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Lula Is Lying: The NATO-Russian Proxy War Isn’t Being Fought “Over Small Things”

By Andrew Korybko | March 16, 2023

Brazilian President Lula proved that his recalibrated worldview in recent years is a lot more closely aligned with the US’ than ever after downplaying the causes of the NATO-Russian proxy war. According to him, “In the 21st century, it shouldn’t be possible that we have war over small things”, which he uttered after declaring that he won’t visit either Russia or Ukraine due to the special operation. This position serves as further proof that he endorses the US’ narrative about the conflict.

Lula previously condemned Russia in a joint statement with Biden during his trip to DC in early February, after which Brazil voted in support of a fiercely anti-Russian UN Resolution demanding Moscow’s full and immediate withdrawal without any preconditions from all the territory that Kiev claims as its own, which includes Crimea. Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzia reacted to the passing of that motion by describing it as pushing a “militaristic Russophobic line”.

Removing any ambiguity about his government’s stance, Lula then called Zelensky shortly afterwards to reaffirm that “Brazil defends Ukraine’s territorial integrity”. Despite these objectively existing and easily verifiable pieces of evidence documenting his political support of Russia’s nemeses in Kiev, an intense information warfare campaign has been waged by forces allied with the ruling party to gaslight its base into falsely thinking that Lula isn’t aligned with the US on this issue or others like Nicaragua.

Elite members of the Workers’ Party (PT) fear that the rank and file might revolt upon becoming aware that their leader is moving Brazil closer to the US-led West’s Golden Billion than the Sino-Russo Entente or even the Global South of which it’s a part amidst the impending trifurcation of International Relations. With a view towards preemptively averting the scenario of them publicly pressuring him en masse to change this grand strategic trajectory, they sought to manipulate their perceptions about Lula’s policies.

This explains the intense information warfare campaign that’s being waged against their minds at this pivotal point in the global systemic transition, which he himself is directly participating in upon downplaying the causes of the NATO-Russian proxy war in an attempt to justify his political support of Kiev. Lula wants his supporters to discount the evidence before their eyes and ears in favor of agreeing with the US’ narrative that Russia supposedly “invaded” Ukraine for purely “imperialistic” purposes.

If the PT’s base was aware of the military-strategic dynamics that forced Russia to commence its special operation as a last resort for defending the integrity of its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them there, then they’d be against his political support of Kiev. It would thus be self-evident to them that Lula is placing Brazil on a US-aligned grand strategic trajectory in the New Cold War, which could lead to them publicly pressuring him en masse to change his policy.

The following analyses explain the larger context within which the special operation is being waged:

* 15 March 2022: “Why Did U.S. Prioritize Containing Russia Over China?”

* 26 March 2022: “Russia Is Waging an Existential Struggle in Defense of Its Independence & Sovereignty”

* 24 December 2022: “Putin Explained Why He Had No Choice But To Protect The Russian Population In Ukraine”

* 22 February 2023: “Putin Reminded Everyone That Russia Is Using Force To End The War That The West Started”

* 22 February 2023: “Russia Would Be Torn To Pieces Exactly As Medvedev Predicted If It Ended Its Special Operation”

A summary of the abovementioned insight will now follow for the reader’s convenience.

In brief, the US spent the preceding eight years between its successful Color Revolution in early 2014 and the start of the special operation in 2022 turning Ukraine into an anti-Russian bastion, the purpose of which was to degrade that targeted Great Power’s strategic capabilities to defend itself from the US. This was to be done through a combination of Hybrid War means related to Kiev’s support of information warfare- and terrorist-driven separatism as well as conventional ones connected to NATO.

The first half of this policy aimed to destabilize Russia from within through the cultivation of forces that could advance its “Balkanization” while the second intended to eventually employ biological weapons, clandestine NATO bases, and “missile defense” infrastructure to place it in a position of blackmail. The US envisaged forcing Russia into a never-ending series of unilateral concessions that would ultimately result in its geostrategic neutralization and thus facilitate the successful “containment” of China.

This plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony was to begin with Kiev’s NATO-supported reconquest of Donbass, which threatened to genocide that region’s indigenous Russian population and ethically cleanse the survivors. That sequence of events was foiled by the special operation that was launched after President Putin realized that the West had no interest in discussing his country’s security guarantee requests from December 2021 for politically resolving their security dilemma.

While the US prepared for the possibility of some kinetic response to its support of Kiev’s imminent reconquest of Donbass, American policymakers hadn’t calculated that President Putin would launch a preventive campaign across all of Ukraine to avert the impending scenario of Russia’s strategic neutralization simultaneously with the preemptive one to stop the Donbass genocide. Had it been otherwise, then they’d have retooled the West’s military-industrial complex well in advance.

This major miscalculation explains why the NATO chief admitted last month that his bloc is in a “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia, which wouldn’t be the case if it truly expected a protracted conflict of this scale, nor would Kiev’s forces be faring as badly as the Washington Post just revealed. President Putin regularly reminds everyone of the existential nature of this conflict, which places his decision to commence an interconnected preemptive-preventive campaign into context.

Returning to Lula’s latest remarks that inspired this analysis, there’s no doubt that he’s well aware of these military-strategic dynamics that forced President Putin’s hand, which thus means that he’s deliberately downplaying them in order to manipulate his base. He can’t claim ignorance after over a year of Russia explaining this at length, hence why it can now confidently be concluded that Lula politically aligned Brazil with the US in the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Sunak grants £5 billion boost to the military despite growing issues of poverty and inflation

By Ahmed Adel | March 16, 2023

Britain’s updated defence and foreign policy strategy envisages an additional £5 billion for armaments and is a demonstration that London’s priority is confrontation with Russia and China. Although UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised this considerable appropriation for the military over two years, it is unlikely to appease British conservatives as the figure did not meet the demands of spending 3% GDP on defence.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace wanted a larger military budget but officials are reportedly “delighted” with the settlement. This is unlikely the case behind closed doors.

Most of the £5 billion will be used to replenish ammunition stockpiles given to Ukraine and work on the AUKUS project to develop nuclear-powered submarines for Australia. Effectively, the main priority of London’s updated defence and foreign policy strategy is to oppose the main geopolitical threats to Anglo hegemony – Russia and China.

