By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | February 14, 2023
Clean product tanker rates soared last week after the European Union and G-7 nations targeted Russia’s petroleum sales. Restrictions on Russian crude exports began in early December. The sanctions have been a ploy by Western countries to limit Russian crude and crude product exports, though it’s definitely not working.
Sanctions have redirected Russian energy flows from Europe to Asia. The rejiggering of supply chains means Russia has to rely more on tankers. According to Bloomberg, this has led to a 400% surge in the daily rates for clean product tankers.
The latest data from the Baltic Exchange in London shows clean product tankers rates have reached $55,857 per day, surging 58% just last Thursday.
According to trading giant Trafigura, Russia relies on a “shadow fleet” of tankers to move crude and crude products. The trading firm said the fleet is about 600 ships.
Bloomberg said the surge in tanker rates has been “spurred in part by a bifurcation of the fleet with some tankers serving Moscow’s interests and others the international market. It highlights a possible flipside of aggressive measures aimed at limiting Russia’s petroleum revenues.”
“Russian volumes continue to flow at more or less the same rate and that takes up a lot of ships.”
“Ultimately, the spike shows demand is pretty good, and the fundamentals are strong,” Lars Bastian Ostereng, an analyst at Arctic Securities.
About 400 tankers, or 20% of the global fleet, recently “switched” from hauling fuels for traditional countries to carrying Russian petroleum products, Trafigura’s co-head of oil trading Ben Luckock said in a recent Bloomberg interview. That has reduced the number of tankers for traditional routes and is leading to the skyrocketing cost of freight.
Bloomberg pointed out that surging rates aren’t entirely because of the tanker “switch.” It’s also due to more crude flowing by water following Western sanctions on Russia. Much of those energy exports are now being sent to Asia.
“We see no indication that Russia will have to cut back its exports of crude or refined products,” said David Wech, chief economist of Vortexa, during a presentation late last week.
Furthermore, crude prices have edged over $86 a barrel following last Friday’s announcement that Russia will reduce crude oil production by 500,000 barrels per day. This is in response to Western price caps on purchasing Russian fuel.
By Wyatt Reed – Sputnik – 14.02.2023
In his first interview since publishing his bombshell story on the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh fleshed out the details of his explosive report exposing the role of the US Navy in blowing up critical German-Russian energy infrastructure.
American journalist Seymour Hersh is “taking heat” over his recent explosive report documenting how the US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, the legendary reporter revealed in a new interview.
In a wide-ranging discussion on the War Nerd podcast, Hersh called on US President Joe Biden to come clean to the American people about the Biden administration’s role in the attack. The journalist underscored that the US public is being misinformed about the proxy war in Ukraine en masse.
Last week, Hersh published a dizzying report detailing how US Navy divers planted C-4 charges on the Nord Stream pipelines during a NATO training exercise and then remotely detonated them with a Norwegian reconnaissance plan.
The veteran war journalist suggests media outlets are refusing to cover his new revelations because “they think that the story I wrote supports Russia” – which “it does,” he concedes.
But Hersh said that despite being “colossally bad” for the European economy and “inexcusable,” the American government’s intentional attack on the critical energy infrastructure of a US ally is not technically illegal under international law.
“The law on the sea is very interesting. There are treaties that go back to 1884, when we began to lay telegraph lines across the ocean, and if you inadvertently or deliberately ran across the line that was a real bad deal.”
But “there were mostly economic consequences” for those infractions, Hersh pointed out, noting there’s actually “no law on the books that says deliberately blowing up a pipeline is a crime.”
Such a crime “has never been considered,” Hersh said, but there are “certainly a lot of law about damages, if you damage a pipeline. And this is a pipeline that’s probably going to cost… — there’s a Swiss company that did an estimate — 1.5 billion to fix the pipelines.”
Asked if he’s ever covered anything like a government “blowing up your ally’s critical infrastructure,” Hersh replied that the Biden administration “didn’t see it that way.” Instead, Biden “saw that gas as a weapon, Hersh claimed, “because as long as Russia was selling that much gas they thought Russia would weaponize if… there was a war.”
In reality, Hersh said “the fear was: Biden wants this war.”
“Don’t ask me why presidents want war. I think it’s good for their ratings. I just don’t know.”
“But Biden was very big on showing the Russians that in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian bodies, soldiers, we’ll show ‘em – we can stand up to Russia,” the journalist explains.
Anti-Russian posturing is “good politically in America too,” Hersh added, noting that in the US, “we all, you know, we wake up everyday kicking Russia and Putin, our…”
“Our nemesis,” the host chimed in.
In the comprehensive interview, Hersh took aim at outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, who he said are only interested in burning his source for the Nord Stream story. According to his recent report, that anonymous figure had “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the pipeline attack.
“I think what the newspapers… think I should do” is “use his name and get him put in jail” – something which would end my career,” Hersh added, stating that under no circumstances would he ever give up a source. “Inside the community, I protect people.”
“I’m taking heat, I have a source, I’m taking heat – but that’s okay, that’s my job, right? But it’s their job to understand the business a little better.” And in terms of the conflict in Ukraine, mainstream Western outlets “don’t seem to have anybody inside,” Hersh said.
“The coverage of the Ukrainian war is, compared to what I’m hearing from my friends who have access to the information… it’s – the thinking is so dumb.”
“The war I know about isn’t the war you’re reading about,” Hersh said cryptically, pointing out that military operations against Russia were by no means going well. “No, of course not. Are you kidding?”
While he admitted Russian forces “made great misjudgments,” he acknowledged “they have a 350,000 man regular army that hasn’t gone in yet.”
One of the likely causes for those waves of misinformation may be what the host refers to as the “Bellingcats and the OSINT [open source intelligence] bros.”
Responding to their mention, Hersh doesn’t mince words: “No one cares about those people.”
The storied journalist seemingly suggested instead that Bellingcat, the self-professed ‘independent’ outlet upheld by much of the mainstream media, is actually a British intelligence operation:
“I mean, why don’t you think about their nexus to certain intelligence agencies in a certain country,” Hersh asked rhetorically. “You know, you get to know who’s who.”
“But there are legitimate people complaining” about his reporting as well, he added.
“It’s amazing to me how they fall in line, my colleagues,” the reporter expressed. “When I was at the New York Times, they didn’t do that.”
“I’m not sure they underestimate the American people,” Hersh said. “We’re ready to accept the fact that an American president did this.”
And “it’s not only accepting it,” the journalist added. “You have to hold the president to account.”
