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UK Labour Party ditches candidate for sharing RT content in 2018

RT | June 20, 2024

The UK Labour Party has suspended one of its parliamentary candidates just two weeks before the general election, after senior members were made aware of his apparent sharing of RT content, six years ago, on his social media.

Andy Brown is campaigning to represent the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East constituency in northeast Scotland. The party’s decision to remove him was reported on Tuesday by The Press and Journal, a local newspaper, and has since become a national news story.

The posts that got Brown in trouble relate to the 2018 Salisbury poisoning case, which the British government claimed to be a Russian assassination attempt on Sergey Skripal, a defector spy. The politician reportedly shared a link to an RT article, which questioned London’s narrative, as well as a social media post suggesting that then-prime minister Theresa May was hiding vital information about the incident.

Brown has claimed in an interview with the BBC that he did not share the posts, and that his account “may have been corrupted at some point.” He rejected the suggestion that he may have forgotten sharing them.

Labour Party bosses were also “spooked” by another post apparently shared by Brown, which questioned claims that anti-Semitism was widespread in the Labour Party, the Scottish newspaper said. The allegation was instrumental in the ouster of Jeremy Corbyn, a vocal pro-Palestinian figure, as Labour party leader. His whip in parliament was later removed by his successor, Keir Starmer, meaning effective expulsion from the party.

Commenting on the Andy Brown case, Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves told Sky News on Wednesday: “I hadn’t heard of this guy until this morning, and I’m very, very pleased that I will hopefully not have to hear of him again because he’s been suspended as a Labour candidate.” She added that unlike Corbyn, Starmer takes “swift action when people misbehave”.

“People who do not share our values in the changed Labour Party get kicked out,” Reeves stressed.

Although he has been deselected, Brown can still stand as a candidate for the election on July 4. Paper ballots will still carry his original description and a Labour logo, according to the British press. If elected, he will be an independent MP – not unlike Corbyn, who is running to represent the constituency of Islington North.

The UK banned RT from broadcasting in March 2022, after the Ukraine conflict escalated into open hostilities.

June 20, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

EU state imprisons Russian academic for ‘spying’

Vyacheslav Morozov
RT | June 19, 2024

Former Tartu University professor Vyacheslav Morozov has been sentenced by an Estonian court to six years and three months in prison for allegedly working for a foreign intelligence service, the news outlet ERR reported on Tuesday.

Morozov, a Russian citizen, was detained by Estonian police in January on charges of collaborating with Moscow by supposedly collecting and providing information about the Baltic state.

According to the court documents, the academic had worked at St. Petersburg State University until 2010. He later joined the faculty of the University of Tartu in Estonia, where, from 2016 to 2023, he held the position of Professor of European Union and Russian Studies. He then worked there as a professor of International Political Theory until his arrest.

“Morozov was tasked by the Russian special service to collect information from the Republic of Estonia about Estonia’s internal, defense and security policy and related people and infrastructure,” the leading state prosecutor Taavi Pern was quoted as saying in a press release by the Estonian internal security service (Kapo).

According to Pern, the professor was forwarding information about Estonia’s “political situation and elections, allied relations, and integration and social integration.” The prosecutor claimed that while most of this information was publicly available, and some had been obtained by Morozov thanks to his “position as a scientist,” it could be used to “threaten Estonia.” Pern noted that Morozov did not have any access to state secrets.

The prosecution also claimed that Morozov had been working with Moscow “for a long time” and alleged that he was recruited by Russian intelligence services when studying at a Russian university in the 1990’s.

At the same time, Kapo Director General Margo Polloson noted that in his actions, Morozov “did not damage or manipulate his own educational or research activities in any way. The science he did and guided is still relevant today.” Nevertheless, Polloson claimed that Morozov “pretended to be a professor of international relations, which gave him access to various entities, events and people, which he took advantage of.”

The head of the Tartu University Johan Skytte Institute for Political Studies, Kristiina Tonnisson, had previously stated that Morozov’s arrest in January was a “shock to us all.” She added that while the university had “no grounds for complaints regarding Morozov’s previous work,” his past activities would be critically reviewed.

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Glenn Diesen about the benefits of a multipolar, Eurasian world order

Reinvent Money | June 16, 2024

Paul Buitink talks to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic and political scientist. He is a professor at the School of Business of the University of South-Eastern Norway. Glenn explains why the current international liberal unipolar world order is in decline. And why a new multipolar Eurasian order is inevitable and how that would benefit the world. He describes Europe’s role and challenge in this new world order. Also Glenn dives into the Russia and Ukraine conflict and why the incremental approach of the West could lead to a boiling frog situation. At the end he also shares his experiences of being a controversial scientist in Norway.

