في الصين بأنّه أوتوقراطيّ، وفي روسيا بأنّه معتدٍ، وذلك قبل استخدام أوصاف لا تليق بأيّ دبلوماسي أو سياسي لوصف رئيس روسيا. 

وأكّدت هذه الدراسة أنّها سوف تدعم تايوان وهونغ كونغ وشينجيانغ في وجه الصين، بذريعة دعم الديمقراطيات والتوجّهات الديمقراطية في العالم. إنَّ الانطباع الذي يصل إليه القارئ بين السطور هو الخوف الحقيقي من صعود الصين، إذ إنها ذُكرت 18 مرة، والخوف من أن يقدّم أنموذجها بديلاً حقيقياً للنظام الرأسمالي الغربي، بحيث تتبنّاه الشعوب وتقلع عن تبعيتها للغرب، ما يشكّل خطراً على استمرار الهيمنة الغربية وقدرتها على نهب ثروات البلدان والشعوب لتغذية نموها وسيطرتها والاستمرار في بسط سلطتها وهيمنتها على المؤسَّسات الدولية ومقدّرات الشعوب.

 كما يصبح واضحاً للقارئ المتابع أنّ الغرب يشعر بتهديد حقيقيّ لنظام الهيمنة هذا، ويحاول في هذه الاستراتيجية أن يتلمّس الطرق والوسائل التي تكبح جماح منافسيه وتضمن استمراريته على القواعد والأسس ذاتها التي درج عليها منذ عقود، أي أنّ هذه الاستراتيجية تعتبر إلى حدّ ما بحثاً عن طريق خلاص من واقع بات يشكّل خطراً حقيقياً على استثنائية الغرب وتفوّقه في مجالات عدّة بعد قرون من نهب ثروات العالم واستخدامها لتغذية هيمنته وسطوته على الدول والبلدان في كلّ أنحاء المعمورة، ولكنّ هذه القراءة لمسار التاريخ هي قراءة مغلوطة، لأنّ النظام الرأسمالي الغربي فقد هيبته ومكانته بعد انكشاف الأسس الحقيقية التي يقوم عليها، ألا وهي تأجيج أوار الحرب وخلق الفوضى، من أجل السيطرة على مقدّرات الشعوب واستخدامها بما يعزّز نظامه الرأسمالي هذا.

 كما انكشفت، وخصوصاً في السنوات الأخيرة، حقيقة المقولات التي تطلقها النظم الغربية، من حرية الإعلام إلى حقوق الإنسان إلى الحكم الرشيد، وأظهر واقع الحال أنّ الإعلام في الغرب بوق للشركات الحاكمة ومصالحها، وأنّ حقوق الإنسان شعار يستخدم بحسب الحاجة، من دون أيّ حرص حقيقيّ على الإنسان وحقوقه. 

وقد ساهمت الحرب الإرهابية على سوريا، بكلّ ما اعتراها ورافقها من نفاق غربيّ، كما ساهم انتشار “كوفيد 19” وعجز الغرب عن مضاهاة الصين أو روسيا في مواجهة الوباء، في الكشف عن حقيقة النظم الغربية التي تستخدم الإعلام بشكل مدروس وسخيّ كي تضخّم مقدراتها وتقزّم قدرات الآخرين وإمكانياتهم.

ومع انطلاق الإعلام في روسيا والصين ونفاذه إلى الغرب ومنصات الأمم المتحدة والعالم، بدأ يكشف حقيقة الزّيف الذي اعتمده الإعلام الغربي على مدى قرون من أجل الاستمرار في تحكّمه بحقيبة المال والرأي في العالم برمّته. ولذلك، وفي وجه هذا الانكشاف المدوّي والخطير، لجأت الدول الغربية إلى استخدام أدواتها، من سكّان محلّيين في بلدان مختلفة تشتري ضمائرهم بالمال، إلى التابعين الذين خلقوا مبهورين بالغرب وأنموذجه، ولم يتمكّنوا من التحرّر من هذا الوهم، فاستمرّوا في غيّهم وخدمتهم للأنموذج الغربي، ظنّاً منهم أنّه الأفضل في العالم، لأنّ الاستعمار دخل إلى عقولهم ولم يكتفِ باحتلال الأرض. وحين رحل جسداً، ترك وراءه عقولاً مستعمَرَة ومستعدّة لأن تنفّذ أوامره، لأنها ترى فيه السيد الذي يحسن التفكير والأداء ولا يخطئ، كما ترى شرفاً كبيراً في الانقياد له والانصياع لأوامره. 

على عتبة هذا الواقع الذي أفرزته الإدارة الأميركية الجديدة، نرى أنّ العالم يتّجه إلى حرب باردة ساخنة من نوع جديد، لأنّ أحد الطرفين، وهو الغرب الرأسمالي، يعتبر أنها معركة وجود، وأنّ صعود الصين وتمدّد روسيا يعتبران خطراً وجودياً عليه، ولا بدّ من أن يستجمع القوى والتحالفات والشركاء لتغيير وجهة هذا الواقع الجديد.

وبما أنّه لن يتمكن من تغيير وجهة التنين الصيني، كما أنّه لن يتمكَّن من إعادة عقارب الساعة إلى الوراء، فإنّ الساحة الدولية مرشّحة لخوض تجاذبات خطيرة لا يعلم أحد بعد الأثمان الخطيرة التي سيتمّ دفعها نتيجة لها، ولكنّ هذه الأثمان سيدفعها أبناء البشرية جمعاء، لأننا جميعاً نتقاسم العيش على هذا الكوكب، بخلاف النظرة الفوقية الغربية التي تعتبر وجودها ورفاهها الضامن الأساس لبقية البشر الذين يجب أن يكونوا تابعين لها.

من الواضح أنّ الاستراتيجية الأميركية التي تقود كتلة عبر الأطلسي و”الناتو” تعتبر ذاتها استثنائية في الرؤى والقوة والتفكير، وأنّ كلّ من يخالفها الرأي والتوجّه هو أوتوقراطيّ أو معتدٍ لا حلّ لديه سوى أن يعود إلى سبيل الرشاد أو أن يقتل أو يخرج من حلبة الصراع. إنها مفاهيم خطيرة على العالم برمّته، ولا بدّ من فهمها بوعي وأناة، كي يتمّ التصدّي لها بحكمة ورباطة جأش وتعاون وتحالف، لإنقاذ البشرية جمعاء من أي أخطار حقيقية محتملة.

Speech by Prof. Bouthaina Shaaban Political and Media Advisor Syrian Presidency At the Shiller Institute Online Conference “World at a Crossroad: Two Months in the New US Administration” March 20-21, 2021

Her Excellency Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban: Reconstruction with Syrian characteristics — rebuilding a truly diverse and more secure world based on the lessons of the Syrian experience

Transcript

Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban is a political and media advisor to President AssadYOUTUBE/SCHILLER INSTITUTE

Good morning.

Allow me first to thank the Schiller Institute, and in particular, to thank Helga Zepp-LaRouche, for inviting me to this very important conference and for allowing me to contribute to this very important panel.

But before I begin my paper, I would like to pass on a few notes that lead me to the conclusion which I would love to conclude for this panel, and for this conference at large.

One of the major problems we face in our country, is that today, Western countries approach our countries with the feeling of exceptionalism or a feeling of righteousness, that whatever Western countries see appropriate or good, should apply to our countries without any question. The first action that was taken by Western countries, when the war on Syria started, was to withdraw their ambassadors from Syria. The question is, isn’t it the job of the ambassadors to convey the reality on the ground, and to help in opening channels of communication between countries instead of closing them?

