Bank’s reasons for booting Nigel Farage revealed
RT | July 18, 2023
UK bank Coutts dropped British politician Nigel Farage as a customer not because his accounts contained insufficient funds but because his social and political views were incompatible with its “values,” according to a 40-page dossier compiled by the bank and seen by the UK Telegraph on Tuesday.
While admitting “there is no evidence of regulator or legal censure of [Farage],” the document concluded Farage was no longer “compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organization.”
“This was not a political decision, but one centered around inclusivity and purpose,” the file stated, recommending the UKIP founder be put on a “glide path” to debanking as soon as his mortgage deal concluded – even though he was described as “professional, polite and respectful” in his dealings with Coutts.
While searching for a legitimate reason to drop him, Coutts apparently tried to leverage Farage’s “Russian connections,” only to find he did not have any. The file discussed his appearances on RT, where he was last a guest in 2017, alongside a claim about receiving payment from the Russian network that the bank admitted was bogus, and lamented that his comments about the conflict in Ukraine “fall short of endorsement” of the Russian position.
The bank ultimately settled on reputational risk. Farage “presents a material and ongoing reputational risk to the bank” as he is “regularly (almost constantly) the subject of adverse media,” the document explained, citing dozens of unfavorable news articles, including many from partisan sources like Hope Not Hate and Labour Movement for Europe.
The populist “is seen as xenophobic and racist” and a “disingenuous grifter” who promotes values that “do not align with the bank’s,” the dossier stated, referring to comments that were “distasteful and appear increasingly out of touch with wider society,” reportedly including tweets expressing his belief that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. His friendships with former US president Donald Trump and Serbian tennis champion Novak Djokovic were also brought up as liabilities.
When Farage revealed last month that Coutts had closed his account without giving a reason, the bank claimed his balance had fallen below the minimum amount required to maintain an account. The dossier, which he obtained through a subject access request, thoroughly contradicts the bank’s statement, explaining that his “economic contribution is now sufficient to retain on a commercial basis.”
Farage described the file to the Telegraph as a “Stasi-style surveillance report” that “reads rather like a pre-trial brief drawn up by the prosecution in a case against a career criminal,” noting the word “Brexit” appears 86 times and that Coutts found no fault with him before Brexit became an issue in 2016.
Israel cuts water supply to Palestinians in Hebron
Israeli forces raze four water wells in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank [Ihab Alami/ApaImages]
MEMO | July 18, 2023
Israel’s water company Mekorot has this month reduced the water supply to the occupied West Bank cities of Hebron and Bethlehem, causing severe shortages for Palestinians, Quds Press reported yesterday.
Mohammad Al-Jaabari, a Palestinian from Hebron, said he has to wait for days in queues until he gets his turn to get a tank load of water for his house.
“However,” he told Quds Press while looking at the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, “we see the settlers play with water, irrigate their trees and home gardens.”
Al-Jaabari said: “This is unfair, but who can deter the Israeli occupation in order to stop its unfair distribution of water?”
Hebron’s Deputy Mayor, Asmaa Al-Sharabati, said: “The Israeli occupation continues practicing its control of natural resources. This complicates the water problem.”
She said that the amount of water being provided to Hebron each day is “far less than the needs of residents,” adding that some areas that used to receive water once every 18 days are not sent supplies every 28 days. This too during the summer heat.
“We do not have any roles in the water supplies,” she told Quds Press. “All we have is to receive water from the Israeli company and ensure fair distribution among the Palestinian residents of the city.”
Al-Sharabati said everyone needs 100 litres of water a day, and 30 litres during emergencies. “A Palestinian in Hebron receives far less than 30 litres a day,” she said.
“The water crisis is political,” she stressed.
‘Most of the world is tired of war’ – PM Orbán touts Hungary and Latin America’s pro-peace stance at EU-CELAC summit
Hungary has found allies outside of Europe for its pro-peace position
BY JOHN CODY – REMIX NEWS – JULY 18, 2023
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán took to Facebook on Tuesday to proclaim that Hungary and Latin America both have a pro-peace stance regarding the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and want the war to end as soon as possible.
“Most of the world is tired of war. Today, we argued for an immediate ceasefire and peace, and this time the leaders of Latin America joined us!” wrote Orbán on Facebook following the meeting of the leaders of the European Union and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) summit in Brussels.
Although Orbán’s pro-peace stance is a minority position in Europe, he has found broad support from nations with a similar outlook toward the war elsewhere in the world, including India, China, and countries in Latin America. China, for example, has put forward a peace plan that Hungary has backed.
Within Latin America, there are a number of nations directly aligned with Russia, including Venezuela and Cuba, but more broadly speaking, there are many more nations skeptical of the Western war effort in Ukraine that have called for an immediate ceasefire. Countries like Brazil and Mexico have also refused to back sanctions against Russia, arguing it is not in their economic interest. … Full article
The Jig Is Up
This is how empire ends: not with a bang, but a whimper
By William Schryver – imetatronink – July 13, 2023
The member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — consisting of the teetering Masters of Empire and their tawdry entourage of class-stratified vassals — have just concluded a historic confab in Vilnius, Lithuania, capital of the alpha Baltic chihuahua.
In a shockingly transparent but otherwise rather banal series of events it became unmistakably clear that their grand plans to subject Russia to the “rules-based order” have come to naught.
Among others, the following consequences will ripple in the wake of this reality:
- Russia will achieve a decisive conclusion to the war on terms they dictate.
- NATO is shattered as a military alliance, and coming apart at the seams as a political alliance.
- Germany is on a trajectory of becoming a failed state, and as it goes, so will go the incoherent iron and clay mixture of the so-called European Union.
- The great myth of overwhelming US armaments supremacy has been exposed as little more than a modestly scaled boutique enterprise utterly ill-suited and ill-prepared to prosecute industrial warfare against a peer adversary.
Of course, many will immediately object:
“But the US hasn’t even employed its military in Ukraine! If the US entered this war with its awesome air and naval power, and its “best-in-class” army … well, the Russians would get pounded to dust within a few weeks.”
Well, I hope the thesis is never put to the test, because it will NOT end well.
I am now more convinced than ever that Russia’s specific strengths match and will consistently defeat the American military’s perceived strengths.
Russia admittedly does not wield an expeditionary military, but the concept and constitution of the military it has built renders it effectively unbeatable in its own neighborhood.
A little over a year has now passed since I published an essay entitled The United States Could Not Win and Will Not Fight a War Against Russia. I have recently revisited it. I felt no impulse to change a thing. Indeed, I am struck by how much it is more apropos now than it was a year ago. I believe it constitutes an essential element of understanding in relation to the geopolitical realities at work in our world circa 2023.
Since I wrote the article, there have been many twists and turns in the path of the continuing quasi-proxy war in Ukraine between the rapidly descendant American Empire and an increasingly resurgent Russia. But in early July 2022, it had, in my estimation, become undeniably evident that Russia had effectively wrecked the formidable original proxy army the empire had built, trained, and partially equipped on the foundation of Ukrainian flesh and blood, and a substantial collection of legacy Soviet implements of war.
Sure, there were still scattered potent remnants, but it had been degraded at least 60% by that point in time. Despite a few own-goals along the way, the Russians accomplished this using a force less than half the size of the one the Ukrainians arrayed against them, while inflicting severe equipment losses and at least a 7 to 1 casualty ratio.
So NATO was forced to up the ante. Aspiring to address the obvious Russian advantage in firepower, they shipped several batteries of M-777 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, followed soon by a few dozen M-142 HIMARS rocket launchers.
M-777 155 mm Howitzer
M-142 HIMARS Rocket Launcher
Both weapon systems enjoyed a smattering of early successes that were ecstatically trumpeted by western media and their devout disciples around the world.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian young men were being trained in NATO bases dotting Europe and the western hemisphere. They were instructed in the use of NATO equipment, and to fight the Russians according to NATO battlefield doctrine.
By mid-summer, a significant portion of this second iteration of the Ukrainian army had arrived back in Ukraine, along with hundreds of NATO infantry vehicles, mountains of ammunition — and perhaps most significantly — a substantial contingent of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” from many countries within the western alliance, notably Poland.
I am persuaded this escalatory step convinced the Russians they must immediately begin to more fully prepare themselves for the prospect that NATO would directly intervene in the war.
First they gave priority to learning how best to track down and destroy the limited-mobility M-777 howitzers. And rather than obsess unduly on targeting the elusive HIMARS launcher vehicles, the Russians instead focused on electronically jamming / spoofing the GPS sensors or otherwise shooting down the rockets with their short- and medium-range air defense systems.
(Their success in this respect has been nothing short of a revolution in military affairs. It is unprecedented in the age of aerial warfare. Yes, some missiles still get through, but not many, and typically only in the absence or on the outskirts of Russian ECM and air defense coverage areas.)
The Russians had, throughout early- to mid-2022, made significant offensive advances into the Novorossiya regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov. But as the summer waned, they began to perceptibly consolidate the entire line of contact. They then quickly brought to pass popular referenda in all but the Kharkov region — thereby formally assimilating the other four into the Russian Federation.
In mid-August 2022, the AFU began to advance against Russian forces on the western borders of the Dnieper River near Kherson. The Russians savaged the initial attacks, but then assumed a tactical-retreat posture. This continued for many weeks as they methodically contracted their lines into a bridgehead on the western part of Kherson city proper, all the while exacting severe losses on the attacking forces.
They would eventually effect an almost-flawless evacuation of twenty thousand troops and virtually all their heavy equipment to the eastern bank of the river, blow up the Antonovsky bridge, and then proceed to methodically destroy the AFU equipment, ammo, and troops on the other side with artillery and airstrikes that continue to this day.
As September rolled around, the Ukrainians (with significant numbers of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” in the vanguard) moved with an even more potent force in the Kharkov region, aiming for the strategic cities of Kupyansk, Izyum, and Kremmenaya.