Find more about Glenn Diesen here, including his latest book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-War-Eu…

Follow Paul on X here:   / paulbuitink  

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

Sham-ocracy, Scam-ocracy

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.

In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.

Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.

After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)

Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)

Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.

The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.

In Europe, many working people are disturbed by not only the immigration situation and the specter of totalitarian “wokeism” but also the insistence of their current leaders on provoking and prolonging a war with Russia. It does not seem to be a matter of sheer coincidence, for example, that French president Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding electoral blow after having expressed the intention to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia, thus directly endangering the people of France. Macron was also assiduous in excluding swaths of his population, who protested in the streets for months on end, from participation in civil society for what he decreed to be their crime of declining to submit to the experimental mRNA treatment during the height of the Coronapocalypse.

Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.

It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.

In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.

That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”

“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”

“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”

Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.

The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.

Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.

Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.

This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.

Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.

Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.

This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.

The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.

The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Clooney Foundation for Justice is Globalist Policy Vehicle Disguised as Charity

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 17.06.2024

Hollywood star George Clooney headlined the Biden campaign’s June 15 fundraiser alongside other celebrities, helping Joe Biden collect over $30 million. Clooney has long been in the vanguard of the Democratic party machine, including through his charity the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ).

The ‘justice’ foundation set up by actor George Clooney and his human rights lawyer wife Amal is just a political slush-fund for globalist causes, Charles Ortel, Wall Street investigator, revealed to Sputnik.

Anna Neistat, the CFJ’s Docket Project legal director, told the US state-controlled Voice of America on May 30 that the organization was asking European countries to launch criminal proceedings against Russian journalists covering the Ukraine conflict.

Neistat said the NGO was deliberately not disclosing the names of targeted Russian reporters because it wanted them “to travel to other countries and be arrested there.”

However, Hollywood actor George Clooney, who founded the CFJ together with his wife Amal, denied on June 3 that his NGO was going after journalists. But the foundation’s apparent intent to suppress freedom of speech has already raised questions.
What is CFJ’s Agenda and Who is Behind It?

“Like the Clinton Foundation, this entity is a ‘public charity’,” Wall Street analyst and charity fraud expert Charles Ortel told Sputnik. “As such, it may not be controlled by one family and its board must be broadly representative of the public at large.”

Ortel noted that the foundation’s board was led by George and Amal Clooney as ‘co-presidents’.

“While substantial amounts are paid for ‘management’ to third parties, I suspect this is actually led primarily by Amal with George along for star power and fundraising,” he said.

“The Docket initiative does not provide details on revenues and expenses which are required,” continued Ortel. “The entity uses ‘cash’ accounting rather than required ‘accrual’ accounting — given its size — which is sloppy and more likely to create conditions prone to fraud.”

Ortel has previously run a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud — and sees similarities between the Clooneys’ and the Clintons’ charities.

The NGO’s major backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Co-Impact and the Ford Foundation. They promote a globalist liberal agenda and often cooperate with the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. According to Influence Watch, the Clooneys also collaborate with the Obama Foundation.

Ranked first in the CFJ’s list of donors, the Gates Foundation has repeatedly drawn criticism over failed agricultural projects in Africa, Bill Gates’ ties with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, participation in the Clinton Foundation’s supposed pay-to-play schemes, and the Gates-funded biotechnology company Oxitec’s apparent involvement in the Pentagon bioweapon program — as exposed by Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (RCB) Troops in July 2023.

Clooney and Co Go After Conservatives

The CFJ and its founders have earned their membership of the club of liberal charities. During Donald Trump’s presidency, Clooney and other Hollywood celebrities were vocal in their criticism of the Republican and US conservatives in general.

In August 2017, the Clooney Foundation gave $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), known for attacking US conservative PACs as “hate groups.”

In March 2018, the SPLC went even so far as to accuse a left-wing Radio Sputnik podcast of pandering to white supremacists, but later retracted its claim and apologized.

Clooney wrote an op-ed for the Daily Beast in June 2020 in support of the controversial and highly-politicized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as part of what appeared to be a concerted effort by liberal Democrats and progressives prior to the November 2020 elections.

The same year, Clooney attacked conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban while defending Hungarian-born US billionaire George Soros from criticisms from his home country.

The actor vehemently denied any connection to Soros or his son Alexander, claiming he had met the tycoon only once at a UN meeting and had bumped into the heir to his international NGO network at an event in Davos.