Of the mainstream Western outlets that covered the story, Hersh faced fierce pushback from most of them, which tended to emphasize White House and CIA denials of the Nord Stream allegations.
Reuters called his jaw-dropping exposé a “blog post,” and one headline from Insider described the report as a “claim by a discredited journalist” which the authors insist “is proving a gift to Putin.”
Hersh faced major attacks on his reputation in the wake of stories debunking now–discredited claims from Western governments about Syrian forces using sarin gas, and for his writings dismantling the official story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. As for the criticism, he says he’s “used to it.”
But this time, it “sort of stunned me because this was such an obvious story,” he said.
As Hersh noted in his story, top US officials – including Biden – repeatedly threatened to sabotage the pipeline in the event that Russian troops engaged Ukrainian forces.
Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland warned in January: “if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
“So what does that mean?” Hersh asked. “I don’t know what anybody’s thinking but I’Il tell you what that means: that’s called a threat.”
“A friend of mine put it this way: what you’ve done, [Seymour]… you’re an expert at deconstructing the obvious. What else was it? What else was it?”
“The Russians didn’t do it, [and] if the Russians didn’t do it, which country in NATO [did]?” he questioned.
“It’s just not even a hard story to understand – the president of the United States and the undersecretary of state both said they were going to do it and then they did it,” Hersh stated, adding: “they waited a long time but they cut off oil.”
“Literally within a month of the actual event,” Hersh noted, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “gave a speech in which he talked about stopping Russia from weaponizing oil and gas – ‘now is the time we can do it,’ he said.”
Meanwhile, the effect on the European economy is “devastating.”
As Hersh pointed out, Germany’s BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, shut down nearly 100 plants and “has actually been talking to China about moving some facilities there.”
In terms of “the economic stuff, which hasn’t been reported nearly enough in the Western press here,” Hersh said, “this is called, I guess you could [say], shooting off your left foot.”
“For no reason whatsoever, yes, we shot ourselves in the foot. Yes, it’s stupid beyond belief. Yes.”
“I would think that it’s certainly, unquestionably, a wonderful degree of stupidity at the White House and on [the] part of the president. It’s just stupid – it’s just damn stupid.”
The journalist said it’s unlikely Biden will face scrutiny for his actions in many mainstream media outlets anytime soon, because “this White House,” Hersh said, has “the New York Times and the Washington Post and MSN and CNN fronting for them.”
And “the enemy is Fox News.”
But “the only reporter that has called me from any TV station – outside of somebody that’s running out of the kitchen of their mother’s house” was Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Hersh declined the request, but said Carlson has been “dead right” about the Nord Stream attack. “And I’ll tell you something else – Tucker’s been right about is the war in Ukraine.”
The reporter repeatedly emphasized his unwillingness to discuss his sourcing, explaining “the one thing government’s good at is tracking down people who talk.” But ultimately, he suggested the information could be coming from someone inside the US oil and gas industry, telling his interviewer: “there’s something called a pipeline industry.”
“There’s an industry [with] American companies involved. They build pipelines around the world. Are you listening to me? They know what happened,” Hersh said. “The last thing they want to do is end up in a goddamn newspaper story, but they know who did what.”
“Of course they know – they built the goddamn things!”
“I’m not talking necessarily about Nord Stream 1 or 2, but they build pipelines and they talk to divers, and they know what’s happening, they know who has the capability, and they know what they hear inside,” Hersh concluded.
RT | February 14, 2023
The media frenzy over “spy balloons” and unidentified flying objects over North America is sadly not about first contact with extraterrestrials, but an engineered panic for political misdirection, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Monday.
“It’s not aliens. I wish it were aliens. But it’s not aliens. It’s just the ol’ engineered panic, an attractive nuisance ensuring [national security] reporters get assigned to investigate balloon bulls**t rather than budgets or bombings” such as the Nord Stream, Snowden tweeted.
Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story last week describing how the US and Norway blew up the pipelines transporting Russian natural gas to Germany last September. The US government denounced it as false.
Over the next several days, the US military began shooting down “objects” in the sky over North America. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that the US government still doesn’t know who owns the three objects brought down over the weekend. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said there was “no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity,” however.
Kirby had announced the downing of a “high-altitude object” off the coast of Alaska on Friday. US fighter jets brought down an “unidentified, unmanned object” over the Yukon in northwest Canada on Saturday. The third object was shot down on Sunday afternoon over Lake Huron as it approached Michigan.
“While authorities don’t yet know what the objects are, they are not a threat,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Monday. “They do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground. They do however present a risk to civil aviation and potentially an intelligence collection threat. And we’ll get to the bottom of it,” he added.
Austin also said the three objects were different from the Chinese ‘spy balloon’ the US shot down over South Carolina last week. The aerostat, which Beijing described as a weather balloon blown off-course by the winds, had passed over most of the continental US before it was destroyed by a F-22 fighter jet.
The Pentagon’s reluctance to describe the ‘objects’ or show any debris that may have been recovered has fueled speculation about their potential extraterrestrial origin. Space magnate Elon Musk joked about “friends of mine” stopping by. Meanwhile, opposition lawmakers have expressed frustration at the lack of official explanations by the White House.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, demanded the Pentagon and the president “tell us what they know – and what they don’t – immediately.”
“What in the world is going on?” wondered fellow Kentuckian and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor. “The administration has still not been able to divulge any meaningful information about what was shot down,” he said, asking if the radar sensitivity may have been turned up after the Chinese balloon incident.
BY LARRY ROMANOFF • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 12, 2023
This essay is the Introductory Chapter to a new series of E-books which will very soon be published on bluemoonofshanghai.com.
When I began doing my historical research in earnest perhaps 20 years ago in Shanghai, my interest was driven by primarily two things: one was the incessant American propaganda flooding the world, and particularly China, with an entirely unjustified air of moral superiority that masked all of the American crimes and atrocities committed over centuries. The second was the irritating flood of negative propaganda about China, filling the print and airwaves about China’s mostly imaginary inferiority to the exceptional Americans. From this, I intended to write a series of articles, and perhaps a book or two, that illuminated the opposite side of these two pictures. This is an oversimplification, but my research and writing interests were limited to an attempt to rectify the standard narrative of “China bad; US good”.
