The Vladimir Putin Interview – Part One
Part One: The Genealogy of a Civilizational Power
By William Schryver | imetatronink | February 13, 2024
On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson, a popular American conservative journalist and polemicist, was granted an interview with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The interview — a two-hour-long marathon by American sound-bite / talking-point standards – was broadcast two days later.
It was initially published on Carlson’s website, and was then posted to the X social media platform. The X post alone has tallied ~200 million views. We may confidently assume that the interview video on Carlson’s website has been viewed by several million more.
It is reasonable to conclude that this interview of Vladimir Putin has been seen by a larger global audience than has ever previously watched an interview of a major national leader.
The reactions of the viewing audience have varied greatly. Western media and political leaders have almost universally condemned the interview as nothing more than what they characterize as typical Russian propaganda and mendacity. These same people have excoriated Tucker Carlson as a “Putin puppet” and a “useful idiot” who never should have afforded Putin the opportunity to speak from such a bully pulpit.
Some western political leaders and commentators even proposed to deny Carlson reentry to the United States, to deprive him of the privilege of traveling in the European Union, to sanction him in punitive ways, and even to charge him with espionage and treason.
Others who watched part or all of the interview considered it boring and tendentious.
Yet others — and my sense is that this category comprises the majority — found the interview surprisingly enlightening and came away from it with a favorable impression of President Putin.
I have now watched the video of the interview twice in its entirety, and have carefully read the transcript twice in full, and some parts additional times.
I have also, over the past two decades, viewed and/or read literally hundreds of Putin speeches, interviews, press-conferences, etc.
In my carefully considered opinion — given its context in this period of unprecedented global tensions and what is indisputably a major proxy war being waged by the United States and its NATO allies against Russia — I regard the interview as arguably the single most important such event of the post-Cold War era.
I submit further that, in my estimation, Vladimir Putin is, by a substantial margin, the single most intellectually potent and personally charismatic world leader of the past century. His knowledge and understanding of history, international relations, macroeconomics, and his manifest talent as an extemporaneous speaker are utterly unparalleled among all the national leaders of whom I have been aware over the course of my lifetime.
The interview commenced, much to my surprise and chagrin, with a mendaciously framed and deliberately disingenuous query by Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
The premise of this question is patently false. Putin’s speech of February 24, 2022 makes no mention whatsoever of the threat of a “surprise attack on our country” from the United States or its NATO allies. Carlson claimed it to be a direct quote. No such statement is present in the speech, nor anything like unto it.
At no point in the speech does President Putin attempt to justify the coming “Special Military Operation” on the threat of an imminent attack from the western powers.
Simply put, Carlson invented this quote ex nihilo, and apparently sought to bait Putin into a response which, presumably, Carlson then intended to take advantage of in some fashion.
I was frankly shocked that he had done this. I was immediately aware that the question was built upon a falsehood, for I am extremely familiar with both the major speeches Putin gave in the days preceding the launch of the Russian “Special Military Operation”.
Why did Tucker Carlson do this? Hard to say. But it evoked from Putin a brilliant reply which immediately turned the tables on whatever Carlson’s motivations were for posing a question built upon a lie.
Vladimir Putin: It’s not that the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. I didn’t say so.
Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?
This pointed response disarmed Carlson’s ill-intentions for the time being, and knocked him back on his heels.
Putin then started a “serious conversation” on his terms, and according to his agenda. And what he did first — although it no doubt befuddled a large proportion of his audience — was not only an exhibition of erudition, but more importantly, it was a type of thing one simply does not see in our day and age, although in ancient times it would have been considered entirely normal, and even de rigueur for a great national leader to do precisely what Putin did: present, as it were, the Russian nation’s Letters Patent; its genealogy dating back over a thousand years; its historical bona fides.
Vladimir Putin is the current leader of a great “civilizational power” — a nation whose history stretches back over a millennium, and whose voluminous archives document that history. And, given the fundamental importance of that fact in the context of what is in many respects a civil war taking place in Ukraine, it was imperative that certain elements of evidence be presented as a preface to the eventual discussion of the illegitimacy and demonstrable falsehoods of Ukraine’s presumptuous claims upon portions of the longstanding “Russian nation”.
“Ukraine” is a sovereign polity created in 1991. Its geographic footprint is an artificial construction effected by exogenous powers over the course of the twentieth century. Its origins are a relatively limited and historically ill-defined cultural area previously known as “The Ukraine” — a region “on the outskirts” of its mother nation: Russia.