Coordinated Infowar in Ukraine

When the Ukraine conflict erupted, Hollywood celebrities including actor Sean Penn flocked to Ukraine to portray the Kiev regime and its leader Volodymyr Zelensky as Winston Churchill-style patriots and freedom fighters.

George Eliason, a US investigative journalist who lived and worked in Donbass at that time, told Sputnik then that the flocking of celebrities to Kiev was nothing short of a “coordinated infowar operation” on the part of the West.

The Clooney Foundation’s Docket Project has been gathering “evidence” of alleged “war crimes” by the Russian military in Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict.

But the NGO has overlooked the Kiev regime’s eight-year-long war against the civilian population of the Donbass and the secret torture chambers run by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), neo-Nazi Mirotvorets website’s kill list targeting Russian and foreign journalists, politicians and children, and many other abuses human rights and media freedom of speech by Ukrainian authorities.

In October 2023, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that HiddenLight Productions, co-founded by Hillary Clinton, Sam Branson and Chelsea Clinton, was working with the Clooneys on their effort to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

The series, with the working title “The Swallows Will Return”, will follow Neistat in her search for stories of how Russians “murdered”, “raped” and “tortured” Ukrainian civilians and their families in a bid to smear and de-humanize Russians as was done the ‘Bucha massacre” hoax.

The Bucha provocation in early April 2022 was used as a pretext to tear up the peace deal struck between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. In December 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov highlighted that no list of alleged victims in the town near Kiev had yet been published, and the incident had not been thoroughly investigated despite intensive media coverage in the spring of 2022.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said in response to a request from Sputnik that it is not in contact with the Ukrainian authorities on the issue of the list of ‘Bucha victims’.

The lack of interest from international organizations shows that the incident was a staged provocation carried out by the hands of the Kiev regime, a Russian Foreign Ministry source told Sputnik, comparing it to Nazi Germany’s attempt to blame its massacre of civilians at Nemmersdorf in late 1944 on the advancing Red Army.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

“Human Rights NGOs” and the Corruption of Civil Society

BY GLENN DIESEN | JUNE 10, 2024

The organisations operating under the banner of “human rights non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) have become key actors in disseminating war propaganda, intimidating academics, and corrupting civil society. The NGOs act as gatekeepers determining which voices should be elevated and which should be censored and cancelled.

Civil society is imperative to balance the power of the state, yet the state is increasingly seeking to hijack the representation of civil society through NGOs. The NGOs can be problematic on their own as they can enable a loud minority to override a silent majority. Yet, the Reagan doctrine exacerbated the problem as these “human rights NGOs” were financed by the government and staffed by people with ties to intelligence agencies to ensure civil society does not deviate significantly from government policies.

The ability of academics to speak openly and honestly is restricted by these gatekeepers. Case in point, the NGOs limit dissent in academic debates about the great power rivalry in Ukraine. Well-documented and proven facts that are imperative to understanding the conflict are simply not reported in the media, and any efforts to address these facts are confronted with vague accusations of being “controversial” or “pro-Russian”, a transgression that must be punished with intimidation, censorship, and cancellation.

I will outline here first my personal experiences with one of these NGOs, and second how the NGOs are hijacking civil society.

My Encounter with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is one of these “NGOs” financed by the government and the CIA-cutout National Endowment for Democracy (NED). They regularly publish hit pieces about me and rarely miss their weekly tweets that label me a propagandist for Russia. It is always name-calling and smearing rather than anything that can be considered a coherent argument.

The standard formula for cancellation is to shame my university in every article and tweet for allowing academic freedom, with the implicit offer of redemption by terminating my employment as a professor. Peak absurdity occurred with a 7-page article in a newspaper in which it was argued I violated international law by spreading war propaganda. They grudgingly had to admit that I have opposed the war from day one, although for a professor in Russian politics to engage with Russian media allegedly made me complicit in spreading war propaganda.

Every single time I am invited to give a speech at any event, this NGO will appear to publicly shame and pressure the organisers to cancel my invitation. The NGO also openly attempt to incite academics to rally against me to strengthen their case for censorship in a trial of public opinion. Besides whipping up hatred in the media by labelling me a propagandist for Russia, they incite online troll armies such as NAFO to cancel me online and in the real world. After subsequent intimidations through social media, emails, SMS and phone calls, the police advised me to remove my home address and phone number from public access. One of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee recently responded by posting a sale ad for my house, which included photos of my home with my address for their social media followers.

