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Israel kills 10 Palestinians, injures a hundred in Nablus

MEMO | February 22, 2023

Ten Palestinians have been killed and over a hundred wounded this morning following an Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus.

The Israeli occupation’s military stormed the city with armoured vehicles and blocked off all entrances before surrounding a home with two wanted Palestinians inside. Hossam Isleem and Mohammad Abdulghani, who were both killed.

The Israeli forces demolished the building while the two were inside; their bodies were later identified by the occuption’s forces. Israeli military sources claim the two Palestinians were involved in numerous resistance attacks against illegal Israeli settlements and in the death of a soldier last October.

The Palestinian Health Ministry reported that ten people were killed and 102 others were wounded as a result of gunfire by Israeli occupation soldiers.

Palestinian victims among the dead include 72-year-old Adnan Saabe Baara, 61-year-old Abdul Hadi Abdul Aziz Ashqar, 16-year-old Mohammad Farid Shaaban, 25-year-old Mohammad Khaled Anbousi and 33-year-old Tamer Nimr Minawi.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Brzezinski’s Confession

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 22, 2023

While American interventionists remain stone-cold silent about the way that the Pentagon, operating through its old Cold War dinosaur NATO, knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, it’s instructive to remind ourselves that this wasn’t the first time that the Pentagon provoked Russia into invading another country.

Let’s go back to 1979, when the Pentagon was still waging its old Cold War racket. That was the year that U.S. officials devised a successful plot to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. 

Now, before you exclaim, “Conspiracy theory, Jacob!” which is the standard official response whenever someone criticizes dark-side activities on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, permit me to disclose something important: There is a confession. 

Yes, you read that last part correctly. There is a confession on the part of the national-security establishment that that is precisely what they did. Even for those who are loath to ever acknowledge that the national-security establishment engages in evil, dark-side activity, a confession is rather persuasive evidence that takes matters out of the realm of “conspiracy theory” and places them squarely in the realm of an actual conspiracy.

The confessor was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s national-security advisor in 1979. He confessed that the U.S. knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally provoked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. 

Mind you, Brzezinski didn’t confess until 1998, some 20 years after the Soviet invasion. Therefore, it stands to reason that if anyone raised the possibility in 1979 that the U.S. provoked the invasion, the standard response would have been “Conspiracy theory!” This is especially true given that U.S. officials were playing the innocent after the invasion. With the same degree of indignation and outrage they are displaying with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they castigated and condemned the Russians for their act of aggression against Afghanistan. They even canceled U.S. participation in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Russia, as a way to punish the Russians for invading Afghanistan.

In 1998, Brzezinski gave an interview to a French newspaper in which he confessed all. You can read the interview here. (For a full context of Brzezinski’s confession, see an article at Aljazeera entitled “Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Vietnam.”) He stated that U.S. officials began arming extremist Muslim elements in Afghanistan who were attempting to oust the pro-Russia regime that was controlling Afghanistan. By doing this, the hope was that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan to put down the anti-Russia Jihadists. 

The planned worked. The Soviets invaded, and U.S. officials were ecstatic. Brzezinski proudly stated that the plan had now given the Soviets their own Vietnam. What he was referring to was the 10-year-plus U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which had sacrificed more than 58,000 American soldiers for nothing. U.S. officials were now celebrating the fact that thousands of Russians soldiers were also now going to get sacrificed for nothing. 

Just as U.S. officials had hoped, over the next 10 years more than 14,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. (Some estimates go as high as 26,000). Another 53,753 were wounded. 

Needless to say, the deaths of Russian soldiers made U.S. officials extremely happy because the deaths were degrading the Soviet regime.

What kind of regime does this sort of thing? What kind of regime provokes another regime into invading a country knowing that this will bring massive death and destruction on both sides? What kind of regime celebrates and revels in the fact that foreign soldiers, all of whom have families or friends back home, are being killed and wounded?

I’ll tell you what kind of regime engages in those sorts of things: An evil regime. There is no better way to describe it. 

When Brzezinski was asked about the potential consequences of arming extremist Jihadist groups in Afghanistan, he replied, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Putin Reminded Everyone That Russia Is Using Force To End The War That The West Started

By Andrew Korybko | February 22, 2023

Those who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s hypocritical information warfare narratives into thinking that Russia’s special operation is illegal and immoral should reconsider their stance. Had the Kremlin let the West’s grand strategic scheme unfold without interference, then more ethnic cleansing and genocide would have taken place in Donbass. NATO’s gradual erosion of Russia’s national security red lines and nuclear second-strike capabilities would also have turned it into a vassal state.