This leads me to the role of corporate media during the war on Syria. Unfortunately, most Western media rely on Al Jazeera, Qatar-funded, and Al Arabiya, Saudi-funded, to report on events in Syria, even though both channels, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, withdrew their correspondents and relied on what are called “eyewitnesses,” which could be anybody, anywhere. This applies also to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by one person in Coventry, U.K., Rami Abdel Rahman.

These media outlets choose to focus on what they find which fits their agenda, ignoring the reality on the ground. For example, even the terrorist acts in Tartus and Jableh recently, which claimed the lives of 200 innocent civilians, were not noticed by Western media, and certainly did not therefore evoke any Western sympathy.

What I would like to say is that the false narrative propagated about Syria was as dangerous to the Syrian people and to the safety and security of Syrians, as the acts perpetrated by terrorists, because it isolated the reality in Syria from the public understanding in the West and in the world at large, and it prevented the creation of a level of understanding between Western countries and the Syrian people about what is going on.

Terrorism and ‘Democracy’

But before we can begin to talk about reconstructing Syria, we still face the monumental challenge of eradicating terrorism in Syria, Iraq, and the region. We have to eradicate this terrorism. And when I say “we,” I do not mean the Syrians or the Iraqis alone, but I mean the world at large, because, as we have seen, in Paris, Brussels, Orlando, and lastly, the U.K., terrorists can strike anywhere in the world; it’s a cancer that can spread anywhere in the world. However, is the world, and in particular, are Western powers, doing all they can to face this danger? This is the question that I would like to ask.

Of course if we separate out what is promoted in the media and look at actions and deeds, rather than words, we see that in the case of Syria, Western countries are not doing what needs to be done to eliminate this danger, both from Syria and from the world at large. And I would like to give you one example: On December 17, 2015, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2253, under Chapter 7, which dictates stopping the financing, arming, and facilitating of terrorists into Syria. The Vienna Group, afterwards, interpreted this resolution, that it should include closing the Turkish border and not allowing armaments and finances to cross to the terrorists. On December 18, the Security Council issued Resolution 2254, which calls for a political solution in Syria.

Now, you see that the entirety of humanity focusses on 2254, without dealing with 2253, which is a logical prerequisite for 2254, that is, for finding a political solution in Syria.

The same thing can be said about humanitarian assistance. Instead of focussing on ending the war in Syria and restoring peace and security in Syria, we see that the entire corporate media is speaking about humanitarian assistance, as if this is the issue! Syria, before this war, was able to host 2 million Iraqis and to feed itself, and to export food to 84 countries in the world. It is since the 1970s that the Syrian people have adopted the motto, “We eat from what we produce, and we wear from what we manufacture,” which means that Syria does not need humanitarian help if there is peace and stability, and if the Syrian people are able to develop their crops and attend to their factories.

Today we hear a lot of talk from the Western alliance about “containing” ISIS, “limiting” ISIS; and lastly, you all heard the speech of CIA Director John Brennan, who said that we did not succeed even in limiting the influence of ISIS. Why? Because there is no real desire and wish, really, to get rid of ISIS. There were two elements: The Russian government had called on Western countries to join efforts to defeat ISIS both in Syria and Iraq, and the agreement in Vienna was that the Turkish borders should be closed. Neither of these two elements received a positive response from the United States or the Western powers. The question is, why?—if there is a real will to fight ISIS.

The other question is, that we in Syria feel that what is needed is a real will in the international community to fight terrorism and to build real bridges. When I say “real bridges,” I mean, on an equal basis, on a basis of parity. The problem with promoting “democracy”—in quotation marks—in our part of the world, is that Western countries believe that liberal democracy is the only issue, or the only copy, or the only formula that should be applied to our countries. And this is not true, because we all have different cultures.

We have different identities, we have different habits, we have different ways of life, and I can give an example: China, India, the Persian culture, Arab culture have contributed a great deal to the world, but on a human basis, and on a basis of parity. In fact, here I would like to make an important point, that the Western world believes in opening markets to the entire world, but only to export its own goods! But not to allow other countries to export to the West, on an equal basis. And every day they invent different formulas in order not to allow equal treatment—tariff constraints and other constraints.

Intellectual Silk Road

The same thing applies to politics. The concepts, values, and ideas, coming from the West should be respected and implemented in our countries, but there is no other road that takes our culture, and our values and our ethics to the West. If we need to create a world for all, if we need to create a peaceful world, if we need to create a prosperous world for all, we need to create a conceptual, intellectual concept of one world; we need to create a conceptual concept of a Silk Road. Not only an actual Silk Road, but an intellectual Silk Road. All of you know that Aleppo and Syria were extremely crucial in the ancient Silk Road that connected Asia to Europe. Syria and the Syrian people will be more than happy to be very active also in a New Silk Road and in a political, social, intellectual Silk Road that connects Asia to the West, that connects Eurasia to the West.

The other byproduct of this war on our countries, and the other byproduct of promoting only Western exceptionalism in our country, is the distortion of the image of Islam in Western eyes. Islam, like any other religion, is a religion of love, a religion of humanity. We, as Muslims, were hardly ever, if ever, addressed in our Quran as Muslims. We are addressed as “ye human beings”: We are part of the human community. And therefore, those who kill in the name of Islam, those who destroy in the name of Islam, are not Muslims at all. They have nothing to do with Islam.

We have to address the concept that the terrorists are promoting, and the lack of dialogue that the corporate media are causing, if we want to create a truly prosperous Silk Road, not only physical, but also intellectual, social, and political. And here, I would like to conclude by thanking Russia and China, who right from the beginning of the war on Syria, took four vetoes against Western attempts to try to strike Syria militarily. And Russia, and China, and Iran, continue to support the Syrian people, to try to find a political solution.

In brief, what I would like to say here is that, in order to build these Silk Roads, we have to deal with each other on an equal basis, on an equal human basis, and dealing otherwise, as superior and inferior, as white and black, as important and less important, is producing extremism, is producing racism which is striking not only in Syria, but in Brussels, in Paris, in Orlando, and last of all in the U.K. Thus, it is in the interests of humanity to think as human beings, to think of the world as truly a human village, where people live equally, and have mutual respect for each other, and deal on the basis of parity.

But this requires a huge change in the mindset of the West, that probably requires another conference, to speak not only about the very important idea launched by China, of building a Silk Road, but to speak about the intellectual, social, and political Silk Road, that thinks and deals with all of us, as human, as brothers and sisters, rather than as superior and inferior. Thus, we can build a new world, and one world, and a much better world than the one we live in. We have an obligation to our grandchildren, wherever they are born, to leave them a better world than this one in which we live now.

Thank you very much.

Julian Assange, Prometheus Bound

By Pepe Escobar

Cross-posted with Consortium News

He is being punished not for stealing fire – but for exposing power under the light of truth and provoking the god of Exceptionalism. 

Police ejecting Julian Assange from Ecuadorian embassy in London, April 11, 2019. (YouTube)

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This is the tale of an Ancient Greek tragedy reenacted in AngloAmerica.

Amid thundering silence and nearly universal indifference, chained, immobile, invisible, a squalid Prometheus was transferred from the gallows for a show trial in a faux Gothic court built on the site of a medieval prison.

Kratos, impersonating Strength, and Bia, impersonating Violence, had duly chained Prometheus, not to a mountain in the Caucasus, but to solitary confinement in a high-security prison, subject to relentless psychological torture. All along the Western watchtowers, no Hephaestus volunteered to forge in his smithy a degree of reluctance or even a sliver of pity.