One needn’t search hard to discover that nineteenth century maps and encyclopedias are perfectly consonant with this reality. In the Chambers Encyclopedia my great-grandfather purchased in 1888, the following map of European Russia appears:
A smaller crop of that map which includes the area crafted into “Ukraine” in 1991 appears below:
And the encyclopedia entry for “Ukraine” reads as follows:
UKRAINE (Slavic, a frontier country or March), the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tatars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The Ukraine was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian Ukraine); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish Ukraine) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised of the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava, and Kharkov.
– Chambers Encyclopedia, Volume VII, 1888 (abbreviations expanded)
But, as it has done in many other regions of the world, the Anglo-American empire, beginning as early as the immediate post-WW2 period, and accelerating in the post-Cold War period, sought to methodically cultivate violent national aspirations among portions of the populace of this region in order to effect a stratagem to weaken its long-time nemesis in Russia.
The western powers focused their nefarious project upon those portions of Ukraine wherein resided the heirs to the German-collaborating Ukrainian nationalists who, in direct affiliation with the Nazi SS formations, had proven to be reliable and particularly ruthless executioners of Jews, Poles, and Russians during the Second World War.
These historical facts are beyond dispute — at least in the realms of the informed. But the highly propagandized people of the so-called “western democracies” are not well-informed, and it is precisely for this reason that Vladimir Putin no doubt felt compelled to expound upon these questions in his lengthy but essential opening remarks in the interview with Tucker Carlson.
Carlson attempted multiple times to interrupt and redirect Putin’s train of thought, but to no avail. He even had the temerity to once again make reference to his initial deceptively constructed question:
Tucker Carlson: … many nations feel frustrated by their re-drawn borders after the wars of the 20th century, and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mention, but the fact is that you didn’t make this case in public until two years ago in February, and in the case that you made, which I read today, you explain at great length that you thought [there was] a physical threat from the West and NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that’s what got you to move. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?
It is NOT a “fair characterization” of what Putin said. In fact, it is emphatically a FALSE characterization of what he said.
And yet Carlson was determined to extract an answer to this tortured misrepresentation of Putin’s own words.
Nevertheless, Putin refused to take the bait, and once again parried Carlson’s disingenuous query:
Vladimir Putin: I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: “Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?” You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.
And then he proceeded to conclude his exposition of the essential historical facts.
I will, in subsequent installments of my commentary on this important interview, highlight multiple additional instances of Tucker Carlson posing ill-formed and disingenuous questions to President Putin, and then examine how Putin skillfully countered these curious attempts to “put words in his mouth”.
Coming up in Part 2: Tucker Carlson himself, along with many other western commentators and state-controlled propaganda organizations (such as Reuters, as seen above), have attempted in the aftermath of the interview to advance the demonstrably false narrative that Putin expressed a desire to negotiate a ceasefire and a mutually acceptable end to the ongoing war. Of course, that is a highly deceptive misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what really happened.
Blood on BoJo’s Hands
Putin’s claim that Boris Johnson scuttled peace deal confirmed by witnesses
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 13, 2024
Former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the mainstream media are hotly denying Vladimir Putin’s claim (in his recent Tucker Carlson interview) that Johnson derailed a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine just a couple of months after the war commenced.
And yet, Putin was merely confirming the statement of David Arahamiya, leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, that was reported in Newsweek on November 27, 2023: Russia Offered to End War if Ukraine Dropped NATO Bid: Kyiv Official.
The German analyst and Former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, Michael von der Schulenberg, also published a reconstruction of these events on November 14, 2023, titled How The Chance Was Lost For A Peace Settlement Of The Ukraine War.
The totality of circumstances and the statements of Arahamiya and von der Schulenberg indicate that an Austrian-style neutrality deal could have prevented this war to begin with, and then—had it been embraced by the the USA and Britain—ended it just two months later.
Since Churchill delivered his June 4, 1940, “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, many postwar heads of state have apparently fantasized that their opponents on the international stage are “just like Hitler” and that there can be no negotiated settlement with them.
In BoJo’s case, this shallow, sophomoric notion has apparently resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.
New York’s Proposed Minor Consent Law ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Misleading,’ Critics Say
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 12, 2024
New York state lawmakers are weighing legislation that would allow any child or teen under 18 to seek out and consent to medical treatment — including vaccines, dental procedures, hospitalization and even surgery — without parental consent, as long as the minor appears to have the mental capacity for making that decision.
