Collapse of the USSR was the part of triumphal march of neoliberal around the globe. Neoliberalism as Tristyism for the rick managed to displace Marxsim as the dominant ideology for almost 50 years (from
approximately 1960 to 2008.
Amazingly bad timing of the collapse resulted in severe economic rape of Russia and post-soviet
republics in best traditions of neocolonialism. The standard of living of Russian and Ukrainian
population outside of top 10% dropped considerably and for Ukraine actually never recovered to
pre-collapse level. For Russia briefly recovered and exceeded Soviet level, but started to
drop after 2008 and then collapse of oil price in 2014. With the current exchange rate of 60
rubles per dollar average income of ordinary Russians is not impressive and Ukrainian population
dropped to Central African level of poverty (less than $2 a day). Actually for Russia it was
simply a miracle that they managed to recover after such an economic rape at all.
And it is funny (and shows the power of neoliberal propaganda) how many Russians and Ukrainians
are still convinced by the Hollywood movies that everybody in the US and Europe has opportunities to
earn a decent living and lives a better life. They never heard about Wal-mart single mom.
That means that collapse of the USSR was caused by the combination of several major factors qnd
well as bad timing of Gorbachov reforms and incompetence of Gorbachov as a politician.
Among major factors (which have complex interplay with one another) we can mention:
Rising neoliberalism as a new social system that displaced both New Deal capitalism (Scandinavian model) and
Soviet bolshevism.
Polishing the techniques of color revolutions and growing power and coordination of Western intelligence
agencies. Especially in propaganda war area and well as bribing certain circles of
"intelligencia" and government officials.
Discreditation of Bolshevism both as ideology and economic system.
Stagnations of soviet economy and inability even to maintain the standard of living of
population which started sliding generating discontent. Which also demonstrated in stagnation of
soviet science. Many soviet scientific magazines deteriorated to junk level. The key
source of new technological and scentic information became western magazines.
Bad timing of Gorbachov reforms and incompetence of Gorbachov as a politician.
Growing influence of Western culture on the USSR which started with Elvis Presley and
Beatles. Especially Hollywood (and generally Western) films and pop music.
Fossilization and degeneration of ruling elite (aka "nomenklatura")
Growing effectiveness
of Western sanctions and politics of economic isolation of the USSR with Nixon china
policy. Which increased the level of stagnation of soviet economics and deprive the USSR of
technological achievement of the West, which generated discontent of population.
Saudi
inspired oil price drop, which deprives the USSR of currency revenue.
Formation of internal neoliberal "fifth-column with the in the USSR, including large part of KGB apparatus.
Probably not without help of major intelligence agencies.
PC and communications revolution. Proliferation of laser printers, Personal computers with
modems and appearance of first network such as FIDOnet
(based on regular phone lines), BBC and, gradually Internet (first in the form of
UUCP) that made maintenance of "hermetic" society like the USSR impossible.
Excessive power of military-industrial complex in soviet nomenklatura resulting is excessive
spending on defense and the maintenance of "Soviet block."
From Peter the Great to Catherine the Great to Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II,
Alexander III and Nicholas II in 1917, Romanov czars ruled Russia. After 1917 came Vladimir
Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin
and Vladimir Putin.
Pat was doing so well up until this set of sentences... when Pat Buchanan horribly erred
in including the shifty and ne'er-do-well Boris Yeltsin as such person was an idiot & a
crook so much more so than an autocrat... He was too dumb, crooked, naive, drunken, and out
of touch with reality to be an autocrat... Yeltsin was just a fool, a lost fool, a forlorn
fool, and a weakling... Much like the Czar that came under the spell of Rasputin... Yeltsin
bought into all the Western Elites malarkey and foolishness about economic reforms that came
close to ruining Russian civilization and destroying Russia as a society and a nation...
Thereafter God upon feeling guilty for having allowed the worthless Yeltsin onto power...
then God sent the Angel St. Vladimir to save Russian civilization from destruction and to
save the Russian people... and the Holy Putin worked his magic and Russia was not destroyed,
the Russians were saved, and Russian civilization preserved for the future and spared its
demise...
CovidBannedTard 12 hours ago (Edited) remove link
The CCP loving corporate western bankers who sold American manufacturing to the CCP almost
had Russia on its knees with Yeltsin.They were asset stripping it.
Then Putin slammed their tally whackers in a door.
And booted them out.
The same CCP loving corporate bankers are still asset stripping America 21 years and
counting since Putin kicked them out.
Several previous studies have examined the risks across generations of radiation exposure
from events such as this, but have yielded inconclusive results. In this study, the
investigators analyzed the genomes
of 130 children and parents from families where one or both parents were exposed to
radiation due to the Chernobyl accident, and where children were conceived afterward and born
between 1987 and 2002.
There was no increase in gene changes in reproductive cells of study participants, and
rates of new germline mutations were similar to those in the general population, according to a
team led by Meredith Yeager of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Rockville,
Md.
Browder's grandfather is Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. Now
freely admitted that he held that post on the payroll of FBI and Office of Naval
Intelligence. Bill merely continues the family business of damaging Russia by any means
possible.
Don't make simple things complicated the irony of starting this way for this post lol :D
(of course everything is complicated as well as simple, language betrays us all).
· The people of the Warsaw pact and then the Russians did what they did for
themselves and not for others, and they did it by themselves. It went well as long as the
people were in charge (ie. the initial actions) but the politicians then soon messed it up as
politicians anywhere are bound to do.
Gorbachev and Yeltsin didn't want or wish for disasters due to the results they got (and
maybe their tasks were impossible in their context). Clear mistakes were made and crimes
"allowed", far too much was rushed and ill thought out. The politicians had no way of being
prepared any more than they would be in the US right now.
· The US is out-competed, dysfunctional, and trapped in a cycle of excuses
in order to shoehorn their labyrinth of lies into their current reality. All people lie
despite this clear lesson as to why no one should, it is the lies one tells without realizing
they are lies that are the worst. This is much like the USSR was but easily even worse.
Will people in Europe and the US manage to duplicate the fall of the Warsaw pact and the
USSR? Right now it looks unlikely but remember or be aware that no one predicted the fall of
the Iron Curtain or the Politburo and most if not all outsiders in "the west" had trouble
believing it and understanding it when it happened or even now (and especially people
on both/all sides that are running on ideological biases as fuel).
(Our systems and models do not capture reality and can not, not even theoretically, a
different bigger discussion which boils down to the Shannon limit in the end (but I notice
thermodynamics is contentious among some so why would I invite that much work?)).
A repeat of history is not necessary nor automatic; the US isn't doing anything to stop
its own ongoing fall, at least not anything that I have noticed.
Because b is right.
(I really hope the CPC has a better grasp on this than that article vk posted hints at
because I want a stable prosperous China and that includes/demands the continuation of the
CPC and the way they have shaped and structured the Chinese system which is noticeable for
not taking the USSR approach that worked itself into a blind alley despite decades of
repeated attempts at reform (hell even Stalin tried)).
Interesting interview. Apparently, Yuri Andropov had a contingency plan on the event of
the disintegration of the USSR - and yes, it included the partition of the Ukraine into two
("east bank Ukraine" and "west bank Ukraine" - probably West of the Dnieper, East of the
Dnieper). It's in Russian, so maybe inconsistencies with automatic translation may exist:
The interview is with Russian neoliberal banker (of the circle of Yeltsin and Gaidar, St.
Petersburg intelligentsia) Viktor Loshak, from "Alfa-Bank group" (machine translation). He
was a working under Shatalin in the 1980s, so he's allegedly an eye witness (primary source)
of the alleged plans.
He also claims that the St. Petersburg neoliberals never intended to end the Union, and
that what really happened in the 1990s wasn't intended. Smells like revisionism to me, but
ok, the St. Petersburg circle was never known for their intellectual prowess, so it's
possible.
--//--
@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Apr 10 2021 21:07 utc | 51
It has in the sense that the Ukraine wants to restore its entire territory, not just some
part of it. There is no scenario where, it being able to reconquer LPR-DPR, it would leave
Crimea with Russia.
ugghhhh the propaganda channel – thesaker – continues unabated
"Putin single-handedly "resurrected" Russia in an amazingly short time"
just LOL @ single-handedly
" Putin turned Russia into the strongest military power on the planet and he completely reshaped the Russian perception
of themselves and of Russia"
strongest? zvezda channel posting youtube videos doesn't make you the strongest military power
completely reshaped? so much that still all the young Russians want to emigrate
"the country which created the best vaccine on the planet "
the best vaccine? only 4% of Russians got vaccinated, that's 6 million out of 144 millions
so much about Russians trusting Putin, LOL
-- -- -
Andrei Raevsky, do you even re-read what BS you write?!
you aren't fooling anyone but a handful of braindead followers you got there on your blog
in the real world – no one gives a shyt about Putin
the West doesn't hate Putin, they just want to loot Russia or get a cut from the loot of Russia.
Russian oligarchs want to loot Russia for themselves without giving a cut/tribute to Western oligarchs.
Putin is a non-issue, a nobody, he just follows orders of the Russian oligarchs.
But there is a real hate @ Putin – that because he is a fake, only a carefully prepared media
image. And you Andrei Raevsky are part of that propaganda effort. Putin is no savior, Putin
is not working for the betterment of Russians or humanity as a whole. He is just a facade for
Russian oligarchs. And that is what we hate . And the more you and the likes of you push
that fake image of Putin, the more the pushback and hate from us.
So go on – continue.
I was a believer in Putin. Then I saw the light. Now I would have no quarrel putting a bullet in
Putin's head. Analyze this!
Soviet leaders were of the people as you say, yes, but when you drill into the details of
their careers before they became General Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, you find they had careers as political administrators and propagandists. Only Leonid
Brezhnev had a technical background. They were the early equivalents of people like former UK
Prime Minister David
Cameron who went straight into the British Conservative Party after leaving Oxford
University with typical graduate qualifications for a career party hack and who for a time
worked for a media communications company; or like current Australian Prime Minister
Scott Morrison
who worked in marketing executive roles in which his most outstanding qualities were his
sheer ineptitude and flouting procurement guidelines.
From Nikita Khrushchev onwards, all General Secretaries with the exceptions of Yuri
Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (neither of whom lasted long as leaders) had some personal
or family connection with the Ukrainian SSR. This may not have been coincidence: it may
suggest that there was a network of individuals selecting future leaders for promotion based
on close personal career connections.
Until recently most people in the most senior
levels of the Communist Party of China , from whom China's leaders are drawn, had
technical, engineering or scientific backgrounds. Current members are now drawn from most
walks of life though several of them have worked in factories or done manual labour at some
point in their working lives.
As a south east asian myself, I do think the east asians really aren't the way forward,
not until Korea is united, Vietnam and China rid themselves of "to be rich is to be glorious"
Dengists, Japan free of LDP and American sock puppetry. I'm also VERY wary of chinese
reactionaries who speak of Confucianism.
Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but I look favorably to the slavs and
their culture, and of course the shining beacon that was the USSR and the 2nd world until
1991 fucks everything up.
Taoism nowadays is basically superstitions. The historical taoist practiced by the ancient
and medieval chinese political class is basically free market libertarianism "just let the
market regulates itself bruh".
There's a reason that most of the greatest chinese emperors practice legalism (Qin Shi
Huang, Liu Bang, Han Wudi), which is direct government intervention in all matters,
especially in market and infrastructure, while the Taoist-leaned dynasty (i.e. the Song)
resulted in mysticism and the take-over of China by the khitdan and then mongols.
In the West, "Taoism" and "Buddhism" are rebranded as some kind of new age exotic
philosophies, but in Asia proper, Taoism is kookery and Buddhism is militarist/nationalist
state religion, see Myanmar and Thailand.
I see you qualify your comment by specifying Hong Kong Chinese. They most certainly are
not Mainlanders and have a culture polluted by British Imperialism that's closer to the
Gangsterism of Chiang Kai-shek than Mao's Collectivism.
You may recall the book and video Affluenza that does a good job of explaining how
traditional conservative mores are assaulted and trampled by affluent modernity. Such
outcomes aren't restricted to North America but are global thanks to human similarity.
If one were to develop a moral equivalency chart evaluating all global cultures and major
sub-cultures, you'd see a majestic hodge-podge with very little uniformity, which also
relates to the very uneven state of human development in all its facets. The great task of
humanity over the next several centuries is to peacefully level out those disparities. But as
I wrote on the Shia thread, the remaining Imperialist nations are a very large impediment in
attaining that goal and need to be removed so humanity can evolve.
There is no reason to speculate. Chinese culture, history, stories, have the answers.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, for example, has:
3 brothers who are put forwards as "godly". There is a celebrated image of the three of
them making the vow of brotherhood in an orchard. The leader, Liu Bei, is a prince of the
declining dynasty. He basically constantly virtue signals, but basically mostly does as the
rest, which is fight, kill, and grab other people's territories. His two other brothers
include a psycho drunk and a supremely self satisfied other. They look good next to a
character like Cao Cao;
the intelligentsia are basically bunch of self satisfied gurus of varying degrees of
competence that compete with devising deception schemes against other kingdoms.
the military is hardcore, brutal. also stuck on formations, aesthetics, which can be a
weakness.
the general population are docile cattle.
What the world hasn't seen for 2 centuries is the famous Chinese arrogance that was their
reputation until they truly pooped the pooch of their country with the arrival of Jews and
Europeans.
A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various
degrees.
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world
order with Chinese characteristics.
Lurking Dragon 66
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world order
with Chinese characteristics.
Well, this is what we are seeing from our western "partners" as was bestowed upon the
globe by so many self righteous defenders of human rights, democracy and the "white man's
burden"
See for an example Halliburton's mercenaries, ISIS and other creepy creatures invented and
bestowed upon civilisation by people that believe that if you are not jewish, you are not
human and, therefore, can be dispensed at will if of no use to the chosen ones.
Yes, the western hippie generation is very fueled by drugs and new age philosophies. But
note that these rebranded exotic religions do not resemble the native ones.
For example in Asia proper, you have actual deities to worship in Taoism, and it's not
just a philosophy waxing about the Dao like in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daode_Tianzun
And Taoist priests are still an actual thing, and you can hire them to check Feng Shui and
even exorcism.
Still, it's superstitions and money making schemes, and I wouldn't put much trust in
them.
Obsequious to superiors, inhuman to inferiors. This is what you can expect from a world
order with Chinese characteristics.
Posted by: LurkingDragon | Mar 6 2021 1:17 utc | 66
That sounds pretty much like every job I have had here in the USA all of my life. (Except
the union jobs.) There is a reason they hate unions, especially ones that have not been
domesticated yet.)
Hong Kong culture is very different from the culture of Mainland China, thanks in no small
part to HK having once been a link between China and the rest of the world for a long time
and becoming very wealthy as a manufacturing and financial services centre as a result. HK
people are very materialistic and status-conscious, and look down on other Chinese (to say
nothing of what they think of other Asians and other non-white people) who do not speak HK
Cantonese. The only people HK people respect are English-speaking white British and
Americans.
My parents visited HK back in the 1990s and my mother tried speaking Taishanese (our
native language: it is related to Cantonese and is spoken just west of the Pearl River delta
not far from Macau, in Guangdong province) to shop assistants. They ignored her and it was
only when she switched to English that their attitude changed dramatically and fell over one
another to help.
Before the 1980s, huge numbers of Cantonese people living in English-speaking countries
were actually Taishanese speakers. My parents visited San Francisco's Chinatown in 1988 and
nearly everyone they came across spoke Taishanese. It was the dominant language there.
My dad's second (and current) wife is Chinese. He met her online in the late 90's, and she
moved with her young son to Wisconsin and married him around 2000.
I think my dad was looking for a docile women after his previous marriage and girlfriends,
and on the surface, Xue Lin seemed docile...in reality she is not docile, but subtle, a
characteristic I found true of her, her son and the Chinese people I have met thru them.
Nobody ever got my dad to work as hard or be as frugal as she!
They came over with money and bailed my dad out of a tax mess. She still owns apartment
buildings in China. Both are very hard working, smart and frugal, but not materialistic.
Jake (her son) and I ended up being pretty close. He received an MBA from the University
of Wisconsin and worked in the natural gas business in Texas before moving back to China
where I've had the pleasure of visiting him.
My impression of China and the Chinese is largely positive, the extreme work ethic can be
a bother given I am a pothead hippy slacker. There is a lot of optimism and energy there, it
makes the USA feel like a barbaric backwater country whose best days are past.
@66
Sounds like projection. You have nicely described my experience in the USA! Aside from my
union jobs, it has been kiss up and kick down...even self-employed.
"A certain fragrance of superstition and sentimentality also is always present, at various
degrees." Growing up in a small, conservative religious town, this is a great description of
my experience.
I will say, the general American population isn't docile, but are herded about like cattle
none the less. I'd also say the Chinese aren't so much docile as they are subtle, which I
believe is far more effective than rowdy but dumb.
The stereotype of the Chinese as the greedy merchant in SE Asia comes from the colonial
era. Western colonization of China created a Chinese comprador elite who was allowed many
commercial privileges within the Mainland (as middlemen) but also in the SE Asian region. As
every Latin American well know, comprador elites are the worst of the worst. No wonder the
peoples of Indonesia, Philippines etc. etc. see the Chinese as a negative force in their
countries.
The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as a mafioso in Latin America: the
Chinese who emigrated to Latin America are mainly triad and hyper-capitalists from Taiwan or
pre-communist China (who may or may not have indirectly come from Taiwan in later
decades).
The same is true for the stereotype of the Chinese as the arrogant, pro-laissez faire
upper middle class individualist in Canada, USA, Australia and Western Europe in the modern
times. They are most tourists and/or a selected bunch of upper middle class Chinese who are
lured into real estate schemes in those countries (Australia, Vancouver etc.).
As we can see, peoples make up stereotypes of other peoples based on small and heavily
skewed samples. That's why we have statistics, and they tell us the Chinese are one of the
most if not the most down-to-Earth, non-religious, socialist and tolerant peoples of the
world today.
Last week. during a visit by the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Russia's Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov
slapped down the EU's sanctimonious interference in Russia's internal policies.
Back in Brussels, Borrell, who was criticized by some EU hardliners for not directly rebuffing Lavrov's
talk, set down to write
a blog post in which again attacked Russia over the latest Navalny stunt:
I have just returned from a very complicated visit to Moscow, on which I had embarked to
discuss the fraught state of EU-Russia relations. They have been low for a number of years,
and deteriorated even further after recent developments linked to the poisoning, arrest,
and sentencing of Alexei Navalny as well as the related mass arrests of thousands of
demonstrators. The purpose of this mission was to express directly the EU's strong
condemnation of these events and to address, through principled diplomacy, the process of a
rapid worsening of our relationship with Russia, and to help prepare the forthcoming
European Council discussions on EU-Russia relations.
Borrell is delusional. Hardly anyone in Russia believes the nonsensical poisoning story
for which the 'west' could provide exactly zero evidence:
Only 15% in Russia believe the Navalny poisoning was the Govt trying to eliminate an
opponent, and the 15% based this opinion from Telegram and the Internet and were mostly
18-24. The rest think it was staged, a Western false flag, personal or opposition:
https://levada.ru/2020/12/24/...
The whole Navalny poisoning was obviously some secret service operation to bash Russia.
His lavish living in in a 5 bed
room luxurious apartment in Germany after he was released from hospital was paid
by the libertarian oligarch Evgeny Chichvarkin . Chichvarkin, who
lives in London, is probably an MI6 cutout. It is still not known who paid the multimillion
production costs for the
fake 'Putin palace' video. The studio renting for the video was requested by a company in
Los Angeles. Some U.S. involvement is thereby assured.
Poland and other NATO countries are now openly pressing Navalny and other traitors like
him to continue their regime change attempts:
This confrontation was predictable. There is a limit to what Russia can accept. Even after
the russophobic UK departure from the EU, the mood is the same.
Therefore a frank confrontation may either be a wake-up call for Europe that they may lose
totally Russia as a partner or in the contrary bring them more apart.
What the EU fails to realize is that without Russia , it may end up become the puppet of the
USA and the UK
Time will tell
thanks b.... you're correct borrell is delusional and a perfect representative for a
delusional europe.... i am glad lavrov said what he did.. i just wish russia would throw the
shit back at them by making a parallel with the wests treatment of assange... it really
highlights the outrageous-ness of the west at this point...
and someone on the open thread posted about mh17 and trying to access more info contained
in boxes on the rear part of the plain that might lead to a different conclusion... as i see
it mh17, skripal, navalny and etc. etc - are all frame ups to take down russia... it has
reached a level of insanity and borrell is the perfect delusional character to represent it
all here..
throw the shit back at them russia... call the west out on their endless bullshit... the
time for diplomacy is long gone and this appears to be the conclusion that russia is indeed
coming to, however slowly....
Borrell - "The strategic choices we make now will determine international power dynamics in
the 21st century, and notably whether we will advance towards more cooperative or more
polarised models, based on closed or on freer societies."