Speaking from San Diego on March 13, Sunak said: “It’s clear that the world has become more volatile, the threats to our security have increased. And that’s why we’re investing £5 billion more in our world-beating armed forces over the next two years and increasing our defence spending to 2.5% of GDP so we can continue to be a world leader when it comes to defence and keeping our country safe.”

Of course, this omits the obvious failures in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and the fact that neither Russia or China pose a threat to Britain. In fact, it is evident from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that the threat is the UK.

Russophobia guides the British political and media establishment, and has thus shaped British public opinion for more than 200 years. Therefore, in the context of Russia’s special military operation, the updated strategy does not represent anything new in terms of escalation. Rather, it just merely shows the British establishment’s continuous Russophobia.

The procurement of ammunition and atomic armament demonstrates that the Sunak government is continuing what Boris Johnson, and those before him, started. What is telling though is that a £5 billion boost is being allocated to the military, partially to replenish stocks given to Ukraine, just as the UK is experiencing the worst economic catastrophe of the 21st century, thus far.

According to the latest figures (2020/21), around one in five people in the UK (20%) were in poverty, or 13.4 million people. Of these, 7.9 million were working-age adults, 3.9 million were children and 1.7 million were pensioners. Therefore, one in four children in the UK are living in poverty (27%).

However, a report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an independent social change organization working to solve poverty in the UK, said in January 2023 that “living standards are likely to have fallen since the latest official data covering 2020/21.”

“Since the last official poverty data, the direct impact of the pandemic on society has lessened, but some of the changes it has brought about will be long lasting,” the report said, citing the war in Ukraine and the continuing effects of Brexit as examples of difficulties.

The report published that across the poorest fifth of British families, the JRF’s cost of living tracker in October 2022 found that around six in ten low-income households are not able to afford an unexpected expense, over half are in arrears, around a quarter use credit to pay essential bills, and over seven in ten families are going without essentials.

However, due to centuries of indoctrination, there is little condemnation from the British public that £5 billion is being used to replenish military stocks sent to Ukraine instead of dealing with an inflation that is currently forecast to peak at around 11%, which will be the highest rate in forty years, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Although Russia is the main adversary for London, China is rapidly becoming its second. This is becoming increasingly apparent considering that the UK and US are not only each other’s main political and military ally, but are also in anti-China formations together, such as AUKUS.

Therefore, it should not be surprising either that the second part of the renewed strategy is arming Australia so that it becomes an Anglo stronghold in the South Pacific. This is all part of preparations to set the stage for a new big showdown with China, especially given that the situation related to Taiwan confirms that the current trajectory is towards military confrontation.

Either way, although the £5 billion is not as much as the British hawks wanted due to budgetary constraints, it still symbolises that the UK is committed to opposing Russia and advancing future hostilities with China.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

March 16, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Let’s compare China’s ‘agents’ in Canada to Israel’s

By Yves Engler | March 11, 2023

What would happen if the media and intelligence agencies applied the same standard used regarding China to the Israel lobby?

In the Globe and Mail Andrew Coyne has written two columns in recent days arguing that the discussion over Chinese interference should focus on “domestic accomplices”. “What we need a public inquiry to look into is domestic complicity in foreign interference”, noted the regular CBC commentator.

In a similar vein Justin Trudeau responded to criticism regarding purported Chinese interference by noting, “We know that Chinese Canadian parliamentarians, and Chinese Canadians in general, are greater targets for interference by China than others.” The prime minister added, “We know the same goes for Iranian Canadians, who are more subject to interference from the Iranian government. Russian speakers in Canada are more vulnerable to Russian misinformation and disinformation.”

Why ignore how Israel and its Canadian lobby use Jewish MPs and Jewish organizations as their agents?

The leading Israel advocate in parliament, Anthony Housefather chairs the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group. That group was previously led by another Jewish Liberal MP, Michael Leavitt, who resigned to head Israel lobby group Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. Housefather and Leavitt have repeatedly met Israeli officials in Canada.

As part of the media frenzy about Chinese interference, there has been significant discussion about Trudeau attending a 2016 Liberal Party fundraiser at the Toronto home of Chinese Business Chamber of Canada chair Benson Wong. Among the attendees was Chinese Canadian billionaire Zhang Bin who is alleged to have donated to the Trudeau Foundation/University of Montréal at the request of a Chinese government official.

But Trudeau has far more extensive ties to pro-Israel funders. Since 2013 the chief fundraiser for the Trudeau Liberals has been Stephen Bronfman, scion of an arch Israeli nationalist family. Bronfman has millions invested in Israeli technology companies and over the years the Bronfman clan has secured arms for Israeli forces and supported its military in other ways. Bronfman openly linked his fundraising for Trudeau to Israel. In 2013 the Globe and Mail reported:

“Justin Trudeau is banking on multimillionaire Stephen Bronfman to turn around the Liberal Party’s financial fortunes in order to take on the formidable Conservative fundraising machine…. Mr. Bronfman helped raise $2-million for Mr. Trudeau’s leadership campaign. Mr. Bronfman is hoping to win back the Jewish community, whose fundraising dollars have been going more and more to the Tories because of the party’s pro-Israel stand. ‘We’ll work hard on that,’ said Mr. Bronfman, adding that ‘Stephen Harper has never been to Israel and I took Justin there five years ago and he was referring at the end of the trip to Israel as ‘we.’ So I thought that was pretty good.’”

In 2016 Trudeau attended a fundraiser at the Toronto home of now deceased billionaire apartheid supporters Honey and Barry Sherman. The event raised funds for the party and York Centre Liberal party candidate Michael Levitt. In 2018 CBC reported on multimillionaire Mitch Garber attending one of Bronfman’s fundraisers with Trudeau. On Federation CJA Montréal’s website Garber’s profile boasts that his “eldest son Dylan just completed his service as a lone soldier serving in an elite Cyber Defense Intelligence Unit of the IDF in Israel.”