Assembly Bill A6761, introduced by New York Assemblymember Karines Reyes (D-Bronx), also would allow Medicaid funds to pay for procedures and drugs administered to children.
Proponents of the legislation, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, say the measure is about ensuring all youth have access to quality care.
But critics, including John Gilmore, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Autism Action Network, said the bill is dangerous.
“The bill’s biggest problem,” Gilmore told The Defender, “is that it allows any medical procedure to be done to children of any age without parental knowledge or consent. That’s the kicker.”
Gilmore said the bill has another problem, too: The “active summary” statement on the official New York Assembly website says it “allows homeless youth to give effective consent to certain medical, dental, health, and hospital services.”
But Gilmore said that statement is “deliberately misleading” because the bill’s text applies to more than just “homeless” youth seeking “certain” services.
The bill states:
“Any person, including a minor, who comprehends the need for, the nature of, and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits involved in any contemplated medical, dental, health, and/or hospital services, and any alternatives thereto, may give effective consent to such services for themself, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary.”
“Albany is lying” about the bill, according to Autism Action Network.
Michael Kane, a New York resident and founder of Teachers For Choice, agreed. “It’s a complete lie to say the bill applies only to homeless children or runaways — and it’s a dangerous one,” Kane told The Defender. “It’s imperative that legislators understand what the bill really does,” Kane said.
With New York lawmakers considering close to 10,000 bills, legislators may rely on a bill’s one-sentence summary — rather than reading its full text — for deciding how they vote, according to Gilmore.
The bill has a companion in the Senate (S8352), introduced Jan. 19 by state Sen. Rachel May (D-Syracuse). The bills share identical text.
Unclear how practitioners would assess minor’s ‘capacity to comprehend’
According to the latest version of the bill, a minor could consent to:
- General medical, dental, health and hospital services.
- Mental health outpatient services.
- Substance abuse treatment.
- Immunizations.
- Family planning services.
- Sexually transmitted disease (STD) diagnosis and treatment.
The bill states that a practitioner may administer a vaccine if “they have reason to believe that a person in parental relation to the child … objects to the immunization.”
It also states, “A child who may give effective consent [to various medical interventions] … may give such consent to their own immunization, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary.”
The bill allows minors under 16, in certain circumstances, to access psychotropic drugs or psychotherapy without parental consent.
Psychotropic drugs include a host of pharmaceutical products, including medications for depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Current New York law allows minors 16 or older residing in a hospital to agree to psychotropic medications without parental consent if any of the following conditions are met:
- A parent or guardian “is not reasonably available” and the physician determines “the minor has the capacity”; or
- requiring parental consent “would have a detrimental effect on the minor”; or
- the parent has refused consent, providing that two physicians (including a psychiatric doctor who does not work for the facility) agree the medications are in the minor’s best interests.
A6761/S8352 would allow minors under 16 in these circumstances to do the same, as long as the youth “comprehends the need for, the nature of, and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits involved.”
The bill does not include detailed information on how medical practitioners would assess a minor’s capacity to comprehend the potential risks of a potential treatment.
It does, however, define “capacity” as follows:
“The minor’s ability to understand and appreciate the nature and consequences of the proposed treatment, including the benefits and risks of, and alternatives to, such proposed treatment, and to reach an informed decision.”
Children’s Health Defense General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg told The Defender that informed consent is a “serious” thing, but this legislation devotes “little attention to how to determine if a child can truly exercise informed consent, how to obtain that consent and why true informed consent is critically important.”
Who is a ‘minor’?
The bill does not provide a clear definition of “minor” that applies across all amended laws. However, some sections of the law define or describe the age thresholds related to minor consent:
- In the amendments to the mental hygiene law section 9.13(a), anyone under 16 would still need parental/guardian consent to be admitted as a voluntary patient to a hospital.
- In amendments to mental hygiene law 33.21(a)(1), a “minor” is defined as a person under 18, excluding some special cases like emancipated minors or minors who are parents.
- In amendments to section 2305 of public health law, treatment for STDs without parental consent is allowed for those under 21.
However, earlier sections of the bill do not specify any age range for minors, suggesting even young minors could consent as long as they demonstrate appropriate “capacity.”
Even infants?
