Washington is resorting to various forms of coercion as it pushes to create regional alliances aimed against its geopolitical rivals, including Moscow and Beijing, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has claimed.
He was speaking to his counterparts representing other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at a meeting in New Delhi. The group, which was established by Russia and China, has six other members, including India.
“Unprecedented pressure is being applied to independent nations through the use of open blackmail, threats, ‘color revolutions,’ coups, and dissemination of blatant disinformation. All those tools long ago became the Western calling card,” the minister said on Friday.
The goal of the US and its allies is to undermine the emerging multipolar world and preserve their dominance, according to Shoigu. Washington chose to dismantle the system of global security in pursuit of its ambition and withdrew from multiple treaties with Russia, the minister told his audience.
Shoigu said that Moscow had attempted to defuse tensions with NATO through diplomacy in 2021, but its proposals were rejected by the West, proving that it is unwilling to have a partnership of equals with Russia.
“Today, Washington and its accomplices are executing a strategic plan to provoke other nations into military confrontation with the states they don’t like, primarily Russia and China.”
The minister interpreted the Ukraine conflict as a vivid example of American “criminal policy.” The US goal in it is to “inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, create a threat to China and preserve its [hegemonic] position,” said Shoigu.
The official blasted Western supplies of weapons to Kiev, stating that they only prolong hostilities and create additional risks to Europe and the entire world. He said the arms “make their way to the black market and further into the hands of terrorist organizations.”
The SCO, a Eurasian intergovernmental organization, includes China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan among its members.
April 28, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | United States |
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By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 26, 2023
Last week, before he left Fox News, Tucker Carlson delivered a commentary on corrupt media, corrupt politicians and “truth-telling.”
According to Carlson, the question to ask when assessing public figures isn’t, “Who is corrupt?” — because there are “too many to count.”
“The question is, Who is telling the truth?” Carlson said. “There are not many of those.”
Carlson singled out Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children Health Defense’s chairman-on-leave who is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, as one of the few truth-telling public figures.
“It’s nice to have a truth-teller around,” Carlson said. “It’s helpful because suddenly the stakes are very high.” He added:
“Kennedy knew early that the COVID vaccines were both ineffective and potentially dangerous, and he said so in public to the extent he was allowed.
“Science has since proven Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right — unequivocally right. But Kennedy was not rewarded for this. He was vilified. He was censored.”
Carlson — who later on his show interviewed Kennedy — said mainstream media channels other than Fox News “maligned” Kennedy for his skepticism of the COVID-19 products.
“The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air — and as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products,” he said.
Carlson pointed out that Kennedy and his father, Robert F. Kennedy — who sought the U.S. presidency 55 years ago — said things “you weren’t supposed to say” and were “hated” by some for their honesty.
For instance, Kennedy Sr. spoke out against the Vietnam War because “he believed — with a lot of evidence — that it was not helping the United States in any way,” Carlson said.
Similarly, Carlson showed his viewers a clip from Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 Democratic presidential campaign announcement speech, in which Kennedy said the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine appears to be “prolonging” the war rather than “shortening” it.
Carlson also showed clips from mainstream media outlets’ coverage of Kennedy’s April 19 announcement, in which news commentators called him “extreme” and “dangerous.”
“Notice,” Carlson said, “not there, not anywhere is a point-by-point rebuttal of his [Kennedy’s] actual points.”
“They never engage him on the actual facts. They can’t — they would lose. Instead, they impugn his character,” he said.
Now that Kennedy is Biden’s leading primary opponent, Carlson said, the media’s message to him is, “shut up — you’re not allowed to talk.”
Carlson said he did not find Kennedy to be “extreme,” but instead “rational and calm and well deliberated.”
“He [Kennedy Jr.] is deeply insightful and — above all else — he is honest, no matter what you think of the substance of what he says,” Carlson added.
April 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Militarism, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Having formally joined NATO earlier this month, Finland has recorded its highest year-on-year spike in defense spending since 1962, the height of the Cold War.
Finland, which shares the longest border with Russia in Europe at 1,300 kilometers, recorded the most drastic spending boost in the EU (36 percent), underpinned by a number of costly purchases, such as a new fleet of 64 F-35 fighter jets from US weapons company Lockheed Martin. The 10-billion-euro procurement was billed as the single largest splurge in the Nordic country’s history.
During the late Cold War-era, Finland spent approximately 1.9 percent of its GDP on defense, yet saw its spending plummet in the subsequent years and reach its lowest in 2001 at 1.1 percent of GDP. Barely two years earlier, the defense expenditure still stood at a meager 1.3 percent of GDP. However, last year alone, Finland’s outgoing five-party government led by the Social Democrats agreed to add more than 2 billion euros ($2.2 billion) in defense spending, citing hostilities in Ukraine as a pretext.