A thorough investigation of pro-Israel Liberal fundraising would uncover a litany of other examples. And they’ve had far greater success. While the Trudeau government has banned Chinese firms, arrested a prominent Chinese capitalist and targeted that country militarily, they’ve been strikingly deferential to Israel. The Trudeau government has expanded the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, organized a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, voted against over 60 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements and created a special envoy to deflect criticism of Israeli abuses. During a 2018 visit to Israel former foreign affairs minister Freeland announced that should Canada win a seat on the United Nations Security Council it would act as an “asset for Israel” on the Council.

Part of the Chinese interference story is about funding University of Montréal and University of Toronto initiatives tied to China. But Jewish Zionist donors have set up far more initiatives, including numerous Israel and Israel-infused Jewish studies programs.

Having fought to establish Israel and with major investments in Israel, David Azrieli spent $5 million to establish Israel studies and $1 million on Jewish studies at Concordia University. At the University of Toronto more than $10 million was donated to establish the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies. Millions of dollars more have been donated to launch similar initiatives at other universities.

On many occasions pro-Israel donors have leveraged donations to block academic appointments or suppress discussion of Palestinian rights. The hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Israel supporters (Schwartz/Reissman, Peter Munk, Seymour Schulich, etc.) partly explains why over a dozen Canadian university presidents recently traveled with apartheid lobby group, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, to Israel despite opposition from significant segments of their institutions.

Much more influential than the ‘China lobby’, the Israel lobby has largely been ignored in recent discussion about the need for an inquiry into foreign interference. But any serious foreign agent registry ought to include the apartheid state’s domestic accomplices.

March 12, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Kosovo wants NATO-Serbia war – Belgrade

RT | March 11, 2023

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has accused the ethnic Albanian authorities in the breakaway province of Kosovo of attempting to provoke a war in which NATO would once again take their side.

“They want to drag Serbia into a conflict with NATO. Kurti wants to be like [Vladimir] Zelensky, and I would be some kind of [Vladimir] Putin,” Vucic said on Friday, referring to Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and the presidents of Ukraine and Russia.

“It’s what they’re after, what they’ve been doing all along. And in this, they have the support of a significant part of the international community, because [Kosovo] is their child,” he added.

Vucic was commenting on the recent arrest of an ethnic Serb on charges of “war crimes” dating back to the 1998-99 conflict, which ended with NATO bombing Serbia on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists. The provisional government in Pristina declared independence in 2008, with Western support, which Belgrade has refused to recognize.

“They don’t want normalization, they want to humiliate Serbia,” argued Vucic. “But I’m telling you, that won’t happen. There will be no humiliation, no capitulation.”

The proposal for “normalization of relations” between Pristina and Belgrade, made public last month by the EU, amounts to a de facto recognition of the breakaway province, which would have the right to join NATO, the EU, and the UN. Vucic insists he did not sign anything and will never agree to those terms.

“We are preparing for talks on Monday or Tuesday,” he said, referring to the EU-sponsored talks in neighboring North Macedonia. “But it’s not clear to me why. They said they wouldn’t agree to a deal. Well, why are you coming then? For us to recognize Kosovo?”

Vucic insists that before anything else can happen, the EU needs to enforce the 2013 Brussels Agreement, which among other things envisioned political autonomy for ethnic Serbs in the province. The ethnic Albanian authorities have refused to implement that part of the deal for ten years now, insisting it clashes with the ‘constitution’ of Kosovo. Neither the EU nor the US has done anything to influence Pristina to change its mind, Vucic noted.

Instead, the EU has just granted Kosovo visa-free travel to the bloc, while threatening an economic boycott against Serbia unless it joins the Western sanctions against Russia.

March 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter Files expose ‘censorship-industrial complex’ – journalist

RT | March 9, 2023

Social media platforms colluded with non-governmental organizations and the US government to suppress information they did not like in the name of fighting “disinformation,” journalist Matt Taibbi testified at a congressional hearing on Thursday.

Taibbi appeared alongside Michael Shellenberger, another journalist who has covered the “Twitter Files” for the past several months, before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by Congressman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio.

Taibbi described what he called the “censorship-industrial complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a free press envisioned in the US Constitution.

Right before his testimony, Taibbi also published a lengthy thread on Twitter, laying out the evidence he entered into the congressional record.

According to Taibbi, Twitter acted “more like a partner” to the government, censoring based on requests it received from federal agencies as well as taxpayer-backed NGOs. Intelligence agencies, dubious “disinformation researchers” and corporate executives effectively worked as a team, he argued.

Taibbi’s thread described an “incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back,” with the same agencies inviting the same “experts” funded by the same foundations and covered by the same reporters to every panel and every conference.

He identified the key players in the censorship-industrial complex as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, authors of the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard. Many of the NGOs involved received funding from the US government, while legacy media outlets acted as their proxies, demanding censorship.

Taibbi described the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and its “Election Integrity Partnership” – renamed the Virality Project after the 2020 election – as “perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” By its own admission, it labeled 22 million tweets during the 2020 election campaign, and was then given access to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, which is able to tackle 50 million tweets a day.

SIO is run by Renee DiResta, who helped design Hamilton68 and worked at New Knowledge – a group caught creating fake “Russian bots” to help Democrats in the 2017 Alabama special election for the US Senate. That did not stop them from advising the Senate Intelligence Committee on “Russian interference” in US elections, and the US legacy media from not questioning any of their conclusions.

“Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, [the CIC] is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality,” Taibbi wrote. “Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.”

During the hearing, multiple Democrats tried to pressure Taibbi into revealing his sources, insinuating Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, was behind the disclosures.

March 9, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

EU’s solutions for Ukraine don’t work – member state

RT | March 6, 2023

The first step in bringing peace to Ukraine should be to stop people from being killed and establish a ceasefire as soon as possible, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Sunday, during an interview with Sweden’s SVT.

The diplomat dismissed the idea of supplying Ukraine with weapons, currently being done by a number of NATO countries, as a viable method to achieve peace. Asked why Hungary refuses to send weapons to Kiev, Szijjarto pointed to the devastating consequences of the war, and how Western arms have only exacerbated the conflict.