It appears the bill’s sponsors may believe that even an infant can give consent. That’s because section 18 of public health law omits previous language stating that children older than 12 can determine who gets access to their medical records.
This deletion suggests that a child of any age no longer “may” but “shall be notified of any request by a qualified person to review their patient information” and deny access to it if they so desire.
The bill states that an infant can choose to withhold information from its parents, without explaining how that would be possible:
In summary, there isn’t one definition of “minor” in the bill, but it seems for most purposes “minor” refers to anyone under age 18.
Minor consent bills bulldoze’ over decades of laws honoring parental rights
The U.S. has a strong legal history going back many decades that honors parental rights and recognizes that the state should step in only where parents are unfit to care for their children, Rosenberg said.
“Minor consent bills bulldoze over those longstanding decisions,” she said. “They try to exclude parents from medical decision-making and take over the parenting role.”
Rosenberg said she’s seen more bills like this recently being introduced in other states, such as Vermont. “We [CHD] successfully stopped one in the District of Columbia and are fighting laws and regulations elsewhere,” she said.
Kane called the bill “just horrendous” because it “completely eradicates parental control over what happens medically to our children.”
Meanwhile, a staff member for Reyes’ office who chose to remain anonymous told The Defender she disagreed, saying the bill was primarily about ensuring all kids have “access to care” and that it included “guardrails” to ensure that not all parental consent was stripped away in all situations.
For instance, the bill explains that a minor must “knowingly and voluntarily” seek care, the staff member said.
But Rosenberg said she’s concerned about the legal ramifications of the bill’s broad language — which appears to erase parental consent for “any contemplated medical, dental, health, and/or hospital services, and any alternatives thereto.”
Rosenberg told The Defender the bill was “rife with problems too numerous to address in brief remarks.”
The bill makes clear, she said, that minors can consent to vaccinations without their parents’ knowledge or consent — and that medical staff and insurance companies must hide that vaccination information from the parents unless the child permits them to share it.
Children “literally may inadvertently take their lives into their own hands” if they make serious healthcare decisions without parental involvement, Rosenberg said.
For example, children frequently don’t know their own health history — let alone their family health history — which may put them at an increased risk for an adverse reaction to a medication or treatment, she explained.
Rosenberg said:
“The legislators supporting these bills need to ask themselves what they would do if a child or grandchild of theirs consented to a surgical procedure of whatever kind requiring anesthesia and the child suffered death or irreversible harm if they had a reaction to the anesthesia.
“Is that a phone call they’d like to receive?”
‘Not a chance’ bill’s sponsors unaware of misleading statement
New York already has a law on the books about homeless youth giving consent for certain services.
Passed in 2022, A09604/S08937 allows “runaways and homeless youth under the age of 18 who are receiving approved crisis or support services to consent to medical, dental, health and hospital services.”
Gilmore, who has done legislative analysis in New York for 23 years, said, “Both Rachel May and Karines Reyes voted for the bill that was passed in 2022.”
So why would they talk about homeless youth in the summary of the new measure they introduced?
A staff member for Reyes’ office told The Defender a bill’s summary statement is written by lawyers — not by the legislator who introduces the bill.
It’s plausible the lawyers chose that language since the bill amends the same section of public health law (2504) that was amended earlier in the law about homeless youth and runaways, the staff member said. However, the staff member confirmed that the present bill does pertain to all minors.
The Defender also reached out to May’s Legislative Director Eric van der Vort, but he did not respond by our publication deadline.
Gilmore said he contacted legislators, too, but didn’t get a straight answer. When he asked van der Vort about the summary language, “he simply refused to address it in any way,” Gilmore said.
Reyes’ Chief of Staff Justin Westbrook-Lowery confirmed for Gilmore that the bill applies to all minors in New York but didn’t explain why the summary statement talked about homeless youth.
Amy Paulin (D-Scarsdale), who chairs the Assembly Committee on Health and co-sponsored the bill, “has a large staff and they’re very good at what they do,” Gilmore said. “There’s not a chance that they aren’t quite aware” that the bill’s summary statement doesn’t match what the bill would do.
Kane said he’s heard from New York legislators and staffers that they believe the bill affects only homeless children.
“There’s a lot of people in the Assembly starting to co-sponsor the bill, which is scary,” he said. “We don’t want this thing passed so that we end up litigating against it for the next five years.”
The Defender asked May’s media relations staff what May would like to tell parents concerned about being excluded from medical decision-making regarding their child’s health, but did not receive a response by our publication deadline.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO’s Fooling Who? The one who gives the orders is the sovereign.