In doing so, Finland notably eclipsed its fellow European nations, such as Lithuania, Sweden and Poland, which saw the next biggest spikes in their defense budgets at 27 percent, 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively.
As a new-fledged NATO member, Finland has emerged as one of the top military spenders in the alliance, spending about 2 percent of GDP. In 2022, only the US (3.5 percent of GDP), Poland (2.4 percent), Estonia (2.3 percent) and the UK (2.1 percent) spent more on defense per capita than Finland. Despite NATO’s spending goal of 2 percent, many nations fall well below this target. For instance, Finland’s neighbor Norway had a spending level of just 1.55 percent. Its neighbor Sweden, with which it filed a joint NATO bid only to part ways later on, has pledged to reach the bloc’s target of military spending “as soon as possible,” whereas Denmark seeks to reach NATO’s target within a decade, by 2033.
Meanwhile, global military expenditure rose to a record high last year amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which spurred European nations and, broadly, the West, into reaching spending levels unseen since the Cold War. European military spending alone shot up 13 percent last year.
According to an estimate by researchers from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), last year’s total global military spending rose by 3.7 percent in real terms to $2.24 trillion. SIPRI stressed that the hike rests on multi-year plans to boost spending from several governments, which is why it is reasonable to expect military expenditure in Central and Western Europe to keep rising in the years to come.
April 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | NATO |
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In the closing address at last month’s Summit for Democracy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken piously proclaimed, “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident.
“It requires constant effort.”
Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters.
The House Judiciary Committee revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign.
Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign.
In the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, Joe Biden invoked that letter from former intelligence officials to deflect Donald Trump’s attacks on Biden family corruption.
Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.
Biden pretended that letter arose spontaneously from the patriotic sentiments of former officials.
But the letter was “triggered” by Blinken’s call to Morell, who then contacted his former colleagues.
Blinken’s ploy may have swayed Biden to appoint him secretary of state.
The media are mostly ignoring or downplaying the revelations of Blinken’s machinations.
If the roles were reversed, cable news and front-page headlines would be screaming about a villainous Trump operative pulling official strings to whitewash the Donald.
MSNBC would be howling about the death of democracy, and CNN hosts would be sobbing hysterically about the dirty deal.
But when Team Biden does it: nothing to see here, move along.
How many presidential elections can Democrats seek to dishonestly rig without suffering any penalty flags from media scorekeepers?
Shortly before the 2016 election, senior Hillary Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan peddled false claims linking the Trump Organization to Russia.
The Federal Election Commission last month levied a $113,000 fine on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier.
The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election.
There was no proof — but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Jake Sullivan is now Biden’s national security adviser.
Did he get that gig in part because of his willingness to lie for Democratic kingpins?
Avril Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence.
Did signing the Hunter laptop letter help her snare that plum job?
The letter Blinken finagled would not have been so influential if journalists were not shamelessly docile to federal job titles.
Inside the Beltway, former intelligence kingpins are viewed like royalty or at least second-tier aristocracy.
But the CIA has a long record of secretly intervening in dozens of foreign elections.
In 2019, former CIA director Mike Pompeo summarized his agency’s motif: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”
Former CIA chief James Woolsey insisted in 2018 that the CIA intervenes in elections “only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.”
Yet the letter from former spooks was instantly revered by journalists as if it were handed down from Mt. Sinai.
For the Washington political elite, defeating Donald Trump was the ultimate good cause to save democracy.
Biden talks as if his 2020 election victory was the result of practically a divine incarnation of the “will of the people.”
Unfortunately, presidential elections are irrevocable regardless of how many voters were conned.
How much official deceit can democracy survive?
Any notion of “informed consent” by voters is a mirage if federal agencies and former officials have the power to endlessly distort the news.
Shortly after he became secretary of state, Blinken boasted that the US government doesn’t sweep problems “under the rug. . . . We deal with them in the daylight, with full transparency.”
That pledge apparently did not extend to Blinken’s own tampering with the 2020 election.
What else is Blinken hiding, and when will the next shoe fall?
April 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | CIA, FBI, Joe Biden, United States |
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By Ahmed Adel | April 24, 2023
According to a Japanese government source, the Group of Seven (G7) members are considering an almost complete ban on exports to Russia. However, such a move only demonstrates the desperate position that the G7 finds itself in because its already existing sanctions regime has not only failed to deter Moscow from its military operation in Ukraine, but has boomeranged and hit the economies of the Group much more severely than Russia.