The Norwegian Helsinki Committee also infiltrates and corrupts other institutions. One of the more eager Helsinki Committee employees is also a board member at the Norwegian organisation for non-fictional authors and translators (NFFO) and used his position there to cancel the organisation’s co-hosting of an event as I had been invited to speak. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is also overrepresented in the Nobel Committee to ensure the right candidates are picked.

Why would a humanitarian NGO act like modern Brownshirts by limiting academic freedom? One could similarly ask why a human rights NGO spends more effort to demonise Julian Assange rather than exploring the human rights abuses he exposed.

This “human rights NGO” is devoted primarily to addressing human rights abuses in the East. Subsequently, all great power politics is framed as a competition between good values versus bad values. Constructing stereotypes for the in-group versus the out-groups as a conflict between good and evil is a key component of political propaganda. The complexity of security competition between the great powers is dumbed down and propagandised as a mere struggle between liberal democracy versus authoritarianism. Furthermore, they rest on the source credibility of being “non-governmental” and merely devoted to human rights, which increases the effectiveness of their messaging.

By framing the world as a conflict between good and evil, mutual understanding and compromise are tantamount to appeasement while peace is achieved by defeating enemies. Thus, these “human rights NGOs” call for confrontation and escalation against whoever is the most recent reincarnation of Hitler, while the people calling for diplomacy are denounced and censored as traitors.

NGOs Hijacking Civil Society

After the Second World War, American intelligence agencies took on a profound role in manipulating civil society in Europe. The intelligence agencies were embarrassed when they were caught, and the solution was to hide in plain sight.

The Reagan Doctrine entailed setting up NGOs that would openly interfere in the civil society of other states under the guise of supporting human rights. The well-documented objective was to conceal influence operations by US intelligence as work on democracy and human rights. The “non-governmental” aspect of the NGOs is fraudulent as they are almost completely funded by the government and staffed with people connected to the intelligence community. Case in point, during Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” in 2004, an anti-corruption protest was transformed into a pro-NATO/anti-Russian government. The head of the influential NGO Freedom House in Ukraine was the former Director of the CIA.

Reagan himself gave the inauguration speech when he established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. The Washington Post wrote that NED has been the “sugar daddy of overt operations” and “what used to be called ‘propaganda’ and can now simply be called ‘information'”.[1] Documents released reveal that NED cooperated closely with CIA propaganda initiatives. Allen Weinstein, a cofounder of NED, acknowledged: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.[2] Philip Agee, a CIA whistle-blower, explained that NED was established as a “propaganda and inducement program” to subvert foreign nations and style it as a democracy promotion initiative. NED also finances the Norwegian Helsinki Committee.

The NGOs enable a loud Western-backed minority to marginalise a silent majority, and then sell it as “democracy”. Protests can therefore legitimise the overthrow of elected governments. The Guardian referred to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004 as “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing” for the purpose of “winning other people’s elections”.[3] Another article by the Guardian labelled the Orange Revolution as a “postmodern coup d’état” and a “CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions”.[4] A similar regime change operation was repeated in Ukraine in 2014 to mobilise Ukrainian civil society against their government, resulting in overthrowing the democratically elected government against the will of the majority of Ukrainians. The NGOs branded it a “democratic revolution” and was followed by Washington asserting its dominance over key levers of power in Kiev.

Similar NGO operations were also launched against Georgia. The NGOs staged Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003 which eventually resulted in war with Russia after the new authorities in Georgia attacked South Ossetia. Recently, the Prime Minister of Georgia cautioned that the US was yet again using NGOs in an effort to topple the government to use his country as a second front against Russia.[5] Georgia’s democratically elected parliament passed a law with an overwhelming majority (83 in favour vs 23 against), for greater transparency over the funding of NGOs. Unsurprisingly, the Western NGOs decided that transparency over funding of NGOs was undemocratic, and it was labelled a “Russian law”. The Western public was fed footage of protests for democratic credibility, and they were reassured that the Georgian Prime Minister was merely a Russian puppet. The US and EU subsequently responded by threatening Georgia with sanctions in the name of “supporting” Georgia’s civil society.

Civil Society Corrupted

Society rests on three legs – the government, the market and civil society. Initially, the free market was seen as the main instrument to elevate the freedom of the individual from government. Yet, as immense power concentrated in large industries in the late 19th century, some liberals looked to the government as an ally to limit the power of large businesses. The challenge of our time is that government and corporate interests go increasingly hand-in-hand, which only intensifies with the rise of the tech giants. This makes it much more difficult for civil society to operate independently. The universities should be a bastion of freedom and not policed by fake NGOs.