He answers his own question - the EU (and "partners") will advance towards a more
polarized international model, based on their own self-serving definitions of "closed" or
"freer" societies. This self-generated dichotomy will be used to mask the true nature of this
perceived crossroad: "they" can live with us, but "we" can't live with them.
In a video posted earlier today, 12/02/2021 Alexander Mercuoris of The Duran analysed the
reaction of Germany's politicians to Lavrov's comments.
Basically even Heiko Maas the anti-Russian foreign minister shit his pants at the though of
Russia abandoning Europe and therefore jeapordizing Germany a significant percentage of it's
energy supply.
When all is said and done, the E.U. will suffer far worse than Russia if Moscow abandons
Europe.
The technocrats know this. However the level of maturity required to overcome their hubris is
patently lacking and to re-orientate themselves idealogically will be viery difficult as can
be seen by the reaction of 70 mental retards who pose as M.E.P.s in a letter they signed
calling for Borrell's resignation and a tougher stance on Russia.
Until a few years ago, Russia did not have an alternative for purchases of many items
other than from the West. It now has China to supply most needs. When China finally solves
the problems caused by the US sanctions to semiconductor factories (it will take roughly a
decade to develop its own photolithography and design, the most critical tools of advanced
semiconductor processing), China will be able to provide everything that Russia needs except
for warm climate fruits and vegetables (maybe Turkey?). This new paradigm seems to be behind
Russia's new assertiveness. Europe should make peace with Russia before it fully tilts
towards the East.
In 1990 at the what I then thought end of Cold War there seemed an opening to the
coalescing of a northern hemisphere zone of peace - but that vision has come to nothing. What
an idiot I was! How could I ever have thought that the best of the inheritance of Western
civilization would lead in the West. The plowing, plundering, grasping, murdering and
scheming for profit psychos in the West stabbed that vision in the heart. I am sure now
another opening will not come in my lifetime - the West will make sure of that.
If I was younger I would leave the US but now can only hunker down and stay out of the way
of the juggernaut of rampaging psychos lurching from one failure to another. The only relief
from the deepest moments of despair is looking to the East and others that are building and
working together to build a new world. Obviously Russia and China, along with Iran, Cuba,
Venezuela, Syria and others. It is a strange world for me turned upside down when I even
include North Korean resistance to the US Empire of Mendacity as contributing to the building
of that new world.
the Reality is NOT quite right the way b has present it. EU together with US, Canada CAN
and WILL hurt Russia deeply if they slap severe economic sanctions on Russia's energy sector.
And Russia knows that and EU knows that Russia knows it.
The West's game is very simple: cut Russia from the Western world, by denying it access to
any type of new tech, economic loans and any type of ties with the West. (this worked quite
well with the Soviet Union, so it WILL work again) And this WILL hurt Russia deeply
economically, no question about it. And before you tell me about China and the supposed
Russia-China's ties, let me inform you that the ties are merely economic and both still don't
trust each other. The Russians are well aware of CHina's claims over Siberia. They don't
really work together, most of those ties are imaginary and dont really exist.
Putin has made several mistakes, and he is too dependent on the Rich Russian millionaires.
The threat of sanctions made him freeze when the West went after Ukraine and Putin didn't act
to save it. Russia will cry bloody tears over this in the very near future. This is only the
overture of things to come. There will be another fake false flag even in the Azov sea after
which USA will demand Russia be boycotted. Ys that will hurt EU also, but the Eu are
masochists who love getting their asses fucked by US.
Russia better get prepared and get their supply ass grease ready, they will be getting
serious ass fucking very very soon. And they wont be able to do anything about it. Good
going, Putin!
I commiserate as we're in the same boat. I watch like a hawk because forewarned is
forearmed!
/////
Published at the right moment given events is this
Strategic-Culture Editorial : "NATO's Road To Perdition With Ukraine." It omits
the Borrell incident to focus on the recent meeting between NATO secretary general Jens
Stoltenberg hosted Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shymhal at the organization's headquarters
in Brussels:
"At a joint press conference, both men were upbeat about Ukraine joining NATO. Stoltenberg
admitted that the former Soviet Republic has been eyed for membership of the alliance since
2008, a timescale which puts more recent conflict over the past nearly seven years in
perspective. He also confirmed that NATO forces have been building up their presence in the
Black Sea in coordination with Ukrainian counterparts. In recent weeks, three US warships
have been training with Ukrainian naval vessels in order to counter what Stoltenberg says is
'Russian aggression'."
So, there's much more in the stew than it appears:
"It is interesting to speculate why Stoltenberg – a former Norwegian premier and
nominal civilian head of NATO – this week appeared to give new impetus to Ukraine's
ambitions. Could it be related to the change of administration in the United States? Senior
members of the Biden administration have publicly stated during Senate hearings a willingness
to increase military support for the Kiev government in its conflict with pro-Russian
separatists in Eastern Ukraine. American and European envoys at the UN Security Council
this week reiterated strident accusations against Russia claiming that Moscow was responsible
for prolonging the conflict in Ukraine . Russia's envoy Vassily Nebenzia countered that
it was the Kiev regime and its Western allies who have not implemented the previously agreed
Minsk peace accord signed in 2015." [My Emphasis]
Bald-faced lies in public forums that began with Clinton/Gore have steadily escalated and
clearly aren't a product of any one administration but a continuity of the War Party's
attempt at Full Spectrum Domination that keeps slipping further away from any possibility of
occurring, thus its desperation. Yesterday, I provided this link to The Saker's latest
analysis and called it a Must Read. Within he links to several reports from Russian media
and military sources that those watching closely need to read. Yesterday, Putin met with his Security
Council ostensibly about arms control but I think the conversation went well beyond that,
although I have no confirmation.
The Solovyov-Lavrov transcript isn't complete yet, but what's there is incredible! As
Lavrov said, "Well, this is some kind of a kingdom of crooked mirrors." If what Lavrov said
of Borrell's position, we should have some pity for him being put into such an impossible
position--but then, he's well paid to do his duty.
Patrick Armstrong wrote yesterday about the consequences of the Navalny brothers' scam in
2012 against Yves Rocher:
NAVALNIY. The story continues. The theory that he's being fitted up for a treason charge
was given a boost when Zakharova said he should be called an "agent of influence" rather than
a politician. His suspended sentence for fraud was lifted and he's off to prison. Read Yves
Rocher's statement; sounds to me as if the company believes he did swindle them. The fact
that there's now a campaign against the company suggests my deduction is correct. https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2021/02/11/russian-federation-sitrep-11-february-2021/
That contains a couple of links giving more details of the case.
Armstrong also links to this tweet by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a video
showing many examples of police brutality in the West and also violence by protesters against
police in Russian (the opposite of what is shown in Western media). https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1356674233464729609
Several days ago on the 10th, I posted
this link and commented about what I deemed the notable words spoken by Lavrov on
Diplomats' Day. IMO, it's a martial pep-talk given his peroration followed by this
paragraph:
"Russia's attempts to become an independent state, to uphold its right to an independent
foreign policy and to protect international law are coming against increasingly harsh
resistance of our Western colleagues, who would like to teach 'obedience' to us. They would
like us to accept the highly questionable interpretation of common human values, an
interpretation that contradicts Russia's cultural and civilisational traditions. They would
like Russia to become a 'convenient' territory for promoting their own security, economic,
social and political interests. We can see that these are becoming ever more aggressive with
every passing day. We must actively apply our efforts, knowledge and experience, based on the
wisdom of our predecessors, to consistently promote the foreign policy course formulated by
President Vladimir Putin."
How else do you prepare your diplomatic corp for war?
If you've followed Lavrov closely for many months as I have, the change in his demeanor is
quite marked; yet as Paco notes, he still maintains his professionalism. Lavrov's perplexity
about how consensus is supposed to function was well put--we know several nations disagree
with the policy yet go along with it--WHY?--the united front undercuts your own interests. In
Putin's latest conversation with his Energy Minister, there was no mention of Nord Stream 2's
situation. Given all the sanctions and lack of pushback by the EU nations most dependent on
it, IMO Russia is willing to sacrifice it as it didn't bear all the costs and has plenty of
potential customers for its hydrocarbons. So, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Russia
stopped short of finishing, said it would fulfill its existing contracts, but no more would
be negotiated until conditions drastically change. Hardball is just that--Hardball.
Levada is
considered a [pro-]Western sociological service (there are links with Soros) in Russia
and the results of its polls, let's say, cause a certain skepticism. 15% of those who believe
in "poisoning"... I would say figures of 5-8 (maximum 10) percent look much more realistic.
It is still not known who paid the multimillion production costs for the fake 'Putin
palace' video.
Well, I would look for sources in names like
Khodorkovsky or/and Browder .
Both scammers are longtime haters of Russia.
The Kremlin later said that some media misrepresented Lavrov's remarks but essentially
confirmed his stand
According to Russian legislation, the country's foreign policy is determined directly by the
president. The Foreign Ministry is essentially just a repeater, although of course it
introduces its own peculiarities. Therefore, there is no doubt that Lavrov's words were
coordinated with (and approved by) Putin. Peskov, as usual, in his own manner, tried to
somewhat "smooth out"/"embellish" Lavrov's directness and rigidity, which, however, does not
negate the essence of the statements themselves.
Today Navalny was back in court for publicly insulting a World War II veteran. The EU will
certainly make remarks about that. But only a few days ago police in Scotland arrested
someone because he typed a mean tweet about a British veteran of that war.
Here I can only support the British, who massively stood up for the offended veteran Sir
Thomas Moore.
Citizens wrote mass appeals, statements to the police demanding to bring to justice the
degenerate who insulted the memory of the war hero.
Unfortunately, Russian society often lacks such civic initiative. Yes, the authorities
will do their job, and a piece of shit named Navalny, who slandered the war veteran, will be
punished. But besides the actions of the authorities, it would be nice to see also the
"demand of the people", you know.
And I have been following you, following Lavrov.....
The Nordstream II is a question mark. It is being finished by the Russians, with their own
ships. The Germans have also realised that their own interests are tied up there. The
"Threatening situation" (from the west) does not come from either one.
My conclusion is that EU policy is being dictated from outside , the secondary
question is "by whom". Unfortunately I suspect that the main driving force is the same one
that "enabled" Biden, Enabled the ousting of socialist candidates in many countries. (Corbyn,
and in S. America generally), and generally assume they are the top of the top.
Is this force based on "nationality" or on "interests", call them Religious nuts, Extreme
militarists OR Financial Fascists? Alternatively are they a mixture of all three***.
One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative
body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have been
taken. That they are not means that they lack the ability to deviate from what they have been
ordered. By way of an explanation, the Media will lie, because they cannot do otherwise
having been "bought" in some way. Lavrov has certainly changed. Because he probably knows
what is "supposed" to happen, and the EU miasma do not understand that they too will be in
the forefront of any battleground. (Since that includes me, I am not too happy about the
situation either).
Aside; *** They could be mixture of all three tendencies. ie. 9/11 had operatives from the
Saudis, Israel, and the Pentagon, with three different motivations. Religious (Saudis),
Suprematist (Israel) and monetary (Pentagon and it's "lost" trillions, and profitability by
insiders).
As the head of the Soviet intelligence service, Leonid Shebarshin, an extremely
well-informed man, once said: "The west wants only one thing from Russia -- that it does
not exist".
"One explanation for Lavrov's coldness is that IF the EU was an independent representative
body (which it isn't) then certain actions to improve the lot of the populace would have
been taken ." [My Emphasis]
Now what current ideology supports such a policy--that the lot of the masses
isn't supposed to be improved; rather, they are to have their wealth wrung out,
then be tossed aside and used as manure. Hint: It was famously announced as Trickle-down
Economics, which was lambasted as Voodoo Economics.
If you read Hudson, then you know where the power center lies within the Outlaw US Empire
and its network of vassals--The privately held Central Banks and those that control them and
many other key corporations thanks to interlocking boards of directors--the same basic cabal
that failed to assassinate FDR and oust him via a coup but succeeded with JFK, RFK, MLK, and
so many others: millions when adding in their terrorists and their Death Squads.
To rid Europe of its Central Bank, the EU would need to be disbanded. But to gain complete
sovereignty, NATO would need to die also. Currently, Europe is essentially occupied by a
force every bit as immoral as the Nazis. It's not by accident that Lavrov, Putin and others
invoke the Great Patriotic War and the events that led to it as recurring.
I would not be surprised to see Russia actually perform the deeds it's accused of, like
actually invade and subdue Ukraine. It it did so, realistically what would change? Nuland
famously gave the answer Russia would now echo--Fuck the EU. As with the Republic's Trade
Federation secretly aligning with the Sith, the EU will come to regret playing dummy to the
Outlaw US Empire as it gets barred from gaining any benefits from being in the Eurasian Bloc
and China's BRI Combo.
I don't really follow the Navalny situation anymore because as soon as I see Russia
mentioned in any Western media I assume it's an "intelligence community" psyop or just plain
old propaganda. But something piqued my curiosity regarding this alleged mansion of
Putin's.
Strategic culture provided two links to YouTube videos in their articles, one of which to
my knowledge isn't subtitled so I don't know what was being said in Russian. In this video a
group of guys made the trip to the site of this mansion compound and showed the place in
disrepair, looking like exterior had aged quite a bit.
The other is to Navalny's own video which alleges to explain that the reason for the
current state of the project is that the original design/construction were faulty and that a
serious mold problem, as well as leaking roofs, had caused them to strip out the entire
interior ostensibly to rebuild from scratch (and allegedly tossing "billions" of rubles worth
of marble and other fancy construction materials). He also says that the original photos and
video which show the place in pristine condition, were from 6 years ago before the
teardown.
Leaving aside the obvious fake photos (like the one in Moscow times which was a
photoshopped Putin swimming in his new mansion, lol) and the situation in general (i.e.,
whether Putin has anything to do with this structure at all), can anyone square this circle
for me? Is it disproven that the place was indeed built a while back and later stripped down
due to the leaking roofs and mold? If so is there a source in the English language that
explains the situation?
There is a strong whiff of desperation of the EuroCrapsters and their US masters to grab
what Russia has (resources) and thus delay own economic collapse. All these crapsters are
freezing their asses off right now whilst dreaming of profits from pillaged Russian energy.
The most precarious is the Western pension system, which with ZIRP and NIRP interest rates
has stopped existing. There is no source of funding in this World that could feed that hungry
monster with ageing population. The Western printing presses are overheating and this is only
a delaying solution for the deeply debalanced system. Absolutely the only way out for the
West is to bring down Russian government and pillage. If Russia did not have nuclear weapons
this would have happened a while ago. The Russians understand this perfectly.
Will the sick West run into a desperate confrontation against a bee with a big sting? It
must be unusually frustrating for the AngloAmerican crapsters not to be able to just take
what they want and need from the World as they have been doing over the past couple if
centuries. They have the big sting but their mark has an even bigger (hypersonic) sting. What
a profound change in world affairs - pillaging from now on to come at the huge cost. And
Putin appears prepared to prevent pillaging of not only Russia.
The calculation is fairly clear - either they will feed, cloth and keep warm the Western
elderly and others using Russian resources or there will be no pensioners after a nuclear
Holocaust. Either way problem solved.
would like to know, in concrete terms, what is the benefit from constant denigration and
provocation of Russia, and who benefits, in precisely what ways. I do know, however, who does
not benefit. The vast majority of Europeans, the Russians and generally the majority of
humanity.
-Pushing Russia around and away is counter productive for the EU and Europe as whole. It is a
big, peaceful, neighbouring country willing to cooperate on the basis of mutual respect and
interest. Russia has put foreward many constructive proposals, all of which have been
rejected
- There is no rational basis for the long-lasting and escalating pressure on Russia. If that
is correct, the goals and actions of the West, and the the EU in particular, are irrational
from the perspective of the real life interests of the majority of European citizens and
welfare and wellbeing of the majority of people in the world.
- I hope that Russia does not abandon its orientation towards Europe, because it is a
European state. It should be part of European integration projects, albeit not on the present
model of the EU. That does not clash, but accords, with its Asian relations and projects.
- The EU should radically change its policies towards Russia, and welcome it as an important
partner in all fields.
- The qeustion is - who is going to stop the race into the abys that the European leaders are
accelarating? I don't see anyone or anything on the European scene considering, capable of
and willing to put an end to this utter madness. I do see who is paying the price and who
will pay even more dearly in the future. The majority of European citizens.Deeply depressing
and very scary.
The Bulletin article doesn't really delve into the issues around the US' new low-yield
'tactical' nukes, it concentrates on a new big 'strategic' ICBM system, the Ground Based
Strategic Deterrent (GBSD). It seems to be basically an attempt to resurrect the capabilities
of the Reagan era MX 'Peacekeeper' that was scrapped under the START treaties as it was
optimised to carry a large number of warheads and the US preferred to keep a larger number of
Minuteman III missiles with single warheads.
Although it probably won't be quite as large as the MX, it will be better suited than the
Minuteman for carrying multiple hypersonic glide vehicles like the Russian 'Avangard' system.
The Russians have an initial operating capability on their SS-19/UR-100N ICBM (similar in
payload to the Minuteman) but will soon deploy their much larger RS-28 Sarmat which will
allow multiple hypersonic gliders to be carried.
The article describes a typically corrupt US procurement process, with the big three arms
companies (Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman) fighting it out for the mountain of
$. Northrop Grumman managed to win out by buying up the only manufacturer of the large solid
rocket motors that the contract required the contractors to use. Solid rocket motors were one
of the only aspects of space technologies where the US was unequivocally in the lead, with 4
or 5 companies producing them. By the time of the GBSD contract only one company remained
after the orgy of mergers and buyouts, Orbital ATK. ATK was the successor to Thiokol Corp,
whose product doomed the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger (being basically a big 'light
it and stand the f*** back' firework solid motors are not a great option for crewed
spaceflight, but well suited to ICBMs).
By buying up ATK, Northrop Grumman threatened to massively cut into the profits of any
other company bidding, ensuring a clear run to the contract for itself. Many analysts had
suspected that Boeing would be given the GBSD contract to compensate for their losses on the
737Max, but Northrop's maneuvers and Boeing's terrible recent track record in space made that
impossible. Boeings SLS moon rocket failed its crucial static-fire test in Jan 2021 and is 5
years behind schedule despite it being basically a Space Shuttle tank with Shuttle engines
bolted to the bottom (early 70s tech). Its Starliner Space Station ferry also failed its
uncrewed flight test last year due to a plethora of software errors, one of which was
discovered with minutes to spare and would have killed a crew by crashing the service module
into the crew module moments after the modules seperated for reentry into the atmosphere.
With all that in mind I don't think the Russians are too troubled by the US's prowess in
space or financial technology. Whatever Frankenstein's Rocket emerges from the GBSD program
will be most unlikely to rival the RS-28 (known to NATO as 'Son of Satan'), and by that time
the 'Grandson of Satan' will probably be flying.
The problem with armchair strategists is of course they don't know all the facts, those at
hand to the actual players. Some leaks into the real world but far too much is hidden.
All we know is that Russia appears to have stopped its subservient position and have
started with the EU, not the US. Is that because they believe they are now finally powerful
enough for a military conflict? Or perhaps as they believe one is coming anyway? Or are there
other hidden factors in play?
One thing of interest is that it hasn't taken long for the NATO/Russian situation to
escalate quickly since Trumps removal, anyone still doubt he was removed? Also of note the US
general now stating nuclear war is possible, more fear to add or just introducing the idea to
us as something that may "have" to be done to save the world for democracy?
How much does one believe in coincidence? Karmically there is no such thing. Many big
issues going on in the world now from covid with its fascist responses to Big Resets, massive
world debt, and now increasing military tension with Russia and perhaps China as well soon.
All interlinked?
Putin created a document about lessons from WW2. Even if you disagree with him or just
hate him, ask yourself if Trump, Biden, Pelosi or any other elderly US leaders could reason
at this level or offer this depth of thought. That's my take away...
The problem with Navalny is not that he is a 'traitor' to Russia but that he is an agent
of the Empire, on the payrolls of the Five Eyes security complex. Which makes him a traitor
to humanity.
McFaul cautions against what he refers to as "Putin's ideological project" as a
threat to the neoliberal international order. Yet he is reluctant to recognize that the
neoliberal international order is an American ideological project for the post-Cold War
era.
After the Cold War, neoliberal ideologues advanced what was seemingly a benign proposition
– suggesting that neoliberal democracy should be at the center of security strategies.
However, by linking neoliberal norms to US leadership, neoliberalism became both a
constitutional principle and an international hegemonic norm.
NATO is presented as a community of neoliberal values – without mentioning that its
second largest member, Turkey, is more conservative and authoritarian than Russia – and
Moscow does not, therefore, have any legitimate reasons to oppose expansionism unless it fears
democracy. If Russia reacts negatively to military encirclement, it is condemned as an enemy of
democracy, and NATO has a moral responsibility to revert to its original mission as a military
bloc containing Russia.