“Look at the infrastructure, look at the people, look at the number of people leaving the country, look at their former houses, look at the damage, the energy infrastructure. This country is being demolished, destroyed. I don’t think that would be of interest to anyone,” he said.

Szijjarto stated that Hungary, as opposed to other European countries, sees the first priority in the Ukrainian conflict as being to “stop killing people,” and suggested that the only way to achieve that is to enter discussions that would hopefully lead to a sustainable peace agreement.

He also noted that the solutions that were being offered in Europe “simply did not work” because everyone is too invested into the “war psyche.” As for sanctions, the minister pointed out that they have also failed to achieve an effect.

“We have introduced packages of sanctions already. Did it bring us any closer to a solution? No. Did it make the war less brutal? No. Did it put Russia on its knees? No. Did it hurt us? Yes.”

Szijjarto’s comments come after NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated last month that “the only way” to guarantee a “lasting and just peace” in Ukraine was to continue to provide Kiev with military support.

Moscow, however, has repeatedly blasted Western arms shipments to Ukraine, arguing that it only serves to prolong the conflict and is essentially making NATO countries participants in the now one-year-long conflict. Last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu warned that if Kiev receives long-range weapons from the West, Moscow will be forced to “push the threat away” from Russia’s borders even further.

March 6, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

UK Embassy Sought to Pay Sudanese Students to Protest Against Russia

By Wyatt Reed | Sputnik | March 4, 2023

Britain’s Embassy in Sudan attempted to pay students who had studied abroad in Ukraine to participate in anti-Russian protests, a new report indicates.

Sudanese outlet Al-Rakoba wrote Friday that its staff spoke with an unnamed student who reports being approached by British embassy officials, who urged him to help put together an organization called the “Association of Sudanese Students in Ukrainian Universities” which would engage in anti-Russian provocations outside Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The student in question, who “refused to reveal his name for security reasons” according to the report, reportedly said the Brits offered the students money as well as protection from Sudanese authorities if they participated in the alleged plot.

As some of those contacted by the UK’s diplomatic staff have participated in anti-government protests, they were told they would be shielded from prosecution, Al-Rakoba writes.

Just how successful the British embassy officials were in their apparent efforts is unclear — as is the identity of the culprits. But British intelligence officers are known to use diplomatic cover which employment at their embassy provides to carry out their clandestine activities.

If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Brits organized chaos in the streets of a foreign land to effect their political will.

Decades ago, former MI6 officer Norman Darbyshire spilled the beans about his personal role in overseeing the bloody 1953 coup in Iran, which overthrew its democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.

“My brief was very simple,” Darbyshire revealed. “Go out there, don’t inform the ambassador, and use the intelligence service for any money you might need to secure the overthrow of Mossadegh by legal or quasi-legal means.”

After bragging that he spent “vast sums of money, well over a million-and-a-half pounds,” Darbyshire added, “I was personally giving orders and directing the street uprising.”

March 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

RT DE accounts frozen

RT | March 3, 2023

RT’s German production company has had its bank accounts frozen amid an EU-wide crackdown on Russian media. The company was already prohibited by the bloc’s sanctions from carrying out its work in Germany, but said it will continue publishing and broadcasting news online.

“The bank accounts of RT DE Productions have been frozen,” RT’s press service said in a statement on Friday. “Despite this move and the ongoing liquidation of RT DE Productions GmbH, RT DE’s online, broadcast and social media platforms will continue to provide German-speaking readers and viewers across the world with quality content.”

RT Productions GmbH is a German-based company that produces content for the RT DE TV channel and website in Moscow. The firm announced at the beginning of February that it would halt journalistic activities in Germany, due to the “repressive state of media freedoms within the EU.”

An EU sanctions package introduced in December blacklisted RT’s parent company, TV-Novosti, as well as revoking the EU broadcasting licenses of Russian media outlets including NTV, NTV Mir, Rossiya 1, REN TV and Perviy Channel. These measures left RT DE Productions cut off from funding and unable to work in Germany.

RT’s French subsidiary faced a similar situation in January. With its accounts frozen by authorities in Paris, the network shut its doors but continued to broadcast on various online platforms and to publish news in French on its website. While the French government had previously been content to allow RT France to operate, a number of prominent French media outlets campaigned for its closure at the beginning of the year.

Even before the conflict in Ukraine, RT DE faced a difficult legal battle to broadcast in Germany. German banks refused to work with the broadcaster, and regulators in Berlin threatened legal action when the network finally began broadcasting into Germany from Serbia in December 2021.

The regulators eventually blocked RT DE last February, a month before the European Commission ordered a bloc-wide ban on all RT channels and websites. Russia’s Foreign Ministry responded by withdrawing the press accreditation of German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and listing the network as a foreign agent.

March 3, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Twitter received ‘state-sponsored blacklists’ from US State Department

RT | March 2, 2023

The US State Department, both directly and through third-party organizations, pressed Twitter to censor American users for their non-existent connections to Russia, China, and Hindu nationalism, according to internal documents.

Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Thursday, the latest ‘Twitter Files’ reveal that the company’s former trust and safety chief, Yoel Roth, was approached in 2021 and given a list of 40,000 accounts suspected of engaging in “inauthentic behavior” in support of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

The list was provided by the ‘Digital Forensics Research Lab’ at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US State Department’s ‘Global Engagement Center’ (GEC), as well as a host of NATO governments and weapons manufacturers.

According to the files, Roth investigated the list and found that “virtually all appear to be real people” rather than Indian bots, while Taibbi contacted several and learned that they were “ordinary Americans” with no connection whatsoever to Indian politics.

Created in the final year of the Obama administration, the GEC is a State Department entity that works with multiple US intelligence agencies to “counter foreign disinformation.” It is forbidden from operating within the United States, and recently had to cut its ties with a George Soros-backed NGO that was using its funding to target American conservative news sites.

While the list of supposed Hindu nationalists was given to Twitter via the Atlantic Council, the GEC directly passed other lists to the social media platform, including 500 accounts that were allegedly spreading Iranian “disinformation,” and 5,500 “Chinese accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation,” despite the fact that this latter list included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees.

Roth described the Chinese list as “a total crock,” while fellow employee Aaron Rodericks said it provided “more entertainment value than anything.”