National Endowment for Democracy - generator of coups and chaos - ANALYSIS

[1] D. Ignatius, ‘Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups’, Washington Post, 22 September 1991.

[2] Ibid.

[3] I. Traynor, ‘US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev’, The Guardian, 26 November 2004.

[4] J. Steele, ‘Ukraine’s postmodern coup d’état’, The Guardian, 26 November 2004.

[5] L Kelly, ‘Georgian prime minister accuses US of fueling ‘revolution attempts’’, The Hill, 3 May 2024.

June 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Ex-Press TV reporter at center of WaPo’s smear campaign against Grayzone

By Maryam Qarehgozlou | Press TV | June 11, 2024

The Washington Post reports that Grayzone journalist Wyatt Reed took funds from Iran, and the report is based on testimonies of anti-Iran elements or those linked to US arms manufacturers.

In another desperate bid to muzzle alternative media that has been revealing Western complicity in Gaza and Ukraine, The Washington Post recently published a hit piece targeting The Grayzone news outlet.

The article alleged that The Grayzone is financially backed by Iran and Russia to “spread falsehoods.”

Authored by Joseph Menn, the article claimed to have “exposed” The Grayzone’s journalist Wyatt Reed’s ties with Iran’s state media, relying on what it said were hacked emails and quotes from sources either anti-Iran elements or linked to the US government or arms manufacturers.

The oldest newspaper in Washington, owned by pro-Israel business tycoon Jeff Bezos, insinuated that since Reed, now a managing director at The Grayzone, appeared on Press TV many years ago, he is on the Islamic Republic’s payroll.

The piece went as far as to suggest that he should be jailed for reporting for the Iranian news channel.

The Washington Post report repeated the same claims about Reed’s reporting for Russia’s state-run news agency Sputnik.

Reed, for his part, has never hidden his work for Press TV. At the start of his journalistic career in 2020, Reed appeared on Press TV several dozen times and openly tweeted his reports. The “correspondent @PressTV” was also featured in his Twitter bio at the time.

“For weeks, we’ve been waiting to see how they would target us. Now we know. Congrats to the @washingtonpost’s ‘Digital threats reporter’ on this earth-shattering reporting on my appearances on Press TV years before I edited Grayzone,” Reed wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, last week.

“How could they possibly have figured it out?” he added.

Dan Cohen, an American journalist and filmmaker, also took to X to assert that The Washington Post’s “sloppy attempt” to discredit independent journalism only highlights the media group’s own corruption.

“The Washington Post is targeting Grayzone journalist @wyattreed13 for having previously worked for Iran state media outlet Press TV and Russian state outlet Sputnik, as if that’s somehow a breach of journalist ethics,” Cohen wrote in a post.

He said The Washington Post reporter Greg Jaffe has a fellowship at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a permanent war think tank funded by the US State Department and Pentagon.

The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal, responded that supporters of the Israeli war on Gaza and the Western proxy war in Ukraine are angry with The Grayzone and Reed because of their truthful reporting.

“The motive behind this malicious attack is abundantly clear: Wyatt now works for The Grayzone, and The Grayzone’s factual reporting has infuriated boosters of the Ukraine proxy war and members of Israel’s international propaganda network,” he said.

‘Embarrassing’ correction

Stung by the backlash, The Washington Post was forced to retract some of its allegations. While the story initially claimed that editors of The Grayzone had received payments from Iranian media, it soon corrected the story, saying only Reed received such payments.

“Less than 24 hours after @JosephMenn’s hatchet job on @TheGrayzoneNews landed, WaPo has been forced into a massive and deeply embarrassing correction,” Kit Klarenberg, a British investigative journalist and contributor to the Press TV website, wrote in a post on X.

“Other egregious distortions and falsehoods remain extant. But it’s a start. And certainly the foundation of future legal action,” he added.

Reed also said in an X post that more corrections are expected in the coming days.

“The ‘journalists’ attempting to get me jailed for journalism just had to issue a major correction to their hit piece. Expect more in the coming days as we expose the US government cutouts, pro-Israel zealots, and federal informants they relied on to target us.”

Bogus claims

Despite the correction, the piece is still filled with false, twisted, and distorted accounts. For example, the author of the article, Menn, claims Blumenthal did not answer emails seeking comment. However, Blumenthal said in a post on X that he received no emails.

“Unless Menn can prove that he emailed me and I somehow missed it, this is malicious conduct that demonstrates reckless disregard for journalistic ethics,” he said.