One of the weaponized information warfare narratives that the US-led West’s Golden Billion is propagating against Russia is that its ongoing special operation in Ukraine is inherently immoral because the use of force is supposedly never an acceptable way to resolve disputes. Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of the most warmongering civilization in centuries claiming that about another after the West itself is responsible for countless civil wars, coups, hybrid wars, and invasions, the point itself is invalid.

President Putin reminded everyone of this when he said during his annual address on Tuesday that “they were the ones who started this war, while we used force and are using it to stop the war.” This statement of fact builds upon prior such ones that he shared across the past year, most recently during his unexpected press conference in late December. It’s important enough to elaborate upon at this moment in time since many in the West either forgot about it or were never informed in the first place.

The run-up to Russia’s special operation was preceded by the then-Ukrainian Civil War dragging into its eighth year due to Moscow being the only signatory of the Minsk Accords that seriously attempted to implement them. It’s now known from former German Chancellor Merkel that everyone else was just exploiting them to buy time for Kiev’s rearmament ahead of a preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the conflict.

Observers shouldn’t forget that the Ukrainian Civil War broke out in the immediate aftermath of the Western-backed fascist coup in early 2014 that followed months of urban terrorism. The Golden Billion overthrew that country’s international recognized government as part of its grand strategic scheme to gradually erode Russia’s national security with a view towards facilitating their ultimate goal of coercing it into a series of never-ending unilateral concessions aimed at turning it into a vassal state.

Crimea’s democratic reunification with Russia right after that regime change spared the peninsula’s residents from being forced under the fascists’ yoke and also deprived NATO of geostrategic Black Sea bases that could have then threatened all of that targeted country’s southern regions. Donbass wasn’t so fortunate since the Kremlin remained reluctant to recognize its desire to join Russia, however, which was predicated on Moscow’s intentions to peacefully resolve the conflict instead of escalate it.

Russia’s grand strategic goal up to the eve of its special operation last year was to employ the Minsk Accords for that purpose, which was expected to stabilize Ukraine simultaneously with enabling it to function as the geo-economic point of convergence between the EU and the Eurasian Union. That would have in turn advanced Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP), which was envisaged as transforming it into the bridge between Europe/EU and Asia/China and thus accelerating its economic development.

The primary calculation upon which the Kremlin’s expectation of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian Civil War was predicated concerned its belief that the US would prefer to wrap up the European front of the New Cold War with Russia in order to more robustly “Pivot to Asia” to “contain” China. This was a strategically sound prediction but didn’t reflect the reality of US decisionmakers being ideologically driven and instead preferring to “contain” Russia first so as to facilitate China’s “containment” after.

The result is that they and their vassals exploited the Minsk Accords for the earlier mentioned purpose of buying time for Kiev’s rearmament ahead of a preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the Ukrainian Civil War that the US itself provoked in 2014. Russia ultimately wised up to these objectively existing military-strategic dynamics in late 2021, ergo why it put forth its security guarantee requests at that time.

To remind the reader since they might either have forgotten or never been fully informed of them to begin with, Russia asked that: 1) Ukraine return to its constitutional neutrality and finally implement the Minsk Accords; 2) NATO stop expanding eastward; 3) strike weapons be removed from Russia’s borders; 4) the 1997 Russian-NATO Founding Act be revived; and 5) serious talks begin on negotiating a truly indivisible security mechanism for Europe. Suffice to say, the US, NATO, EU, and Ukraine rejected them.

In such a situation, Russia had only two courses of action. The first was to let Kiev launch its preplanned NATO-organized “Operation Storm”-like invasion of Donbass for conclusively ending the Ukrainian Civil War, which would have resulted in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Furthermore, NATO’s clandestine expansion into Ukraine would have continued unimpeded, thus further eroding Russia’s national security red lines, especially concerning its second-strike capabilities via more “missile defenses” there.