Although G7 countries have stopped exporting luxury goods and equipment related to the military sector to Russia, the source said the latest plan could expand the trade embargo to used cars, tires, cosmetic items, and clothing. Again, these are non-essential items that can very easily be sourced from other markets.
There is credence to this source when considering that Japan will host the G7 summit on May 19-21 in Hiroshima. The centre of discussions will primarily focus on expanding support to Ukraine and strengthening sanctions on Russia, something that Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US will approve.
The problem for G7 member countries is that if they decide to introduce a complete embargo on the export of products to Russia, they will end up hurting their own industries more as they cut out a major market and allow rivals from China, India and elsewhere to fill the void. For this reason, many Western politicians still fear that a move by the G7 will lead to a harsh reaction from companies that continue to trade with Russia, and more alarmingly, retaliatory sanctions by Moscow.
In addition, from a technical point of view, it is very complicated to implement a total ban on exports to Russia. Russia’s bilateral trade with the European Union in 2021 reached €257 billion, with €158 billion of those being Russian exports to the bloc. Although this has obviously dropped since the Russian military operation began, many problems will still emerge. Despite billions of dollars being slashed from bilateral trade, we are still speaking about tens of billions of dollars, something that is not abstract but is backed by jobs and livelihoods.
It is also unlikely that large economies outside of the G7, such as China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, would join the embargo. This means that it is impossible to impose a global embargo on Russia. In addition, the G7 cannot expect Russia to continue selling its oil and other export goods without receiving payment.
Finally, from a legal perspective, the decision needs to be ratified at the UN level, where Russia and China will vote down such an idea. Therefore, the G7 member countries are just making a cynical attempt to weaken and destroy the Russian economy to supplant a competitor and preserve the unipolar world order.
Importantly, if the G7 imposes a near complete embargo, it will be Europe that will suffer the most and not the US since it is the least dependent on trade relations with Russia. In general, Moscow and Washington do not have deep economic ties, unlike Europe. Western European countries are already in a bad economic situation, and since the introduction of sanctions, they have experienced more damage and inconvenience.
For example, high-tech European products intended for Russia will now lose a major client and they will not so easily find a new one. This situation will lead to European companies having to reduce production, thus leading to lower profits and workers being laid off. Even worse for the West, as already said, is that Russia will not be left without necessary products because they can be purchased from many other countries.
For his part though, Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Yasutoshi Nishimura, refused to comment on the possibility of a complete ban on the export of products to Russia at a press conference in Tokyo. He noted that this issue concerns “diplomatic negotiations.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to join the G7 summit via online stream. In a communique released on April 18, the G7 foreign ministers committed their countries to intensifying sanctions imposed on Russia since the military operation began last year. The foreign ministers demanded Russian forces to immediately and unconditionally withdraw, something which obviously will not happen since it is Moscow, and not the West, in a position of strength.
They also vowed to counter sanctions by Moscow and warned of the “severe costs” that third parties could face if they do not stop providing assistance for Russia’s war effort. However, this is an empty threat as it will be impossible for the G7 to impose a “severe cost” on the likes of China, India, Brazil, South Africa and many others, particularly since their own cooperation is deepening.
Therefore, the G7’s desire to embargo Russia even further will not only humiliatingly fail as all the previous sanction packages have, but is also a demonstration on the desperation they are experiencing in face of Russia’s success in the military operation and rebounding the West’s economic war.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
April 24, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | Russia |
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The relentless criticism by the Biden administration towards the incumbent Hungarian government is entirely disproportionate and unjustified, and does little to separate the current U.S. regime from the malign superpowers it seeks to distance itself from. Hungary’s leader recognizes this and is putting his own country’s interests ahead of those of the United States, a stance that Europe would be wise to follow.
Despite pressure from the U.S., Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said his country cannot be pushed into joining the war on the side of Ukraine.
“The United States has not given up its plan to squeeze everyone, including Hungary, into a war alliance, to go with the crowd,” Orbán told a press conference last week.
“But I have made it clear several times, and Hungarian diplomacy has also expressed this, that the will of the Hungarian people is clear, and our knowledge of history is quite solid, so we will not allow this.
“We will not allow them to squeeze us into a war. We will not send any weapons, and we will not be involved in a conflict that is not our war,” the Hungarian premier added.
Orbán made the remarks amid growing tension with the U.S. Recent disparaging remarks by David Pressman, Biden’s top diplomat in Budapest, have been dismissive of a country which, whilst remaining on many issues a conforming ally to the United States, has had the audacity to form its own view on matters unfolding on its doorstep, and opted not to become entirely subservient to U.S. interests when the two countries have vastly different worldviews and face inherently different geopolitical threats
“We have concerns about the continued eagerness of Hungarian leaders to expand and deepen ties with the Russian Federation, despite Russia’s ongoing brutal aggression against Ukraine and threat to transatlantic security,” Pressman told a news conference in Budapest last week after criticizing the Hungarian government for retaining its stake in Russia’s International Investment Bank (IBB) upon which the U.S. government imposed sanctions last week.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán berated the shortsightedness of the U.S. decision on state radio, explaining that the Russian-controlled financial institution based in Budapest “could have played a serious role in developing Central European economies,” and expressed concern that the United States simply doesn’t understand the geopolitical climate and should stop acting like it does.