Again, amid much triumphalism in the western punditsphere, as well as bitter recrimination and hyperbolic dooming from the Russian sixth column and its acolytes, the Russian high command effected what I observed to be an orderly, well-executed fighting retreat to the other side of the Oskol river, where they had prepared fortified lines and installed substantial reinforcements.
At that point, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkov region reached its high-water mark, and as autumn turned to winter and then to spring, every attempt to advance further — and there were a great many — was met with a decisive repulse.
Though consistently ignored by those who laud the “lightning advances” of the late-season AFU “counter-offensive” in Kharkov, the attacking Ukrainian forces were horrifically mauled between the first week of September and mid-October — and ever since.
As the Russians contracted their lines to much more defensible positions, they concurrently mobilized and commenced intensive training of several hundred thousand reservists and new volunteers; ramped up armaments production to completely unforeseen levels, and settled in for the next few months to fight a punishing war of attrition against Ukraine and its NATO benefactors — even as they simultaneously prepared to face the credible possibility of direct NATO intervention.
That said, despite a mostly defensive posture throughout late 2022 and early 2023, the Russians did launch an operation against the strategic cities of Soledar and Bakhmut that few foresaw would evolve into the bloodiest battle on European soil since the Second World War. “Surovikin’s Meat Grinder” would eventually consume many tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best remaining troops and equipment.
In the end, the second iteration of the Ukrainian army was degraded even more comprehensively than was the first.
Ukrainian air power has long-since been rendered effectively negligible. Provided with occasional but very sparse deliveries of old Soviet aircraft from the former Warsaw Pact nations, they have continued to manage occasional stand-off missile strikes, but close air support has been nonexistent.
Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in early 2023 served to rapidly deplete the legacy Soviet air defense systems. And all western shipments of would-be replacements have proven to be inferior to Ukraine’s old stocks of S-300 and Buk systems.
Fantastical Ukrainian and western media claims of 90%+ shoot-downs of Russian missiles notwithstanding, the Russians now routinely strike targets throughout Ukraine where and when they will.
Most debilitating of all, persistent ammunition shortages have now become acute. Original and supplemented stocks of Soviet-sized 152 mm artillery are nearly exhausted. And despite the US having coordinated the shipment of millions of NATO 155 mm artillery shells from every nook and cranny in the empire’s vast global network of bases and those of its obedient vassals, the cupboard is now bare.
What was widely (albeit fallaciously) believed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of equipment and ammunition in the warehouses of the Pentagon and its various less-than-sovereign minions around the globe has been exposed as entirely inadequate to the demands of a real war.
It is an astonishing revelation in the eyes of a great many in the world.
And yet, it shouldn’t be.
In my July 2022 article, I prominently cited US Army Col. (Ret.) Alex Vershinin’s all-important analysis regarding The Return of Industrial Warfare, which had appeared in RUSI a couple weeks previous. If you have not already done so, I highly recommend this short but powerful essay. His entire argument has now been confirmed by events.
Here in mid-July 2023, almost everything that eighteen months ago was only seen through a glass darkly is now undeniably apparent to all with eyes to see:
Far from being massively attrited, as any number of empire-compromised NATO rent-a-generals and politicians have ludicrously argued from the first weeks of the war, the Russians have employed an extremely impressive economy of force to achieve their objectives. To be certain, they have suffered losses in men and equipment that would be far in excess of anything western nations could abide. But the fact remains that the Russians have inflicted the most disproportionate casualty ratio of any major war in the modern era.
My sense of the matter is that the aggregated total of Russian, Donbass militia, and PMC Wagner combat deaths is probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand.
On the other side of the line, Ukrainian combat deaths are now almost certainly in the range of 250k to 350k – at least 20k of that total occurring just since the first week of June.
The third iteration of the Ukrainian army, equipped predominantly with imported NATO armor, artillery, and ammunition, has been torn to shreds over the course of the previous six weeks of their last gasp offensive. The AFU very likely has been husbanding its scant remaining stock of NATO equipment and ammunition for one last “charge of the damned”, but otherwise Ukrainian offensive potential is played-out, and there will be no fourth iteration of a Ukrainian army to face the Russians on the field.
Meanwhile, upwards of four-hundred thousand uncommitted Russian reserves are champing at the bit to be turned loose. With Russian military industrial output now in high gear, these troops are better-equipped than any that have yet taken part in this conflict.
The Russian air force has received substantial numbers of new airframes from the production line. Attack helicopters roam the battlefield with near-impunity. Russian supply of strike drones, cruise missiles, and supersonic air-launched missiles appears to meet all its battlefield demands. Its so far modest deployment of hypersonic missiles has shown them to be extremely potent weapons that defy the attempts of antiquated western air defenses to interdict them.
This war is a lost cause for the empire and its hapless allies in Europe and around the world. And that, of course, is the unavoidable conclusion that has finally managed to seep into the otherwise dense skulls of the various participants at the recent NATO summit in Lithuania.
The Masters of Empire now face a no-win scenario. They must abandon their failed Ukraine gambit — and inexorably, over the next few years, yield to maximalist Russian demands regarding the roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 borders — or else yield to the mad impulse of a futile attempt to subjugate Russia by force of arms in the form of direct US/NATO intervention into this war.
Either way, the decline of the empire will be radically accelerated; NATO will almost immediately cease to function as a credible military/political alliance; the EU will dissolve as a monetary/political “union”; the demise of the global dollar system will rapidly gain momentum.
And though many, if not most, find risible the assertion that these things could possibly come to pass in anything like the near- or medium-term (2 – 5 years), I increasingly expect they will be proven catastrophically mistaken.
A Bit of Political Theater in Vilnius
A whining President Zelensky goes home with almost nothing but still might start WWIII
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 18, 2023
It is a lucky break that the Screen Actors Guild has gone on strike as it will give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky an opportunity to dust off his thespian credentials and look for a new job when the Russians eventually bring down his government. Hollywood and Las Vegas would undoubtedly compete for such a nice Jewish young man to revive his former comedy routine where he played a piano with his penis. To be sure, without disrobing, Zelensky was inevitably the star performer at the recently completed two day NATO Summit in Vilnius Lithuania on July 11th-12th which also featured as a speaker US President Joe Biden, who provided a certain type of context by declaring that “Russia could end this war tomorrow by…ceasing its inhumane attacks on Russia!”
Zelensky whined and strutted through the two days, complaining that instant fast-track admittance of Ukraine to the NATO alliance was his right to enable him to defeat the Russian invaders. When he was instead offered a collaborative process whereby Ukraine would be made “ready” for entry through necessary rebuilding of its military coupled with institutional reforms to combat corruption and strengthen democracy, Zelensky called the delay “absurd” and “weak” on the part of his hosts. And he did so on social media to make sure that he embarrassed everyone involved. Zelensky also did not help his cause by parading in his ratty green combat fatigues, to include his presence at the first night’s gala reception before a group photo where he was observed standing alone, being ignored by the well-dressed crowd of delegates and spouses nearby who had turned their backs on him both metaphorically and physically.
All of which did not mean that the Summit was not, at least rhetorically, a cheerleading event for the plucky Ukrainian defenders against the Russian hordes. The American delegation emphasized that Washington would be there with whatever it takes to support the Ukrainians until “the end” when the war was “won,” whatever that was intended to mean. This has been described by some in the US media as an “Israel Model” in which you supply your proteges with money and weapons before looking the other way when they actually use them “aggressively and unilaterally,” often contrary to your own interests. And NATO meanwhile was firm in its support of the demand that all Ukrainian land be returned to Kiev’s control, to include Crimea, which is a complete deal breaker if there is ever to be any possibility of a negotiated settlement of the conflict, so it seems that the war will go on.
Observers at the Summit opined that the consensus among participants at the meeting was to throw some scraps to Zelensky while also avoiding any commitments that would heighten the risk of escalation into a nuclear war. The decision not to jump into bed with a desperate Zelensky recognized in part that he was and is reckless and would do anything he could to provoke broadening of the war if given the ability to do so. Beyond that, most of the heads of state gathered in Vilnius recognized that, from a domestic political perspective, their respective fellow countrymen have become increasingly weary of the war as it grinds on and brings with it negative economic consequences. And there are elections coming up, not only in the United States, later this year and in 2024.
Nevertheless, Washington was certainly on top of the effort to make sure that Zelensky would have the tools and political support that he would need to start World War Three, even if it required a bit of dissimulation. Biden wrapped up his whirlwind visit to Europe in new NATO member Finland on Thursday, praising the strength of the NATO alliance and expressing his delusion that there is no possibility that Russia will win the war against Ukraine. He said, without stuttering, that “Putin’s already lost the war. Putin has a real problem. How does he move from here? What does he do?”
Many believe, in fact, that it is Russia that has already won the war and, putting the sage commentary from Biden aside, seems to know exactly what is at stake. The effort to rearm the largely destroyed Ukrainian air force with US-made nuclear capable F-16s was expedited by Summit members, an escalation that was particularly noted in Moscow where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented in explicit terms how “Just one example of an extremely dangerous turn of events is the United States plans to transfer F-16 fighter jets to the Kiev regime. We have informed the nuclear powers, the United States, Britain and France, that Russia cannot ignore the ability of these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. No amount of assurances will help here. In the course of combat operations, our servicemen are not going to sort out whether each particular aircraft of this type is equipped to deliver nuclear weapons or not. We will regard the very fact that the Ukrainian armed forces have such systems as a threat from the West in the nuclear sphere. The United States and its NATO satellites are creating risks of a direct armed clash with Russia, and this is fraught with catastrophic consequences. The conditions for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons are clearly defined in our military doctrine. They are well known, and I will not repeat them once again.”