The second scenario was to preemptively thwart the aforementioned imminent offensive while also expanding the scope of its military operations beyond Donbass in an attempt to advance some of its other national security interests that were previously explained. The first element of this two-pronged strategy would serve to protect lives while the second was expected to create the conditions for improving Russia’s negotiating position regarding those other issues.

As a self-respecting Great Power that will never voluntarily subjugate itself to being anyone else’s vassal, which is precisely what the Golden Billion was aiming to gradually do to it via the clandestine expansion of NATO into Ukraine, Russia understandably decided upon the second scenario via its special operation. Returning to the point mentioned in the introduction to this analysis, it therefore truly is the case that Russia is using force to end the war that the West started, which thus makes its cause legal and moral.

Those who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s hypocritical information warfare narratives into thinking that Russia’s special operation is illegal and immoral should therefore reconsider their stance. Had the Kremlin let the West’s grand strategic scheme unfold without interference, then more ethnic cleansing and genocide would have taken place in Donbass. NATO’s gradual erosion of Russia’s national security red lines and nuclear second-strike capabilities would also have turned it into a vassal state.

With time, Moscow would have been coerced through nuclear and other forms of blackmail into undertaking a never-ending series of unilateral concessions that might have culminated in the worst-case scenario with its “Balkanization” and/or transformation into an anti-Chinese proxy state. Russia has the UN-enshrined right to defend its national interests, which is the legal basis upon which the special operation was commenced, while its leadership has the moral responsibility to defend its people.

Failing to use force to end the war that the West started would therefore have been an abdication of Russia’s moral responsibility to its people and the voluntary surrendering of its international legal rights. Those folks who’ve been manipulated by the Golden Billion’s information warfare campaign into becoming radical “peaceniks” are thus actually functioning as “useful idiots” of neo-imperialism since Russia would have been submitting to such a scenario by not launching its special operation.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

West unwilling to cooperate on Nord Stream probe: Russian diplomat

Press TV – February 22, 2023

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations has once again accused the United States of being behind the explosions on Nord stream gas pipelines in September last year, saying the national investigations of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden into the sabotage are aimed at protecting Washington.

Vasily Nebenzia made the remarks at a UN Security Council session in New York on Tuesday, stressing that Western countries were showing no intention of cooperating with Moscow in an inquiry into the blasts.

“We have strong reasons to doubt the effectiveness, transparency, and impartiality of investigations that are being carried out under some national jurisdictions,” Nebenzia said, adding, “We do not see our partners being eager to cooperate.”

The senior diplomat also noted that “the so-called investigations by Scandinavian states and Germany into the incident not only lack transparency but are aimed at covering up the tracks and exculpating the big American brother.”

Nebenzia said Russia was not allowed to partake in the probe, and all its requests “are ignored with arrogance.”

Nebenzia further explained that Germany, Denmark, and Sweden had ignored Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s communications last October regarding the participation of Russian energy giant Gazprom and other relevant agencies in the investigations.

He said, “Since we talk about a crime that was committed by means of an explosive device, which makes it subject to the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings of 15 December 1997, we expect that all states that have to do with the incident, namely the US, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, will fulfill their obligations under this document.”

“But leadership of these states do not show any political will or rather do not have any,” the Russian diplomat said.

On September 26, 2022, a series of explosions took place on the pipelines, knocking out three of the four strings of the Nord Stream network, off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.

Two of the pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, known as Nord Stream 2, was not yet operational.

Following the blasts, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden conducted investigations into the incident. The preliminary results of a joint probe by Sweden and Denmark showed that the explosions had been “intentional sabotage,” but responsibility was not assigned to any party.

American journalist Seymour Hersh recently claimed that the bombing of the pipelines had been directly ordered by US President Joe Biden and carried out by the CIA with the help of the US Navy.

The White House rejected the report as “utterly false and complete fiction.”

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-minister charged for revealing state secrets

RT | February 22, 2023

Denmark’s former Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen has been charged with divulging state secrets, after claiming Danish military intelligence worked with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on a number of foreign officials, among them ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Frederiksen confirmed the charges in a Facebook post on Tuesday, saying he had been indicted for the “disclosure or passing on of state secrets.” He insisted on his innocence, however, claiming the allegations are motivated by politics

“I deny having exceeded the limits of my far-reaching freedom of speech as a politician, and I have not revealed alleged state secrets. Period,” he said, adding “I will demand a jury trial, as this is a political case.”