Case in point: there was nobody in Moscow advocating for the reunification with Crimea until
the West supported the coup in Ukraine. Yet, as Western "fact checkers" and McFaul
inform us, there was a "democratic revolution" and not a coup. Committed to his
ideological prism, McFaul suggests that Russia acted out of a fear of having a democracy on its
borders, as it would give hope to Russians and thus threaten the Kremlin. McFaul's ideological
lens masks conflicting national security interests, and it fails to explain why Russia does not
mind democratic neighbors in the east, such as South Korea and Japan, with whom it enjoys good
relations.
Defending the peoples
States aspiring for global hegemony have systemic incentives to embrace ideologies that
endow them with the right to defend other peoples. The French National Convention declared in
1792 that France would "come to the aid of all peoples who are seeking to recover their
liberty," and the Bolsheviks proclaimed in 1917 "the duty to render assistance, armed,
if necessary, to the fighting proletariat of the other countries."
The American neoliberal international order similarly aims to liberate the people of the
world with "democracy promotion" and "humanitarian interventionism" when it
conveniently advances US primacy. The American ideological project infers that democracy is
advanced by US interference in the domestic affairs of Russia, while democracy is under attack
if Russia interferes in the domestic affairs of US. The neoliberal international system is one
of sovereign inequality to advance global primacy.
McFaul does not consider himself a Russophobe, as believes his attacks against Russia are
merely motivated by the objective of liberating Russians from their government, which is why he
advocates that Biden "distinguish between Russia and Russians – between Putin and the
Russian people." This has been the modus operandi for regime change since the end of the
Cold War – the US supposedly does not attack countries to advance its interests, it only
altruistically assists foreign peoples in rival states against their leaders such as Slobodan
Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin etc.
McFaul and other neoliberal ideologues still refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance,"
which does not make much sense after the attacks on Yugoslavia in 1999 or Libya in 2011.
However, under the auspices of neoliberal internationalism, NATO is defensive, as it defends
the people of the world. Russia, therefore, doesn't have rational reasons for opposing the
neoliberal international order.
McFaul condemns alleged efforts by Russia to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US,
before outlining his strategies for interfering in the domestic affairs of Russia. McFaul
blames Russian paranoia for shutting down American "non-governmental organizations" that
are funded by the US government and staffed by people linked to the US security apparatus. He
goes on to explain that the US government must counter this by establishing new
"non-government organizations" to educate the Russian public about the evils of their
government.
The dangerous appeal of ideologues
Ideologues have always been dangerous to international security. Ideologies of human freedom
tend to promise perpetual peace. Yet, instead of transcending power politics, the ideals of
human freedom are linked directly to hegemonic power by the self-proclaimed defender of the
ideology. When ideologues firmly believe that the difference between the current volatile world
and utopia can be bridged by defeating its opponents, it legitimizes radical power
politics.
Consequently, there is no sense of irony among the McFauls of the world as US security
strategy is committed to global dominance, while berating Russia for "revisionism."
Raymond Aaron once wrote: "Idealistic diplomacy slips too often into fanaticism; it divides
states into good and evil, into peace-loving and bellicose. It envisions a permanent peace by
the punishment of the latter and the triumph of the former. The idealist, believing he has
broken with power politics, exaggerates its crimes."
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Ghanima223 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:36 AM
In short, the tables have turned since the end of the Cold War. It is no longer communist
ideologues that try to export revolution and chaos while the western world would promote
stability and free markets. Now it's western ideologues that are trying to export revolutions
and chaos while clamping down on free markets with Russia, as ironically as it sounds, being
a force for stability and a strong proponent for the free exchange of goods and services
around the world. The west will lose just as the USSR has lost.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:01 AM
The Dollar is the only fake reason that still keeps US afloat. The moment that goes, it loss
will be a lot worse then of USSR.
US_did_911 Ghanima223 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 12:58 AM
That happened not exactly after the end of the cold war. It was about even for a decade after
that. The real u-turn happened after the 9/11 false flag disaster.
Amvet 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:00 AM
Foreign dangers are necessary to keep the attention of the American people away from the 20
ton elephant in the room--the fact that 9/11 was not a foreign attack. Should any of the main
stream media suddenly turn honest and report this in detail, things will get interesting.
King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:11 AM
I wouldn't worry too much. At the same time Biden will be purging the US military of any men
of capability and replacing them trans and political appointments. The traditional areas
where the military recruited it's grunts are falling as they are waking up to the hostility
of the state to their culture and way of life. The US military will end up a rump of queerss,
off work due to stress or perceived persecution and fat doughballs sat in warehouses
performing drone strikes on goats.
Fjack1415 King_Penda 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:20 PM
Yes, you point to a paradox. While the globalists are using the US as their military arm for
global domination, they are at the same time destroying the country that supports that
military. Perhaps the US military will be maintained by dint of its being the only employer
for millions of unemployed young men in the American heartland, doughballs or not.
Ghanima223 King_Penda 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:39 AM
Ideologues will always be more concerned with having political reliable military leadership
as opposed to actually qualified leaders. It took the Russians 2 decades to purge their own
military of this filth of incompetent 'yes' men within their military.
UKCitizen 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:09 AM
'The Liberal International Order' - yes, that seems a fair description. Led by what might be
termed 'liberal fundamentalists'.
far_cough 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 07:01 AM
the military industrial complex and the various deep state agencies along with the major
corporations need russia as an adversary so that they can milk the american people and the
people of the western world of their money, rights, freedoms, etc etc...
roby007 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:54 AM
I'm sure Biden will pursue "peaceful, productive coexistence" just as his friend Obama did,
with drones and bombs.
Paul Citro 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:16 AM
I hope that Russian leaders fully realize that they are dealing with a country that is the
equivalent of psychotic.
Fjack1415 Paul Citro 1 day ago 23 Jan, 2021 01:26 PM
True, the ruling party and MSM mouthpieces and their readers and followers are now truly
INSANE. Beyond redemption. Staggering in the depth and power of the subversion of so many
people, including many with high IQs (like my ex girlfriend and housemate in the US).
Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 10:57 AM
US security strategy is committed to global dominance
Absolutely. Biden has filled up his admin with "progressive realists," which
when it comes to foreign policy, is just a euphuism for neocons and their lust for world
empire. So expect an unleashing of forces in the coming two years that will finally humble
America's war machine.
tyke2939 Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 01:07 PM
They are desperate for a war with someone but it must be someone they can beat convincingly.
It certainly will not be Russia or China and I suspect Iran will be a huge battle even with
Israel s backing. More than likely they will invade some country like Venezuela as Syria has
Russia covering its back. What a dilemma who to fight.
9/11 Truther Anastasia Deko 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
The "American war machine" has been humbled from Saigon, Vietnam 1975 to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Salmigoni 2 days ago 22 Jan, 2021 09:25 AM
They are not really liberals. They are blood thirsty parasitic neoconservative fascist war
mongers working for the Pentagon contractors. General Eisenhower warned us about these evil
people. A lot of Americans still do not get it.
@annamaria
or wish it well – and everyone knows that.
He must know this. He must also know that his electoral prospects are nil – even if
he was allowed to compete and given access. Short of a revolution he is done, and
revolution is not coming, too soon. That is not a good place to be. He is in theory protected
by his sponsors, but that may not amount to much if things get hot. At best he would get
exchanged. Or he can quietly slip away after a few years if he is lucky.
Mulatto did his job, now mulatto can go. A single-use politician who is endlessly
promoted, celebrated, and then discarded and forgotten, only to be listed on a sad list of
names to demonise the enemy. That enemy is his own country, is that really heroism?
He is a nationalist like the Maiden. Maiden in power promoted with violence anti-Russian
hysteria. This action created a civil war since a large part of Ukraine are Russian
speakers.
Navalny, if in power, would do something similar as in Ukraine. Act as a Nationalist of
only the Russians in the Russian Federation. Get all the other peoples of the Russian
Federation to break away or stir up a civil war.
Within a few years, put in place Zion/USA puppets like Poroshenko and Zelensky. Look at
the recent Ukrainegate Impeachment trial, almost everyone supporting Ukrainegate trial was
Jewish, even the Ukrainians in this sham trial. .
This is not about bringing down Putin but about dismembering Russia and ending its
sovereignty
The easiest proxy here is the 1990s campaign against Milosevic (the campaign) as a tool to
dismember Yugoslavia
Russia is too rich, too week and is refusing to surrender, hence it will be divided
between and
Absorbed on one side by China and on the other side/s by USA and EUSA
The initial planning for disintegration of Russia was drafted in the NSC directive in
1948
West of Russia to Urals will be absorbed by EU/(Germany)
East of Russia to Yenisei will be controlled by US/(Japan)
China will take over hte greatest price – everything between Urals and Yenisei
Putin with his United Russia/One Russia Party is a major obstacle to the master plan
and
will therefore
be eliminated
whether one likes it or not
@annamaria
from his sponsors are of little use in his current situation.
I find the Western coverage of this affair absurdly propagandistic. A few things are never
mentioned:
– what was Navalny convicted off – fraud
– that he is not by any stretch of imagination the "opposition" leader – his
party has not reached even 5% required to be represented in the parliament
There is also an omission of why Russia claims "interference" – because US Embassy
published the routes for the demos. And many of the demonstrators are paid one way on
another by the West – if the situation was reversed, liberals would call for a war
(as they basically did with Trump's allegations).
"... Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough in my opinion. ..."
"... Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a bedraggled starving bear. ..."
"So when was this golden age? Under Reagan? Well, this is when the dismantling of the
inner core of the empire began."
Beg to differ. Reagan understood how to administer the US empire. He knew the risks of
overstretching it. He made the promise to the Soviets not to encroach on their sphere of
influence. He defended the high interest rates which strengthened the USD and which kept the
banking sector in check.
All of that went to hell with Bill Clinton:
He broke Reagan's promise and expanded NATO eastwards, he dismantled the Glass Steagall act
which led to a malignant hypergrowth of the banking sector, and he was the who introduced the
telecommunications act in 1996 which allowed for the concentration of corporate media in the
hands of the few.
Bill Clinton basically turned the empire into a rapacious and uncontrollable animal.
(Funny how noone here is talking about imprisoning him )
There is a silver lining to Bill C's blood-soaked administration. It was while he was in
power, that the Russians finally awoke from their 1990s stupor. They began to understand the
mortal danger they were facing, and they patriotically chose Putin to lead them in 1999.
– Reagan was a disgusting Russophobe and Serbophobe who proclaimed 10th April (the
founding of the Independent State of Croatia) a national holiday in California as governor.
Not surprising given that his was the most RC government ever – he also colluded with
the Polish anti-Christ to destroy the USSR. In the process he encouraged the German Nazis
(see visit to Bitburg) who then destroyed Yugoslavia.
– He brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust that was prevented by a
vigilant Russian officer (in 1983?).
– He turbo-charged the power of corporations and decimated social structures and the
rights of the working class (the Americans are paying for this now).
This is not to say that the scumbag Clinton was good – after all he was trained at
Georgetown – that seminary for American murderers.
Thanks for this Ken. Good to know who Reagan really was!
To get back to your point about the "dismantling of the empire" Reagan, for all his
personal awfulness and recklessness (and subversiveness) was still more restrained than
Clinton. Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all
constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough
in my opinion. I guess it's personal, after what he did to us.
Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong
USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a
bedraggled starving bear. Never again!
The "patriotism" of the previous establishment was bound up with their economic interests.
Once the USA dropped protectionism, the allure of cheap foreign labor (via immigration or
outsourcing) became too much for them and they abandoned the interests of their fellow
Americans to follow the profits.
Thanks for the Tralfamidor perspective. Those of us here on earth know that the US was
never a democracy and always existed as a mechanism for exploitation of everyone else by an
oligarchy.
The USSR was collapsed by traitors as a function of the US imperial drive to destroy them
economically, not because the people were enraged at the "hostile elite". The US henchmen in
the Kingdom in Riyadh pitched in to break the Soviet economy by destroying the Soviet
capacity to obtain foreign exchange.
High treason, where, what? Did I miss something then ? I think not. The Soviet Union was
doomed,
virtually bankrupt, its population queuing for almost everything, DDR likewise and Poland
too, I have seen it in all three places. Oh, you could get everything if you had dollars!
Poland 1975: 1 kg of Russian Caviar and 4 bottles of the best Crimean Champagne :$10 !
Russia: Brand new Makarow, 9 mm, and 100 shots $20 including nice shoulder holster too in
leather $30
But ordinary people did not have $, only the nomenclature had $. A totally corrupt and failed
system in all the Eastern block. I was there then, saw it, and I have not forgotten.
So it was high time for change, and yes it would be tough, but the eastern people are tough
people ( and hospitable, very indeed)so they stood it out.
Abe, take a trip to Russia and speak to some older people, so you may stop posting
nonsense!
Him and his underlings, along with its successor Yeltsin (died too soon, unfortunately)
are directly responsible for millions of dead and destroyed lives in Russia in the `90-ties.
But I sense you are from countries that now grow unhealthy and pathological hate towards
Russian people, so as far you are concerned, it was great period, right?
Blame the Soviets for the economy of places ravaged by war and sabotaged by the West?
Remember the Eastern Front suffered the majority of action. Russia itself suffered the worst
and had to rebuild more than anybody, whereas USA factories easily re-supplied Western
Europe.
Eastern Europeans better guard against being played by the West into fighting Russia
again. They allied with Western-financed Hitler the last time. So, I'm a little worried
they'll be conned again.
It is curious that in one of the articles MoA wrote that, in his opinion (which I share),
there are now two superpowers - the United States and Russia, while China is only on the way
to this.
But Chinese journalists think differently - for example, in this article (very controversial,
btw) the author asks the question "Russia has the potential to become a superpower,
what are the factors preventing it from doing this?" At the same time, apparently, the
journalist believes that the current superpowers are China and the United States, while
"something prevents" Russia from becoming such.
Funny.
Just one quote from the article:
The distance between Russia and the superpower is still very large, and not only because of
the country's "internal problems" - the United States is also constraining and restraining
Russia by all means. It is not easy to become a superpower.
"If you talk to older people in Russia they'll tell you how deeply they despise the
"marked one" as they call him."
I know there are multiple perspectives when assessing Gorbachev's legacy, but I also
encountered that reaction often during my time there by old and young alike. It was a
surprise to me as I had assumed he would be universally accepted in a positive light as he is
in the west.
Asking them why they felt that way, a common response was that he had been too trusting of
the US promises, which ushered in the looting and manipulation of the 90's. Many mentioned
Baker's promise to Gorbachev that if East Germany went to the west, NATO would not move "one
inch to the east", and Gorbachev's failure to get that in writing. (Not to say the US would
have honored it even then, of course, but at least some proof to show the west's
duplicity).
vk@8 "The USSR could've reformed and opened up like China did, and would be in a much better
situation than what really happened (Yeltsin's neoliberal genocide)."
This is nonsense. That's exactly what Gorbachev did. The relative stagnation of the USSR
turned into an economic catastrophe under Gorbachev who dismantled a still-functional
economy. Yeltsin's neoliberalism was a continuation of Gorbachev's economics. Yeltsin's
revolution was not to impose a new policy but to smash the opposition to the new policy, to
carry it out ruthlessly, to concentrate the theft of public property in Great Russian hands.
China's opening up was deliberately fostered by the western powers as a way of separating the
socialist powers. There was never going to be any such opening up with Europe, not for the
USSR. There wasn't in NEP in the Twenties. This absurd counterfactual misreads what happened
with the capitalist roaders in China.
There also seems to be some nonsense lurking about how the Cultural Revolution was a
gigantic catastrophe. Of course, though no one cares to notice, if this was true, then India
would have had all those years to race ahead of China, not being cursed with such a
nightmare. In truth, the Cultural Revolution brought many benefits to the countryside in
particular, and still progressed the economy as a whole. Then after the murderous Deng took
over, there wasn't any magical Great Leap Forward on IOUs to Imperialism as he promised. For
years and years, the wonders of reform and opening up delivered not much faster (at all?)
than the previous system. Not even the notorious Southern Tour was so miraculous. The failure
to deliver on his overblown promises is why the students at Tien An Men square were so
worried about getting good jobs commensurate with their higher elite status, reaffirmed by
Deng. Only after decades did the economic conjuncture finally lead to rapid growth...but at a
tremendous social cost still denied by too many. The iron rice bowl was broken long before
the privilege of working for a capitalist firm started to really pay.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to
counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the
headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of
Russian influence over him is surely justified.
There followed 34 headlines and links to stories about Trump actions, from closing Russian
consulates to U.S. attacks on Russian troops, that were hostile to Russia.
In fact no other U.S. administration since the cold war has been more aggressive towards
Russia than Trump's.
But some U.S. media continue to claim that Trump's behavior towards Russia has not been
hostile at all. Consider this line
in Politico about anti-Russian hawks in the incoming Biden administration:
Nuland and Sherman, who entered academia and the think tank world after leaving the Obama
administration, have been outspoken critics of President Donald Trump's foreign policy --
particularly his appeasement of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Where please has Trump 'appeased' Vladimir Putin?
Here are a number of headlines which appeared in U.S. media since we published our first
list two years ago. Which of the described actions were designed to 'appease' Putin or
Russia?
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
Why, you certainly could view most (if not all) of those actions as favors.
People feel attacked, unite, rally around the flag. Internal problems are blamed on the
external enemy. The sanctions, the sort the West likes to impose, help develop domestic
industries. Etc. Yeah, favors.
Point on! Trump was never 'the Russians' bitch'. He was the whore of the Russian
émigré mafia that had relocated to the US in south Queens in New York City. A
major difference!
Well, the logic is to destroy or ad least severely weaken Russia. Yet damn Russia is
getting stronger and stronger, hence what ever happened under Trump's watch must have been a
favor to Russia.
Competent government would look itself in the mirror and admit it is their own fault and
stupidity, but that ship sailed long time ago for US.
"If we get caught they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it does not
matter what you do, America is a golden calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it
off piece by piece until there is nothing left but the world's biggest welfare state that we
will create and control. Why? Because it is the will of God and America is big enough to take
the hit so we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries that we
hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."
Herdee 9 minutes ago remove link
This is the philosophy that both the CIA and Pompeo used on Trump in order to help destroy
him. It actually sounds like something very similar or left over from the Nazi German era
from WW2:
In an interview published by Moscow news agency Interfax on Tuesday, Deputy Justice Minister
Mikhail Galperin said that litigation over the collapsed Yukos oil empire and fallout from
Russia's 2014 reabsorption of Crimea means that "a tough year" is on the cards.
The long-running dispute over Yukos, once among Russia's leading energy firms and one of the
most valuable companies in the world, has been raging for years. However, it now appears to be
coming to a head as the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which claims it has jurisdiction in
the case, prepares to hear an appeal from Russia's lawyers. A legal settlement of more than $50
billion, thought to be the largest in history, hangs in the balance.
"Of course, we're not sitting idly, waiting for the Supreme Court's decision," said
Galperin. "Every day, we're defending our national interests in this case in different ways.
Legal battles related to the Yukos case are taking place not only in the Netherlands, but in
other jurisdictions as well."
Those who lost money in the collapse of the Yukos empire insist that the arrest of its CEO
on fraud charges and a colossal bill in back-taxes amounted to state appropriation.
Russian authorities argue that previous rulings in foreign courts on the side of the
claimants failed to take into account Russia's anti-corruption laws, and claim that the
investors weren't "bona fide." Moscow also insists that only Russia's courts have
jurisdiction, as the Energy Charter Treaty under which the case is being brought was signed but
never ratified.
Galperin added that the country's "main legal argument is that Russia never agreed for
the case to be heard by an international court of arbitration, which means that the judges had
no mandate to consider the lawsuit Yukos ex-shareholders filed against
Russia."
Last week, one of Russia's highest judicial authorities ruled that the country should
disregard any judgement coming from overseas tribunals. They state that, while the government
of the day took steps to join the Energy Charter Treaty in 1994, they did not have the
authority to make national laws subject to international agreements, or to "challenge the
competence" of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch
court's demands would be "unconstitutional."
However, if the verdict goes in favor of Yukos' former shareholders, refusing to pay the
bill could have substantial repercussions for Russia, with the claimants already calling for
the confiscation of the country's assets overseas as collateral.
Galperin, however, is confident that Russia could avoid cash and property falling into the
hands of the oligarchs who have brought the case. "Since 2014," he said, "they have
made multiple unscrupulous attempts to seize not only state property, but also assets that
belong to Russian companies in Western Europe. We have successfully repelled all these
assaults."
"While we can't rule out that in 2021 YUKOS ex-shareholders will continue their legal
battle in a number of countries, I can tell you without unnecessary bravado that we are fully
prepared to fight off any attempts to seize our property in any country of the world."
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands is expected to hear the case in February next year,
while simultaneous battles have also been fought in US and British courts. The row comes at a
time when tensions between Russia and the West are growing, with Moscow's diplomats arguing
that verdicts against the country have been "politically motivated." In December,
Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko told journalists that the case is part of a "legal
war that has been declared on Russia."
As well as the Yukos case potentially reaching a dramatic climax, Galperin expects that his
ministry will have their hands full next year with at least two other international disputes.