US Ambassador Pressman would push Hungary into war
The intention of Joe Biden’s man in Budapest is to drag Hungary into the conflict in Ukraine, writes József K. Horváth for the Magyar Hírlap newspaper
The Hungarian government withdrew its membership of the IBB the day after the sanctions were imposed, with Orbán stating the U.S. action had rendered the bank’s operations impossible.
“It can’t serve its function,” Orbán said. “We decided that under these circumstances, Hungary’s participation in the bank’s further work has become pointless.”
It’s not the first time the Hungarian government has been frustrated by decisions made in far-away Washington without an understanding of the nuanced consequences for the region.
U.S. government officials have regularly criticized the Hungarian administration for not following suit with the U.S. approach to the conflict in Ukraine, criticism which the Hungarian premier considers to be misguided.
“When I hear about nuclear weapons, or that a Western European country is taking depleted uranium weapons to Ukraine, I think of Chernobyl,” Orbán said while referring to Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium tank ammunition to Ukrainian forces.
“An American would never think of this, but we know that if something happens in Ukraine it’s best if people don’t go out into the streets, so we know what happened then.
“Or if in America they hear that someone died on the Ukrainian-Russian front, they obviously sympathize because it’s a loss, but it is not the same feeling as ours, because I immediately think that the person who died could be a Hungarian person from Transcarpathia.
“Everything that happens there becomes a part of our lives that very day.
“The dimension of the Americans is quite different, so I say that we rightly expect the United States to take note of Hungary’s special situation, its proximity to Ukraine, and to understand that we are therefore on the side of peace and want to stay there.”
Given the continued animosity from the U.S. towards the Orbán administration, it could be assumed that Hungary was an active belligerent nation in the conflict, and yet Budapest has complied with every anti-Russian sanction approved by the European Union, despite voicing its opposition to these actions.
“We have never agreed with sanctions, but we do not dispute anyone’s right, including the United States to impose sanctions if they see fit. We acknowledge these sanctions and roll with them,” Orbán said recently.
Hungary has welcomed tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees and provided humanitarian aid to Kyiv and the affected areas, and it has denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine from day one.
As is its right, Budapest has maintained its neutrality with regard to military intervention and assistance, and has refused to change its stance despite U.S. protestations.
Orbán added that his administration is mature enough to retain the longstanding Hungarian-U.S. alliance despite a difference in approach to the conflict in Ukraine.
“The American-Hungarian friendship must endure this difference of opinion,” he stated last week.
Whether Joe Biden and his politically-appointed diplomat in Budapest is willing to accept a difference of opinion and move on remains to be seen.
However, if the recent anti-Russian poster campaigns dotted across Hungary with the support of the U.S. embassy are anything to go by, it is difficult to see a reconciliation in the immediate future between the two countries, at least not while Joe Biden’s Democrats remain in the White House.
April 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Russophobia | Hungary, United States |
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Greger Mannswerk, head of Norwegian shipyard Kimek located in the town of Kirkenes, which borders Russia, said on Friday that the shipyard’s employees did not find any spy equipment on board Russian trawlers, commenting on recent reports from Norwegian media.
“We have a pretty good understanding of what’s on board and we have never found anything to indicate that they [Russian seamen] are engaged in intelligence gathering. We cannot know if there are any [Russian] intelligence officers on board today, but no fisherman enters a Norwegian harbor without the [Norwegian] police and armed forces having a full idea of who is on board,” Mannswerk was quoted as saying by the broadcaster.
This week, the media published the results of an investigation, which said that up to 50 civilian Russian ships could be involved in intelligence operations against Norway.
April 21, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Norway |
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The Washington Post says it has obtained secret Russian documents detailing a plan to bring anti-establishment political parties together in Germany in an effort to sow discord in the West. The Kremlin has responded that it does not interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations.
The purported Russian documents, largely dated from July to November last year, were obtained by an unidentified European intelligence service, the US news outlet said on Friday. It did not explain how it gained access, but it also interviewed some German politicians for the story.
The article said Moscow’s plan was “part of a hidden front in Russia’s war against Ukraine” and an attempt “to undermine Western unity.” The Soviet Union harnessed anti-war sentiment in the same way, an anonymous German security official told the Post.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the alleged Russian plan “100% fake.” He told the Post : “We never interfered before and now we really don’t have time for this.”