Tedros slams us for lies but it’s all projection: here’s the documentary proof it is the WHO that is lying
BY MERYL NASS | FEBRUARY 12, 2024
The WHO lawyers are trying to play us, saying the nations are sovereign because they still make the laws. What the WHO omits saying is that under the Treaty and proposed IHR Amendments, nations will be forced to pass the laws that the WHO tells them to pass. Examples of this and other word games below.
First the treaty tells you that unhindered, timely access to information is a general principle. Then it adds the caveat that transparency means open access to “accurate” information.
Then a few pages later the treaty demands that nations perform “infodemic management”—which requires not only censorship, but also surveillance of everyone’s social media footprint, so the nation will know who and what to censor. This violates both the First and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution.
Not only that, but the censorship should be performed with international collaboration—so all nations can target the same misinformation spreaders and there will be nowhere to hide. Finally, they want to make sure you Trust the(ir) Science.
Below, the treaty is forced to admit that the so-called sovereignty that Tedros claims we will retain— the ability to pass laws—will in fact be subject to the orders of the WHO.
The WHO treaty draft requires that every nation pass laws to legalize Emergency Use Authorizations, so that unlicensed vaccines can be given to populations during a WHO-declared pandemic. You know, like a Monkeypox pandemic. There are no standards required and the WHO Director-General can declare any pandemic whenever he wants. Then the needles come out.
The WHO also demands that nations pass the laws needed to remove all liability from these untested and potentially deadly vaccines. Who’s sovereign now?
So you see, the WHO has just played a bunch of word games and they intended for us to be the suckers and go along, ignorant. So long as the Treaty and IHR Amendments still let nations make laws, the WHO insists on calling us sovereign. But the real sovereign is the one ordering that laws be passed. That’s the real power. Why would anyone give that up to the WHO, especially when its Director-General is a puppet for Bill Gates, is not a real doctor, and has been accused of withholding food and hiding 3 cholera epidemics to kill members of competing tribes in his native Ethiopia, when he was the #3 top official there? Do you really think he cares about your health during a pandemic?
So you can wait idly by as these treaties move ahead, or you can say ‘Hell No!’ and put on your big girl panties and decide you have finally had enough. Which will it be?
Joe Biden Acts Like the Defender of Gazans, But He is the Destroyer
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | February 13, 2024
This week President Joe Biden was again talking about his ideas of how the Israel government should exercise more restraint in its war in Gaza. But, he remains all talk and no action on this count.
It is tedious to repeatedly hear the man who is, in the absence of congressional action to provide special assistance to Israel for its war, unilaterally providing the key aid including weapons and intelligence for prosecuting Israel’s war continue to insist he supports restraint while the Israel government keeps pursuing relentless devastation.
Biden, in a Monday statement he made at the White House after meeting with Jordan King Abdullah, said the following regarding impending Israel military action:
As I said yesterday, our military operation in Rafah — their — the major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan — a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there. Many people there have been displaced — displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north, and now they’re packed into Rafah — exposed and vulnerable. They need to be protected.
This schtick is way past its expiration date. The Israel war, now in its fifth month, continues to rack up destruction of life, health, and the physical manifestations of civilization in Gaza at an astounding pace, with the brunt of the suffering imposed on civilians. Israel is taking the actions. But, the US is the key accomplice to the atrocities because of the aid it provides.
This is Biden’s war as much as it is Israel’s war.
Biden is notoriously prone to make blunders in his public presentations. The blunder he made in his comment in his Monday White House statement is different than many. Biden quickly corrected his mention of “our military operation in Rafah” to clarify that the military operation is Israel’s. The slipup here was not that Biden had stated something false. Instead, it was that Biden had stated the truth that he and his administration are trying their best to hide.
GMO denounces targeting two members of Al-Jazeera team in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza
Palestinian Information Center – February 13, 2024
GAZA – The Government Media Office (GMO) in Gaza condemned in the strongest terms the Israeli targeting of the Al-Jazeera Arabic news crew for the fifth time, leading to the serious injury of the channel’s correspondent and cameraman in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza Strip.
The GMO said, in a statement on Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes targeted Al-Jazeera’s reporter Ismail Abu Omar and cameraman Ahmed Matar, stressing that “the Israeli occupation army has deliberately targeted the channel’s teams for the fifth time in a row in a complete crime in violation of the international law.”