Prometheus is being punished not for stealing fire – but for exposing power under the light of truth, thus provoking the unbounded ire of  Zeus The Exceptionalist, who’s only able to stage his crimes under multiple veils of secrecy.

Prometheus pierced the myth of secrecy – which envelops Zeus’s ability to control the human spectrum. And that is anathema.

“Prometheus Being Chained by Vulcan,” 1623 oil painting by Dirck van Baburen. (Vulcan Rijksmuseum, Wikimedia Commons)

For years, debased, hack stenographers worked relentlessly to depict Prometheus as a lowly trickster and inconsequential forger.

Abandoned, smeared, demonized, Prometheus was comforted by only a small chorus of Oceanids – Craig Murray, John Pilger, Daniel Ellsberg, Wiki warriors, Consortium writers. Prometheus was denied even the basic tools to organize a defense that might at least rattle Zeus’s cognitive dissonant narrative.

Oceanus, the Titan father of the Oceanids, could not possibly urge Prometheus to appease Zeus.

Fleetingly, Prometheus might have revealed to the chorus that exposing secrecy was not what best suited his heart’s content. His plight might also, in the long run, revive popular attachment to the civilizing arts.

One day, Prometheus was visited by Io, a human maiden. He may have forecasted she would engage in no future travels, and she would bear him two offspring. And he may have foreseen that one of their descendants – an unnamed epigone of Heracles – many generations hence, would release him, figuratively, from his torment.

Zeus and his prosecutorial minions don’t have much of a case against Prometheus, apart from possession and dissemination of classified Exceptional information.

Still it was eventually up to Hermes — the messenger of the Gods, and significantly, the conduit of News — to be sent down by Zeus in uncontrollable anger to demand that Prometheus admits he was guilty of trying to overthrow the rules-based order established by the Supreme Exceptional.

CBC TV covering Assange expulsion from Ecuadorian embassy in London. (YouTube)

This is what’s being ritualized at the current show trial, which was never about Justice.

Prometheus won’t be tamed. In his mind, he will be relieving Tennyson’s Ulysses: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

So Zeus may finally strike him with the thunderbolt of Exceptionalism, and Prometheus will be hurled into the abyss.

Prometheus’s theft of the secrecy of power, though, is irreversible. His fate will certainly prompt the late entrance of Pandora and her jar of evils – complete with unforeseen consequences.

Whatever the verdict reached in that 17^th century court, it’s far from certain that Prometheus will enter History just as a mere object of blame for human folly.

Because now the heart of the matter is that the mask of Zeus has fallen.

Lebanese writer explains why ‘Westerners have no remorse when killing others’

September 03, 2020

Via The Saker

Middle East Observer

Description:

Lebanese writer and researcher of Islamic Studies, Sayed Abbas Noureddine, gives two reasons why he thinks the ‘West can continue oppressing other nations without any empathy or remorse’.

Source: Islamona (YouTube)
Date: Mar 7, 2020

Transcript:

In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. A close look at the Western psyche, the Western man’s personality, and the way he deals with matters related to us, indicates that in the foreseeable future, Western man will continue to provide the necessary fuel for his governments and regimes to continue oppressing, attacking and persecuting us.However, the problem in this context is not that the Western man is an inherently hostile being who intentionally seeks to oppress i.e. that he knows we are innocent, he knows what he is doing is wrong, yet he continues to carry it out. That is not the case. However, there are two main elements being worked on in general – of course we’re talking in general here – to keep Western man and Western societies as providers of the fuel and resources (that their rulers seek).Thus, (Western states) are able to continue developing their weapons, to continue putting forward armies and soldiers dedicated to entering our regions to fight and kill us.

See how (common it is) for professional (Western) soldiers to kill (innocent) people in cold blood. Many Westerners, when they hear that dozens or even hundreds of us have been killed, feel nothing towards this, neither remorse nor empathy. Why? Because they believe perhaps that we deserve death, or that we form a threat to civilization, or that we are simply evil.

Here, there are two elements which crystallized in the mind and personality of the Western man, leading him to continue to provide the fuel for these ominous policies (by Western governments). The first element is that Western man views his government through the lens of economic well-being and comfort. That is, the extent to which his government provides (him/her with) services and privileges in terms of livelihood.

In short, the issue of livelihood and economic prosperity is a central issue for the Western man in terms of evaluating his government’s (legitimacy/performance). For instance, if Trump launches wars in which millions are killed, the Western man will remain largely silent before such a scene, as long as Trump (manages through such wars) to reduce the unemployment rate in (America) for instance. By merely bringing about some economic improvements, Trump secured a great percentage of votes or support (from Americans). In other words, he gained a widely popular base within American society. This scene also takes place in say Britain, France or Germany.

The red line for Westerners vis-à-vis their governments is (precisely) this issue of (economic) wellbeing and prosperity. Therefore, you can see that Western governments work on the economic dimension whenever they intend to carry out any sinister or ominous foreign actions or policies against any world nation.

The second element regarding the Western psyche was intensively worked upon for hundreds of years, especially during the last century, by (Western) societies, institutions, media, and various forces within their culture, and that is the ‘demonization of the Other’. Meaning that according to them, we cannot be imagined as ‘good’. As far as they’re concerned, we are ‘evil’ (beings) or devils that must be killed or exterminated, or preferably, that we ought not to exist on the face of this planet. This ‘demonization of the Other’ process was worked upon intensively.

Therefore, when a Westerner feels empathy for a whale stuck between icebergs, but very rarely empathizes, if at all, with the Palestinian people, who are slaughtered, killed and subjected to all this oppression – this is because the Westerner is unable to extract these demonized images from his mind and imagination, images which (Western) media, educational institutions and (various Western) literature worked intensively on for centuries. Due to this culture, the Western man is unable to accept or view us as normal human beings, or as real people, or at least as people who deserve to live or have dignity.

Unfortunately, in this regard, we have major shortcomings that we must work on, not for the sake of the Western man, but for the sake of completing the (moral) argument against this (Western) world. If we do this, God willing the great Divine support will arrive (to change this situation).

(Important Note: Please help us keep producing independent translations for you by contributing as little as $1/month here: https://www.patreon.com/MiddleEastObserver?fan_landing=true)

Read transcript: http://middleeastobserver.net/lebanese-writer-explains-why-westerners-have-no-remorse-when-killing-others/

Biden / Harris 2020: The Values That Unite the US and Israel

Source

August 13, 2020

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. (Photo: File)

By Benay Blend

Joe Biden declares that what links the United States and Israel goes beyond the exchange of weapons. It is instead the much more ephemeral notion of a “shared soul that unites our countries, generation upon generation.” He proved that notion on August 11, 2020, when he chose Kamala Harris, the former Attorney General of California and current U.S. Senator, as his running mate.

In an article aptly titled “Jim Crow Joe and Kamala the Cop: Another Blue Lives Matter Ticket,” Tatiana Cozzarelli and Ezra Brain explain that Biden’s choice rested on a desire to “co-opt a movement against anti-Black police” by picking a Black woman who “talks about racial justice.” In reality, Harris proved that she is “pro-cop and pro-prison” by “locking up and terrorizing communities of color.”

Following the murder of George Floyd, there has been an unprecedented uprising against police brutality, during which some have called for the abolition of police and prisons. It was no coincidence that support came from beleaguered Palestine, as the same militarized techniques are used in both countries. Indeed, there was speculation that police who used the knee-on-the-neck choke-hold that cost Floyd his life learned that technique as a consequence of Deadly Exchange, the training of American police forces in Israel.