And then there are the cluster munitions, promised by Biden two weeks ago after what must have been consultations with his astrologer, with at least some weapons reportedly being delivered by last Thursday. Cluster munitions are banned by over 100 countries in the world, including most of NATO’s member nations and many consider their use to be a war crime. They are particularly lethal when used in civilian areas as they disperse multiple small explosive charges over a wide area that sometimes do not detonate and kill many years later when they are encountered by accident. They were used extensively during the Vietnam War and are still killing farmers in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam itself. Ironically, the United States accused Russia of using cluster bombs last year after it invaded Ukraine, calling them an illegal weapon, but now it is handing them to a psychopath who will undoubtedly seek to use them inside Russia to create a massive escalation that he expects to bring NATO fully into the war on his side. World War Three then inevitably evolves.
Washington’s aggressive moves to arm Ukraine follow on Britain’s in recently supplying Kiev with depleted uranium shells which contaminate surrounding areas with a radioactive dust during and after use. Evidence from areas such as Fallujah in Iraq, where the US and Britain fired large numbers of these shells, suggests the contamination can include a decades-long spike in cancer and birth defects.
And then there is the final Biden gesture to bring about peace on earth which took place through a White House order issued on the day after the NATO Summit ended. It states that: “I hereby determine that it is necessary to augment the active Armed Forces of the United States for the effective conduct of Operation Atlantic Resolve in and around the United States European Command’s area of responsibility… not to exceed 3,000 total members at any one time, of whom not more than 450 may be members of the Individual Ready Reserve, as they deem necessary, and to terminate the service of those units and members ordered to active duty.” While the numbers are not great and the language is governmentese, it is an order to send more soldiers to Europe to increase available resources for potential combat against the Russians. It may be the first of a number of such orders since NATO has reportedly assured Zelensky that the alliance would be increasing its so-called high readiness forces (ready to deploy in 30 days or less) to 300,000. Right now, the number of US troops in all of Europe is roughly 100,000 plus an estimated 100 CIA officers and some special ops personnel on the ground in Ukraine itself. One would not be surprised to learn that the first tranche of soldiers is bound for Poland, which borders Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and where there has already been a significant military build-up including troops from the 101st Airborne and 3rd Armored Division sent to the country for “training” last year.
There are also reports that the White House has moved B-52 bombers from their bases in the continental US to bases in Alaska closer to Russia to serve as a warning. One can only hope that somehow, some way this insanity will stop. We elect our leaders with the expectation that they will keep us safe, not engage in brinksmanship with nuclear weapons. If this is a pre-electoral ploy to re-elect Joe Biden next year by making him appear to be some kind of strong, wartime president, someone should pull the plug right now and tell Joe it is time to retire. Good going-going-gone to you Joe and whichever morons are advising you, most likely to be Antony, Jake and Victoria! You are well on the way to killing all of us for nothing!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Fake News Alert: Wagner Isn’t Going To Invade The Suwalki Corridor
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JULY 18, 2023
The Daily Mail sensationally claimed on Sunday that Wagner is plotting to invade the Suwalki Corridor from Belarus, after which this narrative virally spread across the global information ecosystem to take on a life of its own. There’s no truth to this allegation, however, since it’s solely the editorial spin that this British tabloid put on the words of a leading Russian parliamentarian. The present piece will debunk this fake news about Russia’s intentions prior to analyzing the importance of what was really said.
Chairman of the Duma’s Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov inadvertently set this scandal into motion after recently saying the following on a top domestic political talk show:
“It is clear that Wagner [mercenary army] went to Belarus to train the Belarusian armed forces… [But] not only, and not so much. There is such a place as the Suwalki Corridor. Should anything happen, we need this Suwalki Corridor very much… A strike force [based on Wagner forces in Belarus] is ready to take this corridor in a matter of hours.”
As can be seen beyond any credible doubt, Kartapolov was only talking about a hypothetical scenario and not conveying his country’s forthcoming intentions like the Daily Mail falsely alleged in their piece.
They spun his words for clickbait, but this also served to fearmonger about Russia, Wagner, and Belarus, which advances the West’s narrative interests in the New Cold War. That trifecta is smeared as the new “Axis of Evil” by the media, with average Westerners now being misled by the Daily Mail into thinking that President Putin might be about to spark the apocalypse if he isn’t stopped. Accordingly, those who fall for this fake news might therefore be in favor of NATO accelerating its buildup in the east.
The above insight should show the Alt-Media Community how irresponsible it is to spew conspiracy theories about Wagner’s presence in Belarus since claiming that there’s some “5D chess master plan” involved unwittingly fuels Western fearmongering about Russia that hastens NATO’s containment plans. In reality, the group’s role in that neighboring country will be limited to improving its defenses in the face of Western Hybrid War threats such as another coup attempt and/or Belgorod-like proxy incursions.
No foreign offensive actions are planned, but that doesn’t mean that Kartapolov’s words aren’t important to pay attention to. Reading between the lines, he cleverly conveyed several points that observers would do well to reflect on. First, he discredited the conspiracy theories about why Wagner was sent to Belarus by reaffirming that they’ll only focus on training that host country’s armed forces, which protects Russia’s integrity by counteracting false claims about its supposedly aggressive intentions.
The second point is that he indirectly reminded everyone of Wagner’s battlefield finesse by talking about a hypothetical scenario where they might be ordered to go on the offensive. This reinforces their hard-earned reputation as being among the most formidable forces that Russia has fielded since World War II, which directly leads to the third point about how they might be ordered to secure this geostrategic corridor in the event that NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine turns into a larger conflict.
What’s so significant about the last-mentioned point is the suggestion that Wagner still takes commands from the Kremlin, thus segueing into the fourth point regarding the outcome of President Putin’s meeting with its leaders in the days after their chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt. There was nothing conspiratorial about this as explained in detail here since it simply concerned the Russian leader requesting their feedback about how best to restructure the group while still retaining its efficiency.
And finally, the last point to be discerned by reading between the lines of Kartapolov’s words is that Wagner remains a bastion of Russian patriots in spite of some members previously being misled by their chief into committing treason. After all, if there were any lingering doubts about their reliability, then he’d never suggest that they’d be ordered to secure the Suwalki Corridor in the worst-case scenario of a direct hot conflict with NATO. This shows that the Kremlin and Wagner have truly reconciled.
To summarize the importance of this scandal, it’s worth paying much more attention to what Kartapolov actually said than what the Daily Mail sensationally claimed for clickbait. Although the West is exploiting the latter’s fake news for information warfare purposes, astute observers who read between the lines of this official’s words will learn a lot about what’s really going on behind the scenes in Russia nowadays, namely that Wagner has returned to its role in defending that country’s national security interests.
Swiss aim to classify details of bank collapse for 50 years
RT | July 18, 2023
A parliamentary investigation into the collapse of Switzerland’s banking giant Credit Suisse will keep its files confidential for half a century, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing a parliamentary committee document.
According to the report, the investigating commission will hand over its files to the Swiss Federal Archives after longer than the usual 30 years to ensure confidentiality in the case, which focuses on the activities of the Swiss government, financial regulator, and central bank in the run up to the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse.
The announcement has raised concerns in the Swiss Society for History, with its president Sacha Zala reportedly writing to the commission that “Should researchers want to scientifically investigate the 2023 banking crisis, access to the CS files would be invaluable.”
At its first regular meeting in Bern last week, the committee was quoted by Reuters as saying that “all persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of the commission, but also the interviewees themselves.”
It warned that “indiscretions complicate the work or damage the credibility of the commission and can have negative consequences for the Swiss financial center.”
Credit Suisse, the second-largest bank in Switzerland, faced a string of scandals, legal issues, and customer outflows in recent years. In 2022 the bank reported a net loss of 7.3 billion francs ($8.5 billion). This March, its biggest investor, Saudi National Bank, announced that it would not be able to provide financial assistance due to regulatory and statutory limits.
Later in the month, Credit Suisse’s rival UBS agreed to buy the struggling institution for the equivalent of $3.25 billion in a government-brokered deal. The merger, the biggest banking tie-up since the 2008 financial crisis, came amid growing fears of a broader contagion after several regional banks collapsed in the US. The acquisition ended Credit Suisse’s 167-year history while the whole affair has dealt a blow to Switzerland’s reputation as a stable global financial center.
Ukrainian naval terror drone bases destroyed – Moscow
RT | July 18, 2023
The Russian military has conducted strikes on Ukrainian facilities used to prepare terrorist attacks, the Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday. The attacks were carried out in retaliation to Monday’s attack on the Crimean Bridge, which claimed two civilian lives and left one child injured.
In a statement, the ministry said that Russian forces overnight launched “a group retaliatory strike” using high-precision sea-based weapons. The attack was aimed at facilities that were used to prepare “terrorist acts” against Russia involving unmanned drones, as well as the shipyard in the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa that produced them, it added.
Apart from this, the barrage targeted depots in Odessa and Nikolaev that contained around 70,000 tons of fuel meant for the Ukrainian military. “All designated targets have been hit. Fires and detonations have been registered at the destroyed facilities,” according to the statement.
On Tuesday, Sergey Bratchuk, the head of the Odessa administration, reported a rocket attack on the city which involved six Kalibr missiles, but claimed that all of them had been downed. However, he noted that “port infrastructure facilities” and several other buildings were damaged in the strike.
Vitaly Kim, the head of the Nikolaev administration, said the attack hit “an industrial facility,” causing a fire that was promptly extinguished.
Unverified footage circulating on social media shows Ukrainian air defenses firing at an unknown target in Odessa Region, with a powerful explosion occurring several seconds later. Local media suggested that the strike could have destroyed a German-supplied Gepard air defense system.
Another unverified clip from Nikolaev Region appears to show a loud explosion and a fire.
On Monday, Russia accused Ukraine of staging a terrorist attack on the Crimean Bridge involving two maritime drones which damaged one section of the roadway and killed a married couple, injuring their minor daughter.