Blumenthal added that if he had received any emails from Menn, he would have stated clearly that Reed reported for Press TV three years before he joined The Grayzone and that Wyatt’s position at The Grayzone was created through “a public, grassroots crowd-funding campaign” in which readers pooled together small donations.

“I would have also stated that The Grayzone does not accept funding from any government, unlike nearly every intel front Menn quoted against us,” he added.

According to Blumenthal, these facts would have undermined the entire premise of Menn’s “malicious” smear piece, which may be why he did not email him.

WaPo quotes NATO-backed groups

Blumenthal also revealed that Menn’s key sources for the article included Neil Rauhauser, a “shady online troll” who is also believed to be an FBI informant, and some NATO-backed outfits.

The article cited the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, a Canberra-based think tank funded by Australia’s Department of Defence, NATO, and the US Department of State.

The Atlantic Council, the semi-official DC think tank of NATO, is another source cited by The Washington Post, which has taken in substantial funding from the US Department of State, EU states, and arms manufacturers.

It also quoted Ali Herischi, personal lawyer of Masih Alinejad, a US-based, exiled Iranian rabble-rouser who is on Washington’s payroll for instigating anti-Iran sentiments inside and outside the country.

Alinejad has advocated for Israeli military attacks on Iran and received $305,000 from the US government for her work at Voice of America, the US state broadcaster, between 2015 and 2019.

“At no point did Menn inform his readers that his sources were state-funded pro-war entities,” Blumenthal said.

Misinforming readers

The Washington Post story also alleged that The Grayzone is spreading misinformation by reporting “widespread Israeli attacks against its [settlers] on October 7” when Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories.

However, the newspaper conveniently failed to inform its readers that Israeli media have corroborated The Grayzone’s assessment that the Israeli military explicitly ordered attacks on Israeli settlers who had been taken captive on October 7, killing many.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last month that Israeli Gen. Barak Hiram ordered an Israeli tank to shell a home in Kibbutz Beeri filled with over a dozen Israeli captives on October 7, killing all but two.

Desperate attempts

According to Hermela Aregawi, a US-based independent journalist, the targeting of American journalists who challenge mainstream narratives is likely to ramp up ahead of the US presidential elections.

“If you read beyond the headline, the ‘editor’s ties’ are that… ‘The files appear to show that the Iranian broadcaster paid [journalist Wyatt] Reed for occasional contributions to its programming’… The reality is US outlets, UK outlets, Qatar (Al Jazeera) etc. pay some of their contributors for their analysis,” she wrote on X.

Journalist Mark Ames also said that the piece was a desperate attempt to trigger a federal investigation against independent journalists.

“This is the second WaPo hit piece against Grayzone this year. Based on the sourcing/media here, you get the sense Langley & DC press corps are so frustrated that their ‘disinformation’ hex cast upon [The Grayzone ] has had no effect, so they’re trying to summon the Feds to shut [The Grayzone ] down.”

The Australia-based anti-war commentator Caitlin Johnstone also said on X that The Grayzone staff worked for foreign media outlets like Press TV because there are no major Western media outlets that platform dissident voices like theirs, who “criticize the Western empire and its actions.”

“The Washington Post is one of the worst propaganda rags ever to exist in any country. If I’d published such an article for such a depraved empire propaganda outlet, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

June 11, 2024 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Scholz and Macron belong to ‘ash heap of history’ – Medvedev

RT | June 10, 2024

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron should abandon politics after their respective parties suffered damaging setbacks in the European Parliament elections, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev believes.

Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is projected to finish third in the key ballot, behind the center-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Macron’s Besoin d’Europe coalition is expected to win less than half of the votes received by the right-wing National Rally party associated with Marine Le Pen, prompting the French president to call a snap parliamentary election after preliminary results emerged on Sunday.

In a social media post on Monday, Medvedev claimed the outcome proves that Scholz and Macron are “respected by no one.” The former Russian leader linked the poor performance at the ballot box with the “idiotic economic and migration policy” pursued by the two leaders and their support for Ukraine “at the cost of [their] own citizens.”

“Time to retire. To the ash heap of history!” said Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.

Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, earlier called on Scholz and Macron to resign and to “stop victimizing the citizens of their states.”

Officials in Moscow have accused leaders of EU nations of betraying the interests of their populations in favor of US geopolitical goals. Responding to the Ukraine crisis in 2022, the bloc vowed to support Kiev militarily for “as long as it takes,” and imposed an array of economic sanctions against Russia. Most notably, Brussels has pushed EU countries to stop buying Russian natural gas.