But near the beginning of this enterprise, I encountered a statement that said, “The history of the world is the history of the Jews.” That remark registered on me and remained in my memory because it startled me and because it made no sense to me at the time. However, as I progressed with my research into things Chinese and American, I would occasionally encounter references to Jews but, at the time, I had absolutely no interest whatever in the Jews, and I initially would delete those references. In my mind, I had a clean story line which I was pursuing and those increasingly occasional references to the Jews were contaminating my story line and confusing my approach. But eventually I had to realise that the references to the Jews were not contamination but were in fact the real story line.
As one example, I was researching the opium travesty inflicted upon China by – as we were all taught – “the English”. But as I delved deeper into the historical record, I was surprised to discover that “the English” had nothing to do with the opium (except as military enforcer) and that the entire opium landscape was 100% Jewish, primarily Rothschild and Sassoon, with Kadoorie and a few other families. Those families may have held British passports, but they were all Jews and not “Englishmen“. This is also true of the HSBC bank which was created solely to launder the Jews’ drug money – a talent in which it still specialises today. The same pattern appeared to evolve in almost any historical topic I chose to investigate. I was, as we all were, taught, indoctrinated, propagandised and browbeaten to believe that the Russian Revolution was really Russian, and I was very surprised to learn that it was 99.9% Jewish, and that “Russians” had nothing to do with it except as victims. Similarly, I was taught the two World Wars were caused by Germany and that gallant little England prevailed over an evil enemy, but was again surprised to learn that it was the European Jews who contrived mightily to bring about both World Wars, that in fact Germany resisted war until the very end, and was the victim of a massive hate campaign by the Jews who wanted it destroyed.
In an earlier essay, I ended with these words:
The Boer Wars were a British story, but the manuscript was written entirely in Jewish handwriting. In like fashion, the two World Wars, the British East India Company, the unconscionable looting, famines, and slaughters of India, and China’s opium century with its vast atrocities of slaughter, misery, and slave-trafficking, were “British stories”, but the manuscripts for these were also written entirely in Jewish handwriting. Similarly, the stories of Yugoslavia, Greece, Iraq, Libya, and Syria today are “American stories”, but these also were written entirely in Jewish handwriting.
This is where we are today. These several volumes were originally to be titled, “America’s Dirtiest Secrets”, but that title no longer strictly applies because there is no sensible way to separate the actions of the Americans from their Jewish masters who gave the orders. For example, we know the media stories of the US hijacking of Iraq and believed this was done to remove a dictator. But our perception is severely altered when we learn the invasion was done entirely on Jewish orders, that the so-called “Provisional President” of Iraq – Paul Bremer – was a Jew and was taking all his orders from the Jews in the City of London, and that further those Jewish bankers have confiscated all of Iraq’s assets and are taking – free – more than 2/3 of Iraq’s oil. Likewise, we were taught it was the British military (with a bit of French help) that looted the 10 million priceless artifacts from China’s Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan) and then utterly destroyed it. But again, our perception changes when we learn the British did so under the orders of the Jews Rothschild and Sassoon, and that a great many of those priceless artifacts ended up in Jewish hands and remain there to this day.
In similar fashion, we were all taught about the famous British aviator “Bomber Harris” who won eternal fame for the incendiary carpet-bombing of countless dozens of German cities like Dresden, creating firestorms that incinerated millions of German civilians in one of the world’s greatest wartime atrocities. But again, our perception is severely altered when we learn that it was a Jew named Frederick Lindemann, sent by the Rothschilds as an “advisor” to Churchill, who brought with him the notion of carpet-bombing civilians with incendiary bombs, and that Churchill simply obeyed his Jewish masters in executing this program to help effect “the total destruction of Germany” that the Jews wanted. In like fashion, we were taught that the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of the war and “to save lives”. But again, our conceptions are thrown in disarray when we learn that it was a Jew, Bernard Baruch, ostensibly “the most powerful man in America” at the time, who not only chose Japan as the target for these bombs, but also personally selected the cities to be incinerated. Our conceptions are even more challenged when we learn that Baruch’s motivation may well have been retaliation to both Japan and Nagasaki for their expulsion of all the Jews prior to the war. (See End Notes)
And with both Europe and especially with Vietnam, in the application of napalm for incinerating civilians, it was indeed the Americans who extensively applied napalm during World War II, in “vast but historically-deleted genocidal incendiary attacks both in Europe and on Japanese cities, as well as during the wars in Korea and Vietnam”. But it was a Jewish chemist named Louis Fieser who developed napalm in a secret laboratory at Harvard University in 1942, and America’s Jewish masters who engineered its use on civilians. Even worse, in Vietnam, the locals discovered they could evade incineration by diving into any body or container of water to extinguish the flames. But it was another Jew, again at Harvard, who engineered the infusion of napalm with white phosphorus, which cannot be extinguished once lit, and will burn a man right through to the bones even under water. In all cases, the Americans did the dirty deeds, but they were “just following orders” from their Jewish overlords.
And we realise, as with all such events in the past, that the American military is, just as the British military was doing in the past, functioning as “The Bankers Private Army”. And thus, in real terms, there is no sensible way to separate the actions – the “Dirtiest Secrets” of the Americans – from the “Dirtiest Secrets” of the Jews who issued the Americans and British their marching orders. We cannot disassociate the Mafia boss from his own orders executed by his own underlings.
And thus, while in these books we will be apparently (and superficially) examining America’s Dirtiest Secrets, there will in almost every instance be a distinct under-layer of Jewish influence and control. It is true we will see a few occasions or events where the Americans appeared to act independently – as in the hijacking of Hawaii – with no apparent evidence of Jewish involvement, but these are very few. And so, what we are really discussing and exposing in these pages are the Jews’ Dirtiest Secrets, and we will see that in virtually every instance the Jews operate admirably and very efficiently with what they call “A Gentile Front”, with some non-Jew apparently in charge but with a full complement of Jews in the background instigating, inciting, and ordering Gentiles to execute their plans.
One striking such example you will read about is US President Wilson’s Creel Commission, which perpetrated an astonishingly intense propaganda campaign designed to create a “white-hot hate” for Germans and lead Americans into a World War no one wanted. Creel was selected by Wilson’s Jewish handlers, quite likely by the so-called “Colonel” House, who was a Jew and whose real name was Huis, but it was the Jews Lippman and Bernays who were actually in control of the entire effort. This Jewish manipulation was so effectively done that Creel became the lightning rod for all the historical disapprobation while Bernays is celebrated today as “The father of public relations” in America. In fact, Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the Father of War Marketing, a template invented and executed by the Jews in the most despicable manner imaginable.