As early as January, the European Court of Human Rights is expected to announce a decision on a
legal fight between Moscow and Kiev over disputed Crimea. There is a further $8 billion claim
from a Ukrainian energy firm that insists it lost its assets when the peninsula was reabsorbed
into Russia. The same court will also rule on a case brought by Georgia over events in South
Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008.
It sure looks like Biden will take over the White House one way or another, and while Trump
and his supporters might still try a few things, the political correlation of forces inside the
US ruling classes is clearly against Trump. As for the "deplorables" – they have been
neutralized by stealing the election. Which means that Russia will soon face the most rabidly
russophobic gang of messianic Neocons in history. So what can the world expect next?
The Dems are not meaningfully different from the Republicans. True, the Dems blame Russia
for everything, while the Republicans blame China. Not much of a difference here: it is all
about hate and scapegoating. And both of these factions of the oligarchic Uniparty like to
blame Iran for, well, being located in the "wrong" part of the world, the Middle-East, which
all US politicians (and not to mention their Israeli masters) want to control. As for the
Israel Lobby, it has been trying to trigger a US attack on Iran for many decades. Recent US
moves of key personnel and bombers might indicate that discussions of an attack on Iran are
still very much taking place.
I don't believe that these fundamental directions in US foreign policy will change much.
Why?
Primarily because the AngloZionist Empire and even the US as we knew them are basically
dead, which means that irrespective of who is in control of the US, the objective
means/capabilities of the Empire and the US will remain the same . In other words, when
Biden promises to show Russia how tough and mighty he will be, he will not have any more
capabilities to threaten Russia with than Trump had.
So the first thing we can expect is simply "more of the same".
Now, in the Empire of
Illusions which the United States has become, appearances matter much more than
facts . US politicians have two quasi-reflexive reactions to any problem: use violence or
throw money at it. Of course, using violence against Russia (or China and Iran) would be
extremely dangerous. So throwing money at a problem is the way chosen by the US political
elites (see here for the, rather
boring, details).
A lot of that money will also be spent on ideological nonsense like supporting trans-gender
rights in Africa, woke-awareness in the Baltic, "critical race theory" in Japan (good luck with
that!), "Holocaust studies" in Poland and the like.
What will happen next is that this money will be spread amongst a pretty large US and EU
bureaucracy (and its subcontractors) to all sorts of political PR actions aimed at presenting
modern Russia as "Putin's Mordor" whose "Nazguls" (scary GRU and/or SVR and/or FSB agents) run
around the planet looking for more targets to infect with the totally ineffective, but still
scary, "Novichok". In the past, much of that money was spent inside Russia by all sorts of
CIA-run NGOs and much of it was also spent on various propaganda efforts outside Russia. Again,
this will not change, if anything, expect even more money poured into what are in reality
strategic PSYOP operations.
The sad truth is that US politicians know very little about Russia, a country which they
hate and fear, but not a country they even begin to understand. In this case, what US
politicians will not realize is that Russia herself has changed a great deal in the past years:
many new laws and regulation (see machine translated example
here ) were adopted which, in essence, "plugged" many political "holes" in the Russian
legislation which allowed AngloZionist organizations to have a great deal of influence in
Russia. As a result of these reforms, it has become far more difficult for western run NGOs to
influence the Russian political scene.
As a direct result of these new rules, I expect that a higher ratio of money will stay
allocated to activities situated in the West and less for Russian-based activities. In plain
English, this means that more US printed money will be spent on completely useless activities.
The only people benefitting from this will be the entire class of pseudo "Russia experts" whose
only true expertise is on how to secure grant money. They will produce even more conferences
and papers which nobody will care about, but which will allow the US Neocons and their deep
state to show how "Biden is firm with Russia". The typical US cocktail of waste, mismanagement
and fraud (and let's not forget good old corruption!).
Russia's response to that will also be "more of the same": Russian politicians will continue
to express their disgust with their western "partners" (FYI – when Russians speak of
"partners" it is understood by all that they mean this only sarcastically). Foreign Minister Lavrov and one of his
deputies have recently made statements basically indicating that Russia will not seek any
(!) form of dialog with the West, because, frankly, it is pretty clear to them that this is a
total waste of time: Russia has nobody in the West to speak to: the only country with real
agency (albeit severely limited by its subordination to Israel) would be the US, all the other
countries of the West are really colonies and/or protectorates with no sovereignty at all.
What about all the many military provocations the Empire is organizing all around Russia? Do
they concern Russia leaders or not?
Well, no and yes.
In purely military terms, US/NATO military capabilities are no real threat to Russia whose
military is much smaller, but also much more capable than the western ones. Why? Simply because
building a truly powerful military has been a core strategic priority for the Kremlin who
needed a military actually capable of a) deterring the West from attacking Russia and b)
defeating the West should deterrence fail. In sharp contrast, western militaries have not been
training for real wars for decades already: most of what the US/NATO do is using western
militaries for all sorts of propaganda purposes (like "sending messages" or "showing
determination" etc.) and for counter-insurgency operations, not for fighting a real, major,
wars.
Right now the Russian military is much more modern (about 80% of new gear on average across
all military branches and services!) and much better trained for real combat operations. In
sharp contrast, the US MIC is heavy on hot air (Space Force! Hypersonic missiles! Artificial
Intelligence!) and short on any actually deployed and engageable weapon systems. Away from the
propaganda machine (aka "corporate legacy ziomedia"), the reality is that the West is about
1.5-2 decades behind Russia in most critical military technologies.
Last, but not least, wars are not won by machines, computers or fancy engineering: they are
won by soldiers, real men, who know what they are defending and why. The contrast between the
typical Russian soldier (in any service or branch of the military) and his western counterpart
could not be greater than it is today. Simply put: no western country can boast that it has
soldiers like Russia has and, again, I don't mean the "super dooper" elite Spetsnaz operators,
I am talking about your very average, garden variety, infantry soldier, like the ones who saved
Russia in the Chechen conflict in spite of operating in truly horrible and totally chaotic
circumstances. These guys might not look like much, but as soldiers they are the kind every
commander dreams about.
All this is to say that Russians have nothing to fear from all the western sabre-rattling,
except maybe one thing: the rogue officer, on either side, who would suddenly decide to open
fire (for whatever reason) thereby creating a situation which could escalate into a full-scale
war very rapidly.
The other thing which is objectively bad for Russia is the number of key treaties the US has
now withdrawn from: these treaties are most needed, especially as confidence building measures.
Right now there are very few treaties left and that means that the US is desperate to try to
suck Russia into an arms race.
This won't work.
Why?
Putin himself explained it very well when he recently said that while the West throws huge
sums of money at any problem, Russia allocates brains, not money. According to Putin, it is the
use of brains, rather than wasting money, which allowed Russia to develop all the weapon
systems mentioned by Putin for the first time in 2018. This made it possible for Russia to get
ahead by a decade or more, while using only a small fraction of the kind of money the US, and
other western countries, are allocating on "defense" (while not being threatened by anybody!).
In the competition between the US money printing press and the Russian brains, you can be sure
that the latter one will always prevail.
The bottom line is this: the US can spend many hundred billion dollars on " countering
Russian (or Chinese) influence ", but this will do absolutely nothing to help the objective
circumstances and capabilities of the Empire or the US.
So the real question is what will change on the level below direct military
confrontation.
In a recent press conference, Putin mentioned something very interesting about the outgoing
Trump administration. He said:
"The current administration introduced new sanctions against Russia 46 times –
against our legal entities and economic operators. Forty-six times – this has never
ever happened before. But at the same time, bilateral trade grew by 30 percent over the
previous year, oddly enough, even despite those restrictions."
So if the putatively pro-Russian Trump Administration sanctioned Russia 46 times, it is
normal for the Russians to look at Biden with equanimity or even a resigned fatalism: " the
West has always hated us, the West still hates us and the West will always hate us "
– this truism is all but unanimously accepted amongst Russian politicians.
Still, we can count on Biden and Harris to try to show how "tough" they are on Russia and
Putin: they will show their prowess mostly by demanding that their NATO/EU colonies and
protectorates continue "send
messages" to Russia and show their "unity" and "solidarity" with each other, mostly by
parroting self-evidently nonsensical Anglo and German propaganda. Will the bilateral trade
between Russia and the US continue to grow? Probably not as the list of corporations and
agencies the US declares to be under sanctions will only grow further. But never say never,
especially with the comprehensively hypocritical Dems
How about the kind of self-evidently ridiculous stories about Russians using (a clearly
ineffective) combat biological agent like the so-called "Novichok", trying to kill irrelevant
bloggers and failing to do so, or some variation on "animal Assad" "poisoning his own people"?
Will that nonsense also continue? Probably, mainly simply because this is something which the
Empire has demonstratively proved that it has the ability to do. So why not continue,
especially with a press corps willing to parrot even the most ridiculous nonsense.
The bottom line is this: to get a sense of what any actor could do next, one always has to
multiply intentions by capabilities. If there is one thing which the outgoing Maga
Administration has shown, is that its declared intentions and actual capabilities are not at
all commensurate: hence the long list of countries Trump threatened, but never meaningfully
attacked. "Biden" (and I use this term very loosely, meaning "Biden and his real handlers")
will inherit the very same geostrategic toolkit Trump had at his disposal for four years and
which did not make it possible for him to effectively flex muscles, not even against weak and
nearby Venezuela! We can be pretty sure that the rhetoric about Russia will get even more
hate-filled and paranoid. Petty harassment (such as arrest of nationals, closures of offices,
expulsion from various international events, etc.) will also continue, not so much because they
work, but because a lot of people depend on these for their salary.
How likely is a shooting war? In my personal opinion, not very likely at all. I think that
the folks at the Pentagon are mostly aware of the real world out there, and they probably
recognize that the US armed forces are in no condition to fight any halfway capable
opponent.
How likely is it that the US will use a protectorate like the Ukraine or Georgia to reignite
another local war? It is not impossible, especially since the US did support SBU infiltration
of terrorists into Russia. Keep in mind that the sole goal of such (a, frankly, suicidal)
attack would be to provoke Russia into a military response, not to actually achieve anything
else. The main problem here is that the regular armed forces of the Ukraine and Georgia are in
no condition to fight, and that the (US letter soup controlled) Ukrainian and Georgian special
services have already tried this many times, and so far without success, mainly because, unlike
all the western countries, Russia has the actual means to lock her borders when needed.
What about the reported plan to destabilize Russia by creating conflicts all along her
periphery?
It would take way too long for me here to describe what is taking place in each of these
countries right now, but I will offer just the following bullet points:
Southern Military District or
the 58th
Combined Arms Army in the region). Those who believe that Turkey strengthened its
position in the region simply do not understand the outcome of the recent war (especially the
very interesting drone war which showed that while Armenia could not deal with them, Russian
EW literally destroyed Turkish drones in mid-air (this also happened in Syria, by the way).
Central Asia is an inherently unstable region, mainly because these countries never succeeded
in effectively transitioning from the Soviet period to full independence. And yes, the US has
a great deal of influence in this region. But only Russia can provide effective security
guarantees to the leaders of Central Asia, they all know that. Finally, Kazakhstan plays an
important "buffer" role for Russia,
putting distance between her and her chronically unstable southern neighbors . In the Far
East, Russia and China are enjoying a long honeymoon in which their already very deep
relationship only gets deeper and their collaboration stronger (in spite of western PSYOPs
trying to scare Russians about how China wants to take Siberia, and other silly fairy tales).
Russia is now even supplying key strategic defense technologies to China. Last, but most
certainly not least, Russia has total superiority in the Arctic, where the West is many
decades behind Russia. In fact, Russia is massively expanding her capabilities (civilian and
military) in the Russian north, which will give her even more weight on our planet's very
rich north.
Now ask yourself: do you see any of that changing in the next 4 years, even assuming a
rabidly hostile Biden Administration? I sure don't.
Conclusion:
Yes, the political atmosphere between Russia and the Empire will get worse. Most of the
"action" will take place in the public media space. The quasi simultaneous collapse of the
Anglo-Zionist Empire and the United States (at least as we knew them before the election steal)
will not give much time or energy to western leaders to pursue policies which have already
failed in the past and for which they simply do not have the means.
Trump or Biden was never a meaningful choice for Russia (only the Russian court jester
Zhirinovskii thought otherwise). It's not much of a choice today either. The most likely
consequence of these collapses will be that the world will split in roughly two sections:
"Section A" which will include all the countries of the "collective West" and which will be
busy trying to survive a crisis which has only begun and "Section B": the rest of the world,
which will try hard to decouple itself from the sinking West and try to develop itself in this
rather unstable environment.
Also, many Russians remember the gerontocracy which ruled in the last years of the USSR and
they know how such gerontocracies act (make no difference if the country is ruled by a
Chernenko or a Biden – such rulers are always weak and clueless).
i remember the late 80's when ronald reagan was declared a genius for single handedly
spending the ussr into oblivion. when the reagan administration took over (with a little help
from daddy bush working a deal with the iranians to hold on to the hostages until after the
election) the national debt was $900,000,000,000. when he left office he had tripled that, a
small price to pay for taking down the evil empire, they told me. in the 90's clinton and his
best friend newt gingrich magically balanced the budget (by raiding the social security trust
fund and leaving a rubber iou behind). when the skull and bones division of the neocons
seized power the debt was $6,000,000,000,000. twenty years and several wars later we were at
$23,000,000,000,000. we are about to reach $30,000,000,000,000 after a bad flu season this
year. our military is exhausted, our equipment is so out dated and worn it isn't worth
bringing back, (if we ever leave the middle east), the russians and chinese are decades ahead
in technological terms. now tell me, who spent who into oblivion?
Russia remains vulnerable to Western efforts at political subversion. And Democrats excel
at this. Remember, it was during the presidency of Barack Obama when Putin faced toughest
challenge to his rule. I'm talking, of course, about Bolotnaya protests.
These days millions of Russian kids watch political videos, promoted by Youtube, where
they are being taught, that their country sucks and there is no hope for their lives
whatsoever unless they overthrow Putin. Russian politicians do not use the internet and
appear completely oblivious to this danger. They're a bit like Saker to be honest: obsessed
with their tank divisions and rockets, dinosaurs preparing for yesterday's war. They risk
finding themselves in Lukashenka's position.
Excellent article. Even the US Marine Corps is cutting infantry battalions to fund
"information groups". A new video addresses this anti-Russian propaganda:
Russia doesn't have the working bodies to be a world hegemon.
CCP China does.
The Russian workers (Moscow, Cyprus) I've seen were indolent compared to Chinese.
Infiltration? Even here, the CCP leaning faction is large.
China appears to be Biden's highest bidder, and largest "investor", so far
Either Trump drops the hammer before Jan 20, or we're fucked on China.
Probably so's Russia, on a longer schedule.
Warsaw Pact was canclled –but NATO grew and grew and grew after Bush stating " We
will never expand–honest" and then 911 arrived and Firechief exclaimng "We decided to
PULL IT !" but othing had struck it and of course WMD in Iraq -- –
It's improbable that there would be any direct military clash somewhere even though
there's always the possibility of a mistake leading to a crisis. The US uses color
revolutions, proxy wars, subversion, bribery, economic warfare, sanctions and varying forms
of sabotage. It's been pretty successful so far with this all over the world but Russia is
too big and self-sufficient to be forced to capitulate.
rhetoric about Russia will get even more hate-filled and paranoid
The US propaganda system always needs a boogeyman to scare the public with. Promotion of
fear is an inherent part of the American system of engineering consent.
far more difficult for western run NGOs to influence the Russian political scene.
Big tech collusion in enforcing censorship here in the US has become heavy-handed and
omnipresent. But one supposes there'll be complaints about lack of free speech in Russia.
Trump was verbally belligerent but stopped short of starting any new wars, placating the
establishment with imposing sanctions, assassinating Soleimani, etc. Biden is a stupid,
reckless incompetent who could easily stumble us into conflicts we can't handle. But then, it
would be his handlers who actually pull the strings and they seem to be as cretinous as
him.
As for the "deplorables" – they have been neutralized by stealing the
election.
Neutralized? No way José, the deplorables are mad as hornets about the stolen
election and are just getting started. And they have their Second Amendment assets, and it's
not even January 20th yet.
Do you see the 'YouTube' kids starting a revolution, storming the Kremlin, and the
'organs' watching them with arms crossed from the side? Wouldn't they rather send them to
develop the Arctic?
Unlike the 80s there is no official ideological differences except that Russia's ideology
of national sovereignty, family and strength is in assendence while the US Marxist one of
globo homo anti white hate thyself BLM is openly ridiculed by the quiet majority.
It is about the US that people openly talk about being on the verge of civil war not
Russia these days.
Most Russians know it's a fight against subjugation there is no other way, defend itself
or get eaten.
Besides under the Harris presidency in a year or two it will be white Americans who will
be told officially they suck.
These days millions of Russian kids watch political videos, promoted by Youtube, where
they are being taught, that their country sucks and there is no hope for their lives
whatsoever unless they overthrow Putin
The cleverest trick the Devil ever invented was to convince young (white) people that
Globohomo, Blacks Lives Matter and Immigration are somehow a benefit to them and that they
should fight for their own displacement
Biden has a lot of compromat and Harris is basically akin to a wigger in a black gang, who
will need to prove her devotion when she takes the reigns after Biden.
Both will be like putty in their handler's hands.
Politicians start wars to make the public look away from domestic or personal crises.
Biden already has his corruption probe, and whilst Trump made many errors, he did not fall
for the trap of starting a major foreign policy disaster for personal political gain.
Both Biden and Harris would do that in a heartbeat. So whether that would be Iran or
Ukraine, or pushing Taiwan too far, I'm pretty confident a war will start.
I always said with Trump the odd's are 80% civil war, 10% world war, 10% peace, whilst
Biden is around 50% civil war, 45% world war, 5% peace.
Nice display of your brainwashedness, from western propaganda.
You didn't follow Saker's link to the machine translated example , did you?
One would need a bit more than broad, completely unsubstantiated claims by you that
Russian kids in large numbers actually believe those YT lies and similar.
And Lukashenko isn't doing so bad, currently.
@Felix
Keverich ng "dusty, dirty" -- a term used in 2nd-millennium BCE texts throughout the
Fertile Crescent for people variously described as rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries,
bowmen, servants, slaves, and laborers"(Wikipedia).
The 2001 paper "Who are the Hîabiru of the Amarna Letters?" by retired professor
(Andrews University) S. Douglas Waterhouse (2001) joined a lot of dots for me. A good stumble
on, thanks, Guyénot and others who posted relevant comments etc. (A copy can be found
here: https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/jats/vol12/iss1/3/
)
@Carlos22
ashion. Yet that is what the US empire wants. It is hard to imagine the opportunity for
satire could be greater.
Here is some preliminary ideas
https://www.youtube.com/embed/noIWQFMskG0?feature=oembed
I also did a satire on Bellingcat called Bellingbat that examines some of the same issues. Of
course there is a fair amount of nudity involved as that is the US way when considering if
powerful females can be trusted. Unlike Lautrec I was never allowed into the ballerina's
dressing rooms even though I was a recognized well respected painter and would seek death
should I betray a slack breast or two.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Z9pggzVJ68?feature=oembed
Cheers all and have a happy new year.
"Last, but not least, wars are not won by machines, computers or fancy engineering: they
are won by soldiers, real men, who know what they are defending and why."
Azerbaijan just ate Putin's lunch by crushing Armenia's entire AA systems and their piece
by piece destruction of hundreds of T90's and all the Armenian artillery. Azerbaijan
accomplished this through Israeli military technology, likely including remote drone piloting
services.
Saker wants to pretend that it is the US that has Israel on a leash, but it is clearly the
other way around. Israel has already hoovered up all of the US electronics and military
patents and clearly any other patents that would be useful in a war, especially a war for
Eretz Israel.
Azerbaijan took out all the Armenian armor and air defenses with Israeli drones like the
Hovering Artillery Drones and Suicide drones. The amount of live film is staggering, and the
T90's were picked off like sparrows sitting on an electric wire. Some of the drones
Azerbaijan used were Turkish, but we can be certain that the technology is either licensed
from Israel or Israel's gollum the JEWSA.
Added to this complete mastery of the traditional battlespace is the complete Heeb control
over the bio-warfare space. Whether Putin allowed Russia to be circumcised while he played
along to the Rabbi's Covid rituals, or whether Putin is playing it safe and vaccinating and
closing its borders pre-emtively is irrellevant. Russia is being bullied like a lone teenage
Swedish boy at muslim majority high school in Malmo.
And of course, Russia still has a Rothschild controlled Central Bank too.
So Putin, just like Biden, is going to do exactly what his Chabad Lubbovitz Rabbi's tell
him he has to do. Both are Israel's Shabbez Bitches.
@Felix
Keverich everyone knows that the US and England hate Russia and Putin, thus whatever
these 2 countries claim about either is dismissed with a laugh. As for Skripal (where are
they now? dead?), Navalny, novichok, Assad gassing his own people ..a child can see through
this stuff. Sorry!