Journalist Abu Omar has had his right leg and some fingers amputated, in addition to other various wounds. His colleague Matar sustained various injuries, as well.
The GMO pointed out that since October 7, the Israeli occupation army has killed 128 journalists, arrested 10, and injured many others, stressing that this indicates that journalists have become targets of the Israeli occupation army.
The GMO called on press unions, media agencies, and human rights groups to denounce this crime and to pressure Israel to stop targeting journalists and to halt its genocidal war against civilians.
Hamas: Israel’s ceasefire proposal is not a serious offer
MEMO | February 13, 2024
Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in Lebanon, said that the Israeli proposal in the context of the talks to release prisoners of war held in Gaza is a “withdrawal from the proposal that was formulated in Paris” and proves that Israel “is not serious about moving forward with the release of the captives.”
According to Hamdan, the Hamas delegation in Cairo discussed Israel’s responses to the proposal put forward in Paris. Hamdan added that Israel “is placing obstacles that make it impossible to reach an agreement.” Israel’s proposal, he explained, “does not guarantee freedom of movement, the return of refugees, or the withdrawal of its forces from the Gaza Strip and does not address the issue of opening the crossings to provide medical treatment to the wounded.”
“[Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu’s behaviour and positions confirm that he is continuing the policy of evasion and procrastination, is not interested in reaching an agreement, and is trying to prolong the war and buy time for personal considerations related to his political future.”
He stressed that “the Hamas movement is committing to its position and was and is still keen to reach an agreement that achieves the cessation of the aggression against our people, the withdrawal of the occupation army from the Gaza Strip, relief for our people, the return of the people to their areas, reconstruction, lifting the siege on the Gaza Strip, and completing the prisoner exchange.”
“Netanyahu is continuing his policy of escaping reality and lying to his audience,” Hamdan said. “The truth that the whole world can see is that he is still stuck in the streets of Khan Yunis, haemorrhaging dead and wounded on a daily basis, and withdrawing destroyed vehicles.”
Made-in-India ‘killer’ drones fly in Gaza sky as Israeli genocide rages on: Report
Press TV – February 13, 2024
An Indian conglomerate has dispatched Hermes 900 killer drones to Israel as the UAVS are extensively used in the regime’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in the Gaza strip amid the genocidal war, a report says.
The sale of more of than 20 Hermes 900 medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) UAVs delivered by Adani-Elbit Advanced Systems India Ltd to Israel was first reported on February 2 by Neelam Mathews for the defense-related website Shephard Media.
The Wire report said it has not yet been publicly acknowledged by either Tel Aviv or New Delhi.
In 2018, Israel’s Elbit Systems entered into a joint venture with Adani group with a 49% share and opened a $15-million facility in Hyderabad to manufacture UAVs for the first time outside of Israel.
The Wire said when it contacted Israel’s Elbit Systems a spokesperson responded that they could “confirm that Elbit Systems collaborates with Adani, which is a supplier to our UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems] supply chain.”
Haaretz reported last February that the vice president of UAV systems in the Aerospace Division at Elbit Systems, Vered Haimovich, said the Hermes 900 has been Elbit System’s flagship drone, which has been operationally used by the Israeli Air Force since 2015. It has also taken part “in all rounds of conflict in recent years.”
Indian activists have criticized the Indian government for its double standards against Palestine, as on one hand, New Delhi backs the Palestinian cause while advocating for a free Palestinian state, but on the other, its actions suggest it supported Israel’s actions in Gaza.
After Israel unleashed a war on Gaza on October 7 following Hamas Operation Al-Aqsa Strom into the occupied territories, India initially expressed unconditional solidarity with Israel.
New Delhi had even abstained on a resolution in the UN General Assembly calling for a humanitarian pause in October 2023. However, two months later, it voted in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
The role of an Indian conglomerate in supplying drones, which are extensively used by the IOF for attacks in densely populated urban areas in Gaza, came as the prime minister Narendra Modi government’s official position is seeking an immediate ceasefire.
Shir Hever, the coordinator responsible for enforcing the military embargo on behalf of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, expressed his disapproval of India’s current alliance with Israel, deeming it disgraceful considering India’s extensive past under colonial domination.
“This moment is a test of the international law system, and instead of siding with Israel’s genocide and its enabling of Western powers, India should take inspiration from South Africa’s global-south leadership and end its complicity with genocide,” Hever told Middle East Eye.