It is no coincidence that Harris was Biden’s choice for running mate for they not only are united in their belief systems; they also share those ideas with the Zionist regime. Biden talks about our shared soul with Israel. Harris reports that she is “honored to join Joe Biden in the fight for the soul of our country.” Yet in a prophetic tweet on May 1, Steven Salaita pleads:

“Please stop this shit about the presidential election being a battle for the ‘soul of America.’ Settler colonies have no souls, only ruling classes that want us to feel pious about their depravity.”

Apparently, neither do the leaders who want to run the country. Joe Biden devoted his career “fighting for the American people,” Harris continues. “And as president, he will build an America that lives up to our ideals.”

Fine words, but what do they really mean? Like Israel, America prides itself on being exceptional. In particular, both Israel and America claim to be exceptional democracies. In fact, they were born in the genocide of Indigenous people in both countries.

Significantly Biden and Harris are both unqualified supporters of Israel. In her statement Harris mentions her parents, both immigrants, mother from India and father from Jamaica, and each, she says, were participants in the civil rights movement of the 60s.

“Some of my earliest memories,” she continues, “are from that time” when her parents were “attacked by police with hoses, fleeing for safety,” with baby Kamala “strapped tightly” in her stroller.

Harris claims that she inherited her “spirit of activism” from her mother, who told her not to “just sit around and complain about things. Do something.” She did just that when she served as California’s Attorney General as well as Senator.

It wasn’t to “fix a broken system from within,” as she claims, that she served in those positions, at least not in the spirit of Civil Rights. As Cozzarelli and Brain make clear, Attorney General Harris was not so “progressive” as she claimed to be. Instead, as a lawyer who was “tough on crime,” she supported the prison industrial complex by “terrorizing communities of color.”

While previously serving as San Francisco DA, she directed a “war on truancy” which resulted in the arrest and prosecution of parents of children who had missed 10 percent of school days, often leading to a year in prison or a $2000 fine, neither of which were helpful for poor communities.

If all of this and more sounds even more appalling considering that Harris is Black, and so should have more empathy for her community, remember that Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State (2005-2009) and US National Security Advisor (2001-2005), who was 8 years old at the time of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, said that afterward there was “no safe place” nor “sanctuary” for Black children in her community.

That experience, she said, led her to empathize with victims in other countries who had lost their families to war. Yet there were numerous war crimes committed under the Bush Administration, which, as Nancy Mancias explains, she condoned and covered for during her time as Secretary of State.

In a Facebook response last night, when emotions were running high, Ernesto Ayala, organizer for the Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida, asked that others organize instead of playing into what appeared to be a political game that tokenizes people of color:

“What a circus Ameriklan politics are. I’ve been on this planet 38 years and I’ve seen this ridiculous game over and over and over and it always follows the same pattern only now the empire is desperate and throwing in non white people into their game to AGAIN fool you into having hope in this decaying empire that has given us what? What on Earth has it given us only pain and misery everything we’ve been able to achieve has been in spite of and come at a cost of struggle that has cost blood NOT by this game show that produces Trump in the first place… Organize!”

Like Rice, Harris might understand the terrorizing of a community from her childhood experiences, but she has not been able to transfer that empathy to foreign policy. Moreover, as a Palestine Chronicle blog post attests, Harris   sports “a record of fighting for civil rights, freedom, and equality in America.”

Yet, as Kyle Kulinksi, a left-wing commentator and founder of the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats, observes, by ignoring Israel’s Occupation of Palestine, Harris is showing that “her moral and ethical concerns are non-existent.”

In a July 8, 2019 article in Electronic Intifada which is resurfacing again after Biden’s pick, Ali Abunimah claims that “[Harris’] support for freedom, civil rights and equality does not extend to one group of people systematically and violently denied them: Palestinians.” On this issue, she appears very much in line with Biden, whose support for Israel has been covered by the media for several years.

Given her record in California, I would argue that Harris’ domestic and foreign policy are all of one piece, seamlessly endorsing some of the same practices as those found in Israel. As AG in California, her stance on incarcerated prisoners was that they were expendable, much like Israel views Palestinians, and really the way that any settler colonial regime views the colonized. For example, when told to reduce the population of California’s crowned prisons, AG Harris’ office responded that if non-violent offenders were released that would lower the prison system’s source of cheap labor.

Writing for In These Times, Marie Gottschalk maintains that

“A new generation of prosecutors is willing to take on the Fraternal Order of Police and the statewide associations of district attorneys and sheriffs—some of the biggest obstacles to real criminal justice reform. And powerful local coalitions are emerging to make sure that those like Harris, who aspire to be ‘progressive prosecutors,’ do not pull back once they are elected to office.”

Will these young prosecutors, though, see the close links between foreign and domestic policies, particularly with respect to America’s ties to Israel? While liberals are quick to overlook the Biden / Harris position on the Occupation, they do so at their peril. As Michael Brown observes: “Substance on Palestine and settler-colonialism also matters and speaks volumes about a person.”

In the words of Palestinian-American writer/activist Steven Salaita: “Silence about ethnic cleansing is a sacrifice much greater than any principle an American might compromise in order to arrive at a voting decision.”

As commentators said after the shooting of George Floyd, our support of such tactics in other countries has implications for the state of our government at home. In addition to the exchange of military tactics and surveillance techniques, Israel’s disregard for what it deems a disposable population was mirrored in Harris’ legal career in California.

Indeed, if Israel meets her human rights standards, as she said, what does that say for what her bar will be at home? Unless we have the courage to look at the entire picture, not just what we want to see, we are doomed to repeat the protests that are going to follow after the shooting of many George Floyds in the future.

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Scarce jobs + revenue desperation = sure Western stagflation post-corona

May 13, 2020

Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog

Among capitalist economists stagflation is the worst possible outcome, excepting a Great Depression.

They even admit they cannot explain it (especially Keynesians), or rather they choose not to – this is why the word has barely been broached during this very depressing coronavirus era. In exactly the same vein, the West’s intellectuals claim they cannot explain the causes of World War I (as I discussed last week here).

There is clearly something in stagflation which, like the banker collusion which orchestrated World War I, strikes at the moral heart of the Western liberal project.

They don’t know what caused the 1970s stagflation, but what’s certain is that the solution – the highest prime interest rates (20% in 1981) in US history, which provoked two recessions and a disaster for the housing market – is not available today in this age of Western ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policies) and Quantitative Easing. A total reversal to that type of a contractionary monetary policy would lead to bankers starting World War III; negative interest rates could reach the US as soon as this winter.

The West wants to ignore stagflation because fixing it is so very, very hard. If Weimar Germany represents the most dynamic pole of Western capitalist-imperialist socio-economic breakdown, then stagflation is its equally destructive passive pole. Stagflation was indeed put to music via the punk movement, with its trumpeting of what everyone knows: the Western capitalist dream does not work without imperialist wars, the liberal democratic neo-aristocrats are phony hypocrites, and anarchy in the UK (and the rest of the West) is needed in order to overthrow the status-quo loving “keep calm and carry on-ers”.

Cover your ears – the West is about to get punk again.

“Stagflation” is a portmanteau of “stagnation” and “inflation”: it is the combination of slow economic growth, high unemployment and price inflation. Stagnant wages is a fourth component but it is often left out because the capitalist West doesn’t want to talk about lifting wages at home, in their factories in Haiti, or even on Mars.

Astute readers should be re-reading that sentence and thinking: “Well, since the Great Lockdown started the West certainly now has all four.”

Indeed, but let’s quickly recap:

Slow economic growth – YES: This existed pre-corona in the West’s “Great Recession”: a Lost Decade for the Eurozone, while US economic growth was only in the asset classes of the 1%. As a result of their hysterical overreaction to corona Western GDP growth is going to drop probably around 5%, which is a total catastrophe for a Western system that relies on constant growth and wage-earning instead of central planning and government intervention to prevent economic catastrophe for their lower classes.