In many cases, these situations include historical events that have been so deeply buried by the Jewish media and Jewish book-publishing industries that perhaps not one person in a million has any knowledge of their existence. One such situation consists of the unremitting and unconscionable atrocities inflicted on Germany and the German people during – but especially after – both World Wars, atrocities committed primarily by the Americans but done under the orders of their Jewish masters. This was so widespread – and so true – that today it is illegal in Germany for anyone to even attempt to research atrocities committed against Germans. The reason is that anyone attempting such research would quickly discover that it was the Jews who were responsible for all those atrocities, by both hate propaganda and direct influence, and the Jews naturally don’t want those truths escaping confinement. Thus, the German government was forced to pass a law rendering illegal any investigation into such matters, and most German people today have no knowledge of the incredible betrayals and atrocities inflicted upon them by the Jews. They are instead taught by Jewish-authored books and by Jewish university professors, aided immensely by the Jewish-controlled mass media, that it was Germans who inflicted atrocities on the Jews.
Another such example is the incendiary carpet-bombing of nearly 100 Japanese cities – long after Japan had agreed to surrender – carried out by the American Curtis LeMay and resulting in the deaths of about 50% of the population of all those cities, done in the same manner as the Jews arranged for Germany and with the same blood-thirsty determination to utterly destroy Japan and the Japanese as they had for Germany and the German people. This immense and unconscionable atrocity, which resulted in the deaths of at least 10 million civilians – almost all women and children – was so heavily excised from history, including the re-writing of all Japanese history books, that almost no one in Japan has any knowledge of it, and no one outside Japan either. The excision in this case was so total that even Japan’s national population statistics were completely forged, fabricated, and re-calculated after the war, to entirely bury the fact of one of the greatest war-time atrocities in history.
The Japanese also do not research atrocities committed against Japan because they have been taught by their Jewish masters, as in Germany, the same things and for the same reasons. Nobody today in Japan has any knowledge of the involvement of the Jews in their destruction. This is not to dismiss atrocities that were indeed committed by the Japanese against others, but to illuminate the fact that the Jews committed much worse atrocities against the Japanese, and yet have such near-total control over the media, over book-publishing, and over the government itself, that these events have been totally excised from the historical record and the knowledge is deleted from the world’s consciousness. Again, this condition is much abetted by “the Gentile Front” where the Jews used the Americans to perpetrate these horrendous crimes while remaining hidden in the background. And again, let’s not forget that it was a Jew – Bernard Baruch – who chose Japan as the victim for the new atomic bombs and who personally selected the cities to be incinerated, almost certainly done as punishment for Japan’s prior eviction of all the Jews.
It would be of use to you to read two of my previous E-books on Propaganda and the Media[1] and Bernays and Propaganda[2], to help gain an appreciation of some of the methods used by the Jews to ensure silence (and ignorance) about past events. One of the tenets of propaganda is that we have a powerful tendency to believe the first thing we read or hear about a topic, especially if those statements are repeated a number of times. Later, even when faced with incontrovertible proof, facts that cannot be disputed, proving that our now-accepted beliefs are in fact false, we are surprisingly reluctant to change our minds, and we will “hesitate and waver and continue to believe there must be some other explanation”. Our minds are apparently unable to accept that we have believed lies.
This is important because the Jews use this to great advantage to pre-empt the discovery of their atrocities and prevent rational thought. Typically, if knowledge of their past crimes is showing signs of escaping historical confinement, the Jews will use this propaganda tactic to “get there first”, with some Jewish author quickly writing a book or treatise on the subject that is replete with lies and falsified history that attempts to exclude the Jews from involvement and, if at all possible, to blame the victim.
When the truths of China’s opium travesty were beginning to creep out of the sarcophagus and into the daylight of public knowledge, a Jewess named Julia Lovell was there with a book titled Opium War in which Jews are not even mentioned and which she categorised as a “tragic-comedy”, the hundred or so million Chinese being killed by the Jews apparently being funny to her. But a great many Americans and others, unfamiliar with the true circumstances and never having read anything else, will tend to believe this woman’s despicably false version of events and the Jews will perhaps be spared exposure.
Another such situation occurred when the truth of the mysterious depopulation of Easter Island was beginning to escape confinement. That truth seems to be that it was Jewish slave traders who kidnapped virtually the entire population of Easter Island as slaves to work their guano mines in Peru. Immediately upon this leakage, a Jew named Jared Diamond from the University of California was there with a book explaining that the Easter Islanders simply had some violent disagreement among themselves and killed each other off. Diamond was ridiculed by other academics for his foolish theory that “had not a shred of evidence to support it”, but his book wasn’t written for academics. It was written for the great unwashed of the US who had no knowledge of these events and would likely accept Diamond’s false version. And once again, the Jews might be spared exposure.
The same thing happened again when details began to emerge and leak about the Holland Tulip Bubble having been entirely staged by Jewish ‘bankers’, what with their futures market and all the rest, and not at all a “public mania” as we have been told, but a deliberate attempt to take advantage of public greed and gullibility and empty half the bank accounts in Holland. Once again, immediately on the risk of these leaks becoming public there was a female Jewish author on hand to write a “definitive” work on the topic which oddly made no mention of Jews, but furthermore claimed that no financial losses had occurred to anyone. In fact, this Jewess solemnly claimed that she had access to all the records in Holland and that through the most diligent search she found records of only a few people in Holland who had gone bankrupt during that time, and all those were bankrupt due to “property speculation“ and nothing to do with tulips. In real life, that so-called “bubble“ bankrupted probably half the people in Holland, but once again the Jews are there to pre-empt the truth and to propagate an entirely falsified version of history to protect themselves from exposure.
I have written elsewhere that at least 90%, and maybe even 95%, of everything that you know, or think that you know, or that you believe to be true about history, is wrong. To re-state another way, if we were to take the history of the entire world for the past 500 years and condense it into a history book of 100 pages, at least 50 of those pages would be blank. This is the amount of history – almost entirely involving the Jews – that has been so thoroughly excised from the historical record that it has literally evaporated from human consciousness with almost no living persons having any knowledge of it. And of the remaining 50 pages in this book, probably 45 are so extensively Photoshopped, sanitised, twisted, with crucial details omitted, that they are largely a work of fiction. And of course, anyone attempting to open this historical sarcophagus and expose the contents, is denounced as a deranged revisionist spreading misinformation. And, if the Jews are at all mentioned in this “revisionism”, we have the added attraction of being labeled an “anti-Semitic, holocaust-denying, Nazi Jew-hater”. Most of those souls attempting this historical illumination have very often paid with their careers, their reputations, their bank accounts, sometimes with their freedom and, in some cases, with their lives. These Mafia overlords in the City of London, the Khazar “so-called” Jews, are today just as brutal, savage, and filled with contempt for humanity as they were 1,000 years ago.