He also said that ever since the International Court of Justice said it’s “plausible” Israel committed genocide in Gaza, two Japanese firms ended their MoUs with Elbit, while, a Dutch high court banned the Netherlands from continuing its export of F-35 parts to Israel, “citing a clear risk of violations of international law.”
In another such instance, on Monday, the European Union foreign policy Chief Josep Borrell called on the US to cut arms supplies to Israel due to high civilian casualties in its war in Gaza.
Adani, a 60-year-old multi billionaire and one of the richest persons in the world, was accused in a report by a US investment research firm, Hindenburg’s Research LLC, of stock manipulation and accounting fraud last year, and is seen by many as someone very close to Modi and his government.
Magical Thinking
By Karen Kwiatkowski | LewRockwell | February 13, 2024
In 2005, Joan Didion published “The Year of Magical Thinking” that about grieving the loss of her husband, the unavoidable instant reduction of a rich marriage to aimless solitude.
Beyond the obvious arena of modern imperial foreign policy, magical thinking is a well-known psychological concept. It is “the belief that wishes can impose their own order on the material world.” It is driven by human goals of fulfillment “without consideration of the constraints of the external world.”
We’ve been reminded of this concept in many different ways over the past few weeks. The befuddled fumbling old man in the White House insulting reporters who ask him about his memory lapses, then demonstrating his disability several times later in the press conference.
He wishes to remain President, yet he is incapable of being President. He wants that particular fulfillment regardless of its fundamental impossibility.
We see the same in many modern political leaders, no doubt Canada’s Trudeau, who was upset that Putin, in a wide ranging interview last week, mentioned the Canadian Parliament’s celebration of World War II Ukrainian Nazi Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old surviving member of the Waffen SS Galicia Division. Zelensky had just spoken, and all present sincerely wished that killing Russians was great Western tradition, habitual and just. Instead we saw the impossibility of wishes making their own reality, their own order; the impossibility of changing fact to fantasy, and fantasy to fact.
Access to the most casual and shallow history of World War II should have revealed to any one of the hundreds of educated and cosmopolitan MPs, and the media covering the event, that those killing Russians in WWII were either part of Nazi Germany, or allied with Nazi Germany. It is modern Russian intolerance for Nazis that we find to be traditional, habitual and just. The propagandized West seeks a better world through magical thinking, not through the embrace of reality.
We see magical thinking in Kiev, but somehow I suspect Ukrainians have a far better understanding of reality than do Zelensky’s American and British advisors – who seem permanently afflicted with lies becoming truth if only we all wished for it hard enough. The best example of this is our puppet in Kiev who insists on no negotiations with Russia until the popular and extremely rational “history buff” President Putin, steps down to face the Ukrainian music for his war crimes.
Yet when Tucker Carlson asked Putin what it was all about – we found simply that the protection of Russia and Russian people are a cause for which Putin is willing to fight. It is a concept that shocks the Western empire circa 2024.
We also learned that years of western actions, like withdrawing from nuclear treaties and pursuing first strike capabilities, drove Russian development of hypersonic missiles and a whole range of capabilities to survive and defeat such extreme threats coming from an increasingly unpredictable West. Meanwhile, US and NATO naval capability is underwhelming, recruitment abysmal, technology plateaued and inappropriate for offense or defense, and funds are dwindling.
We learned that while politicians and academics continue to push for ever more massive sanctions against Russia – new markets materialized and Russia’s economy adapted and thrived, as the economy of the western allies shrank and struggled.
We learned that western cultural fetishes of magic energy replacing hydrocarbons, 72 genders, modern monetary theory and unlimited immigration without cultural integration have all been rejected – rationally and straightforwardly – by Russia. The former Communist empire has become a sanctuary for Orthodox Christianity, while the West bans and abandons Christian churches and principles in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Europe and in America. It sounds unbelievable, unpredictable, a rabbit from a hat and a lady cut in half all in one show – but it’s true.
A key advisor to Zelensky on US-UK-EU proxy war, and former UK PM Boris Johnson is an exemplar of magical thinking. He was outraged that Putin explained with evidence how the last 18 months of war in Ukraine could have been prevented, and ended peacefully, as peace talks in Turkey produced a draft treaty acceptable to both Ukrainian and Russian teams. This was abruptly canned after Boris rushed to Kiev, where he demanded the Ukrainians reject the nascent agreement. Boris, bobbing in the flotsam of magical thinking, is a liar, and yet, one marvels at the power of believing that your desires and wishes can create a new world order.