We know there will be a corona-related demand shock: the expectation of continued economic chaos will increase the desire to save and not spend. There is also the demand shock caused by their generalised consumer terror – i.e., people who remain too scared of corona to even shop or travel, which will affect businesses from luxury goods to tourism to restaurants to the mall.

High unemployment – YES: This is just as obviously another catastrophic but entirely foreseeable consequence of the Great Lockdown. Estimates range from 25-42% of all lost jobs in the US are never, ever coming back. The Eurozone already had persistently high unemployment since 2008, whereas Germany and the US falsified/degraded their unemployment rate with part-time work/minijobs/gig economy jobs.

Price inflation: YES – Just talk to any small businessman: their first goal upon reopening will be to recoup months of zero revenue – they are desperate to do so because they still had to pay costs like rent, debt servicing, utilities, wages and more during the Great Lockdown. Thus, they will raise prices and cut costs (i.e. fire workers) to not be a part of the mass bankruptcies which will arrive once the West actually gets back to work and sees how bad things are now.

Consider the effects on prices of these new Great Lockdown-inspired obstacles for business such as social distancing: If restaurants, for example, are only allowed to run at half-capacity, they have to either sell twice as much food or raise prices. Talk of supply chains moving back to the US are far-fetched, given that US corporate law requires that stockholders not lose a penny just to aid the nation, but supply chain disruptions will raise prices.

How can the price of the few remaining Western government social services go down when government tax revenue has plummeted?

This is all why nobody is expecting prices to go down in 2020, but many are predicting crashes in asset classes like homes, stocks, bonds, luxury goods, etc.

Low wages: YES – This is never discussed in the West because the outlook is so perpetually depressing in a neoliberal-capitalist system which both refuses wage controls and guts stable civil service jobs in order to hand them to the unstable, profit-oriented private sector in the name of so-called “efficiency”: When the Great Lockdown ends there will be an enormous oversupply in the labor market, thus driving down wages – the Western MSM dares not discuss this inevitability. For those who kept their job: if you thought you didn’t ask for a raise from 2008-2020 because you were too shy, fear of joining the jobless ranks will keep you even quieter in 2020.

So we see that all the components are there – were already there – for Western stagflation.

A solution to stagflation would be either increased wages or increased “People’s QE”. Given that wages represent a long-term drain on the bosses’ profits, we should thus expect the Western 1% to prefer another round of direct, but one-time, government payments to individuals and households – but this would be only a temporary staving off of stagflation. However, the preference of this band-aid solution will be resolutely opposed by anti-socialist neoliberals who view government intervention as the work of Satan, as well as the existence of Austrian/Chicago/“immoral competition is normal”-capitalists who are licking their chops at the prospect of buying up the bankrupted at low prices.

From the outset I warned that the West was fooling themselves into thinking they had the same strengths and capabilities as socialist-inspired nations like China, Iran, Vietnam and others – they employed quarantining, control methods and collective-over-individualist concepts used by Asian nations, but without having similar cultures of government economic intervention nor widespread trust in their governments, and amid their economic Great Recession on top of it all.

But you hear that analysis about as often as you have heard about stagflation.

The West will continue to avoid stagflation discussions by continuing to distort the data

The West won’t discuss what it can’t explain or what threatens their cultural chauvinism, whether that is World War I, or stagflation, or how Trump doing the exact same thing Obama did is somehow only evil when Trump does it.

Slow economic growth – the excuse of Western liberal exceptionalism: “2021 economic growth rates can only go up from 2020, thus the definition of stagflation is not met.” This is a purely technical and pedantic reply – there will be both stagnation and inflation, but by taking as narrow and as uncritical a view as possible of what stagflation truly is, then Western journalists can say “claiming stagflation is wrong”. But this response can’t endlessly hold up any more than the “confidence fairy” justification for Eurozone austerity did.

High unemployment – the excuse of Western liberal exceptionalism: This will be the toughest to hide, so they will likely do something similar to what Emmanuel Macron did: stop reporting the embarrassing unemployment data every month and only give it quarterly. Perhaps they will do what the US and Germany do – pretend as if “underemployment” does not exist (even though it is the defining feature of their young adult class for over a decade) and act as if working one hour per week makes one “employed”.

Price inflation – the excuse of Western liberal exceptionalism: Their inflation gauges already exclude the biggest expenses for the average person: food & energy (too volatile to include, they say), housing, health care and education costs. Ask a German politician and they will tell you that they are watching inflation like a hawk and that it is certainly staying in their “acceptable 2% range”. But ask a normal worker – who keeps paying more for the metro, beef, fruit, housing and all those other crucial things which inflation gauges exclude – and you’ll understand why “decreased purchasing power” has been the number one French voter concern for the 11 years I’ve lived here.

Low wages – the excuse of Western liberal exceptionalism: History is clear: It took a pandemic for Americans to finally get a barely liveable wage of $15/hour… but only via government welfare and only until July 31. What many Republicans have already ruled out is extending these benefits – which are better than the low wages their lower classes get – because that would increase unemployment and thus only worsen stagflation. Permanently increasing wages should not be expected, as that would represent a sea-change in Western economics in favor of the bottom 90%, and that hasn’t been seen in 40 years.

Increased wages would, however, increase demand for goods and thus raise revenue and demand, and thus increase employment. It would also theoretically causes prices to rise, but the more worrying near-term reason for the price rises are the hysterical restrictions imposed by new social distancing rules and corona fears which have been overblown to bits across the West.

The West can write off 2020 as a recession or a depression, but stagflation will occur after that

Among the West’s Mainstream Media the general editorial line is denialism: “How can there ever be a catastrophe in the West when There Is No Alternative?” Among the West’s fringe/alternative websites the general editorial line is, “Armageddon/a Brave New World starts tomorrow due to the Mainstream Media’s cover-ups of catastrophe!”

However, the post-Great Lockdown truth is likely a very un-Confucian middle path: 1970s-style stagnation, which is Chinese water torture for the bottom 90%, certainly, but not revolution. They say that revolutions can never be predicted and certainly nothing at all can truly be predicted until their Great Lockdown ends – but if the West’s 1% and their toadies successfully resist the call for change from capitalism-imperialism, then stagflation is the West’s future.

The Western 1% profited from the stagflation era, of course: it proved to be a perfect antidote to their political involvement of the 1960s – creating mass precariousness is a very easy way to shut workers and citizens up. The 1970s were a “long national nightmare” for the US and their Western allies – how could their 1%-controlled Mainstream Media demand a Great Lockdown so very strenuously if they honestly warned that a return of that degraded era would be the result?

The causes of the West’s stagflation era (the “Nixon shock”, going off the gold standard, colluding with the House of Saud to create the Petrodollar system, the lack of imperialist war to keep factories from Detroit to Gary, Indiana, humming, the desire to break the record-level power of organised labor, the increased capitalist fanaticism resulting from the continued refusal of peaceful coexistence with socialist-inspired nations which oppose capitalism-imperialism) and its solutions (the breaking of the housing market in order to gut the primary asset of the bottom 90%, a vast anti-union campaign, purposeful governmental ineptitude in order to provoke the rabid anti-government component of neoliberalism, the hyper-financialisation of the economy, the demand for neoliberal “free markets” in order to send good manufacturing jobs out and weaken labor further, the promotion in the US of Reaganesque jingoism in order to give lower class Whites a feeling of pride to replace their socioeconomic degradation) will require much more analysis in the coming months and years because that lousy past is the capitalist-imperialist West’s post-corona future.