David Edwards was quoted in the “Third World Traveler“ as having written:
”Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true‘. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”
This is the condition we face today in dealing with these recovered historical truths. In the case of the Jews, they know the truth but are frantic and nearly desperate to keep it buried and under confinement, which is why they so vengefully and viciously attack en masse whenever these facts emerge into daylight. With the Americans, their ignorance of their own nation’s criminality is founded on a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever Jewish propaganda that is almost always flatly contradicted by the facts. But even citizens of the victim nations – like Germany – suffer enormous shock and disbelief when confronted with the historical truths of their own country, because the Jews and the Jewish media have for nearly 100 years browbeaten them with a totally false historical narrative. Friends sent to German acquaintances my articles on the Jews’ 1933 worldwide boycott of Germany and some related items, with those Germans replying that they found even those brief articles too painful to read at one sitting because, while the evidence was incontrovertible, it contradicted everything they’d been taught all their lives about themselves and their country, and the shock of learning that the things they “knew” were all lies, was emotionally too painful to bear.
At the same time, the world has been subjected to a century or more of outrageously false positive propaganda about the Jews, an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the Jews as the world’s impoverished, misunderstood, persecuted “chosen ones“. In truth, there is little about the Jews and Israel today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what the world knows about the Jews, their history, their massive crimes spanning centuries, their astonishing contempt for both humanity and truth, their conduct in international affairs, is not only wrong, but violently wrong. And to the same extent, the world has also been subjected to enormously and brutally false negative propaganda and misinformation about other nations – about the Jews’ victims, an equally incomprehensible volume of black-tinted information whereby the Jews typically seek to blame their victims for the atrocities perpetrated against them.
These buried historical truths are the content of my books and articles, the history of the world (or parts of it) as it really was, and is, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast carpet of propaganda, jingoism, and misinformation that Jewish media power has used to blanket and blind the world for well over a century.
END NOTES
The incendiary bombing of German working-class neighborhoods was planned in detail by the Jews. Since at least the early 1900s, Rothschild had owned most of the armament and munitions factories in Germany. It was through those that he supplied Japan (and Russia too) with the weapons for their war in 1905. During the Second World War the Jews didn’t want all their factories bombed to rubble when the Allies began flying over Germany. Their solution was to kill all the factory workers instead but leave the factories untouched. And it was the Jew Frederick Lindemann, sent by Rothschild to Churchill as an advisor, who brought the scheme to him. We have records of Lindemann’s submission of his plan to the war cabinet urging this method and suggesting that “greater flesh-incineration-per-bomb could be achieved” that way. This is further documented by a memo dated March 30, 1942, from Lindemann to Churchill that resulted in those intense terror-bombing campaigns of German civilians. The working-class neighborhoods were high-density, with these incendiary munitions creating natural intense firestorms that incinerated virtually every living thing in many of them. The British and the Americans, obeying the plans of their Jewish leaders, executed one of the most barbaric and inhuman atrocities of the war.
As I discuss in my essay on Japan, where the same was done there, the country’s population statistics were heavily forged, fabricated, and recalculated after the war to bury the evidence of these atrocities. I am almost certain the same was done with Germany. I haven’t the resources or time to delve into this with Germany, and researching atrocities against Germans is now illegal in Germany, but it is almost a certainty that Germany’s population statistics were massaged in the same was as those of Japan, to hide the truth. There had to have been many many millions of civilians killed in these raids, which were nothing more than an inhumanly deliberate attempt to depopulate Germany. And this doesn’t include the normal war casualties nor the 12 million to 15 million German civilians killed after the war from execution, starvation and migration, nor does it include Eisenhower’s Death Camps nor the perhaps additional million civilian deaths from Operation Paperclip.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
NOTES
[1] Bernays and Propaganda
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA-.pdf
[2] Propaganda and the Media
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ENGLISH-PROPAGANDA-and-THE-MEDIA.pdf
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 9, 2023
Pfizer missed a deadline to turn over internal studies on myocarditis, per an FDA order. The deadline came and went. Now, they quietly have a new date in June. Why the delay on such important data? And, why does the FDA set arbitrary deadlines which aren’t enforced?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 9, 2023
As Biden announces the coming end of the Covid Public Health Emergency in the US, the new majority in Congress appear to not be letting agencies off the hook. The past three years of remarkably poor public health policy have placed the CDC, WHO, and Social Media companies in the sights of numerous committee investigations, and new legislation seeking answers and medical freedom.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 9, 2023
Airline pilot and co-founder of US Freedom Flyers, Josh Yoder, and Clinical Cardiologist, Dr. Thomas Levy, join Del to discuss the recent FAA change to the heart test limits and the coincidental timing of the change coming amid increasing concerns over myocarditis from the COVID-19 vaccine.
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 13, 2023
How might strong advocates of community masking – who happen to occupy positions within the hierarchy that provide opportunities to influence research activity – go about achieving their aims? I suggest it would include some combination of discouraging the undertaking of robust research about mask effectiveness and potential harms, impeding and delaying the publication of unfavourable findings, and undermining the value of rigorous empirical science. A look at the history of the Cochrane mask reviews seems to offer an illuminating case study of these insidious forces in action.
Cochrane reviews are widely recognised to provide the most authoritative and comprehensive evaluation of the scientific evidence regarding specific healthcare interventions, and their raison d’être is to inform the decision-making process. On January 30th 2023, the latest version of the Cochrane review of the effectiveness of physical interventions (including masks) in reducing the spread of respiratory viruses was published. In keeping with their earlier reviews, the overarching conclusion of the authors confirmed what we already knew: masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. Arguably of more interest are the indications that powerful forces within the academic world were at work to obstruct the dissemination of this inconvenient truth.
In regard to the potential benefits of mask-wearing, the findings of the review were emphatic: after considering 12 research trials (ten in the community and two among hospital workers) the main takeaway message was that face coverings made “little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission”. When only studies where respiratory infections had been confirmed in a laboratory were included in the analysis, the conclusion was even more stark: “Wearing masks had no effect on… influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes”. Furthermore, the type of mask used – the surgical variety or the higher-quality N95/P2 respirators – made no difference to the outcome.