Danish officials declined to cite Frederiksen by name in discussing the charges, with prosecutor Jakob Berger Nielsen saying the case “includes highly classified information that cannot be presented openly.”

While the details of the state secrets indictment remain under wraps, after facing preliminary charges last year Frederiksen suggested the case was linked to public comments he made regarding joint surveillance missions involving Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service and the NSA. In multiple media interviews in 2020 and 2021, Frederiksen said the Danish agency helped the NSA eavesdrop on high-level officials in France, Germany, Norway and Sweden – including Germany’s then-Chancellor Angela Merkel and several of her political rivals.

Though the NSA’s part in the spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden – who leaked a massive trove of classified documents while working as a private contractor in 2013 – Denmark’s role only came to light in subsequent media reports, which cited a confidential Danish intelligence review carried out following the Snowden revelations.

Frederiksen served as defense minister between 2016 and 2019 and later entered politics under Denmark’s Liberal Party. He retired from public life last year, however, meaning his parliamentary immunity has lapsed and he can now be prosecuted.

No trial date has been set for the former official, who faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

SKRIPAL SALISBURY CHEMICAL WEAPONS ATTACK 2018

In This Together | January 27, 2019

Skripal Salisbury Chemical Weapons Attack 2018. An Investigation (2019 Update.) This video explores the nonsense that passes as the official narrative of 2018 Salisbury chemical weapons attack. T has been updated to include recent revelations about Colonel Alison McCourt. Using stock news footage of the Skripal poisoning and mainstream media reports about the supposed Salisbury attack, we consider, with tongue firmly in cheek, if what we are told about the UK chemical weapons attack is remotely plausible.

On March 4th 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal were allegedly poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by two suggested Russian GRU agents. Both Sergei and Yulia thankfully recovered, as did PC Nick Bailey who was also contaminated. However, the British government maintained that Novichok was the most deadly nerve agent ever created. 5 times more Deadly than VX and 8 times more deadly than Sarin. Scientists at Porton Down stated that there was no known antidote. The Skripal’s recovery is therefore just one of the many aspects of the official government narrative that makes no sense whatsoever.

The lack of evidence about the Skripal’s movements in Salisbury, the bizaar tale of how the two GRU agents discarded the Novichok and its later discovery by Charlie Rowley. The sad demise of Rowley’s partner Dawn Sturgess following first response that did not identify the presence of Novichok. The odd route taken by the alleged assassins and their seeming willingness both to leave evidence at the scene of the crime and remain at the crime scene for unfathomable and totally unnecessary reasons.

Hopefully amusing at times but based upon the available evidence I hope you find Skripal – An Investigation a worthwhile watch.

Take it easy.

February 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

UK government funded unit that created demonetization blacklist of news publishers

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 21, 2023

The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office is funding London-based think tank the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which creates a blacklist of websites it thinks advertisers should avoid that are mostly right-of-center news websites.

GDI states that its objective is to “disrupt their advertising-funded business models by encouraging brands, suppliers and ad tech vendors to blocklist them.”

The GDI is also funded by the US State Department.

Recently, the think tank published a list of 10 “least risky” and “riskiest” news websites in the US. The New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, and AP News were among the list of “least risky.” Among the 10 “riskiest” websites were the New York Post, Newsmax, the American Spectator, and The Federalist.

GDI also wants anything that challenges scientific consensus on vaccines and climate change to be blocked. For instance it is disinformation to describe the COVID-19 vaccines as “experimental.”

The GDI is on a mission to “defund online sources of disinformation.”

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Evidence of US guilt for Nord Stream ‘more than a smoking gun’ – Russia

RT | February 21, 2023

The destruction of Nord Stream pipelines was an act of international terrorism and needs to be addressed to avoid “chaos” on the high seas, Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the UN Security Council on Tuesday. Russia has accused Germany, Sweden and Denmark of a cover-up to shield the US, and said it would only trust a UN investigation.

The two pipelines carrying Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea were damaged by a series of blasts in September 2022. While Moscow has stopped short of openly accusing the US of carrying out the bombing, journalist Seymour Hersh did just that in an article published earlier this month.

Nebenzia referred to Hersh’s article and statements by multiple US officials threatening the pipeline – from president Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to “godmother of the anti-constitutional coup in Ukraine,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland. He also brought up the infamous tweet by former Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski and an alleged text by Liz Truss, the UK prime minister at the time – all suggesting the US and its allies had the motive, as well as means and opportunity, to destroy Nord Stream.