The strategy, as described in the article, involves “marrying” Germany’s far-left Die Linke with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Sahra Wagenknecht, an MP from Die Linke, would have a chance of winning the chancellorship with such backing, the plan suggests.
The Post spoke to Wagenknecht’s former husband, Ralph Niemeyer, who assessed her electoral chances as high. He claimed that Russian officials told him that such an outcome would be in Moscow’s interest.
But Wagenknecht would never accept any support from Moscow, Niemeyer added, and the idea of a union with AfD did not sit well with her either. The politician herself told the Post that there would not be “any cooperation or alliance” between her “and elements of the AfD in any form.”
The Post claimed that the effort was led by Sergey Kirienko, the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration, along with unnamed “political strategists” tasked with executing it. The documents do not show any attempts by the Russian government to communicate the strategy to German politicians or potential allies, the report said.
The article cited instances of Die Linke and AfD holding protests against Berlin’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict and the damage caused by anti-Russian sanctions to the national economy. Members of AfD interviewed by the newspaper said being on the same side of the issue was the result of an intersection of values rather than any Russian influence campaign.
April 21, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Washington Post |
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The Russian Embassy in Finland has demanded an explanation after restrictions were placed on Russian state property in Helsinki.
“A demand has been lodged to the Finnish Foreign Ministry to explain how the actions of the bailiffs are compatible with the norms of international law about the immunity of the property of a (foreign) state,” the embassy said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to Russian officials, the Finnish authorities cited EU sanctions when they imposed restrictions on the Russian Science and Culture Center building, the surrounding plot of land, and the apartments of diplomats who work there.
The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper reported on Tuesday that Finland’s debt recovery agency placed temporary restrictions on the Russian building a week ago at the request of the Finnish Foreign Ministry. Officials now have three weeks to determine if the property can be linked to blacklisted individuals or entities. The injunction forbids the owner from making deals involving the real estate.
The newspaper added that the seven apartments in question are owned by Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian federal agency for foreign cooperation which was blacklisted by the EU last year.
Last month, the Finnish authorities froze the Russian Science and Culture Center’s account at national bank Nordea, TV channel YLE said.
The EU, together with the US and Britain, has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in response to Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. The Kremlin has argued that the sanctions are illegal, while the Russian Foreign Ministry has likened the freezing of assets abroad to theft.
April 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | Finland |
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A joint “media investigation” by the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden just claimed that Russia has been using at least 50 civilian ships to spy on the North Sea for the past decade in speculative preparation of possibly carrying out acts of sabotage sometime in the future. Kremlin spokesman Peskov denied these allegations and accused those countries of trying to distract from last September’s Nord Stream terrorist attack.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh cited unnamed US administration sources to report in early February that Biden personally authorized that attack, which most folks already figured but it was nevertheless extremely newsworthy for this to come from someone as reputable as Hersh. Around a month later, the New York Times (NYT) ran a story claiming to have uncovered the alleged culprit, which they said was a rogue group of people who weren’t connected to any government.
“The US’ Latest Disinfo Campaign About The Nord Stream Terrorist Attacks Was Preplanned”, however, since the argument can compellingly be made that the US planted the seeds of an alternative narrative to rely upon as a backup plan in the event that the truth started leaking out like it did in Hersh’s report. It’s within this context that the Scandinavian states’ “media investigation” was published, thus extending credence to similar concerns that it’s also nothing more than a distraction from that journalist’s work.
After all, those outlets claimed that Russia has supposedly been spying on the North Sea through these means for the past ten years, and it’s extremely unlikely that they suddenly stumbled upon relevant “evidence” in support of that conclusion at this particular point in time. Rather, they were almost certainly fed this information by those countries’ intelligence services, with possible input from NATO as a whole and/or its US leader.
It’s unclear whether there’s any truth to their report, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there’s at least a kernel thereof since it’s a clever way to spy on the NATO-controlled North Sea. That, however, doesn’t mean that this was being done in speculative preparation of possibly carrying out acts of sabotage there sometime in the future. This part of their report was probably included purely to revive the completely ridiculous narrative that Russia was the one responsible for the Nord Stream terrorist attack.
Whatever the purpose of Russia’s alleged spying in those waters may have been, it’s highly unlikely to have concerned sabotage except as an absolute last resort in the event of a conventional war with NATO. The reason behind this assessment is that only a state-level actor or a false flag “non-state” one connected to a state actor is capable of carrying out such acts, especially in waters that are completely controlled by and under the total surveillance of that US-led bloc, and doing so would be an act of war.