The GEC and its organizations tangentially connected to the State Department – such as the infamous ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ that published the ‘Hamilton68’ dashboard of “Russian bots” –  had long pressed Twitter to crack down on allegedly Kremlin-connected accounts, but Roth told staff that it was impossible to detect “Russian fingerprints” on any of the accounts.

Instead, accounts that retweeted “news sources linked to Russia” were considered Kremlin-sponsored. One list handed to Twitter by the GEC considered membership in France’s anti-government ‘Yellow Vests’ movement as “being Russia-aligned.”

While Twitter’s executives may have been skeptical of the GEC’s ‘blacklists’, the US media was not. Emails show that multiple news outlets and agencies – including the Associated Press – would receive reports from the organization, and then press Twitter to take action and ban the listed accounts.

“Reauthorization for GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year,” Taibbi wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Can we at least stop paying to blacklist ourselves?”

March 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

America Goes to War

Constantly without regard for any real national interest

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 28, 2023

At last week’s Rage Against the War Machine peace rally in Washington there was no shortage of speakers who denounced the Biden Administration’s hypocritical foreign policy, which essentially judges any violent action undertaken by the United States and its friends as good by definition while anything done by rivals or competitors, sometimes conveniently referred to as “enemies,” as “evil.” In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia, where the US is engaged in proxy warfare, speakers were able to cite and compare the formidable list of America’s armed interventions worldwide since World War Two ended. Neither Russia nor any other nation comes anywhere near the United States in terms of constant bellicosity, conflicts which hardly ever reflect any real vital national interest or imminent foreign threat. Throw into the hopper the 800-plus US military bases scattered around the world and a growing defense budget larger than those of the next nine nations combined, including China and Russia, and the reader will obtain some idea of the real problem: the United States has become a nation that is best described as a warfare state. That is where the tax money goes to disproportionately and the corruption it feeds produces a willingness to engage in “one more war” on the part of the coddled, protected and richly remunerated political class which in turn supports the carnage by overwhelming majorities.

Several speakers last week also cited as the real problem the media, which once upon a time sought to expose lies and subterfuges by government but now has become a partner with the White House in shaping and promoting a preferred narrative. It should also be pointed out that that media is overwhelmingly Democratic in terms of its ownership and sympathies, so much so that it collaborated in efforts to label Donald Trump and his staff as “Russian agents.”

Sometimes this promotion of a particular point of view is best accomplished using silence, i.e. by not sharing or following up on a story. There was virtually no coverage of last week’s peace rally even though speakers included a number of well-known public figures, three of whom were former congressmen. Likewise, apart from a brief mention in The Washington Post, there has been virtually no follow-up in the mainstream media on Seymour Hersh’s carefully researched and documented investigation of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines by the United States hidden behind the plausible deniability of a covert operation carried out last September.

Much of the press ignored the clear investigative line on day one when the pipeline exploded that the White House had previously been warning that it would “do something” to stop Nord Stream and that it had both the means and motive to follow through on its threat. Likewise, after the Hersh story broke and Russia sought and obtained a hearing featuring Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA Officer Ray McGovern testifying before the United Nations Security Council to initiate investigation of the matter, the US media ignored the story on the evening news and did not follow-up on it on the next day or subsequently.

A major story involving what were war crimes committed both against adversary Russia and NATO ally Germany and which had nuclear conflict potential was thus made to disappear, but the US and its propaganda machine were not finished yet. The White House predictably denied any role in the pipe line destruction and Vice President Kamala Harris sought to turn the tables by declaring at the Munich Security Conference that it is Russia that is guilty of “crimes against humanity.” She claimed that “First, from the starting days of this unprovoked war, we have witnessed Russian forces engage in horrendous atrocities and war crimes. [They] have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population – gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape, and deportation. Execution-style killings, beating and electrocution. Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children. They have cruelly separated children from their families.”

Harris concluded that “we” must continue to “strongly support Ukraine… for as long as it takes!” One might observe that Harris has been unable to secure the actual US borders over the course of more than two years, so “as long as it takes” by her reckoning might well run into the 2050s. And she is hardly known for her ability to discern what is and isn’t true. She might well have added spice to her tale by joking how it must keep Vladimir Putin and his cabinet up until late at night coming up with new atrocities to carry out.

Joe Biden doubled down on the Harris remarks in a speech in Warsaw a few days later, delivered on his return from the Kiev photo op with the man he loves more than any other, Volodymyr Zelensky, where he gave the diminutive comedian another half billion dollars of US taxpayer money and promised that the US will never give up until Russia is defeated. He commented somewhat hyperbolically to Zelensky that after a year of fighting “… Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you and the world stands with you.”

Biden told the Poles just before the February 24 anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine that it was a just war pitting “democracy” against “totalitarianism.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “craven lust for land and power” had only served to unite democracies around the world. “It wasn’t just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages …. And the questions we face are as simple as they are profound: Would we respond, or would we look the other way? One year later, we know the answer. We did respond. We would be strong, we would be united, and the world would not look the other way.”

Demonstrating that delusion is bipartisan, the Biden visit to Kiev was followed by a group of Republican congressmen repeating the feat and traveling to Ukraine to fawn over Zelensky at his presidential palace on the following day. One wonders if there is anyone still “at home” trying to alleviate the huge toxic spill that appears about to consume Ohio? One might well ask where the US federal government gets these idiots from? Dancing around to the tune of a conflict that could have been negotiated away and winding up at the brink of a nuclear war which would in all likelihood destroy the planet is “a test for the ages?” And who pays for these useless congressional trips? More’s the pity, this is not just going on in Eastern Europe. The US is currently cooperating with France in what looks like what will become another military intervention in a perennially unstable Haiti and, of course, China is also in the cross hairs.

And then there is always the Middle East, where Israel benefits from “ironclad” commitments and “unbreakable bonds” rhetoric from Washington. When Israel commands “Jump!” the Biden regime only asks “How high?” Since the media avoids any provocative reporting about the Jewish state, how many Americans know that self-declared Zionist Joe Biden’s Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides has just given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light for attacking Iran with US support for any action taken? Nides told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem last Sunday that “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [in regards to Iran] and we’ve got their back.”