Large consumers such as Germany have struggled to substitute cheap Russian pipeline fuel with other sources, including renewables and expensive liquified natural gas. American LNG producers have since taken over a large share of the European market. A hike in energy prices has forced many energy-intensive businesses to either move out of the EU or shut down entirely.

June 10, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Neocon Star Julie Smith is ‘Worthy’ Successor of Warmongering Victoria Nuland

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.06.2024

US Permanent Representative to NATO Julianne Smith was nominated on June 5 to fill Victoria Nuland’s shoes and become under secretary of state for political affairs. What’s known about Smith?

  • From 2009 to 2012, Julie Smith served as the director of European and NATO policy at the United States Department of Defense and then as the deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2012 to 2013.
  • In 2016, The Intercept called Smith a “rising star in the Democratic foreign policy establishment” akin to neocon and warmonger Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland’s husband.
    In January 2016, Smith signed Hillary Clinton’s anti-Bernie Sanders letter, bashing his desire to normalize ties with Iran. The letter was part of Clinton’s broad smear campaign against Sanders, then her Democratic presidential rival.
  • Testifying before the Senate in February 2017, Smith accused Russia of continuously undermining US interests at home and abroad and peddled the “Trump-Russia collusion” hoax.
  • Between 2014 and 2018, Smith worked in the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) funded by major US defense contractors.
  • She also worked at consultancy firm WestExec Advisors, founded by Antony Blinken and Michele A. Flournoy in 2017, that is suspected of secret lobbying on behalf of US military corporations. Over a dozen WestExec alums joined the Biden administration, triggering concerns “about the potential for groupthink, conflicts of interest, (…) legalized corruption” and “monopolization of foreign policymaking” by corporate interests, per The Intercept. According to the New York Times, some of WestExec’s clients – which the firm keeps on the hush-hush – got hefty contracts from the Pentagon.
  • In May 2020, Smith accused China of undermining US leadership by providing aid to Europe to fight the COVID-19 pandemic; in July 2020 she called to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
  • In March 2022, Smith groundlessly accused Russia of using chemical and biological weapons amid Russia’s revelations with regard to a network of Pentagon-funded secret bio-weapons labs in Ukraine.
  • In December 2022, she announced an effort to step up arms production by NATO member states amid the Ukraine conflict and strongly advocated enhancing NATO military presence in Europe “to ensure that Russia can never attack NATO” in December 2023.
  • “We do consider the Russian threat to the NATO alliance to be the preeminent threat that we’re grappling with,” Smith told an online briefing on April 4, 2020.
  • At the same press briefing she stressed that NATO’s engagements will not be limited to one region, expressing willingness to challenge Russia and China simultaneously and adding that “a lot of the security challenges we face today don’t have any geographic boundaries.”
  • In October 2023, Smith asserted to the press that the US and NATO will continue to support Ukraine and Israel amid the latter’s Gaza war.

Being a darling of the military-industrial complex, Smith is likely to follow in the footsteps of her predecessor, Victoria Nuland, and continue stoking tensions in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

June 6, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Greek EPAM Party Calls for Lifting Sanctions Against Russia, Dialogue

Sputnik – 05.06.2024

Greece’s non-parliamentary United People’s Front party (EPAM), which is running in the elections in the European Parliament, supports Russia and calls for lifting sanctions against the country along with ceasing arms transfers to Ukraine, Liudmila Bogila, the party’s candidate for the elections, told Sputnik.

Bogila was born in the Lugansk region of the USSR. She is a professional doctor and the head of the Center for scientific and social initiatives.

“Only EPAM demands the lifting of sanctions against Russia and, moreover, supports Russia. EPAM has consistently taken a clear position in relations with Russia since the beginning of the [Ukrainian] crisis several years ago — it opposes the adoption of sanctions and is in favor of dialogue, for the preservation of friendly relations with Russia both in economy and in politics. And we want to convey this position to the voters,” Bogila said.

The Ukrainian crisis began 10 years ago, but has worsened and gotten to a new, dangerous level, the candidate added.

“Our party’s election program directly says that today, when Europe, under US directions, is drawn into a war with Russia, the politicians of our country are preparing to sacrifice us to foreign interests. We are fighting to end the war in Ukraine and the lifting of sanctions against Russia, the only result of which is impoverishment of the people and enrichment of the elites,” Bogila said.

The interests of the United States, not Russia’s intentions, spurred the conflict, the candidate said.