It’s with this in mind that Peskov’s denial should be taken seriously since it’s unrealistic to imagine that Russia is plotting impending acts of sabotage there that it would definitely be caught committing red-handed in the fringe scenario that this is attempted. This doesn’t mean that Moscow wasn’t possibly spying on NATO’s naval activities in the North Sea, but just that this wasn’t done for the purpose of plotting sabotage except as an absolute last if it ever formally went to war with that bloc.
Considering this, Scandinavia’s fake news about Russia was released at this particular point in time and specifically included the claim that Moscow is considering acts of sabotage in NATO-controlled waters so as to distract from Hersh’s report and revive the false story that the Kremlin blew up Nord Stream. Just like the NYT’s report from last month, this latest one from a collection of Northern European media outlets is therefore also nothing more than an information warfare provocation.
April 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden |
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Protesters throw Molotov cocktails at police officers. With the EU flag in hand, they try to storm the parliament. What sounds like a civil war scenario or a textbook colour revolution took place from 6 to 10 March in the Caucasus state of Georgia. The ‘bone of contention’ here, quite literally, was a legislative proposal by the Georgian government, which aimed to disclose the foreign funding of NGOs if they receive more than 20% of their money from abroad. Such organisations would have been obliged to grant the Ministry of Justice access to all data, including personal information. However, what is common practice in the USA and other Western countries was denounced as an ‘authoritarian turn’ by Brussels and Washington in this case.
The main call for protests came from the organisation Transparency International, which would have been primarily affected by this law. Its publicly accessible supporters belong to a geopolitically Western-oriented family: the EU Commission, the Open Society Foundation of the self-proclaimed ‘King of Eastern Europe’ George Soros, and the International Republican Institute, which is close to the National Endowment for Democracy, in turn, a think tank and revolution factory funded by the United States. The Georgian government had every reason to cast a critical eye on the numerous NGOs in the country, not least because a colour revolution had already taken place in 2003, the so-called Rose Revolution. This not only subsequently brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power in 2004 but also led to the country’s rearmament by the US, which eventually urged Georgia to provoke Russia in 2008. The result was the Caucasus War of 2008, which Georgia lost.
Not least thanks to Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, the protesters were ultimately successful, and the law was withdrawn. So far, so sobering is the current state of Georgia’s sovereignty. In the face of external pressure on his country, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili warns of a Ukrainianisation of the nation. He claims that the Western strategy is to carry out a coup in Georgia and establish a subservient leader to open a new front against Russia, thereby changing the course of the war in favor of the West. So will people soon be dying not only to the ‘last Ukrainian’ but also to the ‘last Georgian’? Against this background, the notorious German Foreign Minister Baerbock visited Georgia to bring the country onto an EU course. But for now, Brussels is unwilling to give the country a membership perspective, as the reforms are progressing ‘too slowly’. The government in Tbilisi, on the other hand, does not seem to be in a hurry and prefers to gradually free itself from the clutches of the West. The memory of the defeat in the 2008 war is still too fresh for them to be rushed into the next conflict. Georgia’s future, therefore, remains open.
Translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister
Born in 1991 in Vienna, Alexander Markovics is a historian, journalist, and translator who follows the New Right, Fourth Political Theory, and Neo-Eurasianism. He has a BA in History and was the founder, first chairman and spokesperson of the Identitarian Movement in Austria from 2012 to 2017.
April 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | European Union, Georgia, NED |
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The Washington Post tells us that President Macron’s China jaunt has created an European ‘uproar’. So it seems. Though on the face of it, his geo-strategic recommendation that Europe should keep equidistant from both the U.S. behemoth and the China colossus, is scarcely so very radical. Yet, whatever Macron’s underlying motivations, his comments seem to have touched raw nerves. He is accused of something approaching ‘betrayal’. The betrayal of America curiously – rather than a betrayal of ordinary Europeans.
Perhaps the irritation reflects our habitual love of comfort, normalcy, and a desire to ‘not rock the boat’. This normalcy bias keeps people frozen in a state of status quo, as if some inner voice intrudes to say: ‘things will be somehow ok. This will pass, and things will again be as they were. “Everything must change, for everything to remain the same”, in the famous quotation pronounced by Tancredi, Prince Fabrizio Salina’s beloved nephew in The Leopard.
On the other hand, Malcom Kyeyune, writing from Sweden, detects a more profound shift under way – an agony writhing within European Atlanticism:
“The war fever that swept Europe in the summer of 2022 made discussion impossible. Ritual denunciations of “Putinists” and even supposed Russian spies became commonplace on social media, and chest-thumping about the immense power of the West and NATO became obligatory. Again, there was a huge pressure not to notice things:
“The only acceptable position was maximalist: Suggesting that a peace deal would likely involve coming to some sort of compromise marked you out as a “Putin loyalist” and “Russian agent.”