“We’re not going to do ‘highly likely’ here,” said Nebenzia, referring to the British accusations against Russia in the Security Council chamber in 2018. The publicly available evidence is “more than a smoking gun” that Hollywood is so fond of, but all Moscow wants is an independent international investigation into the claims in Hersh’s article, the Russian diplomat added.

The attack on Nord Stream involved explosives and qualifies as international terrorism under a convention signed in 1997, Nebenzia noted. Unless its perpetrators are found and brought to justice, the attack may well usher in an epoch when transnational undersea infrastructure becomes a legitimate target, which would cause “chaos and terrible damage to all of humanity,” he added.

According to Nebenzia, Russia does not trust the investigations currently conducted by Sweden, Denmark and Germany, as they all refused to share their findings or outright ignored Moscow’s inquiries. “It is quite clear,” he said, that they are “covering up for their American big brother.” If Western countries block Russia’s request for a UN investigation, that will “only shore up our suspicion,” he added.

Before Nebenzia addressed the Security Council, former US diplomat Rosemary DiCarlo – currently the under-secretary-general for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs – argued the world body was “not in position to verify or confirm” anything, urging everyone to “show restraint and avoid accusations that could escalate the already heightened tensions in the region.”

The Security Council also heard from professor Jeffrey Sachs and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who both testified to Hersh’s bona fides. While the US government rejected Hersh’s narrative as false, it “did not offer any information contradicting Hersh’s account, and did not offer any alternative explanation,” said Sachs. He also called Nuland’s comments about Nord Stream “not at all appropriate in the face of international terrorism.”

February 21, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

State Department globalists responsible for Ukraine coup – Trump

RT | February 21, 2023

Former US president Donald Trump has blamed “warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists” at the State Department for pushing Ukraine toward conflict. Trump, who is running for office in 2024, promised to rid Washington of “warmongers, frauds and failures” if elected again.

In a campaign video released on Tuesday, Trump warned that “World War III has never been closer than it is right now,” and laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”

The former president singled out Victoria Nuland, the US Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, whom he said was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”

Trump declared that Nuland and “others just like her” at the State Department supported the 2014 “uprisings” in Ukraine that saw democratically-elected former president Viktor Yanukovych replaced with the pro-Western Petro Poroshenko, who then began a campaign of military repression against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Nuland met with rioters in Kiev in 2014, where she promised pro-Western politicians a billion dollar loan guarantee program and military assistance. In an infamous leaked call between Nuland and the US’s then-ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, the pair discussed selecting a leader to replace Yanukovych from a list of opposition politicians.

Trump claimed, as he has on several occasions over the last year, that the conflict in Ukraine would have “never happened if I was your president.”

“I was the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington’s generals, bureaucrats and so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflicts,” he continued, adding that “we need to get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has botched every major foreign policy decision for decades.”

“The State Department, Pentagon, and national security establishment will be a very different place by the end of my administration,” Trump said, claiming that “the warmongers, frauds and failures in the senior ranks of our government will all be gone.”

Opposition to America’s “forever wars” was a core component of Trump’s 2016 platform. Although Trump was the first president in decades not to involve the US in a new foreign conflict, he was criticized by his base for briefly hiring noted war-hawk John Bolton as his national security adviser, and for authorizing missile strikes on Syria.

While President Joe Biden has pledged to indefinitely supply Kiev with weapons, Trump has claimed that he would call Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin if elected and “have a deal made in 24 hours.”

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine bans former president’s party

RT | February 21, 2023

The party of former president Viktor Yanukovich, once Ukraine’s largest, was banned on Tuesday by a Kiev court acting on a government request. Ukraine’s security services had accused the Party of Regions of illegally signing a 2010 treaty with Russia and “crimes” against the 2014 US-backed coup that ousted Yanukovich.

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) announced the ban to state media, saying it followed a motion by the Ministry of Justice based on accusations leveled by the SBI and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) against the party.

“In particular, the SBI provided materials regarding the illegal actions of the leadership of the Party of Regions during the signing and ratification of the so-called Kharkov Agreements, as well as crimes committed by them during the events of the Revolution of Dignity,” the agency said.