In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised retaliation, noting at the time that the Defense Ministry was already preparing “necessary proposals.”
Biden regime obstructing ‘Ukraine aid’ audits
By Drago Bosnic | July 18, 2023
In late November 2022, Washington DC admitted that it was unable to account for approximately $20 billion in weapons sent to the Kiev regime. At the time, the newly elected Republican-dominated Congress vowed to conduct “impending audits” as soon as they took over in January. Officially, the GOP wanted audits to determine and then release information on the massive weapons shipments from the United States to the Kiev regime and how much of that “aid” was ending up “where it’s supposed to be”. Republicans promised to “hold the government accountable” for spending US taxpayers’ dollars for the sake of the deeply corrupt Kiev regime.
At the time, major news media, such as Fox News, claimed that the Biden administration inspected only 10% of approximately 22,000 weapons sent to the Kiev regime from late February to November. However, oversight issues also extended to other “theaters of operation”, such as Taiwan, where approximately $19 billion in weapons sales for China’s breakaway island province were “missing”. In late August, a Defense News report claimed there was a $14 billion backlog in weapons sales to Taiwan. However, the November data indicated that the actual number was nearly $19 billion in delayed deliveries, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“US government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan, further delaying efforts to arm the island as tensions with China escalate,” the WSJ report claimed. “The US has pumped billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, taxing the capacity of the government and defense industry to keep up with a sudden demand to arm Kiev in a conflict that isn’t expected to end soon,” the authors added in an admission rarely seen in mainstream media.
And yet, close to eight months since promising to conduct the aforementioned “impending audits”, the Republican-dominated Congress never did anything of sorts, while the so-called “aid” has swelled to over $170 billion, according to the data released by the Neo-Nazi junta itself. Strangely, the troubled Biden administration has been successful in preventing Congress from creating an inspector general’s office that would finally provide the much-needed oversight for the massive weapons shipments to the Kiev regime. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would create the inspector general office modeled after the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The issues US government experienced during the existence of SIGAR is what likely caused the GOP-dominated Congress to keep postponing its “impeding audits”, despite clear promises it would conduct them. It can even be argued that much of the electorate voted for Republicans precisely because of their promises to heavily scrutinize the so far “unquestionable commitment” to provide the massive amount of “aid” to the Kiev regime. And indeed, the regular reports issued by SIGAR were a source of great embarrassment for any administration in Washington DC during America’s decades-long invasion of Afghanistan. These issues later greatly contributed to the humiliating US defeat in August 2021.
The Afghan-era inspector general John Sopko detailed the unchecked, all-present corruption that led to numerous failures during the truly unprovoked US aggression in Afghanistan. Sopko’s quarterly reports regularly embarrassed US and NATO officials who tried to present the supposed “improvement” of the operational situation as true. He has warned that “an inspector general’s official for the Ukraine war needed to be established to prevent a repeat of the situation American aid created in Afghanistan, which saw massive corruption”. Considering that the “Ukraine aid” is orders of magnitude greater than anything Afghanistan ever got, the scale of corruption in Kiev is virtually impossible to overstate.
“There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves,” he wrote in a report submitted to Congress earlier this year, adding: “Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable. You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or the host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to try to steal the money. There’s just so much money going in, and it’s hard to keep track of.”
Still, the troubled Biden administration keeps insisting that an inspector general for Ukraine would be an “unnecessary hurdle” as the Pentagon is “already monitoring transfers“.
“This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented, as oversight of US assistance for the benefit of a country’s people is already provided by the Inspectors General for the Department of State and United States Agency for International Development,” the White House stated.
And yet, according to a June report issued by the Pentagon inspector general, a number of issues with US weapons shipments to the Neo-Nazi junta were found.
“DoD [Department of Defense] personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland],” the report claimed, adding: “We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed.”
The political West has sent tens of billions worth of weapons to the Kiev regime since before Russia launched its strategic counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe. This includes everything from small arms and tactical reconnaissance drones to heavy armor and very likely nuclear-capable fighter jets in the near future. And while Washington DC and its favorite puppet regime insist “all weapons are strictly and only being used on the battlefield”, dozens of countries in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere routinely complain that various extremely dangerous and violent criminal groups and terrorist organizations now possess advanced military-grade weapons that have been illegally acquired in Ukraine.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz • Unz Review • July 17, 2023
In the West, we’re taught that Hitler is the embodiment of all evil, but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? The more I read about Hitler, the more convinced I am that his views about the Versailles Treaty were fairly commonplace among Germans living at the time. It seems to me that if Hitler hadn’t emerged as the leader who promised to restore Germany (to its original borders), someone else would have taken his place. The real problem was the injustice of the treaty itself which exacted reparations that could not be repaid along with the partitioning of the German state. It was the onerous settlement of Versailles that ensured there would be Second World War not Hitler.
Am I wrong about this? And would you agree that our over-simplified “cartoonish” portrayal of Hitler prevents people from understanding the events that led to WW2?
Ron Unz—You’re correct on all those points, but the true history is even worse than that.
Germany had been very successful during the early years of the First World War, repeatedly defeating the Russians while occupying portions of northern France, but nevertheless its leaders then sought to end the horrible mutual slaughter in 1916 by proposing a peace without winners or losers. However, most of the Allied leadership harshly rejected any peace negotiations and were instead determined to continue the war until Germany was defeated and permanently crippled. I discussed that important forgotten history in a long article last year.
- American Pravda: Lost Histories of the Great War
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 28, 2022 • 8,100 Words
A couple of years later, after America had entered the war, Germany agreed to an armistice—an end to the fighting—on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which seemed to offer a fair peace without a victory for either side. But this turned out to be a bait-and-switch operation, since once Germany had withdrawn its army from French territory and given up its powerful naval forces, the Allies then imposed a brutal starvation blockade upon the weakened country, inflicting many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths until the new German government finally accepted very harsh peace terms. These included the dismemberment and occupation of portions of their country, permanent military weakness, and acceptance of the entire guilt of the war, as well as paying gigantic future financial reparations to the victorious Allies.
The outrageous terms imposed at Versailles deeply rankled all Germans, and the memory of the starvation imposed upon Germany during the war and even afterward was one of the reasons Hitler believed it was so important to somehow gain access to additional agricultural territory.
As for the German leader himself, several years ago I pointed out that his contemporaneous assessment by many leading figures was very different than one might imagine based upon his demonic portrayal in the historical propaganda-narrative later created after war broke out.
By resurrecting a prosperous Germany while nearly all other countries remained mired in the worldwide Great Depression, Hitler drew glowing accolades from individuals all across the ideological spectrum. After an extended 1936 visit, David Lloyd George, Britain’s former wartime prime minister, fulsomely praised the chancellor as “the George Washington of Germany,” a national hero of the greatest stature. Over the years, I’ve seen plausible claims here and there that during the 1930s Hitler was widely acknowledged as the world’s most popular and successful national leader, and the fact that he was selected as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938 tends to support this belief.
I discovered a particular example of such missing perspectives earlier this year when I decided to read The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s magisterial and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 history of the world oil industry, and came across a few surprising paragraphs buried deep within the 900 pages of dense text. Yergin explained that during the mid-1930s the imperious chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, who had spent decades at the absolute summit of the British business world, became greatly enamored of Hitler and his Nazi government. He believed that an Anglo-German alliance was the best means of maintaining European peace and protecting the continent from the Soviet menace, and even retired to Germany in accordance with his new sympathies.
Since the actual history of this era has been so thoroughly replaced by extreme propaganda, academic specialists who closely investigate particular topics sometimes encounter puzzling anomalies. For example, a bit of very casual Googling brought to my attention an interesting article by a leading biographer of famed Jewish modernist writer Gertrude Stein, who seemed totally mystified why her feminist icon seemed to have been a major admirer of Hitler and an enthusiastic supporter of the pro-German Vichy government of France. The author also notes that Stein was hardly alone in her sentiments, which were generally shared by so many of the leading writers and philosophers of that period.
There is also the very interesting but far less well documented case of Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest British military heroes to come out of the First World War and who may have been moving in a rather similar direction just before his 1935 death in a possibly suspicious motorcycle accident. An alleged account of his evolving political views seems extremely detailed and perhaps worth investigating, with the original having been scrubbed from the Internet but still available at Archive.org.
A couple of years ago, the 1945 diary of a 28-year-old John F. Kennedy travelling in post-war Europe was sold at auction, and the contents revealed his rather favorable fascination with Hitler. The youthful JFK predicted that “Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived” and felt that “He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” These sentiments are particularly notable for having been expressed just after the end of a brutal war against Germany and despite the tremendous volume of hostile propaganda that had accompanied it.
The political enthusiasms of literary intellectuals, young writers, or even elderly businessmen are hardly the most reliable sources by which to evaluate a particular regime. But earlier this year, I pointed to a fairly comprehensive appraisal of the origins and policies of National Socialist Germany by one of Britain’s most prominent historians:
Not long ago, I came across a very interesting book written by Sir Arthur Bryant, an influential historian whose Wikipedia page describes him as the personal favorite of Winston Churchill and two other British prime ministers. He had worked on Unfinished Victory during the late 1930s, then somewhat modified it for publication in early 1940, a few months after the outbreak of World War II had considerably altered the political landscape. But not long afterward, the war became much more bitter and there was a harsh crackdown on discordant voices in British society, so Bryant became alarmed over what he had written and attempted to remove all existing copies from circulation. Therefore the only ones available for sale on Amazon are exorbitantly priced, but fortunately the work is also freely available at Archive.org.
Writing before the “official version” of historical events had been rigidly determined, Bryant describes Germany’s very difficult domestic situation between the two world wars, its problematic relationship with its tiny Jewish minority, and the circumstances behind the rise of Hitler, providing a very different perspective on these important events than what we usually read in our standard textbooks.