“But once again, the fever is starting to break. Few still post about Ukraine on social media; people by and large prefer to pretend it isn’t happening. The chest-thumping has gone away, replaced with a sullen, bitter silence. People aren’t quite ready to admit that the sanctions were a failure and that the West overplayed its hand, but many know these things are true, and that the economic and political consequences of these failures are only really beginning to be felt.”
Is Macron picking up on these ‘vibes’? That is to say, the self-deception, by which we feel the illogicality of going about our daily lives with ‘darkening clouds’ looming ever closer, yet never questioning why Europe is being de-industrialised; why its industry is relocating to the U.S. or China; or why Europeans have to import Liquid Natural Gas at three or four times its going price.
Are Europeans then beginning to notice things again? Are they asking ‘how come’ the economic paradigm has been so drastically eclipsed, or ‘how come’ the fall into mad fervour for incipient wars with China and Russia?
Macron’s equidistant prescription is entirely aspirational. He gives it no substance; he gives no explanation of how strategic autonomy would be achieved, nor does he address the issue of ‘the empty stable’. There is no point in shutting the stable door now after the autonomy horse’ has long fled; It ‘fled’ with the war fever of 2022. We are therefore, where we are. Can the autonomy horse still be led home? That seems improbable.
So much of the ‘uproar’ no doubt reflects the warding-off of uncomfortable admissions, as things begin to be noticed again. Macron at least has opened the issue (however sensitive it may be); He is an outlier for the moment, but is not alone.
EU Council chief, Michel, in an interview, said: “Some European leaders wouldn’t say things the same way that Emmanuel Macron did”, adding: “I think quite a few really think like Macron.” And SPD chair in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, said “Macron is right” and “we must be careful not to become party to a major conflict between the U.S. and China.”
There are multiple revolutions afoot everywhere across the globe. And Macron asks where does the EU fit in, which is fine. But he doesn’t give the answer. To be fair, though, at this point, maybe there isn’t one, for now.
Equidistant from the U.S.? Does Macron mean equidistant from specifically the Neo-con strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony through aggressive projections of military and sanctions power? If so, this needs to be made explicit.
For America, too, is undergoing a quiet revolution, and the Macron prescription could need nuancing in the case that the Ukraine war marks the final collapse of the Neo-cons’ short-lived ‘American Century’. There has been a noticeable tone of desperation to western MSM reportage this past week. Ever since the Intelligence leaks, it’s been doom, gloom and panic. The leaks have made uncomfortable truths unmissable (even to those who preferred not to notice) – that the vast ‘optics’ construct that is the Ukraine project is slowly coming undone.
The ‘Saving Ukraine for Democracy’ project was supposed to underwrite the legitimacy of the U.S.-led World Order. In reality, Ukraine has become the “harbinger of terminal crisis”, Kyeyune suggests.
The political path likely to be followed in America however, is far from straight-forward. It is possible though that today’s ‘Other Project’, the ‘western class war’ inversion ‘project’ may similarly collapse in the crisis (in this case) of U.S. societal schism. The Woke ‘project’ is an unlikely one – a strange neo-Marxist construct, in which an ‘oppressed class’ actually is composed of élite affirmative-action intellectuals (who lay claim to the mantle of being redeemed oppressors), whilst Americans, working in industry and in the low-paid service industry, are conversely denigrated as racist supremacist, anti-diversity, white oppressors.
China, too, is undergoing transformation: It is preparing for the war which the American ‘uniparty’ China hawks increasingly clamour. Meanwhile, its ‘political warfare’ strategy is to use geo-political mediation, underpinned by a powerful economy, as the non-intrusive means by which to pursue the Chinese operational art. This project already has re-shaped the Middle East –and its geo-strategic appeal is spanning the globe.
President Putin’s slow, long-term practice of political warfare (as opposed to China’s operational ‘art’) is clearly conceived with an understanding that the slowly-building disillusionment in the West with woke-liberalism – requires time in the chrysalis. In the Russian perspective, this Sun Tzu approach (overcoming the western paradigm, without militarily fighting it) calls for the ‘economy of military application’ within an all-of-system, holistic political ‘war’.
Russia’s is perhaps then, the more complex and more revolutionary: Embracing reform and efficiencies in all areas (cultural, economic, and political) of Russian society too.
China disavows the explicit aim to force a change of behaviour on the West, but for Russia its security is contingent on the U.S. fundamentally changing its military posture in Europe and Asia. This objective requires both patience and employing all complementary means at Russia’s command, (i.e. effectively ‘weaponising’ non-military tools such as financial ‘warfare’ and energy) to overcome the enemy – yet staying at some threshold, just short of all-out war.