There is already a precedent as Israel has in fact been attacking neighboring Syria repeatedly without any comment from Washington, which actually has troops based in that country stealing Syrian oil. Nor has Washington objected when the Israeli army raided two Palestinian camps during the past month, killing respectively 10 and 11 civilians and wounding more than 100 others. To set the stage for what comes next vis-à-vis the wag the dog relationship, after Israel struck a defense compound in Iran on January 29th, the Biden administration suggested to reporters that the Israeli attack was part of a new “joint effort” by Washington and Jerusalem to contain Tehran’s nuclear and military ambitions. Secretary of State Tony Blinken elaborated on the shift on the next day while offering no criticism or concern for the destabilizing potential of the strikes, let alone a condemnation. Instead, he defended the Israeli attack, saying “[It is] very important that we continue to deal with and work against as necessary the various actions that Iran has engaged in throughout the region and beyond that threaten peace and security.”

Nides’ comment reveals that he is ignorant regarding who is causing trouble in the Middle East. It also confirms that even if there is a military action initiated by Israel that does grave damage to US interests, the White House will support the Israelis. That should surprise no one as the top three officials at the State Department are Jews, as are the top two on the National Security Staff, the Head of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, the Deputy Director at CIA, and the president’s Chief of Staff. The policy shift, for that is what it is, also gives Israel the green light to attack Iranian targets with impunity. Nides also stated that the United States is pledged to deny nuclear weapons to Iran, implying that if it believes such a development is imminent it would destroy the facilities used to create or store the weapons. He also mentioned that the US will not engage in any possible negotiations with Iran as long as it is selling weapons to Russia. Though Nides has no problem with freely killing Palestinian children, he is rather more inflexible when Persians are somehow involved, saying that “The Iranians are providing drones to Russia and those drones are killing innocent Ukrainians. There is no chance today of us going back to the negotiating table.”

So what do we have? Does anyone remember the famous quote attributed to British statesman Lord Palmerston, that “Nations have no permanent friends or allies. They only have permanent interests.” The United States, uniquely, does not even appear to have interests, apart from pandering to the various constituencies and groups that have bought or stealthily acquired control over the political system and media. So the American public, less safe and prosperous now than at any time since the Second World War, is kept in the dark about what is important and is lied to about almost everything. That is why we are on the brink of destruction in Ukraine and are slaves to the power brokers who hate Russia and favor Israel above all nations. Raging against the war machine will do little good if we are incapable of first figuring out who is screwing us and then developing the courage to put a stop to it. Starting with cutting the current tie that binds with Ukraine and Israel would be a good beginning followed by bringing the troops home from nearly everywhere. Trying the Biden Administration officials who initiated an illegal war by destroying Nord Stream and putting them all in jail would be even better. Yes, every one of them in jail with no parole, starting with mumbling Joe himself.

 

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

February 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Russophobia, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Manichaeism and ‘An Ideology of Liberal Empire’ – Biden’s Forever Cosmic War Against Russian ‘Evil’

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 27, 2023

“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: “No.” “No.” “No.” (Applause.). “No, you will not take my country.” “No, you will not take my freedom.” “No, you will not take my future … A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease [erase] the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine — Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never”. (Applause.)

“Stand with us. We will stand with you. Let us move forward … with an abiding commitment to be allies not of darkness, but of light. Not of oppression, but of liberation. Not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”.

Biden’s speech at Warsaw, complete with the lighting effects and dramatic backdrop reminiscent of his Liberty Hall speech in which he sought to portray his own domestic MAGA opposition as a grave security threat to America, again resorts to radical Manicheanism to depict (this time) Russia, (the external counterpoint to the related U.S. MAGA threat), as the foundation for the epic battle between light and the forces of darkness. The eternal struggle that persists – that must be fought endlessly and won crushingly.

Again, as with his Liberty Hall speech, Biden offered no concrete plan. Here in Warsaw, with the sands of time running out on his Ukraine ‘project’, and with U.S. ‘Realists’ and China ‘hawks’ gaining more traction at home, Biden elevated the struggle from the literal to the metaphysical plane.

By so doing, he is trying to cement America’s deep-seated missionary ethos to a ‘forever’ cosmic war against Russian ‘evil’. He hopes to tie the American ruling class to the metaphysical struggle for the ‘light’. Should Biden continue in office, he hopes by this means, both to ‘define’ himself, and to set this overarching global struggle as something binding Americans, for the period ahead.

Simply put, his metaphysical framing is intended to trump those Realists calling for policy change.

Manichaeism is nothing new – it is an ancient cult with deep roots in Latin Christianity (and likely, Biden at least partially subscribes to seeing Putin as the Demiurge, the ‘dark’ anti-God).

So will this work? Well, this is the struggle now playing out in U.S. politics. At the upper level, the elites are more concerned with power and money than metaphysics – so, Biden’s attempt to transcend the latter and assemble an army “not of darkness but of light; not of oppression, but of liberation; not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”, more likely will be regarded as a reflection of Biden’s derangement syndrome – his detachment from reality; his kookiness, in other words.

If many of the overlap establishments (the ‘Uniparty’) want this war, it will not be for virtuousness, but for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex. If the latter élites are veering away, it is because they think the MIC needs time to refurbish –and to restock – so as to take on China.

“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever … That’s what Americans are and that’s what Americans do”, Biden said.

But the political landscape is no longer a Team Biden monopoly. Trump responded: “World War III has never been closer”; and he laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex”. The former president singled out Victoria Nuland in particular who, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO”.

Florida Governor DeSantis too, insists that the Biden administration has “effectively [given Kiev] a blank check with no clear strategic objective identified”. “I don’t think that it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war … over things like the [Ukrainian] borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said.

Republican Senator Hawley a week ago gave an reflective address to the Heritage Foundation:

“It’s hard to challenge the ‘Uniparty’: They’ve gotten very good at telling their favourite story. That’s why anyone who questions them gets called “anti-American” or “Vladimir Putin’s puppet” from a hundred different quarters”.