See why they don’t want to talk about stagflation?

**********************************

Corona contrarianism? How about some corona common sense? Here is my list of articles published regarding the corona crisis.

Capitalist-imperialist West stays home over corona – they grew a conscience? – March 22, 2020

Corona meds in every pot & a People’s QE: the Trumpian populism they hoped for? – March 23, 2020

A day’s diary from a US CEO during the Corona crisis (satire) March 23, 2020

MSNBC: Chicago price gouging up 9,000% & the sports-journalization of US media – March 25, 2020

Tough times need vanguard parties – are ‘social media users’ the West’s? – March 26, 2020

If Germany rejects Corona bonds they must quit the Eurozone – March 30, 2020

Landlord class: Waive or donate rent-profits now or fear the Cultural Revolution – March 31, 2020

Corona repeating 9/11 & Y2K hysterias? Both saw huge economic overreactions – April 1, 2020

(A Soviet?) Superman: Red Son – the new socialist film to watch on lockdown – April 2, 2020

Corona rewrites capitalist bust-chronology & proves: It’s the nation-state, stupid – April 3, 2020

Condensing the data leaves no doubt: Fear corona-economy more than the virus – April 5, 2020

‘We’re Going Wrong’: The West’s middling, middle-class corona response – April 10, 2020

Why does the UK have an ‘army’ of volunteers but the US has a shortage? – April 12, 2020

No buybacks allowed or dared? Then wave goodbye to Western stock market gains – April 13, 2020

Pity post-corona Millennials… if they don’t openly push socialism – April 14, 2020

No, the dollar will only strengthen post-corona, as usual: it’s a crisis, after all – April 16, 2020

Same 2008 QE playbook, but the Eurozone will kick off Western chaos not the US – April 18, 2020

We’re giving up our civil liberties. Fine, but to which type of state? – April 20, 2020

Coronavirus – Macron’s savior. A ‘united Europe’ – France’s murderer – April 22, 2020

Iran’s ‘resistance economy’: the post-corona wish of the West’s silent majority (1/2) – April 23, 2020

The same 12-year itch: Will banks loan down QE money this time? – April 26,

2020

The end of globalisation won’t be televised, despite the hopes of the Western 99% (2/2) – April 27, 2020

What would it take for proponents to say: ‘The Great Lockdown was wrong’? – April 28, 2020

ZeroHedge, a response to Mr. Littlejohn & the future of dollar dominance – April 30, 2020

Given Western history, is it the ‘Great Segregation’ and not the ‘Great Lockdown’? – May 2, 2020

The Western 1% colluded to start WWI – is the Great Lockdown also a conspiracy? – May 4, 2020

May 17: The date the Great Lockdown must end or Everything Bubble 2 pops – May 6, 2020

Reading Piketty: Does corona delay the Greens’ fake-leftist, sure-to-fail victory? – May 8, 2020

Picturing the media campaign needed to get the US back to work – May 11, 2020

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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.

It’s No Accident Britain And America Are the World’s Biggest Coronavirus Losers

By Nesrine Malik – The Guardian

There’s something profound about the irony. The world’s highest coronavirus death tolls belong to two countries whose leaders came to power promising the restoration of greatness and control – the United States and Great Britain. Neither can claim to have been caught by surprise: both nations had the benefit of time, ample scientific warnings, and the cautionary examples of China and Italy.

The similarities are striking, the conclusions unavoidable. Here in the UK, we comforted ourselves with the belief that while our own buffoonish rightwing leader had his faults, at least he was no Donald Trump. But in the end, Boris Johnson has managed to stumble over even this lowest of hurdles. The UK government’s response to the crisis has turned out to be nearly as flippant and ill-prepared as the US’s.

Two nations that prided themselves on their extraordinary economic, historical and political status have been brought to their knees. Their fall from grace is the outcome of a damaged political culture and distinct form of Anglo-American capitalism.

Over the past four years, reckless political decisions were justified by subordinating reality to rhetoric. The cost of leaving the EU would be “virtually nil”, with a free trade agreement that would be one of the “easiest in human history”. Imaginary enemies were erected and fake fights confected as both countries pugnaciously went about severing their ties with other nations and international institutions.

Political discourse focused on grand abstract notions of rebirth and restoration, in a way that required few concrete deliverables. All the Tory government needed to do was Get Brexit Done, no matter how slapdash the job. In the US, all Trump needed to do to maintain his supporters’ loyalty was bark about a wall with Mexico every now and then, pass a racist travel ban, and savage various public figures for sport.

This is corrosive stuff – not only to the quality of public debate, but to the caliber of politicians. When the business of government becomes limited to populist set pieces, its ranks are purged of doers and populated instead with cheerleaders. This is how we ended up with the current cast of dazed-in-headlights Tory cabinet members. In the US, the very notion of an “administration” has been worn away. As the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it, “There is no White House. Not in the sense that journalists have always used that term. It’s just Trump – and people who work in the building.”

By the time Covid-19 hit their shores, the UK and US were lacking not just the politicians but the bureaucracies required to respond effectively. Prior to the crisis, Trump repeatedly attempted to defund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC]. In the UK, the pandemic inconvenienced a Tory cabinet embroiled in a feud with its own civil service. The intellectual and practical infrastructure to deal with facts had been vandalized.

But there is a longer, non-partisan history that rendered both nations incapable of an adequate response to the pandemic. The special relationship is not just one of linguistic and cultural proximity, but an ideological partnership forged in the post-second world war era. Anglo-American capitalism, pursued by both right and center-left parties, rooted in small government and powered by exceptionalism, had dismantled the state. No notice or warning could have refashioned the machinery of government quickly enough to save lives. An economic and political model that hinges on privatization, liberalization and the withdrawal of labor rights created a system prone to regular crises, despite such shocks being framed as one-offs.

The economic and regulatory kinship was strengthened by the transformation of Britain’s quaint and mercantile financial sector into a replica of the US’s aggressive markets. The City caught up with Wall Street.

An interventionist foreign policy – publicly moralistic but privately cynical – gave the model an expansionist edge, which helped both nations project power abroad and defend their own financial and political interests. But the wars led to quagmires, and the rapidly expanding financial sectors to economic near-death experiences. Neither triggered significant rethinking or reflection. After the 2008 financial crisis, when this system came within “48 hours” of the “apocalypse”, two center-left leaders, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, chose to shore up the infrastructure that had brought their economies to the brink, recapitalizing the banks and revitalizing the markets, opting for more regulation rather than fundamental reform.

Just as the financial crash was treated as the malfunctioning of a particular unsupervised bug in the system rather than as a feature of it, so is the failure to grapple with the pandemic being cast as an unforeseen, exogenous event, rather than a result of an ideology that enables the state to scramble unprecedented resources to save banks but not lives. A nurse will wear a bin liner as PPE in the US for longer than a failing bank can go unfinanced.

Hollow triumphalism about making America great again and Britain taking back control becomes more and more likely in such a system. Trump and the Tories alighted on this formula not entirely out of mendacity or ideology. Without radically challenging Anglo-American capitalism, they have nothing else to offer their voters. And so they must separate economic suffering from politics, and attempt to blame it on immigrants and outsiders. They must blame other countries and international institutions – the EU, WHO, NATO – for the feelings of helplessness experienced by their own citizens. The swagger is a facade. Behind it hides a rotting national landscape.

As the bodies pile up, the failure of the US and the UK will be somehow spun into victory. The triumphalism will intensify; that is certain. The only question now is how many will continue to believe it.