Among other surprising facts, he notes that although Jews were just 1% of the total population, even five years after Hitler had come to power and implemented various anti-Semitic policies, they still apparently owned “something like a third of the real property” in that country, with the great bulk of these vast holdings having been acquired from desperate, starving Germans in the terrible years of the early 1920s. Thus, much of Germany’s 99% German population had recently been dispossessed of the assets they had built up over generations…
Bryant also candidly notes the enormous Jewish presence in the leadership of the Communist movements that had temporarily seized power after World War I, both in major portions of Germany and in nearby Hungary. This was an ominous parallel to the overwhelmingly Jewish Bolsheviks who had gained control of Russia and then butchered or expelled that country’s traditional Russian and German ruling elites, and therefore a major source of Nazi fears.
Unlike so many of the other historians previously discussed, after the political climate changed Bryant assiduously worked to expunge his suddenly unfashionable views from the written record, and as a consequence went on to enjoy a long and successful career, topped by the accolades of a grateful British establishment. But I suspect that his long-suppressed 1940 volume, presenting a reasonably favorable view of Hitler and Nazi Germany, is probably more accurate and realistic than the many thousands of propaganda-drenched works by others that soon followed. I have now incorporated it into my HTML Books system, so those so interested can read it and decide for themselves.
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- Unfinished VictoryArthur Bryant • 1940 • 79,000 Words
Help me understand Munich. We’ve all been taught that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s demands on the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland which, in turn, fueled Hitler’s lust for global conquest. But was that really what happened? And was “appeasement” really such a bad idea or should the European leaders have accepted that Versailles was a disaster from the get-go and agreed to Hitler’s demands to restore Germany’s original borders?
Ron Unz—The First World War had led to the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian, Czarist, and Ottoman empires, each of which had been politically dominated by one ethnic group at the expense of all the others. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Versailles Peace Conference had elevated the principle that nationalities should be given freedom and ruled by their own leaders, and this had served as the logical basis for most of the successor states thus created.
However, there was a blatant double standard in the political application of this policy, with the creation of the new country of Czechoslovakia being one of the most obvious examples. Like the much larger Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia was stitched together from several entirely different nationalities, with roughly half the population being the ruling Czechs and the other half being Germans, Slovaks, and Ukrainians, who had little political power and deeply resented the domination of the Czechs, who completely controlled the government and its administration.
Czechoslovakia had been established as an important strategic ally for France to use against Germany, geographically serving as an ideal staging area for bombing attacks, almost amounting to an unsinkable aircraft carrier directly jutting into the heart of its German neighbor. Since the country was intentionally designed to threaten Germany, the overwhelmingly German Sudetenland region had been included so as to strengthen its geographical border defenses. The Germans were actually the second largest nationality within Czechoslovakia, so the very name amounted to dishonest propaganda, and something like Czecho-Germania might have been a little more accurate.
One of Hitler’s main goals was to free the suppressed German populations of Central Europe and reunite them with their German homeland and this included the more than 3 million Sudeten Germans. The Czech government was also quite friendly with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and therefore seemed a particularly menacing potential military threat, a possible future base for Soviet attacks against Germany.
Hitler gradually rebuilt Germany’s strength and by March 1938 managed to reunite his country with the Germans of Austria, accomplished with the overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of the latter. He then demanded that the Sudeten Germans be freed by the Czechs and allowed to unify with Germany as well, being willing to potentially risk a wider European war with the British, French, and Soviets on that issue. To avoid this, the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy together negotiated an agreement at Munich, allowing the Sudeten Germans to secede and join Germany. This peace agreement was wildly popular across nearly all of Europe.
However, once the Germans had been allowed to secede from Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks soon also did the same, establishing their own independent state of Slovakia (just as happened once again in 1993), and the entire country fell apart. At that point, Poland also grabbed a piece of disputed territory and the Hungarians threatened to do the same, so according to most accounts that I’ve read, the desperate Czech president turned to Hitler for support, and what was left of the country became a German protectorate.
Although anti-German propaganda soon portrayed the loss of Czech independence as a flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement, proof that Hitler couldn’t be trusted to keep his promises, the situation was really not so clear-cut since Czechoslovakia had already fallen apart and no longer existed. Furthermore, the Czechs had only been fully independent for twenty years after having previously spent nearly 700 years under German suzerainty, so in many respects, this merely restored the the traditional geopolitical arrangements in that part of Europe, doing so far more peacefully than when the Soviets invaded and occupied the Baltic States the following year.
Ironically enough, the Munich agreement signed by Chamberlain was reportedly so tremendously popular in Britain that if he’d called elections soon afterward, he probably would have won an overwhelming majority in Parliament, strongly consolidating his political hold over the British government for the next few years.
For those interested in a much more detailed discussion of this important history, I’d recommend the 1961 classic The Origins of the Second World War by renowned Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor as well as David Irving’s outstanding 1991 volume Hitler’s War, available in HTML format on this website:
- Hitler’s War
David Irving • 1991 • 397,000 Words
Another excellent book covering this complex history is 1939: The War Had Many Fathers, published in 2011 by Gerd Schultze-Rhonof, a fully mainstream German professional military man, who rose to the rank of major-general in the German army before retiring. I’d also recommend David L. Hoggan’s extremely detailed narrative history in The Forced War, whose English version was originally published in 1989 and was long unavailable.
- The Forced War
When Peaceful Revisionism Failed
David L. Hoggan • 1989 • 320,000 Words
I should mention that both Schultze-Rhonof and Hoggan view these events somewhat differently than I have presented, with the former sharply condemning Hitler’s move into Czechia as a serious violation of the Munich Agreement and the latter arguing that the British government under Lord Halifax’s influence had always intended to orchestrate a war against Germany and was merely using the Munich Agreement as ruse to gain additional time for full rearmament before attacking.
Question 3: Churchill “The Drunken Poltroon”
I can’t make any sense of Churchill’s behavior prior to the war. Why was he so eager to declare war on Germany over a German territorial dispute with Poland many hundreds of miles away from his own country? Why did he think that should involve England? Besides, Churchill clearly had no way to transport British troops to Poland to defend the country nor would the battered British army have fared well against the better-trained and equipped Wehrmacht. In your book, Understanding World War II, you suggest that Churchill had benefactors who may have been pulling his strings and persuading him to do things that were clearly not in his country’s best interests. Is that what was going on, was Churchill just following a script that was written by others?
Ron Unz—Actually, Churchill only became a member of the British government on the day that war was declared against Germany, but he had indeed been strongly pressing from the outside for an anti-German policy by Chamberlain’s government, so the issue remains.
When I first encountered David Irving’s important historical work a few years ago, my biggest surprise was not the new information he provided about Hitler but the astonishing facts he revealed about Churchill. As I explained in my 2019 article on World War II:
I recently decided to tackle one of Irving’s much longer works, the first volume of Churchill’s War, a classic text that runs some 300,000 words and covers the story of the legendary British prime minister to the eve of Barbarossa, and I found it just as outstanding as I had expected.
As one small indicator of Irving’s candor and knowledge, he repeatedly if briefly refers to the 1940 Allied plans to suddenly attack the USSR and destroy its Baku oilfields, an utterly disastrous proposal that surely would have lost the war if actually carried out. By contrast, the exceptionally embarrassing facts of Operation Pike have been totally excluded from virtually all later Western accounts of the conflict, leaving one to wonder which of our numerous professional historians are merely ignorant and which are guilty of lying by omission.
Until recently, my familiarity with Churchill had been rather cursory, and Irving’s revelations were absolutely eye-opening. Perhaps the most striking single discovery was the remarkable venality and corruption of the man, with Churchill being a huge spendthrift who lived lavishly and often far beyond his financial means, employing an army of dozens of personal servants at his large country estate despite frequently lacking any regular and assured sources of income to maintain them. This predicament naturally put him at the mercy of those individuals willing to support his sumptuous lifestyle in exchange for determining his political activities. And somewhat similar pecuniary means were used to secure the backing of a network of other political figures from across all the British parties, who became Churchill’s close political allies.
To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating war. The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government. A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire intent upon promoting a war against Germany. Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s involvement in this sordid behavior are recounted in an Irving chapter aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”
Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted. I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution would surely have saved tens of millions of lives.
My impression is that individuals of low personal character are those most likely to sell out the interests of their own country in exchange for large sums of foreign money, and as such usually constitute the natural targets of nefarious plotters and foreign spies. Churchill certainly seems to fall into this category, with rumors of massive personal corruption swirling around him from early in his political career. Later, he supplemented his income by engaging in widespread art-forgery, a fact that Roosevelt eventually discovered and probably used as a point of personal leverage against him. Also quite serious was Churchill’s constant state of drunkenness, with his inebriation being so widespread as to constitute clinical alcoholism. Indeed, Irving notes that in his private conversations FDR routinely referred to Churchill as “a drunken bum.”
During the late 1930s, Churchill and his clique of similarly bought-and-paid-for political allies had endlessly attacked and denounced Chamberlain’s government for its peace policy, and he regularly made the wildest sort of unsubstantiated accusations, claiming the Germans were undertaking a huge military build-up aimed against Britain. Such roiling charges were often widely echoed by a media heavily influenced by Jewish interests and did much to poison the state of German-British relations. Eventually, these accumulated pressures forced Chamberlain into the extremely unwise act of providing an unconditional guarantee of military backing to Poland’s irresponsible dictatorship. As a result, the Poles then rather arrogantly refused any border negotiations with Germany, thereby lighting the fuse which eventually led to the German invasion six months later and the subsequent British declaration of war. The British media had widely promoted Churchill as the leading pro-war political figure, and once Chamberlain was forced to create a wartime government of national unity, his leading critic was brought into it and given the naval affairs portfolio.