“But today, I want to tell you something else. I want to tell the truth. And the truth is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods. Our current foreign policy isn’t working”. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the ‘Uniparty’ doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries”. Simply said: “we’re over-committed, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire”.

Is this enough to ‘turn the worm’? Or, to bring a senior Deep State grandee to Biden’s office to whisper: ‘Remember what happened to Nixon?’ ‘Time for you to let go of Zelensky; (such a pity should Hunter end in jail…!)’.

There is however, another aspect to Biden’s resort to metaphysical Manichaeism that brings real, palpable consequence. Again, not new. Rather, a case of old demons re-surfacing. Here was the Estonian PM, Kaja Kallas, at the Munich Security Conference, saying that ‘NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens’: “The entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of imperialistic dreams’ – claiming that absent a mandated rehabilitation, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.

German FM, Annalena Baerbock, similarly warned the 90% of the world who have not taken the U.S./EU side:

“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor … take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself”.

Yes, alongside this European Manichaeism, the edging towards a new racism can be espied: an ancient rhizome that has one tendril long burrowed into radical Ukrainian nationalism and with other tendrils coiling through mainstream EU structures, as the Euro-Élites patiently debate whether Russia was insufficiently ‘pacified’ after WW2, or whether more radical ‘rehab’ is required.

The rise of this class who regard themselves as credentialled to decide whether Russian culture must be cancelled – and ‘re-wired’ – is a particularly pernicious dynamic in global politics. It has been getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, as its culture-war leaches out into geo-politics. This sense of superiority and impunity, in itself, provokes increased tensions and the risk of war.

Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, was asked for the meaning of Chancellor Scholtz’s ‘German Zeitenwende’ (turning point). He responded:

“The Zeitenwende speech was a response to intensified pressure … for Germany to fall in line with the foreign policy of the U.S. – and, in particular, with that of the Biden administration. What is clear is that Scholz’s Zeitenwende entails a promise, above all to the United States, that Germany will from now on, unlike in the past, act in line with a view of the world as divided between the West – and an evil empire, or better: several evil empires, from Russia to China to Iran…”.

(Nota Bene: This is pure Leo Strauss, channelling Carl Schmitt’s earlier explicit German Manichaeism.)

Streeck continues:

“Between [Germany and the U.S.] – and the various evil empires: Peace is possible, only temporarily and intermittently, and only as long as we enjoy military superiority. In principle, we and they are always at each other’s throats. Real peace will require regime change making an evil empire part of our virtuous one – as a result of its conversion to ‘our values’. It is legitimate to use all its political, economic, and military means to bring such conversion about.

“After the Zeitenwende, wars will always be around the corner and we must be prepared for them. What should help is that a virtuous empire’s “value-driven” or “feminist foreign policy” (Baerbock) fights only just wars – as wars against evil cannot be unjust. The underlying world view here is not social-Darwinist, history being a battle for the “survival of the fittest“, but Manichaean, in which history is a relentless struggle between good and bad, in which the forces of virtue must do their utmost to prevail over those of evil. Before they have won, there can be no real peace, only cease-fires for tactical reasons. For real peace we, the forces of virtue, must prepare for war.

“There is a strong and a weak version of Zeitenwende rhetoric. The strong version implies that the world was always like this: ontologically Manichaean. Those who in the past had a different view were either feeble-minded fools, cowards who all-too-willingly let themselves be deceived by enemy propaganda, or traitors. This essentially coincides with the world view of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the United States.

“The weak version, the one Scholtz obviously prefers, is that the world has recently changed: while in the past it allowed for peaceful coexistence between regimes and countries with different interests or ‘identities’ – so that life in peace could be preferred over victory in war – now the enemy has become so evil that there is no moral alternative to defeating him, cost it what it may.

“Today, American messianism seems to have migrated to Europe. At the same time, Bob Dylan is right. And times continue to be a’changing. How long the German government can remain as subservient to the United States as it has now promised to be is an open question – considering the risks that come with Germany’s territorial closeness to the Ukrainian battlefield – a risk not shared by the U.S.. There is also pressure from France for Germany to become more European and less transatlantic in outlook, and this may, with time, have an impact. Furthermore, it is likely that the U.S. at some point, will try to “Europeanise” the war and bow out, as they tried to “Vietnamise” the Vietnam war in the 1970s – hoping that post-Zeitenwende Germany can take the burden of sponsoring their proxy war from them.

“As for Europe, the United States may not object to Germany, Poland, and others continuing to help the Ukrainian government pursue its dream of a final victory over Russia, at their own cost and risk. With Germany and the EU having turned their political judgment over to Zelenskiy and Biden, and all serious discussion of the aims of the war – the terms of a settlement – being de facto precluded, this is quite a frightening prospect”.

If Streeck’s analysis is correct, the Bidenesque ideology now gripping the upper reaches of Europe suggests that the EU’s conversion to Zeitenwende makes any future relationship with Russia nigh impossible. The conviction this class has of itself as the global future, and of being on the ‘right side of history’, whereas ‘others’ (Russia and the ‘autocrats’) represent only that dark side to history, effectively forecloses on mediation. Mediation with ‘evil’ is a tautology.

The reality is that the EU is gripped by the attempt to impose a ‘cultural revolution’ – in the sense that broad citizen conformity to its cultural norms and ‘emergencies’ is not enough. But rather, it is its’ thought-processes that have to be fully reflected in modes of thinking such that every citizen’s acts and thoughts reflect EU ‘right thinking’.

We see this with the war party’s poster girl, Annalena Baerbock’s, lecturing non-aligned countries that there is no space for neutrality when it comes to Ukraine: ‘You are ‘either with us or against us’; and if the former, then GIVE U.S. AMMO!’.

Well, the cultural revolution already is reversing. Today, the Civilisational States (Russia, China, Iran, etc. and link) see the future as theirs and view the woke globalists – and their financialised economic structures – as passé. This reversal increasingly is evident in the popular war in the U.S., but not in Europe.

But can the EU change? – since all the bridges by which it might reconnect to the future have long since been burned down. In essence, the EU is a steam-roller ‘offensive’ ever incrementally moving towards ‘more Europe’.