It is plausible to assume that the conclusions of the Cochrane scholars did not make easy reading for the pro-mask establishment. The Covid era has been characterised by extraordinarily high levels of censorship of views that did not tally with the dominant public health narrative, and this silencing of alternative perspectives has often been evident within the academic and research spheres. A close inspection of the two most recent updates to the Cochrane review – their development and content – suggests that these malign forces of suppression may have been targeting this initiative in an effort to dilute the impact of its masks-are-ineffectual message. There are five observations consistent with this premise.
1. Scarcity of robust studies
It is intriguing that, three years after the start of the Covid event, there is a dearth of prospective randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the type that provide the most robust kind of scientific evidence – to evaluate the efficacy of community masking as a means of reducing viral transmission. In the words of the Cochrane review authors, there was a “relative paucity” of such studies “given the importance of the question”. In a politicised environment, where Covid policy was often determined without recourse to empirical evidence, perhaps those in power did not want to fund research that would provide a definitive answer to the question of whether masks offered an effective viral barrier, particularly in light of the earlier discouraging results?
2. Unpublished research
In November 2020, the Danish mask study – the first RCT of mask efficacy specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – found that masks achieved no significant benefit for the wearer. Despite this ground-breaking conclusion, the research was initially rejected by at least three prestigious medical journals. This publication bias is also evident in the current Cochrane review where the authors, when discussing the range of RCTs included in the analysis, state that: “We identified four ongoing studies, of which one is finalised, but unreported, evaluating masks concurrent with the COVID‐19 pandemic” (my emphasis). Why would a finalised RCT, on such a pressing issue as mask effectiveness, not be published? The most likely answer, in this censorial environment, is that it came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion.
3. A disregard of the harms of masking
Very few of the studies included in the Cochrane review addressed the potential harms of wearing masks; harms were “rarely measured and poorly reported”. When one considers the wide range of credible negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with mass masking in the community, this is a glaring omission. Once again, the most plausible reason for this inattention to harms in mask research in the last three years is political pressure – Government policy makers urgently sought evidence to support their premature decisions to impose mask mandates, to demonstrate their effectiveness as a viral barrier, and were disinclined to investigate the potential harms.
4. Publication delays
A blatant indication of top-down censorial influence on the ‘masks don’t work’ message is the way that publication of one of the Cochrane review updates was delayed. The previous 2020 version, incorporating updates up until January 2020, had passed peer review and was finalised by April of the same year. Extraordinarily, its publication was delayed until November 2020 due to “unexplained editorial decisions“. According to lead author, Dr. Tom Jefferson, this extra scrutiny was “a very unexpected event in Cochrane, especially during a period in which the topic of the review and the setting of policy was of global importance”.
It is unlikely to be coincidence that this window of delay corresponds to the period when the U.K. and other Governments, under intense pressure from pro-mask groups, U-turned and imposed mask mandates on their populations. In the midst of this policy flip-flop, it would have caused considerable political embarrassment to our public health leaders should the Cochrane group – the source of the most authoritative and comprehensive scientific evidence – have broadcast its conclusion that masks are ineffective as a viral barrier. In the words of Dr. Jefferson, by the time their report was published in November 2020, “the advisers had changed their minds about the evidence, and the policies had been set”.
The latest Cochrane review update includes studies up to October 2022. Its publication three months later suggest that this edition was not delayed, presumably because, at a time when most of society is unmasked, its conclusions are likely to evoke less discomfort for policy makers.
5. Editorial interference
An explicit example of the top-down interference with the Cochrane review process (referred to above) is an editorial that accompanied the 2020 edition. Including statements such as, “Waiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis”, the content of this commentary appears totally at odds with the ethos of the Cochrane initiative. Indeed, this decisions-before-evidence assertion mirrors the proclamations of pro-mask zealot Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who has previously stated that the rigorous search for empirical evidence is the “enemy of good policy“.
In the words of Dr. Jefferson, the 2020 Cochrane editorial “seemed to undermine our work” and had the effect of “completely subverting the precautionary principle”. The lead author of the editorial was Dr. Soares-Weiser (Cochrane’s Chief Editor) who is “responsible for ensuring that the Cochrane Library meets its strategic goals of supporting health care decision-making by consistently publishing timely, high-priority, high-quality reviews”. Clearly, the 2020 Cochrane mask review failed her ‘timely’ criterion and her trivialisation of the value of empirical evidence is at odds with the ‘high-quality reviews’ aspiration.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Smile Free campaign that opposes mask mandates.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 13, 2023
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene set up a “Misinformation Response Unit” to monitor what it would determine to be “dangerous misinformation” posted on social media, non-US sites, and non-English media in the US.
This “misinformation” mostly had to do with Covid vaccination – the Department was determined to drive vaccination rates up by spreading its word, and in this gathered over 100 partners whose job was to craft positive messaging around the controversial subject.
Among those the dedicated new unit is working with is Public Good Projects, otherwise known for receiving funding from a lobbying group representing two major Covid vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna.
Their “good” work here also included sending Twitter, on a weekly basis, lists of posts slated for censorship.
In an article published by the NEJM Catalyst journal, those behind the effort are now assessing the Unit’s work as successful, what with it being able to “rapidly identify messages” deemed as containing inaccurate information about the virus, vaccines, treatment, etc.
And although admitting that “vaccine hesitancy” remains high around the world even two years after the vaccines were first introduced – and this is something attributed to “disinformation and misinformation” and continues to worry the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Surgeon General, as well as “medical experts” – the New York City Health Department thinks that it did well in getting its own narrative out, particularly in traditional media.
However, it needed help on the internet and so, in 2021, the NYC Health Commissioner penned a letter to the largest social networks asking them to engage in “broader efforts to curtail deliberate disinformation, particularly from the most notorious spreaders of disinformation and from non-English language sources.”
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
This is also where the Public Good Projects came in, to enlist social media “microinfluencers” to spread pro-vaccine messages, and train others to come up with campaigns.
The email Dave A. Chokshi, New York City health commissioner, addressed to then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with the subject line reading, “Vaccine Misinformation,” urges the pair to “take immediate action to stop the spread of fraudulent and inaccurate information about COVID-19 vaccines” on their platforms.
Chokshi wanted this action to be “effective and vigorous” and asserted that misinformation on these sites, as understood by the city’s Health Department, was “costing New Yorkers their lives.”