• Imam Khamenei Highlights West’s Failure amid COVID-19 Battle

The deeper roots of Chinese demonization

May 03, 2020

By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission

Hegel saw history moving east to west – ‘Europe thus absolutely being the end of history, Asia the beginning’

Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the tipping point when the Asian – actually Eurasian – century truly began.

Immanuel Kant was the first thinker to actually
come up with a theory of the yellow race. Photo: Google Images

The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with the National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top “threats” of China, Russia and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a “community of shared destiny” for mankind, mostly addressing the Global South.

The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now set in stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab. China is responsible. China lied. And China has to pay.

The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not only by crude functionaries of the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex. We need to dig much deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded in Western thinking – and later migrated to the “end of history” United States. (Here are sections of an excellent study, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia , by Jurgen Osterhammel).Only Whites civilized

Way beyond the Renaissance, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, whenever Europe referred to Asia it was essentially about religion conditioning trade. Christianity reigned supreme, so it was impossible to think by excluding God.

At the same time the doctors of the Church were deeply disturbed that in the Sinified world a very well organized society could function in the absence of a transcendent religion. That bothered them even more than those “savages” discovered in the Americas.

As it started to explore what was regarded as the “Far East,” Europe was mired in religious wars. But at the same time it was forced to confront another explanation of the world, and that fed some subversive anti-religious tendencies across the Enlightenment sphere.

It was at this stage that learned Europeans started questioning Chinese philosophy, which inevitably they had to degrade to the status of a mere worldly “wisdom” because it escaped the canons of Greek and Augustinian thought. This attitude, by the way, still reigns today.

So we had what in France was described as chinoiseries — a sort of ambiguous admiration, in which China was regarded as the supreme example of a pagan society.

But then the Church started to lose patience with the Jesuits’ fascination with China. The Sorbonne was punished. A papal bull, in 1725, outlawed Christians who were practicing Chinese rites. It’s quite interesting to note that Sinophile philosophers and Jesuits condemned by the Pope insisted that the “real faith” (Christianity) was “prefigured” in ancient Chinese, specifically Confucianist, texts.

The European vision of Asia and the “Far East” was mostly conceptualized by a mighty German triad: Kant, Herder and Schlegel. Kant, incidentally, was also a geographer, and Herder a historian and geographer. We can say that the triad was the precursor of modern Western Orientalism. It’s easy to imagine a Borges short story featuring these three.

As much as they may have been aware of China, India and Japan, for Kant and Herder God was above all. He had planned the development of the world in all its details. And that brings us to the tricky issue of race.

Breaking away from the monopoly of religion, references to race represented a real epistemological turnaround in relation to previous thinkers. Leibniz and Voltaire, for instance, were Sinophiles. Montesquieu and Diderot were Sinophobes. None explained cultural differences by race. Montesquieu developed a theory based on climate. But that did not have a racial connotation – it was more like an ethnic approach.

The big break came via French philosopher and traveler Francois Bernier (1620-1688), who spent 13 years traveling in Asia and in 1671 published a book called La Description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l”Indoustan, du Royaume de Cachemire, etc. Voltaire, hilariously, called him Bernier-Mogol — as he became a star telling his tales to the royal court. In a subsequent book, Nouvelle Division de la Terre par les Differentes Especes ou Races d’Homme qui l’Habitent, published in 1684, the “Mogol” distinguished up to five human races.

This was all based on the color of the skin, not on families or the climate. The Europeans were mechanically placed on top, while other races were considered “ugly.” Afterward, the division of humanity in up to five races was picked up by David Hume — always based on the color of the skin. Hume proclaimed to the Anglo-Saxon world that only whites were civilized; others were inferiors. This attitude is still pervasive. See, for instance, this pathetic diatribe recently published in Britain.

Two Asias

The first thinker to actually come up with a theory of the yellow race was Kant, in his writings between 1775 and 1785, David Mungello argues in The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800.

Kant rates the “white race” as “superior,” the “black race” as “inferior” (by the way, Kant did not condemn slavery), the “copper race” as “feeble” and the “yellow race” as intermediary. The differences between them are due to a historical process that started with the “white race,” considered the most pure and original, the others being nothing but bastards.

Kant subdivided Asia by countries. For him, East Asia meant Tibet, China and Japan. He considered China in relatively positive terms, as a mix of white and yellow races.

Herder was definitely mellower. For him, Mesopotamia was the cradle of Western civilization, and the Garden of Eden was in Kashmir, “the world’s paradise.” His theory of historical evolution became a smash hit in the West: the East was a baby, Egypt was an infant, Greece was youth. Herder’s East Asia consisted of Tibet, China, Cochinchina, Tonkin, Laos, Korea, Eastern Tartary and Japan — countries and regions touched by Chinese civilization.

Schlegel was like the precursor of a Californian 60s hippie. He was a Sanskrit enthusiast and a serious student of Eastern cultures. He said that “in the East we should seek the most elevated romanticism.” India was the source of everything, “the whole history of the human spirit.” No wonder this insight became the mantra for a whole generation of Orientalists. That was also the start of a dualist vision of Asia across the West that’s still predominant today.

So by the 18^th century we had fully established a vision of Asia as a land of servitude and cradle of despotism and paternalism in sharp contrast with a vision of Asia as a cradle of civilizations. Ambiguity became the new normal. Asia was respected as mother of civilizations — value systems included — and even mother of the West. In parallel, Asia was demeaned, despised or ignored because it had never reached the high level of the West, despite its head start.

Those Oriental despots

And that brings us to The Big Guy: Hegel. Hyper well informed – he read reports by ex-Jesuits sent from Beijing — Hegel does not write about the “Far East” but only the East, which includes East Asia, essentially the Chinese world. Hegel does not care much about religion as his predecessors did. He talks about the East from the point of view of the state and politics. In contrast to the myth-friendly Schlegel, Hegel sees the East as a state of nature in the process of reaching toward a beginning of history – unlike black Africa, which he saw wallowing in the mire of a bestial state.

To explain the historical bifurcation between a stagnant world and another one in motion, leading to the Western ideal, Hegel divided Asia in two.

One part was composed by China and Mongolia: a puerile world of patriarchal innocence, where contradictions do not develop, where the survival of great empires attests to that world’s “insubstantial,” immobile and ahistorical character.

The other part was Vorderasien (“Anterior Asia”), uniting the current Middle East and Central Asia, from Egypt to Persia. This is an already historical world.

These two huge regions are also subdivided. So in the end Hegel’s Asiatische Welt (Asian world) is divided into four: first, the plains of the Yellow and Blue rivers, the high plateaus, China and Mongolia; second, the valleys of the Ganges and the Indus; third, the plains of the Oxus (today the Amur-Darya) and the Jaxartes (today the Syr-Darya), the plateaus of Persia, the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; and fourth, the Nile valley.

It’s fascinating to see how in the Philosophy of History (1822-1830) Hegel ends up separating India as a sort of intermediary in historical evolution. So we have in the end, as Jean-Marc Moura showed in L’Extreme Orient selon G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie de l’Histoire et Imaginaire Exotique, a “fragmented East, of which India is the example, and an immobile East, blocked in chimera, of which the Far East is the illustration.”

To describe the relation between East and West, Hegel uses a couple of metaphors. One of them, quite famous, features the sun: “The history of the world voyages from east to west, Europe thus absolutely being the end of history, and Asia the beginning.” We all know where tawdry “end of history” spin-offs led us.

The other metaphor is Herder’s: the East is “history’s youth” — but with China taking a special place because of the importance of Confucianist principles systematically privileging the role of the family.