The West, by contrast, conceptually separates the military from the political means, which perhaps explains why western analysts misconceive Russian ‘switching’ between military procedures to diplomatic or financial pressures as reflecting some deficiency or stumble in the Russian military machine. It is not. Sometimes the violins play; other times the cellos. And sometimes it is the moment for the big bass drums to sound; It is up to the conductor.
Julian Macfarlane has commented that Russia has started a veritable ‘revolution’, with China now joining in. To make his point, Macfarlane adapts Thomas Jefferson’s “we hold these truths to be self-evident …” speech and glosses it to say “… that all States are equally entitled to sovereignty, undivided security and full respect”. He contextualises this in terms of a Jefferson focus on the tyranny of the British Crown, whereas Putin formulates his multi-polar order doctrine, as versus U.S. hegemonic ‘Rules’ tyranny.
Xi Jinping says it straight: “All countries, irrespective of size, strength and wealth, are equal. The right of the people to independently chose their development paths should be respected, interference in the affairs of other countries opposed – and international fairness and justice maintained. Only the wearer of the shoes knows if they fit or not”.
It is a doctrine winning support across the globe. The EU would be unwise to discount its appeal.
So, back to Macron and the equidistant concept for European Union ‘strategic autonomy’: It is hard to see what space might comprise a median ground between homogenous, ‘Rules Hegemony’ and the Sino-Russian declaration of heterogenic ‘National Rights’. It will have to be one or the other (with perhaps a little ‘betweenness’ just possible, should the U.S. drop its “with us; or against us” dogma).
Equally, Macron warns the EU against the extra-territorial reach of the U.S. dollar (and therefore of sanctions and Third Country sanctions).
Yet, the EU cannot escape the U.S. dollar. The Euro is its’ derivative.
Europe has little autonomous defence manufacturing infrastructure. NATO is the political, as well as the military, framework in which the EU operates. How does it escape from a NATO framework that is so closely meshed in with the EU political one?
The EU is deeply divided on its future path: Macron wants more strategic autonomy for Europe (and Charles Michel says this is supported by not a few member-states), whereas Poland, the Baltic States and certain others want more America and more NATO and a continuing war to destroy Russia. Poland has proved to be a vociferous critic of Western Europe’s perceived softness toward the Kremlin.
Indeed, the war in Ukraine has ushered in a kind of geopolitical shift in Europe, Ishaan Tharoor writes, moving “NATO’s centre of gravity” – as Chels Michta, a U.S. military intelligence officer, recently put it – away from its traditional anchors in France and Germany, and eastward to countries such as Poland, its Baltic neighbours and other former Soviet Republics. In Central and Eastern Europe, wrote Le Monde columnist Sylvie Kauffmann, “the weight of history is stronger … than in the West, the traumas are fresher and the return of tragedy is felt more keenly”.
The EU is deeply divided on structure as well: Warsaw, nervous about a general election due this autumn, is encouraging anti-German paranoia. Its propaganda suggests that Polish opposition politicians are secret agents in a German plot to take control of the EU, and to force degenerate western permissiveness on heterosexual Catholic Poland – a ‘bastion of western Christian civilisation’ – unlike Brussels, which is viewed as a as a “Germanised” conspiracy to overrule the right of independent nations to make their own laws.
Jarosaw Kaczyski, leader of the PiS party, plays with an alternative future for Europe. This would be a Europe des patries, almost on de Gaulle’s model: an alliance of fully sovereign nation states, within NATO but independent of Brussels, which would include post-Brexit Britain, rather than just the EU’s present members. (No EU Third ‘Empire’ there).
In a major speech, the Polish Prime Minister has emphasised that now is the moment to shake up the status quo further West and dissuade those in Brussels who would “create a super-state government by a narrow elite. In Europe nothing can safeguard the nations, their culture, their social, economic, political and military security better than nation states”, Morawiecki said. “Other systems are illusory or utopian”.
Elections are due this autumn in Poland, and polls suggest that the outcome will be close.
It seems that Macron has opened a veritable can of worms. Possibly, this was his intent; or maybe he just didn’t care – his objective being primarily domestic: i.e. to shape a new image in the context of a changing, and turbulent, French electoral landscape.
But in any event, the EU is caught in the midst of a maelstrom of geopolitical change at a moment when it faces the possibility of a banking crisis, high inflation and economic contraction. Simple survival may become more pressing than addressing Macron’s speculative musings about the EU becoming a Third Force.
April 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Russophobia | China, European Union, France, NATO, Poland, Russia, United States |
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