Change ultimately will come to the EU as a result of a clash of interests, factiousness, and possibly a big political implosion or two – but above all by events on the ground in Ukraine as the Russian offensive proceeds.

Reality has been so far exorcised from the Credentialled Class ‘bubble’. It is not clear how the latter will react to having their ‘Balloon’ popped. Already, we see signs of incipient hysteria.

But the bottom line is this: When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’. The latter will soon find that for all its florid language of fighting on behalf of the ‘light’, the number of Europeans willing to die so that Sevastopol can become Ukrainian will be few indeed. Baerbock will find herself alone, as the rest of world already has shifted across to Russia (see here), ignoring her taunts.

February 28, 2023 Posted by | Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

TREATING PUTIN AS AN IRREDEEMABLE IMPERIALIST HAS PAINTED THE WEST INTO A DANGEROUS CORNER

By Larry Johnson | Son Of the New American Revolution | February 27, 2023 

When it comes to imperialism — i.e., “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas” — the United States and Europe are quick to label Putin as a rabid practitioner who must be stopped or else he will conquer the world.

This is lazy propaganda on the part of the West and it is a bullshit accusation. Putin is an old school nationalist and an Eastern Orthodox Christian who eschews the Soviet Communist legacy. Since taking power in 1999, Putin has not led unprovoked conquests of adjacent territory. Russia’s military engagements with Georgia in 2008 and with Ukraine are a direct result of U.S. and NATO interference in the region.

But the U.S. and Europe persist in describing Putin as Stalin reincarnated and a man hell bent on imposing Russian sovereignty over the world. This just a 21st century version of the Domino Theory. It is Domino 2.0 and Putin is the new Vietnam. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. and Europe are bona fide imperialists and are ignoring Putin’s actual record. Instead, the West is engaging in gross hypocrisy and psychological projection — attributing to Putin what they themselves have done and are doing.

Here are some recent examples of the imperialist meme the West is pushing with regards to Putin and Russia:

Putin’s words speak for themselves: What he is aiming for in Ukraine is the restoration of Russia as an imperial power.

Many observers quickly picked up on one of Putin’s more provocative lines, in which he compared himself to Peter the Great, Russia’s modernizing tsar and the founder of St. Petersburg – Putin’s own birthplace – who came to power in the late 17th century.

“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” a relaxed and apparently self-satisfied Putin said. “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was.”

Foreign Policy magazine, an establishment mouthpiece, pushes the same meme:

Above all, it means viewing contemporary Russia as the heir to the Soviet empire—a highly centralized state in which the Russian core determined the internal and external policies of the non-Russian republics—and the product of that empire’s sudden collapse.

Mikhail Mamedov, an Azeri by birth who fled Russia in 1996, offers an unintentionally ironic perspective on Russian imperialism:

How did Russia become an imperial power? Not how other European powers did, by crossing seas and oceans to colonize parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Russia’s imperial growth was largely land-locked: expansion stretched continentally across Eurasia. The empire went west into Poland and Lithuania; east towards Siberia; and, in the south, towards the Caucasus region and Ottoman and Persian empires. . . .

“Russia’s concept of empire was different from that of the Western powers. Russia did not possess ‘distant colonies’ but expanded across its borders into the depths of Eurasia. It had a better opportunity for the closer integration of native and Russian nobility into one body.”

Did you catch that last paragraph? Mamedov apparently has not studied American history. If Russia is an imperialist because it “expanded across its borders” and exerted authority over adjacent territory, then what is the United States? Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California were not independent free states who voted to join the U.S. They came under U.S. control thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the Mexican–American War and “required Mexico to cede 55 percent of its territory including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and most of Arizona and Colorado. Mexico also relinquished all claims for Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.”

After sixty years of failed foreign military expeditions, the political class in Washington, D.C. clings tenaciously to the childish notion that if you can just get rid of the “bad man” you can usher in a political utopia. Just consider the list of villains the United States has targeted in repeated bids to change governments and create “democracy or eliminate terrorism, etc. How have those worked out? Did it make the world safer? Is the United States more secure?

  • Mossadegh, Iran
  • Arbenz, Guatemala,
  • Castro, Cuba
  • Diem, Vietnam
  • Mao, China
  • Noriega, Panama
  • Saddam Hussein, Iraq
  • Bashir Assad, Syria
  • The Shah, Iran
  • The Ayatollah Khomeni, Iran
  • Osama Bin Laden, ???
  • Vladimir Putin, Russia

I am amazed that so many so-called foreign policy experts adhere to the magical belief that eliminating a leader will provide a political solution that favors the West. Just listen to Hillary Clinton pleading for the Russian elite to eliminate Putin:

The notion that getting rid of Putin will neuter Russia and make it an obedient serf of the West is profoundly stupid and myopic. Just because people like Clinton and Biden insist that Putin is a dictator in the mold of Stalin, it does not magically transform delusional belief into reality.

The Latin American Information Agency (ALAI) shares my scorn for the West’s double standard when it comes to portraying modern Russia as an amalgam of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union:

The main Western governments and media outlets question Moscow’s incursions while justifying similar actions carried out by their own camp. The deployment of troops in Ukraine, Georgia or Syria is presented as an unacceptable act, but the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya are interpreted as routine events. The annexation of Crimea is categorically repudiated, but the appropriation of land in Palestine is warmly welcomed.

This hypocrisy is combined with implausible allegations that seek to frighten the population. They describe a gigantic Russian power with immeasurable capacity for harm. Moscow’s manipulation of the US elections through infiltrators and algorithms has been the most absurd accusation in this campaign.

Every diabolical conspiracy is attributed to Putin. The media often portrays him as the embodiment of evil. He is depicted as a despot rebuilding an empire that rests on brutal methods of internal totalitarianism (Di Palma, 2019). Comparisons are never made with the lauded plutocracies of the United States or Europe, which enforces validation of the domination exercised by ruling elites.

Why should you care? If the West persists in demonizing Putin it is creating potentially insurmountable obstacles for future negotiations. This approach makes a diplomatic solution virtually unattainable and is likely to increase Putin’s doubts that the West can be trusted to uphold any agreement short of unconditional surrender.

February 28, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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