Nothing outlined above is of course neutral in terms of understanding Asia. The double metaphor — using the sun and maturity — could not but comfort the West in its narcissism, later inherited from Europe by the “exceptional” US. Implied in this vision is the inevitable superiority complex, in the case of the US even more acute because legitimized by the course of history.

Hegel thought that history must be evaluated under the framework of the development of freedom. Well, China and India being ahistorical, freedom does not exist, unless brought by an initiative coming from outside.

And that’s how the famous “Oriental despotism” evoked by Montesquieu and the possible, sometimes inevitable, and always valuable Western intervention are, in tandem, totally legitimized. We should not expect this Western frame of mind to change anytime soon, if ever. Especially as China is about to be back as Number One.

‘This Yellow Vest carnage’ more ‘French exceptionalism’

 

July 23, 2019

by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog (cross-posted with PressTV by permission)

(Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea, and elsewhere. He is the author of “I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China.”)

At a recent demonstration against the recently fired, third-ranking French civil servant (the president of parliament), who had been caught enjoying jumbo lobster and 1,000-euro bottles of wine with his friends on the taxpayer’s centime, I chatted with a former political prisoner.

It may surprise some that he was a Westerner. The West is, of course, exceptional: everyone else has political prisoners, but there isn’t a single one in the free, free West.

He had just spent four months in prison for protesting with the Yellow Vests. In a story which appears trite but which I believed – given the fact that testimony by police cannot be questioned in France’s judicial system – he said that it was the protester next to him who had thrown something at the cops and not him. There was no falsehood in the intense bitterness with which he said, “Four months in prison – I wish that I actually had thrown it!”

He showed me the many scars and permanent knots on his wrists and forearms – defensive wounds caused by protecting himself from fiercely-armed, well-protected and ruthless riot police. I praised his sacrifice for the common good, but I did not tell him that this was exceptional: in the past eight months I had heard many similar stories. Just last weekend I saw children getting tear gassed, and yet another woman shot in the eye with a rubber bullet.

This is carnage, pure and simple, and it happens all around France every Saturday starting around 11 am.

The biggest complaint of the Yellow Vests these days may not be against the French model of government, but towards a Western Mainstream Media which acts as if such carnage doesn’t exist.

If the world believed that the French system of governance was exceptional, then the repression of the Yellow Vest movement should forever silence that false claim. It has been eight months: their media system obviously cannot report on domestic political repression, and their political system can obviously perpetuate domestic repression with an impunity unparalleled in the world. In no other country has such regular, political repression occurred this century.

This ability to inflict such record-breaking repression while talking passionately about liberté – and being believed at home and abroad! – is the true “French exceptionalism”, and it is nothing to boast about or emulate.

Western propaganda has shut down all criticism of French repression in favor of hysterical and one-sided coverage of the protests in Hong Kong. Another widespread belief among Westerners is that they are exceptional in that their systems don’t permit the creation of “propaganda”, whereas that is the only thing the journalists of most other nations can do, especially nations like Russia, Iran, Syria, etc.

One thing about exceptionalists is their certainty of its permanence: it seems that once one is exceptional, one can never stop being exceptional, no matter how immorally one acts. Exceptionalism, once bestowed by God, can never be subject to a Day of Judgment, apparently. It’s a, uh, “unique” view….

Undoubtedly, the necessarily corollary to exceptionalism’s assertion that “We are different” is rarely stated but extremely important in order to understand the exceptionalist’s mindset, and it is: “while all the rest of you idiots are all the same”.

Those in the developing world are told that there is an enormous difference between Belgians and the English, for example. Even though the former is merely a peninsula of the latter, what a mighty chasm separates the Danes and the Germans! Yet in France all Blacks are just that – Blacks – even though they hail from parts as varied as West Africa, Madagascar and the Caribbean. In the US all Latinos – whether from the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego or Boston – are painted with the same brush. Of course, in both countries Muslims are certainly all “Arabs”. This total nonsense illustrates an obsessive self-esteem which necessarily strains cooperation, diplomacy and true tolerance.

A difference between US and French claims for their own exceptionalism is that the US believes it is exceptional lock, stock and barrel, yet the French are more likely to claim their “cultural exceptionalism”.

It takes a bit of experience here to figure that out, but what they mean is that “White French culture” is exceptional: any influences from the nearby Muslim world, or anything their neo-imperial subjects might bring, or even the neighbouring Anglo-Saxon world – all are second-rate and somehow corruptive of an exceptionally wonderful culture which must never change.

What especially galls nations like Iran and many, many others regarding French exceptionalism are two things:

France claims to especially honor human rights… and yet how do we explain the the Yellow Vest repression? This was after we were told to believe that their bombs in Libya, their guns in the short-lived Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and their rapes in the Central African Republic are “humanitarian interventions”. We also were disgusted by the deification of the dangerous magazine Charlie Hebdo, which made millions by publishing Islamophobic pictures but never publish an anti-Jewish one.

It boggles to mind to think of the weight of the cognitive dissonance which France’s political and cultural elite must bear in their minds: they regularly imprison hundreds of protesters in the morning, and then in the afternoon talk about France being a beacon, champion and even the inventor of human rights.

It is simply intolerable to get lessons on human rights from a nation which so clearly violates them; it is intolerable because all nations must converse diplomatically, and yet France believes they can continually disrespects everyone else’s intelligence and get away with it.

Secondly, Iran is a nation which has been under hot and cold war for 40 years, therefore they have been truly living in wartime conditions, forced to have a true state of emergency in the past, and endure vast suffering caused by an illegal, homicidal blockade which aims to provoke either civil war or all-out war. France, however, suffers none of these hardships, and yet are more homicidal by multiple orders of magnitude.

How can Iran have such a very poor image and France such a positive image, given the former’s unjust handicaps and the latter’s lack of restraint, common decency and refusal to cooperate? Part of it is Iranophobic propaganda, and the other part is propaganda which champions the alleged legitimacy of “French exceptionalism”.

However, current anthropological scholarship is finally shedding their West-centric blinders to realise that France is not at all the “birthplace of human rights”: the conception of individual rights in today’s West was yet another resource stolen from the American Indians, namely the Iroquois Confederacy in the northeastern US. This fascinating subject, which academics simply must study,certainly seems logical – where was the conception of individual freedom in France’s long history of an absolute monarchy which was as absolute as anywhere in Europe? They obviously learned it from someone else, namely the Indians they came into contact with. To me, the Iroquois seemed to be about as freedom-loving as your average, ever-roaming Iranian nomad, but the point here is not to make exceptional claims about who invented human rights – the point is: the French did not invent them, as they claim.

It is inherent in countries which assert their exceptionalism – and perhaps in all Western Liberal Democracies – to deny shared authorship of the world’s many fine ideas and concepts, as they endlessly promote individualism and do not prize the communal, collective spirit.

I can report that those incredibly brave Yellow Vests who are still protesting – in the face of all the guaranteed state violence – repeatedly tell me what respect they have for Iran and its modern governmental system. They routinely tell me what shame they have in their own government. Indeed, the Yellow Vests are the new, courageous political vanguard of France. Unlike the French 1%’s support of aristocratic Western Liberal Democracy, Yellow Vests display French values which are in common with those around the world: solidarity, bravery, faith and self-sacrifice.

If the Yellow Vests could ever win political or cultural power they would certainly end the hypocrisy of “French exceptionalism”, which they correctly see as an unwanted yoke which only perpetuates France’s ongoing domestic repression.

The French have a fine saying: “One time does not make a custom.”

However, eight months does. The Yellow Vests obviously cannot be distracted with the false pride of “French exceptionalism” – they are busy defending themselves from the carnage such arrogance inevitably provokes.