“People must understand, what is happening in Ukraine today is not the result of Russia’s alleged invasive sentiment. It is the outcome of the invasive sentiments of the US and its satellites and Russia’s forced actions,” Bogila said, adding that most of the people she communicates with support this position.

Western countries and their allies rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Russia after it launched a military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The EU, in particular, has already adopted 13 sanctions packages targeting Russia’s economy, energy and banking services, among other areas. Moscow says that Western sanctions against Russia have failed.

June 5, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Persecution against Scott Ritter shows US not democracy anymore

By Lucas Leiroz | June 4, 2024

The persecution of political dissidents in the US is becoming commonplace. People who oppose Washington’s aggressive foreign policy are being seen as enemies and treated as criminals, even when there is no plausible reason to charge them. Recently, military analyst Scott Ritter had his passport confiscated by US authorities without any specific reason, showing the advanced levels of tyranny in the country.

Ritter was on a plane at the New York airport. His plan was to travel to the Russian Federation, as he had a special invitation to participate in the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which will begin in the next few days. Ritter was already boarding when three policemen suddenly forcibly removed him and seized his documents. When asked about the reason for this action, the policemen said they were following orders from the US State Department and refused to clarify any details about the case.

“I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said ‘orders of the State Department’. They had no further information for me (…) They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport,” he told journalists.

Without his passport, Ritter is unable to leave the US territory. In practice, he will begin living under a regime similar to house arrest, not only being monitored by American authorities, but also being prevented from leaving the country. It is curious that this happened precisely during a trip by Ritter to Russia. It seems that Washington is trying to make it clear to all its citizens that there will be no tolerance for citizens who maintain any form of ties with Moscow.

Ritter has long been one of the most vocal critics of military support for Ukraine. In his interviews and articles, he openly advocates for an end to arms supply and for a friendly policy between the US and Russia. Ritter has repeatedly exposed the truth about Ukrainian Nazism and Western collusion with ultranationalism and racism. In addition, his main work as a military analyst consists of providing detailed, technical analyses that show the situation of the sides in the conflict.

While Western media have long claimed that Kiev is “winning the war,” Ritter has emerged as a dissenting voice proving the opposite, saying that military control of the conflict belongs to the Russian Federation. He has refuted fallacious narratives such as the “Ukrainian victory in Kiev” or the “Kherson counteroffensive.” Using impartial and technical military analysis, Ritter has substantiated each of his arguments about Russia winning the war. Today, his work is recognized as one of the best among military experts around the world, with many of his predictions having come true.

This is not the first time that Ritter has suffered persecution in his own country. In the past, he has been criticized, defamed and even detained by American authorities because of his stance against Washington’s war initiatives. Ritter severely criticized the American decision to invade Iraq, stating that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country. At the time, he was a UN weapons inspector and had privileged information about the real situation in the Middle East.

Currently, in addition to providing military analysis on the war in Ukraine, Ritter has also been strongly critical of Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip, which has certainly generated discontent among radical Zionists in American domestic politics. In addition, he has worked to refute fallacies and stereotypes about Russia and the Russian people, making frequent trips to Russia to show the local reality. Recently, Ritter was in Chechnya, Moscow and St. Petersburg and spoke to the Western media about what real life is like in Russia today, explaining that the country is in a favorable economic situation, without any effect of Western sanctions.

It is already clear that persecution is the fate of any American dissident. When US citizens disagree with their country’s policies, the authorities attack, arrest and defame them. Unfortunately, this is the reality in the country that claims to be the global guardian of democracy. However, this lie is increasingly discredited. Despite all the propaganda efforts, it is already clear to the world that the US is no longer a democracy.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.

June 4, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

US seizes Scott Ritter’s passport

Scott Ritter. © David McNew/Getty Images
RT | June 3, 2024

The US State Department has seized the passport of former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he told RT on Monday.

Ritter was on his way to Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) when he was pulled off the plane and had his documents confiscated.

“I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said ‘orders of the State Department’. They had no further information for me,” Ritter told RT. “They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.”

Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, who later served as the US and UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He is also a RT contributor, writing about international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation.

He most recently visited Russia in January, spending time in Chechnya, Moscow and St. Petersburg, among other places.

The most recent post on Ritter’s Telegram channel put the Clooney Foundation for Justice on notice for its alleged crusade against “Russian propagandists.”

“Here I am. In your face. If telling the truth about Russia makes me a propagandist in your book, then I accept the title,” he wrote. “Bring it on. I’ll school you on the First Amendment.”

“You have zero concept of what free speech is. Try and arrest me and you’ll find out. In spades. It’s war,” he added.

June 3, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

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