Young people in Russia watching US propaganda against their country you honestly think
they are going to agree with the country (USA) that has targeted them with missiles and
nuclear bombs for 70 years? Do you think we can't see the corruption and stupidity?
But I'm wasting my time here. Facts, logic, is lost on a person so naive and brainwashedas
yourself.
he's pretending to be Russian intelligent, which I doubt – not his name nor his
thoughts seem to be Russian.
He's right only in one thing – there's quite a big part of our society who think that
Putin (despite his obvious achievements) has to go. And those aren't liberasts, but patriots.
Putin is very deep in oligarchy swamp and he achieved max he could, i'm afraid.
Now he's just trying to keep the status quo.
I believe you have a serious problem. When the stork brought you, it must have dropped you
on your head. Your comment is sheer nonsense. Do you really believe the shit you have written
or do you have a vulgar desire for "replies".
You are either an idiot or an ass wash douche troll. Comment intelligently or not at all
and for heavens sake, seek medical attention for the lump on your head ( and the one inside
it as well)
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own drama . And while you're
studying that drama -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other
new dramas , which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're
drama's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Dont be so hard on Felix the cat. He has been hiding under his mother;s bed surrounded by
rolls of toilet paper and wearing a mask since March 2020. Self imposed solitary confinement
does things to a person more so one who was retarded at birth.
Once he has his operation to remove his head from his ass his IQ should increase by 100%
.from 2 to 4 !
Patrick Armstrong spent 30 years as an analyst for the Canadian government, specializing
in first the USSR and then Russia. He was a Political Counselor in the Canadian Embassy in
Moscow from 1993 to 1996. Given the torrent of anti-Russian sentiment in the West, it's
unlikely Moscow would get a fair hearing in legal proceedings overseen by Western courts. And
recent hints suggest three decades of engagement may be coming to an end.
A Dutch court has just reversed another earlier Dutch court ruling that reversed an even
earlier Dutch court ruling. Russia had been sued by a company representing the shareholders of
erstwhile oil giant Yukos. The latest iteration, reversing the reversal and taking us back to
the original judgment, demands that Russia pay $50 billion to its shareholders. Yukos was
nationalized in the early 2000s, on the grounds of failure to pay tax arrears after the arrest
of its CEO for tax evasion.
So, what should Moscow do? It has appealed, but perhaps it should think about whether it
still wants to play the game.
Let's look at the behavior of other Dutch courts. In 2001, Slobodan Milošević
appeared at the Hague charged with crimes against humanity, genocide – the full package.
And, quite rightly, said most Westerners, because had not their media already named him the
"butcher of the Balkans" ?
In 2016, the International Court of Justice ruled that maybe he hadn't been as guilty as
first assumed. But it was too late: Milošević had died in his prison cell 10 years
before, with the trial still rolling on.
The Netherlands is also in charge of the investigation into the destruction of the MH-17
flight over Ukraine in 2014. Again, we had immediate Western news assertions that Putin and
Russia were responsible, and the personal assurance of former Secretary of State John Kerry
that US intelligence resources had watched the whole thing unfold. And it's been a fact-free
Gish gallop ever since.
After several investigations, suspiciously dependent on Ukrainian intelligence sources,
social media, and the US-government funded agency Bellingcat, with no one asking where the
"we saw it" was, the trial of four individuals began in March 2020 and has been
proceeding at the same comfortable pace as the Milošević trial.
In 2018, Ukraine, without the least suspicion of a chain of evidence, produced some parts it
claimed were from the surface-to-air missile said to have shot the plane down. The parts had
numbers, numbers can be traced, and the missile factory traced them. They were parts of a
missile shipped to an anti-aircraft unit in the west of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
in December 1986.
The judges decided that the documents were irrelevant because they "may say something
about where the missile was between [19]86 and 91, but they say nothing about where the missile
was in July 2014." Presumably, a daring raid from Donetsk to an ammo dump in Western
Ukraine had happened, which nobody noticed. So, one might ask what Russia can expect from any
trial held in the Netherlands except an interminable process until the defendant dies.
Russians might then turn their attention to the practice of the rule of law in other Western
countries today. Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, is approaching her third year
of house arrest in Canada. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been in a British prison with
one of the most severe regimes for the past 18 months and is approaching the second year of his
extradition hearing. Maria Butina, convicted in 2018 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent
of Russia, was in a US prison for five months, often in solitary confinement, on very
questionable charges. Senior French executive Frédéric Pierucci arrested in 2013
and later imprisoned in a US maximum-security facility for unwittingly breaching American
bribery laws. Or the US's open-ended Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act
– a federal law that, in 2017, imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Or the
huge fine imposed on Russia's Gazprom energy corporation in a Polish court just last month over
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Or they might consider that Venezuela stored its national gold
reserves in London for safekeeping but can't have it back (although that judgment has recently
been reversed – for now). Or that the European Union extended its sanctions on Russia
because it couldn't prove its innocence of the latest accusation over Ukraine. Russian
observers might be forgiven if they regarded this as not rule of law but war of law –
lawfare.
Moscow has generally played the game and accepted Western court rulings and, sometimes,
they've gone its way: for example, the European Court of Human Rights' ruling of 2011 that the
case against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky had not been politically motivated. But, given
the relentless cascade of accusations – redoubled in the past five years – perhaps
Moscow should reconsider, on the grounds that Western 'justice' will never give it a fair
shake.
Will it do so? Well, there have been some hints. At a conference of the Valdai Discussion
Club think tank last month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia no longer looked to
Western Europe as an example and was not going to be its vassal. The constitution was recently
amended to make Russian law primary. These would appear to be clues that Moscow is at least
pondering the conclusion that Western courts are not an arbiter, but a weapon.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Moscow is set for a showdown with Western judges and 1990s Russian oligarchs, over a new
ruling enabling the country to refuse to pay what is considered to be the biggest legal
settlement in history, over a collapsed oil empire.
The Constitutional Court, one of Russia's highest judicial authorities, ruled on Friday that
the decision of an international tribunal in the long-running dispute over the now-dissolved
energy giant Yukos is incompatible with Russian law. The case has been heard by a court in The
Hague, which claims jurisdiction under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, and awarded the
company's former shareholders a $50-billion payout from the Russian government earlier this
year. Moscow claimed a win in November on the other side of the Atlantic, when a US court,
which had been hearing the case simultaneously, decided to throw it out.
However, as Russia signed but never ratified the Treaty, which hands powers to international
tribunals, the Constitutional Court has now determined it is not bound by the terms of The
Hague judgement. The ruling states that, while the country's government of the day began the
process of signing up to the pact in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national
laws inferior to international agreements, or to "challenge the competence" of Russian
courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court's demands would be
"unconstitutional."
The claimants in the case are oligarchs who lost cash when Yukos, once among Europe's
largest firms, collapsed. They say that a multi-billion dollar tax bill and the arrest of its
CEO and founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges amounted to state 'appropriation' of
its assets. However, Russian authorities insist that the shareholders cannot be considered
"legitimate," and that the Dutch judges had steamrolled over the country's laws against
corruption and fraud when ruling in their favour.
As far back as July 2014, The Hague ordered Moscow to cough up $50 billion to compensate the
plaintiffs. After exhausting the appeals process in February this year, Russia's lawyers asked
the Dutch Supreme Court to consider the case and overrule the decision. However, at the start
of December, it similarly backed the oligarchs.
Russia has insisted that the judgements are "politically motivated," and in December
the country's Justice Minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, told journalists that the case was part
of a "legal war that has been declared on Russia." He added that "Russia must
adequately defend itself and, sometimes, even attack back."
Now standing at around $50 billion, around the same ballpark as Russia's annual military
budget, the colossal settlement is thought to be the largest award in history. If the country
now rejects the bill, it would spark one of the most serious impasses in international legal
history, and leave Western states deciding whether to respect Russia's constitutional ruling,
or to enforce the demands by confiscating assets.
Yukos' former shareholders have already sought to have Western governments take control of
Russian property overseas as an insurance policy in case Moscow refuses to pay up. However, in
November, a judge in the simultaneous hearing in the US refused that request, saying that
"the Russian Federation is a sovereign country with economic tendrils that cross the globe,
not an insecure potential debtor that must be required to post security lest there be no assets
to seize at a later date."
Not all countries have taken the same approach, however, and in 2015 Russia's diplomats
slammed France and Belgium for confiscating state cash in overseas banks, and even buildings,
to be held as collateral in the case. Moscow again rejected the court's authority and said
their move was "an openly hostile act." Tim Osborne, a British lawyer representing the
former shareholders, said at the time that such seizures were necessary because Russia "has
no regard for international law or the rule of law."
At its height, Yukos produced 20 per cent of Russia's oil, placing it firmly among the ranks
of the world's most valuable enterprises. It had been formed by the privatization of former
state assets after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Khodorkovsky acquiring the assets for a
fraction of their worth at an auction that one economist, Andrey Illarionov, called "the
swindle of the century."
Khodorkovsky claims his arrest on fraud charges and the subsequent collapse of Yukos
was tied to his
political activism and his personal animosity towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin,
however, claims that the oligarch, once said to be Russia's wealthiest man, had admitted his
guilt to him privately in exchange for a pardon in 2013.
Khodorkovsky insists that he has renounced any claims to his former empire and that, should
a settlement be reached in the Yukos case, he would not stand to benefit. However, Russian
authorities are said to suspect that a number of claimants have close financial ties to the
former oil magnate.
On December 17, 2020, a new US Maritime strategy was unveiled putting into practice the
regressive concepts first outlined in the early National Defense Strategy 2020 doctrine which
target China and Russia as the primary enemies of the USA and demanding that the USA be capable
to " defeat our adversaries while we accelerate development of a modernized integrated
all-domain naval force of the future".
The Pentagon's
Advantages at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power continued by saying
"China's and Russia's revisionist approaches in the maritime environment threaten US interests,
undermine alliances and partnerships and degrade the free and open international order
moreover, China's and Russia's aggressive naval growth and modernization are eroding US
institutional advantages."
The document continued to describe that "we must operate more assertively to prevail in
day-to-day competition as we uphold the rules-based order and deter our competitors from
pursuing armed aggression ready, forward-deployed naval forces will adopt a more assertive
posture in day to day operations"
For anyone who has been paying attention to the vast growth of the Pentagon's Full Spectrum
containment policy around China's perimeter begun with Obama's Asia Pivot, it may appear as
though these words are not new, but just a continuation of American unipolar agenda, Pacific
war games, and psychological projection onto perceived enemies, that have been underway for
years. While this is certainly true, it must be noted that they are occurring at a time that
NATO 2030 has
enshrined an anti-China military posture into the Trans Atlantic security doctrine which had
formerly channeled most of its hate purely onto Russia.
The fact is those unipolar zombies programmed to think in no other terms but global
post-nation state dominance are deathly afraid of the Russia-China bond of survival which has
created a uniquely viable foundation for an alternative economic/security architecture for the
world. This model is based on a system of finance that defines money not in speculative but
rather long-term development of the real economic foundations of life. It also features a
strong emphasis on win-win cooperation as opposed to Hobbesian zero-sum logic dominant among
western powers, and it also finds itself driven by OPEN system economic practices shaped by
unbounded scientific and technological progress that once upon a time guided America's better
traditions.
With the obvious threat of nuclear war breaking out between a collapsing unipolar order in
the west and an emergent Multipolar alliance, it is important to review what possible latent
policy traditions may yet be revived within America's history which certain forces have worked
very hard to scrub out of the historical record and memory. This study will take us to the
incredible fights that arose over America's identity at the turn of the 20th century during the
period of President William McKinley and the treasonous anglophile President of vice, Theodore
Roosevelt.
Munroe Doctrine or Empire?
As
Martin Sieff eloquently laid out in his recent article , President McKinley himself was an
peacemaker, anti-imperialist of a higher order than most people realize. McKinley was also a
strong supporter of two complementary policies: 1) Internally, he was a defender of Lincoln's
"American system" of protectionism, internal improvements and black suffrage and 2) Externally,
he was a defender of the Munroe Doctrine that defined America's
anti-imperial foreign policy since 1823.
"After fifty years the United States has, without a single exception, respected the
independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.
That the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the
well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only
of her own.
That by involving itself in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States would
destroy its own reason of existence; the fundamental maxims of her policy would become, then,
no different than the empire America's revolution defeated. It would be, then, no longer the
ruler of itself, but the dictator of the world."
America's march is the march of mind, not of conquest.
Colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social
improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them".
It was an aging John Quincy Adams whom a young Abraham Lincoln collaborated with in ending
the imperial Mexican-American war under Wall Street stooge James Polk in 1846. When Adams died
in 1848, Lincoln picked up the torch he left behind as the London-directed "proto deep state"
of the 19th century worked to dissolve the republic from within. The foreign policy conception
laid out by Adams ensured that America's only concern was "staying out of foreign imperial
entanglements" as Washington
had earlier warned and keeping foreign imperial interests out of the Americas. The idea of
projecting power onto the weak or subduing other cultures was anathema to this genuinely
American principle.
A major battle which has been intentionally obscured from history books took place in the
wake of Lincoln's murder and the re-ascension of the City of London-backed slave power during
the decades after the Union victory of 1865. On the one hand America's role in the emerging
global family of nations was being shaped by followers of Lincoln who wished to usher in an age
of win-win cooperation. Such an anti-Darwinian system which Adams called "
a community of principle " asserted that each nation had the right to sovereign banking
controls over private finance, productive credit emissions tied to internal improvements with a
focus on continental (rail/road) development, industrial progress and full spectrum economies.
Adherents of this program included Russia's Sergei Witte and Alexander II, Germany's Otto von
Bismarck, France's Sadi Carnot, and leading figures within Japan's Meiji Restoration.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/gYeVDjFKpOU
On the other hand, "eastern establishment families" of the USA more loyal to the gods of
money, hereditary institutions and the vast international empire of Britain saw America's
destiny tied to an imperial global partnership with the Mother country. These two opposing
paradigms within America have defined two opposing views of "progress", "value",
"self-interest" and "law" which have continued to shape the world over 150 years
later.
William Gilpin vs Alfred Mahan: Two Paradigms Clash
A champion of the former traditionally American outlook who rose to the international scene
was William
Gilpin (1813-1894). Gilpin hailed from a patriotic family of nation builders whose
patriarch Thomas Gilpin was a close ally of Benjamin Franklin and leading member of Franklin's
Philosophical Society. William Gilpin was famous for his advocacy of America's trans
continental railway whose construction he proselytized as early as 1845 (it was finally begun
by Lincoln during the Civil War and completed in 1869 as I outlined in my previous paper
How to Save a Dying Republic ).
In his thousands of speeches and writings, Gilpin made it known that he understood America's
destiny to be inextricably tied to the ancient civilization of China- not to impose opium as
the British and their American lackies were want to do, but to learn from and even emulate!
In 1852, Gilpin stated:
"Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the
"Chinese constitution" viz. the "patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire". The
political life of the United States is through European influences, in a state of complete
demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For
this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the
Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must
bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere
calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about
the United States".
With Lincoln's 1861 presidential victory, Gilpin became Lincoln's bodyguard and ensured the
president survived
his first assassination attempt en route to Washington from Illinois. During the Civil War,
Gilpin was made Colorado's first Governor where he successfully stopped the southern power from
opening up a western front during the war of secession (applying Lincoln's greenback system to
finance his army on a state level) and winning the " Battle of Glorieta Pass ", thus
saving the union.
After the war Gilpin became a leading advocate of the internationalization of the "American
system of political economy" which Lincoln applied vigorously during his short-lived
presidency. Citing the success of Lincoln's system, Gilpin said:
"No amount of argument will make America adopt old world theories To rely upon herself, to
develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within
her territory- this is and has been the policy of the USA from the time of Alexander Hamilton
to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days".
Throughout his speeches Gilpin emphasizes the role of a U.S.-Russia alliance:
"It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having
broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2
or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a
hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence"
And seeing in China's potential the means to re-enliven the world- including the decadent
and corrupt culture of Europe:
"In Asia a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long
pause, but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up has continued to
exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new
life and European culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms."
In opposition to the outdated British controls of "chock points" on the seas which kept the
world under the clutches of the might of London, Gilpin advocated loudly for a system of
internal improvements, rail development, and growth of the innate goodness of all cultures and
people through scientific and technological progress. Once a global system of mutual
development of rail were established, Gilpin stated "in the shipment of many kinds of raw and
manufactured goods, it will largely supersede the ocean traffic of Great Britain, in whose
hands is now carrying the trade of the world."
Gilpin's vision was most clearly laid out in his 1890 magnum opus "The Cosmopolitan Railway" which
featured designs for development corridors across all continents united by a "community of
principle".
Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping's New Silk Road today, Gilpin stated:
"The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the
separate nations to families of our great nation From extended intercommunication will arise
a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical
reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track
of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates
one stimulates every other agency of progress."
Mahan Derails America's Anti-Imperial Identity
Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) represented an opposing paradigm which true American
statesmen like Lincoln, Secretary of State James Blaine, William Seward, President Grant,
William Garfield, and McKinley detested. Sadly, with McKinley's murder (
run by an anarchist ring with ties to British Intelligence ) and the rise of Teddy
Roosevelt in 1901, it was not Gilpin's but rather Mahan's worldview which became the dominant
foreign policy doctrine for the next 120 years (despite a few brief respites under FDR and
JFK).
Mahan is commonly credited for being a co-founder of modern geopolitics and an inspiration
for Halford Mackinder. Having graduated from West Point's naval academy in 1859, Mahan soon
became renowned as a total failure in actual combat having crashed warships repeatedly into
moving and stationary objects during the Civil War. Since reality was not his forte, Mahan
focused his post-war career on Ivory tower theorizing gushing over maps of the world and
fawning over Britain's power as a force of world history.
His "Influence of Sea Power
Upon History 1660-1783 published in the same year that Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan
Railway (1890) was a total break from the spirit of win-win cooperation that defined America's
foreign policy. According to
the Diplomat , this book soon "became the bible for many navies around the world" with the
Kaiser of Germany (now released from the influence of the great rail-loving statesman Otto von
Bismarck whom he fired in 1890) demanding all of his offers read. Later Teddy Roosevelt ordered
copies for every member of Congress. In Mahan's book, the geopolitician continuously asserts
his belief that it is America's destiny to succeed the British Empire.
Taking the British imperial definition of "commerce" which uses free trade as a cover for
the military dominance of weak nations (open borders and turning off protectionism simply makes
a people easier to rob), Mahan attempts to argue that America need not continue to adhere to
"outdated" habits like the Munroe doctrine since the new order of world empires demands America
stay relevant in a world of sea power and empire. Mahan writes : "The advance of Russia in
Asia, in the division of Africa, in the colonial ambitions of France and in the British idea of
Imperial Federation, now fast assuming concrete shape in practical combined action in South
Africa" demands that the USA act accordingly.
Attempting to refute the "outdated habits" of rail development which consume so many foolish
statesmen around the globe, Mahan states: "a railway competes in vain with a river because more
facile and copious, water traffic is for equal distances much cheaper and because cheaper, more
useful". Like those attacking today's Belt and Road Initiative, the power of railways is that
their returns are not measurable by simple monetary terms, but are rather QUALITATIVE. The
long-term construction of rail systems not only unite divided people, increase manufacturing
and industrial corridors but also induce closer powers of association and interchange between
agriculture and urban producers. These processes uplift national productive powers building
full spectrum economies and also a culture's capacity for creative thought.
The attempt made to justify sea traffic merely because "larger amounts of goods can be
shipped" is purely quantitative and monetaristic sophistry devoid of any science of real
value.
While Gilpin celebrates the successful awakening of China and other great nations of the
world, in the
Problem of Asia (1901) Mahan says:
"It is scarcely desirable that so vast a proportion of mankind as the Chinese constitute
should be animated by but one spirit". Should China "burst her barriers eastward, it would be
impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependant upon a firm hold of the Hawaiian
islands by a great civilized maritime power."
Mahan's adherence to social Darwinism is present throughout his works as he defines the
political differences of the 3 primary branches of humanity (Teutonic, Slavic and Asiatic) as
purely rooted in the intrinsic inferiority or superiority of their race saying: "There are
well recognized racial divergencies which find concrete expression in differences equally
marked of political institution, of social progress and of individual development. These
differences are deep seated in the racial constitution and partly the result of the
environment". Mahan goes onto restate his belief that unlike the superior Teutonics "the
Oriental, whether national or individual does not change" and "the East does not
progress".
Calling China a carcass to be devoured by an American eagle, Mahan writes: "If life departs,
a carcass can be utilized only by dissection or for food; the gathering to it of the eagles is
a natural law, of which it is bootless to complain the onward movement of the world has to be
accepted as a fact."
Championing an Anglo American alliance needed to subdue and "civilize" China as part of the
post-Boxer Rebellion, Mahan says " of all the nations we shall meet in the East, Great Britain
is the one with which we have by far the most in common in the nature of our interests there
and in our standards of law and justice".