Following his lightening six-week defeat of Poland, Hitler unsuccessfully sought to make peace with the Allies, and the war went into abeyance. Then in early 1940, Churchill persuaded his government to try strategically outflanking the Germans by preparing a large sea-borne invasion of neutral Norway; but Hitler discovered the plan and preempted the attack, with Churchill’s severe operational mistakes leading to a surprising defeat for the vastly superior British forces. During World War I, Churchill’s Gallipoli disaster had forced his resignation from the British Cabinet, but this time the friendly media helped ensure that all the blame for the somewhat similar debacle at Narvik was foisted upon Chamberlain, so it was the latter who was forced to resign, with Churchill then replacing him as prime minister. British naval officers were appalled that the primary architect of their humiliation had become its leading political beneficiary, but reality is what the media reports, and the British public never discovered this great irony.
This incident was merely the first of the long series of Churchill’s major military failures and outright betrayals that are persuasively recounted by Irving, nearly all of which were subsequently airbrushed out of our hagiographic histories of the conflict. We should recognize that wartime leaders who spend much of their time in a state of drunken stupor are far less likely to make optimal decisions, especially if they are extremely prone to military micro-management as was the case with Churchill.
In the spring of 1940, the Germans launched their sudden armored thrust into France via Belgium, and as the attack began to succeed, Churchill ordered the commanding British general to immediately flee with his forces to the coast and to do so without informing his French or Belgium counterparts of the huge gap he was thereby opening in the Allied front-lines, thus ensuring the encirclement and destruction of their armies. Following France’s resulting defeat and occupation, the British prime minister then ordered a sudden, surprise attack on the disarmed French fleet, completely destroying it and killing some 2,000 of his erstwhile allies; the immediate cause was his mistranslation of a single French word, but this “Pearl Harbor-type” incident continued to rankle French leaders for decades.
Hitler had always wanted friendly relations with Britain and certainly had sought to avoid the war that had been forced upon him. With France now defeated and British forces driven from the Continent, he therefore offered very magnanimous peace terms and a new German alliance to Britain. The British government had been pressured into entering the war for no logical reason and against its own national interests, so Chamberlain and half the Cabinet naturally supported commencing peace negotiations, and the German proposal probably would have received overwhelming approval both from the British public and political elites if they had ever been informed of its terms.
But despite some occasional wavering, Churchill remained absolutely adamant that the war must continue, and Irving plausibly argues that his motive was an intensely personal one. Across his long career, Churchill had had a remarkable record of repeated failure, and for him to have finally achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming prime minister only to lose a major war just weeks after reaching Number 10 Downing Street would have ensured that his permanent place in history was an extremely humiliating one. On the other hand, if he managed to continue the war, perhaps the situation might somehow later improve, especially if the Americans could be persuaded to eventually enter the conflict on the British side.
Since ending the war with Germany was in his nation’s interest but not his own, Churchill undertook ruthless means to prevent peace sentiments from growing so strong that they overwhelmed his opposition. Along with most other major countries, Britain and Germany had signed international conventions prohibiting the aerial bombardment of civilian urban targets, and although the British leader had very much hoped the Germans would attack his cities, Hitler scrupulously followed these provisions. In desperation, Churchill therefore ordered a series of large-scale bombing raids against the German capital of Berlin, doing considerable damage, and after numerous severe warnings, Hitler finally began to retaliate with similar attacks against British cities. The population saw the heavy destruction inflicted by these German bombing raids and was never informed of the British attacks that had preceded and provoked them, so public sentiment greatly hardened against making peace with the seemingly diabolical German adversary.
In his memoirs published a half-century later, Prof. Revilo P. Oliver, who had held a senior wartime role in American Military Intelligence, described this sequence of events in very bitter terms:
Great Britain, in violation of all the ethics of civilized warfare that had theretofore been respected by our race, and in treacherous violation of solemnly assumed diplomatic covenants about “open cities”, had secretly carried out intensive bombing of such open cities in Germany for the express purpose of killing enough unarmed and defenceless men and women to force the German government reluctantly to retaliate and bomb British cities and thus kill enough helpless British men, women, and children to generate among Englishmen enthusiasm for the insane war to which their government had committed them.
It is impossible to imagine a governmental act more vile and more depraved than contriving death and suffering for its own people — for the very citizens whom it was exhorting to “loyalty” — and I suspect that an act of such infamous and savage treason would have nauseated even Genghis Khan or Hulagu or Tamerlane, Oriental barbarians universally reprobated for their insane blood-lust. History, so far as I recall, does not record that they ever butchered their own women and children to facilitate lying propaganda….In 1944 members of British Military Intelligence took it for granted that after the war Marshal Sir Arthur Harris would be hanged or shot for high treason against the British people…
Churchill walks through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1941
Churchill’s ruthless violation of the laws of war regarding urban aerial bombardment directly led to the destruction of many of Europe’s finest and most ancient cities. But perhaps influenced by his chronic drunkenness, he later sought to carry out even more horrifying war crimes and was only prevented from doing so by the dogged opposition of all his military and political subordinates.
Along with the laws prohibiting the bombing of cities, all nations had similarly agreed to ban the first use of poison gas, while stockpiling quantities for necessary retaliation. Since Germany was the world-leader in chemistry, the Nazis had produced the most lethal forms of new nerve gases, such as Tabun and Sarin, whose use might have easily resulted in major military victories on both the Eastern and Western fronts, but Hitler had scrupulously obeyed the international protocols that his nation had signed. However, late in the war during 1944 the relentless Allied bombardment of German cities led to the devastating retaliatory attacks of the V-1 flying bombs against London, and an outraged Churchill became adamant that German cities should be attacked with poison gas in counter-retaliation. If Churchill had gotten his way, many millions of British might soon have perished from German nerve gas counter-strikes. Around the same time, Churchill was also blocked in his proposal to bombard Germany with hundreds of thousands of deadly anthrax bombs, an operation that might have rendered much of Central and Western Europe uninhabitable for generations.
I found Irving’s revelations on all these matters absolutely astonishing, and was deeply grateful that Deborah Lipstadt and her army of diligent researchers had carefully investigated and seemingly confirmed the accuracy of virtually every single item.
The two existing volumes of Irving’s Churchill masterwork total well over 700,000 words, and reading them would obviously consume weeks of dedicated effort. Fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker and several of his extended lectures on the topic are available for viewing on BitChute after having been recently purged from YouTube:
- American Pravda: Understanding World War II
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2019 • 20,500 Words
Irving’s 1987 Churchill book had laid bare his subject’s extremely lavish lifestyle as well as his lack of any solid income, together with the dramatic political consequences of that dangerous combination. This shocking historical picture was fully confirmed in 2015 by a noted financial expert whose book focused entirely on Churchill’s tangled finances, and did so with full cooperative access to his subject’s family archives. The story told by David Lough in No More Champagne is actually far more extreme than what had been described by Irving almost three decades earlier, with the author even suggesting that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was almost unprecedented for anyone in public or private life.
For example, at the very beginning of his book, Lough explains that Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, the same day that German forces began their invasion of the Low Countries and France. But aside from those huge military and political challenges, Britain’s new wartime leader also faced an entirely different crisis as well, being unable to cover his personal bills, debt interest, or tax payments, all of which were due at the end of the month, thereby forcing him to desperately obtain a huge secret payment from the same Austrian Jewish businessman who had previously rescued him financially. Stories like this may reveal the hidden side of larger geopolitical developments, which sometimes only come to light many decades later.
The unacknowledged influence of secret payments to our own national leaders may be similar. George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley, a very prominent mainstream legal expert, recently published a column in The Hill expressing his total outrage that the American media was completely ignoring the massive corruption scandal involving Biden family members, who had received at least $10 million in secret financial payments from overseas interests. And just a few days ago, we learned that those payments to the Bidens had been made by a Ukrainian billionaire, perhaps helping to explain our current military confrontation with Russia over that country. Over the last year, Joseph Biden has sometimes been praised as another Winston Churchill, and that characterization may indeed be correct but not in the way intended.
Why was FDR so eager to drag the United States into a war that posed no threat to US national security? It seems to me, that FDR’s decision may have been shaped—not by principle—but by the expectation that if the industrial centers of Europe were left in ruins, the US would unavoidably emerge as the lone global superpower. That, of course, turned out to be exactly what happened. But keep in mind, the “tipping-point” Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, whereas, D-Day took place in June, 1944. What that means, is that the United States did not enter the conflict for a whole 16 months after it was certain that Germany would lose the war. In other words, the US invasion was basically a mop-up operation aimed at ensuring US hegemony over western Europe while preventing the Soviet Union from spreading communism across the continent. (Perhaps, you disagree with my analysis??)
What can you tell us about FDR and his motivation to enter the war? Was it entirely his decision or were there other factors involved?
Ron Unz—It’s possible that FDR envisioned that a European war would lead to the destruction of industrialized Europe as an competitor and the establishment of American global hegemony. But I think his motivation for American involvement in a war was actually much simpler than that.
America had been hit especially hard by the Great Depression and although FDR had reached the White House based upon his promise to end it, after five years in office, his policies had largely failed.