We see this in the US, in both its obsession with Julian Assange despite the utter irrationality of its pursuit of a man who exposed US lawbreaking and evil – something top politicians in the US should always be eager to correct in the name of American heroism and honor.
We see this in the continued fantasy of electoral honesty in the US, in the imperial two-tiered system of law, in the incomprehensible funding and moral support provided to Israel as it directly and systematically exterminates 2 million people, destroys their homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses, and takes their land. We see it in Israel, as it imagines what it is doing will save rather than destroy her. Magical thinking.
Joan Didion popularized the term, documenting her grief at the sudden end of a life, marriage, meaning, and purpose. Magical thinking may be part of a process by which people and institutions cope with the innate realization of irretrievable loss.
The US government, and its very federalism, is undergoing an imperial metamorphosis from rapacious caterpillar, to life in a rapidly decaying cocoon, to something entirely different and unrecognizable – life in the air, with little baggage, free, vulnerable and alive. It will own nothing and be happy. Dissolution and death of empire is a story told many times, a pattern of nature, and it cannot be stopped. Magical thinking is simultaneously necessary and futile, and Washington and many of the European capitols are deeply engaged in this phase. They are ending, ungracefully, ungratefully, undeniably.
But for the people, who live with feet on the ground, and eyes wide open, who bear the costs of the magical thinking of their governments, and the lies of their propagandists, and the waste of their wars, and the contamination of everything that was good – for us the only value is seeing the reality of things. Recognizing reality, acting upon it, rejecting even the most subtle suggestions of magical thinking and fantasy and imaginations of world orders – in this way imperial error can be stopped, and reversed.
Peace, transparency, prosperity, exchanges of goods, ideas, and many charming conversations with partners and friends around the planet – none of this is fantasy, and it doesn’t require magic. Let’s get on with it.
Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, farmer and aspiring anarcho-capitalist. She ran for Congress in Virginia’s 6th district in 2012, is a Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, and an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute.
Copyright © Karen Kwiatkowski
Tucker Slayed the Mainstream Media Dragon
By Ron Paul | February 12, 2024
There has been much written and said about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. As of this writing the video on Twitter alone has been viewed nearly 200 million times, making it likely the most-viewed news event in history.
Many millions of viewers who may not have had access to the other side of the story were informed that the Russia/Ukraine military conflict did not begin in 2022, as the mainstream media continuously reports, but in fact began eight years earlier with a US-backed coup in Ukraine. The US media does not report this because they don’t want Americans to begin questioning our interventionist foreign policy. They don’t want Americans to see that our government meddling in the affairs of other countries – whether by “color revolution,” sanctions, or bombs – has real and deadly consequences to those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.
To me, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin was the US mainstream media reaction. As Putin himself said during the interview, “in the world of propaganda, it’s very difficult to defeat the United States.” Even a casual look at the US mainstream media’s reporting before and after the interview would show how correct he is about that. In the days and weeks before the interview, the US media was filled with stories about how horrible it was that Tucker Carlson was interviewing the Russian president. There was the danger, they all said, that Putin might spread “disinformation.”
That Putin might say something to put his country in a better light was, they were saying, reason enough to not interview him. With that logic, why have journalism at all? Everyone interviewed by journalists – certainly every world leader – will attempt to paint a rosy picture. The job of a journalist in a free society should be to do the reporting and let the people decide. But somehow that has been lost. These days the mainstream media tells you what to think and you better not dispute it or you will be cancelled!
What the US mainstream media was really worried about was that the “other side of the story” might start to ring true with the public. So they attacked the messenger.
The CNN reporting on Tucker’s interview pretty much sums up the reaction across the board of the US mainstream media. Their headline read, “Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Putin. He’s already doing the bidding of the Kremlin.”
By merely doing what used to be called “journalism” – interviewing and reporting on people and events, whether good or bad – one is “doing the bidding” of the subject of the interview or report?
No wonder fellow journalist Julian Assange has been locked away in a gulag for so many years. He dared to assume that in a free society, being a journalist means reporting the good, the bad, and the ugly even if it puts those in power in a bad light.
In the end, the massive success of the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin demonstrates once and for all that the American people are sick to death of their mainstream media propagandists and liars. They are looking not for government narratives, but for truth. That’s the really good news about this interview.
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