In case there was any doubt in the minds of Mahan's readers as to the MEANS which America
should assert its dominance onto China, Mahan makes clear his belief that progress is caused by
1) force and 2) war:
"That such a process should be underlain by force on the part of outside influences, force
of opposition among the latter themselves [speaking of the colonial European monarchies
racing to carve up China in 1901 -ed] may be regrettable, but it is only a repetition of all
history Every step forward in the march that has opened in China to trade has been gained by
pressure; the most important have been the result of actual war."
A Last Anti-Imperial Push
The chaos induced by the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion of 1899 which spread quickly across
China resulted a heated battle between imperial and anti-imperial forces in both Russia and the
USA. Where Transport Minister Sergei Witte who spearheaded the development of the Trans
Siberian rail line (1890-1905) tried to avoid military entanglement, McKinley was busy doing
the same.
The boxers soon attacked the Manchurian rail connecting Russia to China by land and Witte
succumbed to pressure to finally send in troops. The reformers of China who attempted to
modernize with American and Russian assistance under Emperor Kuang Hsu and Li Hung Chang fell
from power as total anarchy reigned. The outcome of the Boxer chaos involved the imperial
powers of France, Germany and England demanding immense financial reparations, ownership of
Chinese territory and mass executions of the Boxers.
While McKinley is often blamed for America's imperial turn, the reality is just the
opposite.
The Spanish-American war begun in 1898 was actually launched unilaterally by Anglophilic
racist Theodore Roosevelt who used the 4 hour window he had while Undersecretary of the Navy
(while the actual Secretary was out of Washington) to send orders to Captain Dewey of the
Pacific fleet to engage in a fight with the Spanish over their Philippine territories. McKinley
had resisted the war hawks until that point but found himself finally bending to the momentum.
In China, McKinley, like Witte worked desperately to reject taking territory resulting in great
fears from the British oligarchy that a U.S.-Russia alliance led by McKinley and Witte was
immanent.
The assassination of McKinley on September 18, 1901 catapulted Mahan-loving Vice President
Teddy Roosevelt into high office, who enmeshed America into a new epoch of Anglo-American
imperialism abroad, a growth of eugenics and segregation at home and the creation of an
independent police
state agency called the FBI .
"Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to
integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial
imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that
destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations."
In Russia, the 1902 Anglo-Japan Treaty led to the disastrous Japan-Russo war of 1905 which
devastated the Russian navy, ended the political career of Sergei Witte and threw Russia into
chaos leading to the fall of the Romanovs (Czar Nicholas II was the last statesman occupying
high office that this author is aware of to have actively promoted the Bering Strait Tunnel
rail connection in 1906 . It wasn't
until FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace met with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 that the
idea resurfaced once more ).
In his Two Peoples One Friendship , Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister
Molotov in 1942 saying:
" Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing
population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia
and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow When Molotov [Russia's Foreign
Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway
and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I
would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the
future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our
own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East."
While the "open door" rape of the China was attempted by the Anglo-Americans, a fortunate
rear guard maneuver orchestrated by another follower of Abraham Lincoln named Sun Yat-sen
resulted in a surprise overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the institution of the
Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as the acting President. While Sun Yat-sen sided with Gilpin
and Lincoln in opposition to the Mahanists on the issue of rail and industrial development
(illustrated in his extraordinary 1920 International Development of China
program which called for 160 000 km of rail, water diversion projects, ports and 1.5
million km of paved roads- illustrated below), the intrigues that sank the world into World War
I made any hopes of this early development of China impossible in Sun Yat-sen's lifetime.
Expressing his own deep understanding of these top down tactics of world history (and the
recognition that the same British imperial forces that orchestrated the US Civil War were
planning to do the same to China), Sun Yat-sen wrote in 1912:
"We understand too well that there are certain men of power -- not to include for the
present, certain nations -- who would view with a greater or lesser satisfaction an internal
rupture in the new Republic [of China]. They would welcome, as a move toward the
accomplishment of their own ends and designs, a civil war between the provinces of the North
and the South; just as, 50 years ago, there was applause in secret (in certain quarters) over
the terrible civil strife in the United States.
Americans of today who were alive in those dark days of the great republic will remember
the feelings in the hearts of the people -- the bitter and painful thoughts that arose from
the knowledge that foreigners were hoping and praying for the destruction of the American
Union.
Had the war been successful from the South's standpoint, and had two separate republics
been established, is it not likely that perhaps half a dozen or more weak nations would have
eventually been established? I believe that such would have been the result; and I further
believe that with the one great nation divided politically and commercially, outsiders would
have stepped in sooner or later and made of America their own. I do not believe that I am
stating this too forcibly. If so, I have not read history nor studied men and nations
intelligently.
And I feel that we have such enemies abroad as the American republic had; and that at
certain capitals the most welcome announcement that would be made would be that of a
rebellion in China against the constituted authorities.
This is a hard statement to make; but I believe in speaking the truth so that all the
world may know and recognize it."
Today's Belt and Road Initiative , and strategic friendship established between Russia and
China has re-awoken the forgotten vision of William Gilpin for a world of cooperating sovereign
nation states. Does the USA have the moral ability to avoid disintegration by accepting a
Russia-U.S.-China alliance needed to revive McKinley's American System or will we slip into a
new Great Reset and World War?
is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for
Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic 22 Dec, 2020 12:08 Joe
Biden, set to be the oldest-ever US president, is actually on the younger side of people
currently running the American political establishment, who show no sign of wanting to ever
step aside for another generation.
It is often overlooked that Donald Trump currently holds the distinction of being the
oldest-ever US president, being 70 at the time of his inauguration. Biden will take that trophy
as well if he's inaugurated in January 2021, having turned 78 last month. Even so, he is
actually younger than the current leaders of the House and the Senate!
Though all major power brokers in Washington are older than the "gerontocracy" that
ruled the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the 1980s, you won't hear the US mainstream media make
the comparison, as it wouldn't fit their Narrative.
Sure, there has been some carefully calibrated talk about the "cognitive decline" of
Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is 87. But Feinstein is from an overwhelmingly Democrat state and
she can be easily replaced at the same time as Kamala Harris, Biden's running mate who still
hasn't resigned her Senate seat.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) is 80, and has raised eyebrows herself with the
whole "Good Morning. Sunday Morning" glitch-in-the-Matrix behavior during a TV
appearance in September.
Way back in 2018 , Pelosi
insisted that any talk about wanting someone younger in the leadership position was
"sexist," and went on to ruthlessly crush any opposition to her getting the gavel
– and the power that went with it – inside the party. In the same interview, Pelosi
blanked out on the name of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), calling him
"whatshisname."
Born several months ahead of Biden in 1942, McConnell is 78 himself. He had a bout with
polio when very young, and though successfully treated, he's had difficulty climbing stairs all
his life. While he hasn't shown any signs of cognitive decline, his political choices as of
late have certainly caused some Republicans to wonder if he's truly the legislative genius his
supporters make him out to be.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is "only" 70, but has actually been
in Congress longer than McConnell, if one counts his 18 years in the House before he got
elected to the Senate in 1998.
Only House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, 55, technically qualifies as a member of
'Generation X' rather than a Baby Boomer. Nor does he have any Cold War political baggage like
the rest, having been in the House since only 2006. If the Republicans somehow win the House
majority in 2022, he might gain more influence – but that's speculation at this point, on
both counts.
Meanwhile, the young activist House members who came in with 2018's "Blue Wave," such
as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), are being kept in check by the old guard. Just last
week, AOC was denied a spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, thwarting her plans to
push for her "Green New Deal" proposal.
Compare this state of US politics with the notorious "gerontocracy" of the Soviet
Union. Three aging Soviet leaders died in quick succession between 1982 and 1985, prompting
then-US president Ronald Reagan to say "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians
if they keep dying on me?" Yet Reagan was 74 at the time, older than all three.
Leonid Brezhnev was 54 when he took over the Communist Party in 1964. For the sake of
political stability, he remained a figurehead after his 1975 stroke and "ruled" the USSR
until his death in 1982, as no one in the party could agree on who ought to succeed him. His
18-year tenure was later dubbed the "Brezhnev stagnation."
Former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, part of a triumvirate running things for the better part of
Brezhnev's latter years, died himself at the age of 70 in 1984. He had led the Soviet Union for
less than 16 months. Konstantin Chernenko, 73, took over from Andropov – and died in
March 1985, after only 13 months in charge. His successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, was 54 at the
time, two years younger than Kamala Harris is now.
In one of those strange intricacies of the American political system, Harris went from
getting zero delegates in the Democrats' nomination process and dropping out before the first
primary to being widely expected to take over from Biden sooner rather than later. One might
say her relative youth and being a 'Woman Of Color' – an identity politics feature
increasingly important to the Democrats – might spell the end of the Boomer
dominance.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is that the "young reformer" Gorbachev managed to
run the Soviet Union into the ground within five short years. In 1991, the old guard tried a
military coup against him. Though Gorbachev survived the coup, the Soviet Union didn't. By the
end of that year, the USSR had "dissolved," breaking up along Communist-drawn boundaries
into independent and quasi-independent states.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
UKCitizen 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 08:34 AM
Not only American politics but much of USA public life too. I believe one facet of rule by a
gerontocracy is maintenance of the status quo; another is less control over younger and more
vigorous members of society. The two come together in the rise of Silicon Valley and
dominance of USA affairs by corporate interests. But nothing lasts forever and there are long
cycles too. Little will change in the short term but I predict at least four years of more
serious decline in America. The turning point will be final disillusionment with liberal-left
politics (see K/r theory) and the arrival of some younger leaders, not yet known.
Liberal-leftism will fail eventually for the simple reason it is founded in utopian like
fantasies, disconnection with the real life (however harsh,and probably because it is harsh)
but above all an attempt to spread finite resources veneer thin and remove any effort to get
them (free everything and equality for all). America will come round eventually but it will
be painful and will require it to revise much of its political structure to becoming a true
democracy, which even I have realised it isn't, and probably only has been fleetingly since
its founding. K/r theory is magnificently expounded in the 'The Evolutionary Psychology
Behind Politics' and long cycles in 'Biohistory'. The former rings true on just about every
page.
KarlthePoet UKCitizen 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 11:35 AM
America is collapsing because its foundation is solidly built on lies. The US government and
Wall Street are ultimately being controlled by the Jewish Banking Cartel. It cannot be
denied. Take the Federal Reserve away and America collapses overnight. Trillions upon
Trillions of dollars that are being printed out of thin air are keeping the failed system
afloat, for now. A massive global economic collapse is imminent. Just watch. Happy Holidays
Thomas74 17 hours ago 23 Dec, 2020 03:46 AM
There are clear parallels between the USSR and USA. The question is whether the leadership in
the USA's leader class has the same self-awareness that arose at the top of the USSR in its
last years. Also whether the American people will tolerate the economic hardship that the
former Soviet peoples endured in the transition. Is this what we're seeing now with the
coronavirus situation? A gradual taking down of expectations in the West behind the
smokescreen of a virus?
Anubis64 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:24 PM
Dear Nebojsa, So what? Andropov would have made a first-class statesman (give or take his
infatuation with technocracy). Brezhnev was not only a hero but a capable statesman whose era
is remembered with nostalgia. Let us focus on the fact that Russia's responses to the blows
coming hard and fast are rather passive and lacking any historical vision. It is not age but
will that matters.
Anubis64 Anubis64 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:53 PM
Then, a young scoundrel was brought in by the shady Yakovlev character and destroyed the
greatest country in the world in less than a decade. May the same happen to the insufferable
Americans.
Krieger 1 hour ago 23 Dec, 2020 08:34 PM
I think this is mostly apples and oranges. In the USSR, the "old guard" were patriots who
wanted to preserve their country. The "young reformers" were traitors who wanted to destroy
their own country to benefit their Western masters and personally enrich themselves. In the
USA, on the other hand, both the young and old politicians are totally corrupt and want to
maintain the status quo, which is slowly destroying the country from within.
Mira Golub 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 10:17 AM
America is ruled by mobster clans, the puppets are indeed resemble walking dead. Russian
imbecile liberal pro Western 2% 'opposition' though are getting their jollies by calling
Putin who is 68 'grandpa'. Bunch of degenerates.
Marek Weglinski 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 08:25 AM
Maybe it's a telltale that the Soviet-like demise for the US is near. Hopefully the American
empire will not come to a SUPERNOVA-like ending (inflicting great damage to the rest of the
world), before turning itself into a dwarf.
Ohhho Marek Weglinski 1 day ago 22 Dec, 2020 11:37 AM
The Evil empire will implode and take the rest of the world down with it, that's the problem!
USSR had it's own economic system pretty much isolated from the Western world, and when that
system collapsed the effect was felt all around the satellite countries for years!
Since when has USA needed evidence? They blamed Saddam for years that he had "weapons of
mass distraction". And back in 1990, they created the famous "Iraq solders took babies out fo
incubators " lies. Some of us have lived longer than 30 years and we remember all the lies
USA has said.
All part of the plan to cut Russia from the SWIFT in 2021. Once Biden becomes a president,
he will call on all "democracies" to stand up to Russia. He and other "Western democracies"
will hold a joint meeting sometime in 2021 where they will "condemn Russia for all the malign
things Russia has done" and will press Belgium to cut Russia fro the SWIFT.
Whats wore, instead of doing anything, Russia is just sitting and watching them instead of
warming Europe that this will mean Europe will freeze their collective asses next winter when
they won't be able to get Russia gas. Even Iran is warning Russia that they will be cut off
from the SWIFT...
I have to agree with you, the deep state just cannot get over losing Russia to Putin and
nationalism after the thought that they had turned it into their playground in the 1990s.
They are hot to trot to take out Russia and make it bend the knee, whatever the risks are.
Would not put it past them to pull the SWIFT option, although that would have huge
implications for the Europeans who buy so much oil and gas from Russia.
It could end up as an own goal, as the Europeans join the Russian payments network and
start paying in Euros convertible directly into Rubles (especially with Nordstream 2 in
place). The Indians and Chinese are already setup for payments in local currencies. Right now
China needs Russia as an ally, so they would also probably re-source oil imports to take more
from Russia.
Russia has already made itself self sufficient in food etc., and has been working on
payments in local currencies. They are not stupid, and see such a move coming.
ByFyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs,
chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director
of the Valdai International Discussion Club. This Monday marked 50 years since one of the
20th century's most iconic moments, when German Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in
Warsaw, emotionally apologizing for the horrors the Nazis had unleashed on Eastern Europe.
It was one of the milestones of the Neue Ostpolitik – Bonn's policy aimed at
normalizing relations with the USSR and its East European satellites. On the day of this
anniversary, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote the following: "Unlike Brandt, we no
longer have to go via Moscow to talk to our eastern neighbors nowadays. Many partners in
Eastern and Central Europe now view Russia very critically – and German foreign policy
must take our neighbors' concerns seriously. In addition to offers of dialogue, clear German
positions vis-à-vis Moscow are therefore important for maintaining trust in Eastern
Europe."
A clear testimony to the fact that, compared to other Eastern European states, Russia is now
of secondary importance to Berlin. This is perhaps the first time it's been stated so
explicitly.
A day later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made several important statements about
relations between Russia and the EU, including the EU's locomotive, Germany. At the annual
meeting of the Russian International Affairs Council, Lavrov pointed out that "apparently,
the European Union has given up any attempts to become one of the centers in the emerging
multipolar world order and is now simply taking its cues from the US. Germany's policy on a
number of issues tells us that this is the course Berlin has chosen, as it reaffirms its
intention to preserve Germany's undisputed leadership within the EU. France's position is
somewhat different. The prevailing notion is that the European Union is now giving up any
ambitions of becoming a center of power in a multipolar world. And if France itself decides to
compete for this role well, we'll see how it goes."
Lavrov also mentioned the concept of a "sham multiculturalism that the Germans and the
French concocted," which they "are promoting, presenting the EU's policies and
initiatives to the world as beyond reproach, a shining example for everyone to see."
Right after that, Russia's top diplomat headed to a meeting with members of the Alternative
for Germany parliamentary party. Lavrov sent a clear message, basically saying that this visit
was his response to the political steps taken by official Berlin. "As for us, we don't have
any objections when German politicians communicate with the Russian opposition, and we never
get in the way of such contacts. Interestingly, Berlin officials prefer meetings with
opposition activists who work outside the system and do not represent parliamentary parties
" Obviously, a nod to the red carpet welcome that Alexey Navalny, a comparatively marginal
opposition figure back home, received in Germany.
While the meeting with a right-wing German party was more of a symbolic gesture, the Foreign
Minister's statement about the EU giving up its independent voice and Germany being the main
driver in this process reflected Moscow's official stance. The Kremlin has decided that it no
longer has any special relations with Berlin.
There is little hope that this connection will be restored in the foreseeable future, since
Angela Merkel's potential successors are even less likely to promote these special ties. The
Navalny case was just the last straw, with the Kremlin astonished by the irrational nature of
Berlin's actions.
Viewed from Russia, it seemed absolutely unnecessary to go against the pragmatic interests
that both countries seemed to have shared in the past. However, the Moscow-Berlin axis, once
viewed as something special, began to deteriorate a long time ago. Now it's over, along with
Russia's dreams about continental Europe changing its allegiances in the new world order and
moving away from its Transatlantic identity towards a more independent role.
And Germany has become the main obstacle for this hypothetical emancipation. That's why
France was mentioned, although the remark was also somewhat sarcastic.
Two months ago, Sergey Lavrov said that Russia was prepared to suspend its dialogue with the
EU, because it wasn't yielding any results. But he was talking about European institutions, not
the continent itself. Now relations with separate European countries are being revised, based
on their stance towards Russia and their role within the European Union. This concludes a very
important phase in Russia's foreign policy that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union
(or, to some degree, even before that) and signifies a transition to a different, probably a
lot less Eurocentric, approach.
The dialogue between Russia and the West, with Germany being a major participant, has now
reached a dead end – there is nothing of substance left to discuss. All the talk about
common values, which has been a focal point ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has
accomplished nothing. Back then it was believed that the whole of Europe, including Russia, was
a space of shared values that rested on the foundation of Western liberalism.
Since the 1990s, Russia has been publicly accused of departing from these values, which was
interpreted as evidence that Russia is, overall, unprepared for meaningful cooperation with the
rest of Europe. There are various assessments of the changes Russian politics has undergone in
this period, but it is apparent that it has moved away from the ideological commitments of 30
years ago. And Russia will not go back to them: not just because its own evolution as a state
has made this impossible, but because the old value system is growing obsolete and is no longer
perceived as universal.
The world has entered a new era, where pluralism of morals and values is becoming the new
normal, no matter how the European Union feels about it. International relations can no longer
be based on countries demanding their partners to conform to a certain set of values.
In this respect, Russia would gladly return to the time when internal political mechanisms
of individual states were not brought up as talking points in negotiations with their foreign
partners. Ideally, Russia would want to go back to the start of the Ostpolitik era – the
first half of the 1970s, before the Helsinki Accords and its "third basket" provisions,
which made respecting human rights and freedoms an integral part of all international
discussions. Back then, it was unthinkable for an expensive and strategically important
project, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to be jeopardized because of the personal history
of a single political figure – no matter how well regarded he is by Western
leaders.
For 30 years after the end of the Cold War, relations between Russia and the West have been
determined (to a lesser and lesser extent with every passing year) by the principles
established during the confrontation period – principles that were to be transformed into
a new form of international cooperation. However, this project has been abandoned, as have been
all attempts to adapt international institutions created in the second half of the 20th century
to the realities of the 21st century.
Stability and cooperation in the late Cold War period were dictated primarily by the need to
strengthen global security and prevent open confrontation. This was perceived as an absolute
priority. Today, Russia and the West no longer attach such importance to their relations
(although the perception persisted for a time, on both sides, even after the Cold War).
The EU is now busy dealing with its own issues. The United States also has problems to tend
to at home, on top of its efforts to contain China. Thus, Russia needs to redefine its
priorities and work out a proper new model of international relations – one that would
have Asia at the center and China as Russia's new key partner.
Simplified, the model of Russian-German relations in 2020 looks like this: Germany, as the
de-facto leader of the EU, no longer views promoting the 'European model' eastward as a
priority. And Russia, which had long viewed its relationship with Western Europe as
intrinsically valuable, has ceased to do so and is seeking closer cooperation with the nations
of Asia.
So, the specific circumstances that brought about the current crisis are just the trigger,
not the underlying causes of the change. Russia and the West are growing increasingly apart in
terms of their priorities. This is happening for objective reasons, but is also compounded by
subjective perceptions.
All of this does not mean, however, that the trend cannot be reversed. Russia, as the
largest country in Eurasia and a bearer of European culture, and Germany, as the strongest
European economy and a country that will have to redefine its identity in the coming years,
will have need of each other again, some day. But this cannot happen until a new world order is
fully formed – one that has little in common with the ways of the last century. The
notion of Ostpolitik was an integral part of the old model, and as one faded away into the
past, the other followed.
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Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump's 'America First' foreign
policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray. "Donald Trump's
brand of America First has too often led to America alone," Biden proclaimed.