The American economy had also been weak in 1914, but once the First World War broke out, the huge needs of the Allied countries boosted our industrial production to new heights, resulting in American prosperity. Similarly, many mainstream history books admit that it was only the outbreak of World War II in 1939 that finally pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression, but they never consider the possibility that FDR might have deliberately provoked the war for that purpose. However, as I wrote in 2018, there seems strong contemporaneous evidence to that effect:
During the 1930s, John T. Flynn was one of America’s most influential progressive journalists, and although he had begun as a strong supporter of Roosevelt and his New Deal, he gradually became a sharp critic, concluding that FDR’s various governmental schemes had failed to revive the American economy. Then in 1937 a new economic collapse spiked unemployment back to the same levels as when the president had first entered office, confirming Flynn in his harsh verdict. And as I wrote last year:
Indeed, Flynn alleges that by late 1937, FDR had turned towards an aggressive foreign policy aimed at involving the country in a major foreign war, primarily because he believed that this was the only route out of his desperate economic and political box, a stratagem not unknown among national leaders throughout history. In his January 5, 1938 New Republic column, he alerted his disbelieving readers to the looming prospect of a large naval military build-up and warfare on the horizon after a top Roosevelt adviser had privately boasted to him that a large bout of “military Keynesianism” and a major war would cure the country’s seemingly insurmountable economic problems. At that time, war with Japan, possibly over Latin American interests, seemed the intended goal, but developing events in Europe soon persuaded FDR that fomenting a general war against Germany was the best course of action. Memoirs and other historical documents obtained by later researchers seem to generally support Flynn’s accusations by indicating that Roosevelt ordered his diplomats to exert enormous pressure upon both the British and Polish governments to avoid any negotiated settlement with Germany, thereby leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The last point is an important one since the confidential opinions of those closest to important historical events should be accorded considerable evidentiary weight. In a recent article John Wear mustered the numerous contemporaneous assessments that implicated FDR as a pivotal figure in orchestrating the world war by his constant pressure upon the British political leadership, a policy that he privately even admitted could mean his impeachment if revealed. Among other testimony, we have the statements of the Polish and British ambassadors to Washington and the American ambassador to London, who also passed along the concurring opinion of Prime Minister Chamberlain himself. Indeed, the German capture and publication of secret Polish diplomatic documents in 1939 had already revealed much of this information, and William Henry Chamberlin confirmed their authenticity in his 1950 book. But since the mainstream media never reported any of this information, these facts remain little known even today.
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943
So according to Flynn’s January 1938 account, FDR and his advisors had originally viewed a possible war with Japan as the key to America’s economic revival, but they subsequently shifted their focus to a European war against Germany instead, and I think a turning point may have been the widespread Kristallnacht riots against German Jews in November 1938, following the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish activist. These attacks outraged the very influential Jewish communities of America and Europe, completely undoing any positive consequences of the Munich Agreement a couple of months earlier and focused intense international hostility against Hitler’s Germany, which had previously worked out reasonably amicable relations with its small Jewish population while establishing an important economic partnership with the rising Zionist movement.
Ironically enough, according to Irving’s very detailed reconstruction, Hitler had nothing to do with the anti-Jewish riots and urgently sought to suppress them once they began. Instead, the attacks seem to have been orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, his powerful Propaganda Minister, who had recently fallen from favor because of his high-profile love affair with a Czech actress, leading to the bitter complaints of his wife, a close friend of Hitler. Goebbels apparently hoped he could use the anti-Jewish riots to restore his influence in the Nazi hierarchy, but they instead had disastrous consequences, thus raising the remarkable possibility that the political fallout from an extra-marital affair may have played a crucial role in the outbreak of World War II.
Recently, I’ve watched a number of David Irving videos on Rumble all of which are extremely persuasive. I really have a hard time understanding why powerful Jewish groups characterize Irving as an antisemite. What’s that all about? It seems to me that he’s just providing evidence from “primary source” material that he’s acquired from personal interviews or historical archives. In other words, he’s just doing what you would expect any credible historian to do, presenting the facts without ‘fear or favor’. Can you help me understand why these Jewish groups are so hostile to Irving?
Ron Unz—Irving’s research methodology has always relied heavily upon the use of documentary material and as he spent years working on his landmark Hitler biography, he gradually realized that there seemed to be no such evidence that the German dictator had approved or even been aware of any Jewish extermination project, strongly suggesting that he had had nothing to do with it. Jewish activist groups had come to regard Hitler as a demonic figure, so they bitterly resented those unorthodox conclusions from such a world-famous historian, and as I explained in 2018, their attacks enormously escalated after he later agreed to testify as an expert witness in a Canadian trial:
Fred Leuchter was widely regarded as one of America’s leading expert specialists on the technology of executions, and a long article in The Atlantic treated him as such. During the 1980s, Ernst Zundel, a prominent Canadian Holocaust Denier, was facing trial for his disbelief in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and one of his expert witnesses was an American prison warden with some experience in such systems, who recommended involving Leuchter, one of the foremost figures in the field. Leuchter soon took a trip to Poland and closely inspected the purported Auschwitz gas chambers, then published the Leuchter Report, concluding that they were obviously a fraud and could not possibly have worked in the manner Holocaust scholars had always claimed. The ferocious attacks which followed soon cost him his entire business career and destroyed his marriage.
David Irving had ranked as the world’s most successful World War II historian, with his books selling in the millions amid glowing coverage in the top British newspapers when he agreed to appear as an expert witness at the Zundel trial. He had always previously accepted the conventional Holocaust narrative, but reading the Leuchter Report changed his mind, and he concluded that the Auschwitz gas chambers were just a myth. He was quickly subjected to unrelenting media attacks, which first severely damaged and then ultimately destroyed his very illustrious publishing career, and he later even served time in an Austrian prison for his unacceptable views.
Although Irving has never been directly focused on Holocaust issues, in some of his presentations he has emphasized the total lack of any documentary evidence to support the standard narrative, an extremely suspicious fact given the massive scale of the alleged extermination project and the notorious German tendency for meticulous record-keeping.
In my previous interview, I’d already discussed many of the reasons I’m so extremely skeptical of the reality of the Holocaust, so there’s no need for me to repeat those arguments here.
- Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
Question 7: The Holocaust
However, I’d like to add the important point that once I read the books of leading mainstream Holocaust scholars such as Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Peter Novick, I found that their contents actually provided some considerable evidence against the historical reality of their central topic. As I explained in 2018:
These days, my morning newspapers seem to carry Holocaust-related stories with astonishing frequency, and probably no event of the twentieth century looms so large in our public consciousness. According to survey data, even as far back as 1995, some 97% of Americans knew of the Holocaust, far more than were aware of the Pearl Harbor attack or America’s use of the atomic bombs against Japan, while less than half our citizenry were aware that the Soviet Union had been our wartime ally. But I’d suspect that anyone who drew his knowledge from the mainstream newspapers and history books during the first couple of decades after the end of the Second World War might never have even been aware that any Holocaust had actually occurred.
In 1999 Peter Novick published a book on this general theme entitled The Holocaust in American Life, citing that survey, and his introduction began by noting the very strange pattern the Holocaust exhibited in its cultural influence, which seems quite unique among all major historical events. In the case of almost all other searing historical occurrences such as the massive bloodshed of the Somme or the bitter Vietnam War, their greatest impact upon popular consciousness and media came soon afterward, with the major books and films often appearing within the first five or ten years when memories were fresh, and the influence peaking within a couple of decades, after which they were gradually forgotten.
Yet in the case of the Holocaust, this pattern was completely reversed. Hardly anyone discussed it for the first twenty years after the end of the World War II, while it gradually moved to the center of American life in the 1970s, just as wartime memories were fading and many of the most prominent and knowledgeable figures from that era had departed the scene. Novick cites numerous studies and surveys demonstrating that this lack of interest and visibility certainly included the Jewish community itself, which had seemingly suffered so greatly under those events, yet apparently had almost completely forgotten about them during the 1950s and much of the 1960s.
I can certainly confirm that impression from my personal experience. Prior to the mid- or late-1970s, I had had only the vaguest impression that virtually all the Jews and Gypsies of Europe had been exterminated during the Second World War, and although the term “Holocaust” was in widespread use, it invariably referred to a “Nuclear Holocaust,” a term long-since supplanted and scarcely used today. Then, after the Berlin Wall fell, I was quite surprised to discover that Eastern Europe was still filled with vast numbers of unexterminated Gypsies, who quickly flooded into the West and provoked all sorts of political controversies.
I found even more striking material in a widely-praised research study by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, Book Review Editor of the Journal of Holocaust Studies. Descriptively subtitled “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army,” his volume ran more than 500 pages with 1350 endnotes and was based upon ten years of archival research, but when I read it in 2019, I discovered an extremely strange omission:
Oliver’s peremptory dismissal of the standard Holocaust narrative led me to take a closer look at the treatment of the same topic in Bendersky’s book, and I noticed something quite odd. As discussed above, his exhaustive research in official files and personal archives conclusively established that during World War II a very considerable fraction of all our Military Intelligence officers and top generals were vehemently hostile to Jewish organizations and also held beliefs that today would be regarded as utterly delusional. The author’s academic specialty is Holocaust studies, so it is hardly surprising that his longest chapter focused on that particular subject, bearing the title “Officers and the Holocaust, 1940-1945.” But a close examination of the contents raises some troubling questions.
Across more than sixty pages, Bendersky provides hundreds of direct quotes, mostly from the same officers who are the subject of the rest of his book. But after carefully reading the chapter twice, I was unable to find a single one of those statements referring to the massive slaughter of Jews that constitutes what we commonly call the Holocaust, nor to any of its central elements, such as the existence of death camps or gas chambers.
The forty page chapter that follows focuses on the plight of the Jewish “survivors” in post-war Europe, and the same utter silence applies. Bendersky is disgusted by the cruel sentiments expressed by these American military men towards the Jewish former camp inmates, and he frequently quotes them characterizing the latter as thieves, liars, and criminals; but the officers seem strangely unaware that those unfortunate souls had only just barely escaped an organized mass extermination campaign that had so recently claimed the lives of the vast majority of their fellows. Numerous statements and quotes regarding Jewish extermination are provided, but all of these come from various Jewish activists and organizations, while there is nothing but silence from all of the military officers themselves.