The 2010 agreement, signed in Kharkov, extended the Russian lease of naval facilities in Crimea through 2042 and gave Ukraine a discount on Russian natural gas supplies. The “Revolution of Dignity” is the name the new Ukrainian government gave the Maidan coup of 2014, which triggered the conflict over Crimea and the Donbass.

The Ukrainian government is “currently determining” the value of the party’s assets, which will be seized under a law enacted in May 2022. It enables President Vladimir Zelensky’s government to ban any party that challenges its official position, in particular when it comes to the conflict with Russia. A court’s decisions are final and cannot be appealed.

The law has been used to ban a dozen parties so far. The largest parliamentary opposition bloc, Opposition Platform – For Life, was outlawed last June.

The Party of Regions was established in 1997 and had grown into Ukraine’s biggest political party by 2006, in response to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ that installed a pro-American government. It practically ceased to operate after the 2014 coup, as Yanukovich and Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov sought asylum in Russia.

The latest ban comes just a day after US President Joe Biden visited Kiev and compared Ukraine’s government to democracy itself. “Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. America – and the world – stands with Ukraine,” Biden declared after a photo-op with Zelensky.

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

How Long Did Americans Support America’s Longest War?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 21, 2023

In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Alexander J. Moytyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers, asks, “How long will Russians tolerate Putin’s costly war?” After pointing out the many negative consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moytyl makes a pointed observation: “And yet, almost a year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russians continue to support strongman Putin and the war.” Moytyl just cannot understand how this can be.

Well, maybe if we look inward, which Moytyl certainly does not do in his op-ed, we can figure out the answer. 

Let’s consider, for example, the U.S. government’s wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. There were lots of negative aspects of those two wars, beginning with the fact the U.S. invasions of both countries were illegal, both under International law and U.S. law.

It is undisputed that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq ever attacked the United States. That means that the U.S. was the aggressor in both wars.

Yes, I know, defenders of the Afghanistan invasion point to the fact that Osama bin Laden, who was accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks, was supposedly living in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, under International law, the U.S. had no legitimate legal authority to invade Afghanistan to arrest or kill him. 

It is also undisputed that there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. Therefore, when President Bush demanded that the Afghan government extradite bin Laden to the U.S., under international law Afghanistan had the legitimate authority to say no. Under international law, Bush had no legitimate authority to invade the country simply because Afghanistan rejected his unconditional extradition demand. 

It is also undisputed that neither the Iraqi people nor the Iraqi government had any connection to the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. invasion of that country was a pure war of aggression, one based on the flagrant and fraudulent pretense of uncovering non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” 

It is also undisputed that there was no declaration of war issued by Congress against either Afghanistan or Iraq, as required by the U.S. Constitution. That made both invasions illegal under our form of constitutional government. 

It is impossible to know exactly how many people in Afghanistan and Iraq were tortured, injured, or killed by U.S. forces in those two wars of aggression. That’s because, early on, the Pentagon announced that it would not keep track of enemy dead. That’s because the lives of Afghans and Iraqis didn’t count. 

However, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University, “Nearly 20 years after the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.”

That is a lot of money. And that is a lot of dead people. I would estimate that 99 percent of those dead people had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. 

Yet, many Americans supported their government throughout all this mayhem, just as the Russian people are standing with their government during its current mayhem. In fact, I remember church ministers all across the United States beseeching their congregations for years to “support the troops, especially those in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq.” I also recall how we were all encouraged to “thank the troops for their service” whenever we saw them in uniform. I also remember all those critical things that were said against those of us who opposed these wars of aggression and resulting occupations. 

Supporting their government in time of war is what most citizens do in every nation, including Russia, the United States, and Germany. Most citizens are forced into the state’s educational system at a very young age, where their minds are molded to blindly come to the support of their regime during wartime. Children are inculcated with mindsets of deference to authority and blind trust in their political, military, and intelligence officials. That mindset continues well into adulthood. In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I recall many people, including commentators in the mainstream press, exclaiming, “We need to trust our officials. They have access to information that we don’t have.”

So, what befuddles me is why Alexander J. Moytyl is befuddled by the overwhelming support by Russian citizens of their regime during wartime. If American citizens blindly support their regime during wartime, why would anyone expect that Russian citizens would respond differently?

February 21, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

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