He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America's reputation.
While Donald Trump called for making America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American
Empire Great Again .
Joe Biden: "Tonight, the whole world is watching America. And I believe at our best, America
is a beacon for the globe. We will lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power
of our example."
Among the president-elect's pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the
decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush
administration.
"It's long past time we end the forever wars which have cost us untold blood and treasure,"
Biden has said.
Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will delegate that duty to the
most neoconservative elements of the Democratic Party and ideologues of permanent war .
Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden's thousands-strong foreign policy brain
trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war dating back to the Bill Clinton
administration.
During the Trump era, they've cashed in through WestExec Advisors – a corporate
consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to
government.
Flournoy is Biden's leading pick for Secretary of Defense and Blinken is expected to be the
president's National Security Advisor.
Biden's foxes guard the henhouse
Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the
military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish
think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.
Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense
Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military's doctrine of permanent war – what
it called "full spectrum dominance."
Flournoy called for "unilateral use of military power" to ensure "uninhibited access to key
markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources."
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As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD's,
Flournoy remarked that "In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of
mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic
attack against the United States."
Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Joe Biden,
who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush's
illegal invasion of Iraq.
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Biden declared, "In my judgment, President Bush
is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein's relentless pursuit of weapons of mass
destruction."
As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper
titled "Progressive Internationalism" that called for a "smarter and better" style of permanent
war . The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that "Democrats will maintain the
world's most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using
it to defend our interests anywhere in the world."
With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the
sidelines.
In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter
from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to
"increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000
troops each year over the next several years."
In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one
of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a
New American Security (CNAS). CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms
manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big
banks.
Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for
policy, the position considered the "brains" of the Pentagon. She was keenly aware that the
public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new
concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a
drawdown.
Flournoy wrote that "unmanned systems hold great promise" – a reference to the CIA's
drone assassination program. This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called
for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare,
clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all
buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and
corporate news media.
Architects of America's Hybrid wars
Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key
architect of Obama's disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body
bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she
deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the
tide against the Taliban: "We are beginning to regain the initiative and the insurgency is
beginning to lose momentum."
Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban
back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into
the future: "We are not leaving any time soon even though the nature and the complexion of the
commitment may change over time."
Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued
to argue against a U.S. withdrawal: "I would certainly not advocate a US or NATO departure
short of a political settlement being in place."
That's the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in
Biden's own words, he'll "bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan" implying
some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele
Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a
presence.
Michele Flournoy: "If we are fortunate enough to see a political settlement reached, it
doesn't mean that the US role or the international community is over. Afghanistan without
outside investment is not a society that is going to survive and thrive. In no case are we
going to be able to wash our hands of Afghanistan and walk away nor should we want to. This is
something where we're going to have to continue to be engaged, just the form of engagement may
change."
In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO
regime-change war on Libya.
Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had
given up his nuclear weapons program – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.
Flournoy, Hillary Clinton's State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they
waged an elaborate propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi's soldiers were
on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.
Fox News: "Susan Rice reportedly told a security council meeting that Libyan troops are
being given viagra and are engaging in sexual violence."
MSNBC jumped on the propaganda bandwagon, claiming: "New reports emerge that the LIbyan
dictator gave soldiers viagra-type pills to rape women who are opposed to the government."
So did CNN.
As the Libyan ambassador to the US alleged "raping, killing, mass graves," ICC Chief
Prosecutor Manuel Ocampo claimed: "It's like a machete. Viagra is a tool of massive rapes."
All of this was based on a report
from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming
extremist militias in Libya to overthrow the government.
Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims "hysteria." Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.
Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi's forces committing
rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war: "I supported the
intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds. I think we were right to do it."
Tony Blinken, then Obama's deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change
in Libya. He became Obama's point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called "moderate rebels"
that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a
full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn't anything like the other wars the
U.S. had waging for more than a decade.
Tony Blinken: "We are doing this in a very different way than in the past. We're not sending
in hundreds of thousands of American troops. We're not spending trillions of American dollars.
We're being smart about this. This is a sustainable way to get at the terrorists and it's also
a more effective way."
Blinken added: "This is not open-ended, this is not boots on the ground, this is not Iraq,
it's not Afghanistan, it's not even Libya. The more people understand that, the more they'll
understand the need for us to take this limited but effective action ."
Despite Blinken's promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its
ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is
facing famine.
Largely thanks to the policy of using "wheat to apply pressure" – a recommendation of
Flournoy and Blinken's CNAS think tank.
When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a
chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass
destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of
Defense James Mattis admitted: "So I can not tell you that we had evidence even though we had a
lot of media and social media indicators that either chlorine or sarin were used ."
While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria,
Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d'etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government
overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the
ground.
At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for
economic pressure.
Tony Blinken: "We're working, as I said, to make sure that there's a cost exacted of Russia
and indeed that it feels the pressure. That's what we're working on. And when it comes to
military assistance, we're looking at it. The facts are these: Even if assistance were to go to
Ukraine that would be very unlikely to change Russia's calculus or prevent an invasion."
Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces. And Tony
Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.
But Trump obliged.
The Third Offset
While the U.S. fueled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called
the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to
maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.
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The Third Offset strategy
shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition
against China and Russia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities,
development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones,
hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence
making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind.
All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley
giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.
The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner
of Flournoy and Blinken's at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of
this dangerous new escalation .
She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and
reversing that must be the Pentagon's priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might
not be able to defeat China in Asia: "That technological investment is still very important for
the United States to be able to offset what will be quantitative advantages and home theater
advantages for a country like China if we ever had to deal with a conflict in Asia, in their
backyard."
While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied
forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive
capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the
entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea . Not only a blatant
war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.
At the same time, Biden has announced he'll take an even more aggressive and confrontational
stance against Russia , a position Flournoy shares: "We need to invest to ensure that we
maintain the military edge that we will need in certain critical areas like cyber and
electronic warfare and precision strike, to again underwrite deterrence, to make sure Vladimir
Putin does not miscalculate and think that he can cross a border into Europe or cross a border
and threaten us militarily."
As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast: "Large scale, open-ended
deployment of large standing US forces in conflict zones with no clear strategy should end and
will end under his watch . But we also need to distinguish between, for example, these endless
wars with the large scale open ended deployment of US forces with, for example, discreet,
small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors In
ending the endless wars I think we have to be careful to not paint with too broad a brush
stroke."
The end of forever wars?
So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public
doesn't even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.
In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and
parcel of the Pentagon's shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power
competition.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that, "Long-term strategic competitions with
China and Russia are the principal priorities" and the U.S. will "consolidate gains in Iraq and
Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach."
As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he'll end U.S. support; but in 2019,
Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia .
Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations.
However, Trump's withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek
engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the
devil.
In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used
as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.
In Central America, Biden
has presided over a four billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments
and neoliberal privatization projects, fueling destabilization and sending vulnerable masses
fleeing north to the United States.
Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global
supremacy , escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of
humanity. That's what Joe Biden calls "decency" and "normalcy."
naughty.boy , 14 hours ago
deep state will bankrupt the USA with forever wars.
Distant_Star , 14 hours ago
Yes. As a bonus neither of these Deep State wretches has even seen a shot fired in anger.
They are too "important" to be at risk.
Russia has consistently stressed its willingness to work with either candidate -- late last
month, the Kremlin's press secretary Dmitri Peskov rebuffed suggestions that Moscow prefers the
incumbent: "it would be wrong to say that Trump is more attractive to us."
But Russia's political commentary sphere has proven more polarized. Some cite
Biden's readiness to extend the New START treaty without additional conditions as evidence that
Biden is someone that the Kremlin can do business with; others have expressed concern over the
Democratic candidate's "Russophobic" cabinet picks and predict that, under a Biden presidency,
Washington's policy of rollback will escalate to an unprecedented level. But there is also an
overarching belief that Washington's Russia policy is so deeply embedded across U.S.
institutions that not much is likely to change in U.S.-Russian relations.
As Peskov put it, "there is a fixed place on the altar of US domestic policy for hatred of
Russia and a Russophobic approach to bilateral relations with Moscow." Still other commentators
are interested in the process as much as the outcome, drawing attention to ongoing mass unrest and
allegations of electoral misconduct in order to argue that Washington has forfeited its moral
authority to lecture others on proper democratic procedure and the orderly transition of
power.
In Lavrov's interview with Kommersant which was mostly about the conflict between
Armenia and Azerbaijan, he was asked about the US Election and then about the dire state of
relations with the EU. Lavrov reiterates Russia's position:
"I repeat once again that Russia will respect the choice of the American people, and that
we are ready to establish constructive cooperation with the winner of the race for the White
House, regardless of his party affiliation. However, considering the current circumstances,
we realistically assess the prospects of bilateral cooperation and do not expect too much.
Anyhow, let's wait for the voting results. We don't have long to wait."
Yes, the interview was done prior to the vote counting anarchy. IMO, we can substitute the
Outlaw US Empire for the EU in Lavrov's answer about the current crisis in relations:
"Russia's relations with the European Union are in crisis – and it is not our fault.
The EU bureaucracy and individual member states are using any, even the most absurd, reasons
to enhance something they call 'containment' of Russia.
"New sanctions, illegitimate from the international law perspective, are being imposed.
Considering the number of sanctions imposed on our citizens under far-fetched pretexts, the
EU is second only to the United States. The European media continue a broad anti-Russia
campaign. In trade and economy, the Brussels bureaucracy is stepping up various protectionist
policies, violating WTO rules and introducing its openly politicised rules of the game as
they go.
"At the same time, we are being told that Russia can "earn" the right to have normal
relations with the EU by changing its behaviour. This cynicism is absolutely off the
scale."
Lavrov repeats it's up to the EU to alter its behavior:
"[O]ur European colleagues must clearly understand that any interaction is only possible
on an honest and equal basis and respect for each other's interests. We will not allow any
one-sided games here. There will be no unilateral goodwill gestures on our part. We still
hope that a rational approach and common sense will prevail, both in Brussels and in member
capitals. We are ready to wait for that as well."
The Australian parliament seems about to
approve a 'human rights' law that would establish the ability to exert arbitrary state power over individuals in other
countries who have been accused of human rights violations. Ironically, this law gives the accused no day in court, and no
chance to see charges or evidence, confront accusers, present a defence or have a ruling made by an authority other than the
prosecution.
The law is called a Magnitsky Act. Kimberley
Kitching, a Labor senator from Victoria, has given notice that she will introduce the bill in December. If it's like the other
Magnitsky Acts introduced in half a dozen countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, it will itself
violate human rights when it is weaponised to target international adversaries. How did Australia come to consider a law that
violates human rights? And how does it weaponise 'human rights' to target international adversaries? How come it isn't being
critically questioned by the media? How come it enjoys
bipartisan
support
? Here is the backstory Australians don't know. I call it the Browder Hoax.
In 1998 William Browder, an American
investor, gave up his passport to become British, which put him on the US Internal Revenue Service list of '
tax
expatriates
', as the United Kingdom, unlike the United States, doesn't tax profits on offshore holdings. This was
convenient because from the mid-1990s he invested in Russian shares, becoming, he says, the largest foreign holder of Russian
stocks. The shares were moved offshore to tax-free British Virgin Island
shells
.
In a 2007 scam involving collusive lawsuits
('You cheated me, you must pay'; 'Yes, I agree, I will pay'), Browder's shell companies claimed to the Russian Treasury that
they had to pay out all their 2006 profits and requested refunds of all taxes paid in 2006: $230 million. This was known as
the tax-refund fraud.
The victim of the scam was the Russian
Treasury, though Browder first lied to the
Financial
Times
that his companies had been targeted by crooked Russian officials who were after the companies' assets. This,
however, was rather unlikely, as the companies themselves were participants in the scam, and Browder later admitted in a US
federal court
deposition
that
his companies had no assets to go after.
Browder would then claim that the shells were
stolen by an unrelated criminal operation, but evidence raises questions about that. His trustee, HSBC (as confirmed by the
HSBC comptroller in US federal
court)
,
said in July 2007 that it needed $7 million for legal fees to recover stolen companies, but Browder wrote in his book he
didn't know that they were stolen till
October
of
that year.
Browder declares that his 'lawyer' Sergei
Magnitsky, hired in 2007 (and really his accountant since 1997), discovered the scam and was jailed because of it, and then
beaten to death when he wouldn't recant. However, Browder never provided evidence of this, and neither do Magnitsky's
pre-arrest
testimon
i
es
,
which list him as an auditor. In fact, the scam was first revealed in April 2008 by a Russian, Rimma
Starova
,
the figurehead director of a shell company that took over the companies, and reported in July by the
New
York Times
and the Russian paper
Vedomosti
.
Magnitsky didn't allude to it in testimony until October.
Magnitsky was
named
as
a fraud collaborator by the scam's operative, Viktor Markelov, in the Russian trial that sent Markelov to prison.
In fact, the whole Magnitsky hoax was
invented two years after the accountant's 2009 death (due to terrible prison medical care) when Browder needed to block the
Russians from using Interpol to arrest him and return him for trial over $100,000 in tax evasion (he falsely claimed that he
hired the disabled and invested locally) and illicit stock buys of Gazprom, the energy conglomerate whose share sales in
Russia were then restricted to Russian citizens (he used cut-out companies with nominee owners). Browder admitted the
'disabled' ruse in his US court deposition.
Browder's public statements to
Chatham
House
, London, and University of San Diego
Law
School
in the two years after Magnitsky's death said nothing about his being beaten. Browder invented the story that
Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards to promote the Magnitsky Act in the United States to block the Russians'
tax-evasion pursuit. The Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to whom he gave all his evidence,
contradicts
the
beating claim, but the 'attack' is nevertheless cited in the US law.
Thus the 2012 US 'Magnitsky Act', formally
known as the
Russia and Moldova
Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act
2012, sanctioned dozens of Russians that Browder
said, without evidence, were responsible for the death of his claimed 'lawyer' -- that is, his accountant, Magnitsky. They were
low-level officials, tax investigators, court officers, and medical and prison staff. It was a stretch to say that
investigators looking into tax evasion overseen by an accountant were responsible for his death in detention.
In fact, the European Court of Human Rights
ruled
last
year that, 'The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion'. It said: 'The accusations were
based on documentary evidence relating to the payment of taxes by those companies and statements by several disabled persons
who had confessed to sham work for the two companies. One of them testified that he had been in contact with Mr Magnitskiy,
had received money from him and had assisted him in finding other sham employees. He also said that Mr Magnitskiy had told him
what to say if questioned by the authorities and had asked him to participate in a tax dispute as a witness'.
None of the targeted people were given a
chance to answer the charges. When former Interior Ministry tax investigator Pavel Karpov brought a defamation case in London
against Browder for accusing him of the murder of Magnitsky, the judge
ruled
that
he didn't have standing, because he didn't have a UK reputation to defend. However, the judge said there was no justification
for the charge. He said, 'nothing in this judgment is intended to suggest that, if the Defendants were to continue to publish
unjustified defamatory material about the Claimant, the Court would be powerless to act'. It was the only time any of the
targets had anything close to due process in a court of law.
The US act was expanded to sanction human
rights violators in any country of the world. Browder has had it passed in half a dozen countries, and is lobbying for an
Australian version. Putting Magnitsky's name on a law builds his wall against Russian justice. But the so-called 'human
rights' law has dangerous implications for the civil societies of democratic countries.
It violates due process of the law. People
accused of crimes in Australia have the right to hear the charges against them, to have evidence presented in court, to
challenge or refute the evidence and if found guilty to be punished according to law. Should people accused of crimes in
countries other than Australia be charged here while being denied those rights?
Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia from
2012 to 2014 and a friend of Browder's,
writes
in
his book
From Cold War to Hot Peace
that
before the Magnitsky Act the United States had already put Russians on a sanctions list. 'I was the one that ran that
decision-making process in the government. And we did that. And we don't need the Magnitsky Act to deny people visas to come
to the United States of America.' But, he said, Browder wanted a more public action: 'He said that wasn't good enough -- we
needed to do this publicly' -- with Magnitsky's name on the bill. McFaul went on:
'Bill and I had a philosophical
disagreement. I did not believe that the U.S. government should be able to seize individuals' private property without due
process. They should have the right to defend themselves in a court of law. Bill disagreed. He vowed to push on with his
campaign in Congress. I wished him luck'.
In fact, the Magnitsky Act is not about human
rights, which might have made the due-process issue salient. It is the weaponisation of human rights not only to benefit
Browder but to attack declared adversaries. The Magnitsky Acts are now added to an arsenal of sanctions that includes economic
sanctions against a country for 'crimes' attributed to their governments, though the crimes are not adjudicated by any
international tribunals, which would provide due process. Though the Magnitsky Act was devised by Browder to attack Russia,
Australian parliamentarians appear to be aiming it at China, which follows the United States' escalating campaign against that
nation. Most of the 160 witness
statements
filed
with the foreign affairs subcommittee considering the law came from invited witnesses attacking Beijing. Browder was one of a
handful invited to give live testimony. Critics of the bill were not. Later, former senior diplomat Tony Kevin was given a
chance to oppose the law in a
statement
and
a
hearing
.
In fact, the Australian parliament did its best to prevent critics of the proposed law from expressing their views even in
print. I filed an extensive comment exposing Browder's falsehoods that was largely
redacted
,
with links to documents
blocked
.
After I responded to a direct attack on me by
Browder, the subcommittee refused to post my response.
One must be careful about the models one
constructs. This law is aimed only at people in other countries, since Australian law guarantees due process to anyone charged
in Australia. How can Australia claim jurisdiction over crimes in other countries? Would it accept other countries claiming
jurisdiction over crimes alleged in Australia? This law would deprive people charged in other countries of rights enjoyed in
Australia. That challenges Australia's claims to be a country that honours the rule of law. In effect, the proposed law is not
aimed at people because they are human rights violators (such as some police in the United States or France) but because they
are political enemies (officials in Russia and Iran). This damages the legitimate worldwide human rights movement by allowing
targeted governments to dismiss charges as politically motivated. And in many cases, they would be right.
Beyond that, there may be another harmful
effect. Authoritarian right-wing political movements are growing in the world. Imagine what any of their governments could do
with a Star Chamber law bereft of due process that accuses and punishes political targets. They could say that they are just
copying the West. The precedent is poor. Back in 2001, George W. Bush's government pushed the UN General Assembly to
adopt
a resolution
requiring all member states to pass anti-terror laws, and this rapidly became an open invitation for various
regimes to bring in oppressive laws, with far-reaching consequences. The Magnitsky Act risks giving more tools to
authoritarian regimes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LUCY KOMISAR
Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist
who writes about the secret underbelly of the global financial system -- offshore banking and corporate secrecy -- and its links
to corporate crime; tax evasion by the corporations and the very rich; empowerment of dictators and oligarchs; bribery and
corruption; drug and arms trafficking; and terrorism. She was the winner in 2010 of the Gerald Loeb, National Press Club,
Sigma Delta Chi, and National Headliner awards in the United States for her exposé of Ponzi-schemer Allen Stanford, which was
printed by the
Miami Herald
. The Loeb
award is America's the United States' most prestigious prize for financial journalism. @lucykomisar
There are now much stronger arguments to believe that both Harvard mafia players and Browder
were puppets of certain intelligence agencies.
Notable quotes:
"... Just how much this changed is partly witnessed in the life of bill browder - a person well known to most here... so, clearly russia made changes to try to protect itself from the encouraged kleptocracy that was in full swing in the early 1990s ..."
"... You mention Bill Browder. He is the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1930-1945. It is now freely admitted that Earl was always in the employ of the FBI. Bill simply continues the family business, which is Get Russia. The odds that Bill is an independent actor and is not working for .gov are same as odds that Easter Bunny is real. ..."
@ 26 eric... thanks... unfortunately it seems michael hudson hasn't really commented on
russia in any significant way unless one goes back 5 years or so... i wonder how things have
changed since?? here is a link to the articles that top up using russia as the search term -
https://michael-hudson.com/?s=russia
i enjoyed the paul craig roberts - michael hudson article from 2019 on pcr's website...
again, i am not informed enough to make an informed comment on pcr's conclusions from march
of 2019... he and however much of the article hudson contributed - might be exactly right,
especially in the conclusions of the 3rd to last paragraph in the article.. i don't know...
thanks for the ongoing conversation..
@ Jen | Oct 24 2020 23:04 utc | 29 / 31.. thanks jen.. i haven't been to marks website in
a long time! i recall moscow exile.. is he still posting their?? regarding central banks and
nabiullina the head of russias central bank... i am not sure how many know this but the
position of being the head of a central bank in any country is not a position that is decided
upon by the country itself, or at least not in any democratic way... and the country is
supposed to not get involved in the politics of it either as i understand it... instead these
people are suggested in some other way - not elected - and while they do have to work with
the political leadership - they can't be gotten rid of easily as i understand it.. i think a
lot of this has to do with the way the international institutions work and how if a country
wants to be a part of this same international system of money, they need to accept the
structure as it is opaquely set up as... thus the central banks are under specific guidelines
that they have to follow that comes from somewhere outside the actual country.... i would
love someone to correct me on all this, but it is my present understanding of how this
particular system works... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
As for what happened in Russia during the breaking up of the USSR and the transition of
Russia during the 1990's - one could argue the agenda of the Harvard plan for Russia was to
exploit russia for it's resource rich territory and install people like Yletsin who would
happily go along with this madness..