Bendersky’s ten years of archival research brought to light personal letters and memoirs of military officers written decades after the end of the war, and in both those chapters he freely quotes from these invaluable materials, sometimes including private remarks from the late 1970s, long after the Holocaust had become a major topic in American public life. Yet not a single statement of sadness, regret, or horror is provided. Thus, a prominent Holocaust historian spends a decade researching a book about the private views of our military officers towards Jews and Jewish topics, but the one hundred pages he devotes to the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath contains not a single directly-relevant quote from those individuals, which is simply astonishing. A yawning chasm seems to exist at the center of his lengthy historical volume, or put another way, a particular barking dog is quite deafening in its silence.
I am not an archival researcher and have no interest in reviewing the many tens of thousands of pages of source material located at dozens of repositories across the country that Bendersky so diligently examined while producing his important book. Perhaps during their entire wartime activity and also the decades of their later lives, not a single one of the hundred-odd important military officers who were the focus of his investigation ever once broached the subject of the Holocaust or the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But I think there is another distinct possibility.
As mentioned earlier, Beaty spent his war years carefully reviewing the sum-total of all incoming intelligence information each day and then producing an official digest for distribution to the White House and our other top leaders. And in his 1951 book, published just a few years after the end of fighting, he dismissed the supposed Holocaust as a ridiculous wartime concoction by dishonest Jewish and Communist propagandists that had no basis in reality. Soon afterward, Beaty’s book was fully endorsed and promoted by many of our leading World War II generals, including those who were subjects of Bendersky’s archival research. And although the ADL and various other Jewish organizations fiercely denounced Beaty, there is no sign that they ever challenged his absolutely explicit “Holocaust denial.”
I suspect that Bendersky gradually discovered that such “Holocaust denial” was remarkably common in the private papers of many of his Military Intelligence officers and top generals, which presented him with a serious dilemma. If only one or two of those individuals had expressed such sentiments, their shocking statements could be cited as further evidence of their delusional anti-Semitism. But what if a substantial majority of those officers—who certainly had possessed the best knowledge of the reality of World War II—held private beliefs that were very similar to those publicly expressed by their former colleagues Beaty and Oliver? In such a situation, Bendersky may have decided that certain closed doors should remain in that state, and entirely skirted the topic.
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words - American Pravda: Secrets of Military Intelligence
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2019 • 12,500 Words
Question 6: WWII and Ukraine, Connecting the Dots
In our last interview, you challenged two of the most widely-accepted claims about World War 2, that:
- Hitler started WW2
- Hitler’s invasion of Poland was the first step in a broader campaign aimed at world domination
You showed that both of these are not true. Even so, they are still accepted as fact by the vast majority of people in the West. My concern, is that this same pattern is repeating itself in Ukraine where we’ve been told repeatedly that the war was an “unprovoked aggression” by an imperialist Putin who sees Ukraine as merely the first step in restoring the Soviet Empire. This is the prevailing narrative we read in the media about Ukraine, but is it true?
In your opinion, who started the war in Ukraine and why is it important that our record of events be based on historical facts and not on the fabrications of political partisans?
Ron Unz—When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I’d almost immediately noticed the remarkable parallels to Germany’s invasion of Poland, which caused the outbreak of World War II. In each case, influential Western interests had heavily orchestrated the war by encouraging powerful provocations while blocking any reasonable negotiations, so I quickly published an article emphasizing this historical analogy and pointing out that America had clearly been responsible for the Ukraine war.
Although FoxNews has become one of the outlets most rabidly hostile to Russia, a recent interview with one of their regular guests provided a very different perspective. Col. Douglas Macgregor had been a former top Pentagon advisor and he forcefully explained that America had spent nearly fifteen years ignoring Putin’s endless warnings that he would not tolerate NATO membership for Ukraine, nor the deployment of strategic missiles on his border. Our government had paid no heed to his explicit red-lines, so Putin was finally compelled to act, resulting in the current calamity:
Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, one of our most distinguished political scientists, had spent many years making exactly these same points and blaming America and NATO for the simmering Ukraine crisis, but his warnings had been totally ignored by our political leadership and media. His hour-long lecture explaining these unpleasant realities had quietly sat on Youtube for six years, attracting relatively little attention, but then suddenly exploded in popularity over the last few weeks as the conflict unfolded, and has now reached a worldwide audience of over 17 million. His other Youtube lectures, some quite recent, have been watched by additional millions.
Such massive global attention finally forced our media to take notice, and the New Yorker solicited an interview with Mearsheimer, allowing him to explain to his disbelieving questioner that American actions had clearly provoked the conflict. A couple of years earlier, that same interviewer had ridiculed Prof. Cohen for doubting the reality of Russiagate, but this time he seemed much more respectful, perhaps because the balance of media power was now reversed; his magazine’s 1.2 million subscriber-base was dwarfed by the global audience listening to the views of his subject.
- Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
Isaac Chotiner • The New Yorker • March 1, 2022 • 3,900 WordsDuring his long and distinguished career at the CIA, former analyst Ray McGovern had run the Soviet Policy Branch and also served as the Presidential Briefer, so under different circumstances he or someone like him would currently be advising President Joe Biden. Instead, a few days ago he joined Mearsheimer in presenting his views in a video discussion hosted by the Committee for the Republic. Both leading experts agreed that Putin had been pushed beyond all reasonable limits, provoking the invasion.
Prior to 2014 our relations with Putin had been reasonably good. Ukraine served as a neutral buffer state between Russia and the NATO countries, with the population evenly divided between Russian-leaning and West-leaning elements, and its elected government oscillating between the two camps.
But while Putin’s attention was focused on the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, a pro-NATO coup overthrew the democratically-elected pro-Russian government, with clear evidence that Victoria Nuland and the other Neocons grouped around Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had orchestrated it. Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula contains Russia’s crucial Sevastopol naval base, and only Putin’s swift action allowed it to remain under Russian control, while he also provided support for break-away pro-Russian enclaves in the Donbass region. The Minsk agreement later signed by the Ukrainian government granted autonomy to those latter areas, but Kiev refused to honor its commitments, and instead continued to shell the area, inflicting serious casualties upon the inhabitants, many of whom held Russian passports. Diana Johnstone has aptly characterized our policy as years of Russian bear-baiting.
As Mearsheimer, McGovern, and other observers have persuasively argued, Russia invaded Ukraine only after such endless provocations and warnings were always ignored or dismissed by our American leadership. Perhaps the final straw had been the recent public statement by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he intended to acquire nuclear weapons. How would America react if a democratically-elected pro-American government in Mexico had been overthrown in a coup backed by China, with the fiercely hostile new Mexican government spending years killing American citizens in its country and then finally announcing plans to acquire a nuclear arsenal?
Moreover, some analysts such as economist Michael Hudson have strongly suspected that American elements deliberately provoked the Russian invasion for geostrategic reasons, and Mike Whitney advanced similar arguments in a column that went super-viral, accumulating over 800,000 pageviews. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline carrying Russian natural gas to Germany had finally been completed last year and was about to go into operation, which would have greatly increased Eurasian economic integration and Russian influence in Europe, while eliminating the potential market for more expensive American natural gas. The Russian attack and the massive resulting media hysteria have now foreclosed that possibility.
So although it was Russian troops who crossed the Ukrainian border, a strong case can be made that they did so only after the most extreme provocations, and these may have been deliberately intended to produce exactly that result. Sometimes the parties responsible for starting a war are not necessarily those that eventually fire the first shot.
Just days after the war began, I pointed out that the total demonization of Russia and Vladimir Putin by our media and government seemed exactly similar to how they had treated Germany and Adolf Hitler three generations earlier.
Such international retaliation against Russia and individual Russians seems extremely disproportionate. As yet the fighting in Ukraine has inflicted minimal death or destruction, while the various other major wars of the last two decades, many of them American in origin, had killed millions and completely destroyed several countries, including Iraq, Libya, and Syria. But the global dominance of American media propaganda has orchestrated a very different popular response, producing this remarkable crescendo of hatred.
Indeed, the closest parallel that comes to mind would be the American hostility directed against Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, as indicated by the widespread comparisons between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Hitler’s 1939 attack on Poland. A simple Google search for “Putin and Hitler” returns tens of millions of webpages, with the top results ranging from the headline of a Washington Post article to the Tweets of pop music star Stevie Nicks. As far back as 2014, Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer had documented the emerging meme “Putin is the new Hitler.”
Ironically enough, the arguments of Mearsheimer and others that Putin was greatly provoked or possibly even manipulated into attacking Ukraine raise certain intriguing historical parallels. The legions of ignorant Westerners who mindlessly rely upon our disingenuous media may be denouncing Putin as “another Hitler” but I think they may have inadvertently backed themselves into the truth.
- American Pravda: Putin as Hitler?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 7, 2022 • 7,900 Words - American Pravda: World War III and World War II?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 24, 2022 • 4,700 Words
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Why vaccines for children are Big Pharma’s holy grail – Part 1
By Serena Wylde | TCW Defending Freedom | October 18, 2023
James A Shannon, director of the US National Institutes of Health 1955-68, said: ‘No vaccination can be proven safe before it is given to children.’
When he made that statement, it was still possible in the US to sue vaccine manufacturers under tort law for vaccine-induced deaths and injuries, which is no longer the case.
Today the US has the world’s most aggressive vaccine schedule and ranks as the sickest country, with the highest infant mortality, in the developed world. The UK does not lag far behind.
Vaccines carry three separate areas of potential risk. Firstly, they artificially stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies, which temporarily inhibits another part of the body’s defence mechanism. In an infant, whose immune system is just developing, this high demand of energy can in some cases overwhelm its metabolic reserves, and cause brain inflammation. The brain is the highest energy-consuming tissue in the body, followed by the gastro-intestinal tract and the immune system.
Secondly, vaccines contain chemicals, metals and drugs. Thirdly, according to the former pharmaceutical R&D executive Sasha Latypova, traditional vaccines are consistently contaminated with plant and animal proteins which hyper-sensitise the body, especially in children, giving rise to allergies.
In the US in the 1970s there were three inoculations recommended for children… continue
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