Twitter and Facebook were then urged to do the following: “Consistently and promptly remove all misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines from your platforms and ban any user that repeatedly posts misinformation, including the Dirty Dozen; redesign the algorithms used by your platforms to avoid amplifying misinformation, particularly among non-English languages; provide greater transparency to your data to allow health departments to better identify, track and understand the spread of misinformation, and amplify messaging from trusted public health experts and local partners.”
By Ron Paul | February 13, 2023
Twenty years ago this spring the US government was finally successful in lying us into war with Iraq. Administration after administration had sanctioned and bombed and even invaded the country, but finally 20 years ago next month the Bush Administration unleashed “shock and awe” to flatten a country that did not and could not threaten the United States.
After eight years of battle in Iraq perhaps as many as a million innocent people died, either directly or indirectly, from Washington’s aggression. No one was brought before a tribunal over the lies and destruction. No one even apologized. Washington’s puppet of the day, Ahmed Chalabi, brushed off the lies about Iraq’s WMDs by proclaiming that the war promoters were “heroes in error.” They got their regime change and that’s all they cared about.
The propaganda machine pushing the Iraq war seemed overwhelming at the time. At that time several fellow Members of Congress began to open communication across party lines to look for way to stop the war. From conservatives like the late Rep. Walter Jones and Rep. John Duncan, to progressives like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Jim McGovern, and so many more, we began to organize and strategize.
One tool we used to our advantage was the idea of an “improbable” coalition of left and right uniting to oppose the war. The media may not have been interested in our antiwar views, but they could not help themselves when presented with this “man bites dog” story. Time and again this “unlikely” group held press conferences, introduced various legislative tools, and communicated behind the scenes to try and grow the movement against the Iraq war.
Unfortunately with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, who ran as an antiwar candidate but then launched numerous military attacks abroad, that old coalition fell apart. Some progressives excused Obama’s militarism and lost interest in cooperating with conservatives. Some conservatives were driven by their personal dislike of Obama and lost sight of the target.
Suddenly, as we face the once-unimaginable prospect of a direct military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine, a beyond Left-Right coalition is emerging from its long slumber. This Sunday, February 19th, a broad and very diverse group will assemble in Washington, DC at the Lincoln Memorial to denounce Washington’s sleepwalking into World War III.
The “Rage Against The War Machine” rally promises to be the first large-scale rally against Washington’s aggressive war lobby in many years. I am looking forward to sharing the stage with my good friends and former House colleagues Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as my good friend and fellow libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano, and so many more speakers from a broad political spectrum.
Many of us have watched with alarm as the Biden Administration – with the enthusiastic backing of many Congressional Republicans – has continuously escalated involvement in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and now sits dangerously close to a direct, hot war with the largest nuclear superpower on earth.
How did we get here? Where are the sane voices and cooler heads? Just when it seemed they were nowhere to be found, here we are! I hope as many people as possible will join us and continue to come together for this important cause. We must join together while we still can. No war with Russia!
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 13, 2023
Hysterics at the Chinese balloon overflying the U.S. – taken to volume 11 – through scrambling a hush-hush Raptor jet (F-22) to ‘pop’ it, and then bally-hooing the ‘pop’ as Raptor’s first ever ‘air-to-air kill’, may be a source for quiet derision around the world, yet paradoxically this seemingly trivial event may cast a long shadow over the U.S. war-timetable for Ukraine.
For it is the U.S. political calendar that may yet determine what happens next in Ukraine – from the western side.
Seemingly nothing important occurred – it was an instant of spy frenzy, leaving Biden’s ‘tough task’ unchanged: He needs to convince the American voter, facing collapsing standards of living, that they misread the ‘runes’; that rather than gloom, the economy – contrary to their lived experience – is ‘working well for them’.
Biden needs to perform this magic against polls that say only 16% of Americans feel better off since the start of his tenure, and 75% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters wish him to not stand in 2024. Significantly, this message is coming today from the Democratic-leaning media, suggesting thoughts of replacing him are already in circulation.
For now, Biden’s allies in the party establishment (the DNC) continue to clear the way for his candidature – postponing initial primaries (in which Biden could be expected to be trounced) for a later South Carolina primary election, where Black and Latino voters would reflect demographics in which Biden might (possibly) shine. It may work; it may not.
Simply put, against this highly sceptical Party backdrop, Biden will have to change American perceptions of the economy at a moment when many indicators signal further deterioration. It will be a ‘heavy lift’. The economic team, for sure, will be insisting: ‘Keep the focus on economic achievements! We don’t want distractions from any foreign policy débacles; We do not want the TV debates to centre on Balloons, or around Abrams tanks: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’’.
The ‘Chinese balloon’ was popped, yes, but similarly popped was Team Biden’s hope to negotiate a limited understanding with a tetchy President Xi that could stop China tensions becoming a spoiler issue in the primary debates. The balloon incident obliged the U.S. to cancel Blinken’s appointment with Xi (even though such a meeting with the head of state would be a rare event).
The powerful ‘China hawk’ faction in the U.S. was ecstatic. The China balloon ‘kill’ inadvertently, and in an instant, elevated China to ‘Main Threat’. It was the chance for these hawks to ‘pivot’ foreign policy back from Ukraine and Russia – to fully focus on China.
They make the case that Ukraine was ‘eating’ too much of America’s arms inventory. It was leaving America vulnerable; already, it would take years for the U.S. to make up for this equipment loss by reinstating weapons supply-lines. And there is ‘no time to spare’. The military ‘deterrence fence’ around China has to be in place – ASAP.
Naturally, the tight neo-con circle around Biden – some of whom have invested in the ‘Destroy Russia’ project for decades – is not ready to ‘let go’ the Ukraine project, for China.
Yet, the Ukraine narrative ‘bubble’ has been punctured, and has been leaking helium for some time. The Beltway – and even the MSM narrative – has pirouetted from ‘Russia losing’ to an ‘Ukrainian defeat is inevitable’. Indeed, Kiev is defeated, and is hanging by the slenderest of threads.
Olexii Arestovich, Zelensky’s senior adviser and former ‘spin doctor’ in the Presidential office, speaking in late January this year, was candid in his assessment:
“If everyone thinks that we are guaranteed to win the war, then it is very unlikely. Since January 14, it has ceased to be like this. What do you think, that the assessment from the President of Poland, Duda, not only did he say this about the decisive months. That it is generally unknown whether Ukraine will survive …
“The war may not end as the Ukrainians expect, and as a result, Ukraine may not return all its territories, and the West is ready to follow such a scenario … What will happen to the society that raised its expectations too high, but will receive a conditional Minsk-3? This recoil of unfulfilled expectations will hit us so hard – morally and everything else – that we will simply be stunned.
“The way out of this war may not be at all what it seemed to us three months ago, after the success of the Kherson operation. And not because the insidious Americans do not give weapons or delay, but because success requires 400 thousand of perfectly trained soldiers with NATO weapons to grind it all up and liberate the territories. Do we have it? No. Will it be next year? Will not be. There will not be enough training facilities…
“We as a society are not ready for such an outcome. I decided to say it as the expectation of the Russian side. But the most unpleasant thing is that in the West they think the same way, and we are totally dependent on them. What should the West do? The scenario of two Koreas. Create South Korea with guarantees”, Arestovich said, adding that with this option, Ukraine can get a lot of bonuses.
Put bluntly, if Biden is to avoid a repeat of the humiliating Afghan débacle, America needs urgently to to move-on before the 2024 Presidential calendar kicks-off this summer – with Ukraine/Russia sucking all the oxygen out from the coming economic debates.
But that is not what is happening. Victoria Nuland – who has been ‘capo’ in Kiev for a decade – is overseeing a purge: Unreliables are ‘out’, and pro-American radical Ukrainian hawks are ‘in’. It is a make-over of the Kiev mafia, which leaves Zelensky without friends – and wholly dependent on Washington. It looks to be preparation for the U.S. to attempt a double-down in Ukraine.
Seymour Hersh’s detailed article on the backdrop to the Nordstream pipeline sabotage by the U.S., on which Hersh worked for many months (though his assertions have been denied by the White House), tells us something highly significant.
All the familiar, anti-Russia neo-cons (Nuland, Sullivan and Blinken) were part of the Nordstream sabotage plot – but the impulse for it came from Biden. He led it. And just to be plain, Biden is just as emotionally invested in Ukraine as his team mates; it is likely that he too cannot ‘let go’ in Ukraine.
BUT, doubling down now, in Ukraine, won’t work for Biden. It would be highly reckless (although the Nordstream plot was nothing, if not reckless).
Doubling-down will not bring his hoped-for ‘win’, because its logic is based on an egregious mis-analysis.
Olexii Arestovich, Zelensky’s former ‘spin doctor’ and adviser, has described the circumstance of the Russian SMO first entry into Ukraine: It was conceived as a bloodless mission and should have passed without casualties, he says. “They tried to wage a smart war… Such an elegant, beautiful, lightning-fast special operation, where polite people, without causing any damage to either a kitten or a child, eliminated the few who resisted. They didn’t want to kill anyone: Just sign the renunciation”.
The point here is that what occurred was political miscalculation by Moscow – and not military failure. The initial aim of the SMO didn’t work. No negotiations resulted. Yet from it flowed two major consequences: NATO controllers pounced on this interpretation to trumpet their pre-conceived bias that Russia was militarily weak, backward and stumbling. That misreading underlay how NATO perceived Russia would prosecute the war.
It was wholly incorrect. Russia is strong and has military predominance.
On the presumption of weakness, however, NATO switched plans from a planned guerrilla insurgency, to conventional war along the ‘Zelensky Defence Lines’ – thus opening the path for Russia’s artillery domination to attrit Ukraine’s forces to the point of entropy. It is an error that cannot be rectified. And to try it might just lead to WW3.
The Abrams M1 tank will not save Biden from débacle in the lead-up to the U.S. election debates:
“It was designed for the kind of tank-on-tank combat that hasn’t happened since WW2. It’s huge, expensive, full of sorts of electronics. And powered by a repurposed jet engine. It breaks down quickly and needs its own army of mechanics, runs out of gas quickly and at almost 70 tonnes, it is too heavy to cross most bridges and needs specialized bridge crossing equipment. And it sinks in the mud. The Saudis used Abrams tanks in Yemen – and lost 20 to the Houthis, not exactly the most sophisticated military force”.
So, how does this all pan out? Well, the fight is on – in Washington. The China hawks will try to wrench the U.S.’ full attention back to China. The Biden neo-cons may try for some escalatory tactic in Ukraine that makes war with Russia unstoppable.
However, the reality is that the Ukraine ‘Balloon’ is popped. Military and civilian circles in Washington know it. The ‘elephant in the room’ of inevitable Russian success is acknowledged (albeit, with the compulsion to avoid seeming ‘defeatist’ – that persists in certain quarters). They know too that the NATO (as ‘formidable force’) ‘balloon’ has popped. They know that the balloon of western industrial capacity to manufacture weapons – in sufficient quantity and over a long duration – has popped also.
The consequences are the risk of severe U.S. reputational damage, the longer the war persists. These circles do not want that. Perhaps they will conclude that Biden is not the man to lead the U.S. out of this blind alley – that he is the part of the problem, and not the solution. If so, he must be gone in good time for the Democrats to work out who they want to lead them into the 2024 Presidential election (no easy prospect).
They may sense too, that the 2024 campaign lines already are coalescing for the Republican Party, which has its own reading of the Ukraine débacle – ‘Let’s exit from Ukraine to confront China’ (with full bi-partisan support). This means firstly, that the thread of U.S. financial support for Ukraine – as Bill Burns (CIA chief) reportedly told Zelensky on his last visit – likely will taper this summer. And secondly, it hints that any bi-partisan support for further arming Kiev may be over by the time the primary season will be in full swing.
Bill Burns travelled (in secret) in mid-January to meet Zelensky. Was it to prepare Zelensky for a shift in the American stance? Burns, the long-standing U.S. quiet negotiator, is not party to the Nuland programme. The former said at Georgetown Universityin early February that “China remains the biggest geopolitical challenge the U.S. faces in the decades ahead, and the biggest priority for CIA”. His framing, ‘was not a bug, but the substance’ in his address.
Nuland may be planting U.S.-aligned hawks around Zelensky in order to continue the war, but there are other, wider interests within Washington. Financial circles are worried about a market collapse that could lead to the dollar haemorrhaging value. There are worries too, that the Ukraine war is contributing to a serious weakening of America’s standing in the world. And there are concerns that a reckless Team Biden could lose control and take the U.S. into a wider war with Russia.
In any event, time is short. The Election Calendar looms. Is Biden to be the Democratic candidate? Whether or not he will be a candidate in 2024 needs to be resolved before the early primaries to allow any successor to demonstrate his or her paces in good time.
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