Just how much this changed is partly witnessed in the life of bill browder - a person
well known to most here... so, clearly russia made changes to try to protect itself from the
encouraged kleptocracy that was in full swing in the early 1990s ... just how much they
have managed to ween themselves off private finance - i have no idea... it sounds like they
are in the same boat as the rest of the planet in being beholden to private finance....
Of course private verses public finance is a confusing topic that keeps on getting
revisited here at moa and for good reason... i don't really know how all this interfaces with
everything else.. i appreciate erics particular vantage and am curious to hear of others
viewpoint as well.. thanks jen.. i have some other comments to read now on this topic from
H.Schmatz @ 28
You mention Bill Browder. He is the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the
Communist Party USA from 1930-1945. It is now freely admitted that Earl was always in the
employ of the FBI. Bill simply continues the family business, which is Get Russia. The odds
that Bill is an independent actor and is not working for .gov are same as odds that Easter
Bunny is real.
@ old hippie... yes, i was aware of that - thanks.. if you haven't seen it yet - the movie
the Russian guy made on Browder is quite good - worth the watch, but i think you have to pay
for it now.. there was a time where you could watch it for free... yes indeed, the son worked
or works for the same folks as the father did...here is a link to the movie.. http://magnitskyact.com/
here is an interesting link that i found just looking for a link to the movie... if you
haven't watched the movie, this is a good start and covers it from a particular angle.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOx78CBq0Ck
Earl Browder was an interesting dude who led an interesting life..
I have not yet read the whole transcript of Putin´s long intervention in the Valdai
Discussion Club, and thus, I do not know how deep he went about last frenzy on "regime
change" intends in the post-Soviet space, but in case he did not put it clear enough,
background of the recent explosions of regime change intends in countries surrounding Russia
( Spoiler: it was all there in a 2019 Reand Corporation file...)
"As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure
campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?"
The endpoint is to weaken Russia and sabotaging its economy. Less income through oil and
gas exports means less money for weapons, which affects Russia's operations beyond its
borders, less money for hospitals, education, welfare etc. increasing domestic instability
etc.
Diplomatically Russia is also weakened by having its reputation tarnished, regardless of
whether it deserves it or not.
In order to get to the King, the pieces standing in front of it must be either taken out
or moved out of the way. Sanctions, informational and economic warfare are the only available
pieces on the chess board, short of direct military confrontation.
NATO seems to be trying to frighten Russia with maneuvers in Poland and B-52 flights over
the Ukraine and the Black Sea ( see here for a full analysis). As for the
Poles and Ukronazis, they apparently believe that the Russian bear covered himself in poop and
ran away at full speed.
What I am going to say next is not a secret, every military person who looked into this
issue knows and understands this: NATO, and I mean the combined power of all NATO member
states, simply does not have the hardware needed to wage a war against Russia in Europe. What
NATO does have is only sufficient to trigger a serious incident which might result in a
shooting war. But once this war starts, the chances of victory for NATO are exactly zero.
Why?
Well, for one thing, while coalitions of countries might give a thin veneer of political
legitimacy to a military action (in reality, only a UNSC resolution would), in purely military
terms you are much better off having a single national military. Not only that, but coalitions
are nothing but the expression of an often held delusion: the delusion that the little guy can
hide behind the back of the big guy. Poland's entire history can be summarized in this simple
principle: strike the weak and bootlick (or
even worse !) the powerful. In contrast, real military powers don't count on some other guy
doing the heavy lifting for them. They simply fight until they win.
Yes, the Europeans, being the cowards that they are, do believe that there is safety in
numbers. But each time these midgets gang up on Russia and start barking (or, to use Putin's
expression, start oinking ) all together, the Russians clearly
see that the Europeans are afraid. Otherwise, they would not constantly seek somebody to
protect them (even against a non-existing threat).
As a direct result of this delusion, NATO simply does not have the equivalent of the
First
Guard Tank Army in spite of the fact that NATO has a bigger population and much bigger
budgets than Russia. Such a tank Army is what it would take to fight a real war in Europe,
Russia has such an Army. NATO does not.
The other thing NATO does not have is a real integrated multi-layered air defense system.
Russia does.
Lastly, NATO has no hypersonic weapons. Russia does.
(According to President Trump, the US does have super-dooper " hydrosonic " weapons, but nobody really knows what that is
supposed to mean).
I would even argue that the comparatively smaller Belarusian military could make hamburger
meat of the roughly three times larger Polish armed forces in a very short time (unlike the
Poles, the Belarusian are excellent soldiers and they know that they are surrounded by hostile
countries on three sides).
As for the "armed forces" of the Baltic statelets, they are just a sad joke.
One more example: the Empire is now sending ships into the Black Sea as some kind of "show
of force". Yet, every military analyst out there knows that the Black Sea is a "Russian lake"
and that no matter how many ships the US or NATO sends into the Black Sea, their life
expectancy in case of a conflict would be measured in minutes.
There is a popular expression in Russia which, I submit, beautifully sums up the current
US/NATO doctrine: пугать ежа
голой
задницей , which can be translated as "
trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked bottom ".
The truth is that NATO military forces currently are all in very bad shape – all of
them, including the US – and that their only advantage over Russia is in numbers. But as
soon as you factor in training, command and control, the ability to operate with severely
degraded C3I capabilities, the average age of military hardware or morale – the Russian
armed forces are far ahead of the West.
Does anybody sincerely believe that a few B-52s and a few thousand soldiers from different
countries playing war in Poland will really scare the Russian generals?
But if not – why the threats?
My explanation is simple: the rulers of the Empire simply hope that the people in the West
will never find out how bad their current military posture really is, and they also know that
Russia will never attack first – so they simply pretend like they are still big, mighty
and relevant. This is made even easier by the fact that the Russians always downplay their real
capabilities (in sharp contrast to the West which always brags about "the best XYZ in the
world"). That, and the fact that nobody in the Western ruling classes wants to admit that the
game is over and that the Empire has collapsed.
... the Empire still refuses to deal with Russia in any other way except insults, bullying,
threats, accusations, sanctions, and constant sabre-rattling. This has never, and I mean never,
worked in the past, and it won't work in the future. But, apparently, NATO generals simply
cannot comprehend that insanity can be defined as " doing the same thing over and over
again, while hoping to achieve different results ".
Finally, I will conclude with a short mention of US politicians.
First, Trump. He now declares that the Russians stole the secret of hypersonic weapons from
Obama. This reminds me of how the Brits declared that Russia stole their vaccine against the
sars-cov-2 virus. But, if the Russians stole all that, why is it that ONLY Russia has deployed
hypersonic weapons (not the US) and ONLY Russia has both two vaccines and 2 actual treatments
(and not the UK)? For a good laugh, check out Andrei Martyanov's great column " Russia
Steal Everything ".
And then there is Nancy Pelosi who, apparently, is considering, yes, you guessed it –
yet another impeachment attempt against Trump? The charge this time? Exercising this
Presidential prerogative to nominate a successor to Ruth Ginsburg. Okay, Pelosi might be
senile, but she also is in deep denial if she thinks impeaching Trump is still a viable
project. Frankly? I think that she lost it.
In fact, I think that all the Dems have gone absolutely insane: they are now considering
packing both the Supreme Court and the Senate. The fact that doing so will destroy the US
political system does not seem to bother them in the least.
Conclusion: quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat !
We live in a world where facts or logic have simply become irrelevant and nobody cares about
such clearly outdated categories. We have elevated " doubleplusgoodthinking " into an art form. We
have also done away with the concepts of "proof" or "evidence" which we have replaced with
variations on the "highly likely" theme. We have also, for all practical purpose, jettisoned
the entire corpus of international law and replaced it with " rules-based
international order ". In fact, I can only agree with Chris Hedges who, in his superb book
the " Empire of
illusions " and of the "triumph of spectacle". He is absolutely correct: not only is this a
triumph of appearance over substance, and of ideology over reality, it is even the triumph of
self-destruction over self-preservation.
There is not big "master plan", no complex international conspiracy, no 5D chess. All we
have is yet another empire committing suicide and, like so many before this one, this suicide
is executed by this empire's ruling classes.
According to the updated Russian military doctrine, any missile fired at Russia would be
considered tipped with Nuclear war head. If so, with available Hypersonic weapons, a
significant portions of the Empire, including EU would be potentially turned to Radioactive
ash within 20 minutes. Does this register at the highest levels of the Empire? I surely
hope so.
Photograph Source: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P098967 – CC BY-SA 3.0 de
It is time for the United States to debate the downsizing, if not the dissolution, of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). U.S. national security would be strengthened by the
demise of NATO because Washington would no longer have to guarantee the security of 14 Central
and East European nations, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
European defense coordination and integration would be more manageable without the
participation of authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary. Key West European nations
presumably would favor getting out from under the use of U.S. military power in the Balkans,
the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, which has made them feel as if they were "tins of shoe
polish for American boots."
Russia would obviously be a geopolitical winner in any weakening -- let alone the demise --
of NATO, but the fears of Russian military intervention outside of the Slavic community are
exaggerated. The East European and Baltic states would protest any weakening of NATO, but it
would be an incentive for them to increase their own security cooperation.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created seven decades ago as a political
and military alliance to "keep the United States in Europe; the Soviet Union out of Europe; and
Germany down in Europe." The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the Warsaw Pact and the East
European communist governments in 1990; and the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the high water mark
for the alliance.
For the past three decades, however, the United States has weakened NATO by forcing a
hurried and awkward expansion on the alliance. Most recently in 2020, North Macedonia was
admitted as its 30th member, further weakening the integrity of the alliance. Did President
Donald Trump actually believe that the presence of North Macedonia as well as 13 other Central
European states would strengthen U.S. security?
The enlargement of NATO demonstrated the strategic mishandling of Russia, which now finds
the United States and Russia in a rivalry reminiscent of the Cold War. President Bill Clinton
was responsible for bringing former members of the Warsaw Pact into NATO, starting in the
late-1990s; President George W. Bush introduced former republics of the Soviet Union in his
first term. German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for dissuading Bush from seeking
membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
The United States justified the expansion of NATO as a way to create more liberal,
democratic members, but this has not been the case for the East European members. Russia,
moreover, views the expansion as a return to containment and a threat to its national security.
Russia was angered by the expansion from the outset, particularly since President George H.W.
Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that the United States wouldn't "leap frog" over Germany if the
Soviets pulled their 380,000 troops out of East Germany.
NATO's success from 1949 to 1991 was marked by a common perception of the Soviet threat,
which is the key to solidarity in any alliance framework. In 2020, however, the 30 members of
NATO no longer share a common perception of the Russian threat in Europe. The United States has
one view of Russia; the key nations of West Europe have a more benign view; and the East
Europeans perceive a dire threat that the others do not share. The United States has always
expressed some dissatisfaction with the asymmetric burden sharing and risk sharing within the
alliance, and the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from NATO over the burden
sharing issue.
Turkey has rapidly become the outlier within NATO, and there have been a series of
confrontations in the eastern Mediterranean that threaten the integrity of the alliance. Greek
and Turkish warships collided in August, creating the first such confrontation between the two
navies since 1996, when the Clinton administration mediated the problem. The United States no
longer acts in such diplomatic capacities, so French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped into
the breach by sending jet aircraft to the Greek island of Crete as well as warships to exercise
with the antiquated Greek navy. Greece and Turkey, which joined NATO together in 1952, are
rivals over economic zones in the Mediterranean where there are important deposits of oil and
natural gas. Greece and Turkey have squabbled since 1974 over the divided island of Cyprus.
Turkey and France have additional differences over Turkey's violations of the UN arms
embargo on Libya. The two NATO allies had a confrontation in the Mediterranean when a French
warship tried to inspect a Turkish vessel. Last week, France joined military exercises with
Greece and Italy in the eastern Mediterranean following a Turkish maritime violation of
contested waters. Paris backs Athens in the conflicting claims with Ankara over rights to
potential hydrocarbon resources on the continental shelf in the Mediterranean.
President Macron took a particularly tough line in stating that he was setting "red lines"
in the Mediterranean because the "Turks only consider and respect a red-line policy," adding
that he "did it in Syria" as well. Macron's tough stance is somewhat surprising in view of the
concern of France and other European NATO countries regarding Turkey's ability to turn on the
refugee spigot, which would cause economic problems in southern Europe. Turkey has been using
the refugee issue as leverage since 2015, when huge numbers of refugees in West Europe led to a
rightward shift in European politics.
There is also the problem of Turkey's purchase of the most sophisticated Russian air defense
system, the S-400, which was developed to counter the world's most sophisticated jet fighter,
the U.S. F-35. As a result of the purchase of the S-400 system, the United States reneged on
the sale of eight F-35s to Turkey at a loss of $862 million, creating additional problems
between Trump and Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey had planned to buy 100 F-35s
over the next several years, and had begun pilot training in the United States.
Trump's constant harangues about burden sharing have created more friction within NATO.
Trump falsely takes credit for increased European defense spending, but it was the Obama
administration that successfully arranged greater Canadian and European defense spending in
2014 in the wake of Russia's seizure of Crimea. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg panders
regularly to Trump on the issue of increased defense spending, ignoring Trump's false claims
that NATO spending will increase by $400 billion annually. The $400 billion is in fact the
increased spending over an eight-year period.
With Trump's drift toward isolationism and unilateralism ("America First"), there is
incentive for the European Community to take control of its own "autonomous" defense policy.
The Europeans have reason to believe that a second presidential term for Trump could lead to a
sudden U.S. withdrawal from NATO. The unilateralist character of U.S. foreign and defense
policy strengthens the case for building European defense cooperation along side of an
undetermined transatlantic relationship with the United States.
That's according to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who pointed out that US broadcaster
RFE/RL, which is openly state-run, and British outlet BBC are also financed from public
funds.
Two of Russia's broadcasters are facing open discrimination across their countries of
accreditation, Lavrov told Sputnik.
RT has been forced to register with the US Justice Department under the 1938 Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA). Its correspondents have also been barred from attending events hosted
by the French president; likewise, RT and Sputnik have faced enormous difficulties while
reporting from Baltic nations.
"We are being presented with the argument that there is state funding [for RT and
Sputnik]," Lavrov commented. Nevertheless, there are is media in the West – the BBC
and Radio Liberty being prime examples – that also receive government donations and
"are considered beacons of democracy."
They also rely on state funding, but for some reason no restrictive measures are being
taken against them, including through the internet, where censorship is now openly
introduced.
This comes as audiences of both broadcasters are growing and their popularity is on the
rise. "I saw the statistics; I can only assume that this is another sign of the fear of
competition on the side of those who dominated the global information market until
recently," the foreign minister said.
The pressure Western nations pile on Russian media is one reason to wonder if they actually
practice what they preach. Lavrov recalled that the West demanded Russia "open up to the
world" during the period of perestroika – including by allowing full access "to
any kind of information, whether it was based on domestic sources or came from abroad."
Thirty years later, the West is "already even embarrassed" to stick to the same
principles when Russia asks "that access to information be respected, including in France
with respect to Sputnik and RT," Lavrov stated. France has its own state-funded outlets,
such as AFP, Radio France International and France 24.
Double standards, hypocrisy – unfortunately, these are the words to describe
their position.
Russia will take these matters to the upcoming ministerial summit of the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) this December. "These questions will not
disappear anywhere from the agenda, our Western colleagues will have a lot to answer,"
Lavrov vowed.
Speaking about the pressure put on Russia in general – and often initiated by the
media and not among political circles – Lavrov described the current times as "the age
of social media, disinformation and fake news." It is fairly easy "to throw any
invention into the media domain" and get away with it, he said, adding, "and then no one
will read the rebuttal."
By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs
from 2017-2019. In June, she published her book on diplomacy 'Diplomatie Macht Geschichte' in Germany through Olms, and in early
September her book 'Die Mobilitätswende', or 'Mobility in Transition', was released in Vienna by Braumüller. The cacophony of
noise generated in the wake of the attack on the Russian opposition figure is drowning out the reality. As Angela Merkel has always
maintained, the German-Russian gas deal is purely a commercial project.
Nord Stream has always had the ingredients to drive sober-minded Germans emotional. I remember energy conferences in Germany back
in 2006 when already the idea of such a gas pipeline as a direct connection from Russia to Germany provoked deep political rows,
not just in Berlin but across the EU.
Conservatives disliked it for the simple reason that it was a "Schröder thing," the legacy of social democrat Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, who lost the election of September 2005 to Angela Merkel. Schröder had negotiated the project with his good friend, President
Vladimir Putin, and then chaired the company in charge of implementing it.
Around that time, I was invited to an energy conference in Munich by the conservative think tank, the Hanns Seidel Foundation,
managed by the Bavarian party CSU, the traditional junior partner of the ruling CDU in the government. The bottom-line of the debate
on Nord Stream was negative, with the consensus being that the German-Russian pipeline would lead to the implosion of a European
common foreign policy and damage the EU's energy ambitions.
I attended many other such events across Germany, from parliament to universities, and listened carefully to all the arguments.
The feelings towards Nord Stream were much more benign at meetings held under the auspices of the SPD.
But over the years, the rift between different political parties evaporated, and a consensus emerged which supported enhanced
energy cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. Politicians of all shades defended the first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, after it went
operational in 2011, bringing Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
They also enthusiastically supported the creation of the second, Nord Stream 2, better known by its acronym NS2. This $11bn (£8.4bn)
1,200km pipeline is almost finished and was due to go online next year.
But now, in the very final stage of construction, everything has been thrown in limbo thanks to the alleged poisoning of Russian
opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
NS2 has always been controversial. Critics, such as the US and Poland, have argued that it makes Germany too reliant on energy
from a politically unreliable partner. President Trump last year signed a law imposing sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's
state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish it. The White House fears NS2 will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and
reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.
These sanctions have caused delays to the project. A special ship owned by a Swiss company menaced with sanctions had to be replaced.
And prior to that, various legal provisions were brought up by the European Commission that had to be fulfilled by the companies
in retrospect.
Now the case of Navalny, currently being treated at a Berlin clinic after being awoken from a medically induced coma, has thrown
everything up in the air again. It has triggered a political cacophony that threatens relations between Germany, the EU, Russia,
and Washington. And at the center is the pipeline.
Various German sources, among them laboratories of the armed forces, have alleged that Navalny had been poisoned with the nerve
agent Novichok. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD)
stated in an interview published on Sunday by Bild: " I hope the Russians don't force us to change our stance on Nord Stream
2 – we have high expectations of the Russian government that it will solve this serious crime ." He claimed to have seen "
a lot of evidence " that the Russian state was behind the attack. " The deadly chemical weapon with which Navalny was poisoned
was in the past in the possession of Russian authorities ," he insisted.
He conceded that stopping the almost-completed pipeline would harm German and broader European business interests, pointing out
that the gas pipeline's construction involves "over 100 companies from 12 European countries, and about half of them come from Germany."
Maas also threatened the Kremlin with broader EU sanctions if it did not help clarify what happened "in the coming days." Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded by labeling the accusations "groundless" and Moscow has staunchly denied any involvement
in the affair.
The whole matter is complicated by domestic political considerations in Germany. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen, who heads up
foreign affairs within the ruling party and has demanded that the pipeline should be stopped, is among those conservatives vying
to lead the CDU in the run-up to Chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement next year. Meanwhile, Merkel is still trying to strike a balance
between the country's legal commitments, her well-known mantra that NS2 is a " purely commercial project, " and what is now
a major foreign policy crisis.
The chancellor had always focused on the business dimension. But most large energy projects also have a geopolitical dimension,
and that certainly holds true with Nord Stream.
When I was Austria's foreign minister, I saw first-hand the recurring and very harsh criticism of the project by US politicians
and officials. I remember the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in a speech at the margins of the UN General Assembly in September
2018 that focused solely on NS2. I replied by pointing out to him that pipelines are not built to annoy others, but because there
is demand. One thing was certain – the US opposition to Nord Stream would not wane and now the Navalny case has given it new impetus.
What we are witnessing is a tremendous politicization of the pipeline with a wide range of people all shouting very loudly.
So here we are, in a very poisoned atmosphere where it might be difficult to revise positions without losing face. The social
democrat Maas, just like the conservative Röttgen and many others, have taken to the media for different reasons. In my observation,
it might have to do with their respective desires to take a strong position in order to also mark their upcoming emancipation from
the political giant Merkel (she is due to step down next year).
Due to her professional and empathetic handling of the pandemic, she is today much more popular than before the crisis. That makes
it difficult for a junior partner, represented by Foreign Minister Maas, and for all those who wish to challenge her inside the party.
What is needed is to get the topic out of the media and out of the to-and-fro of daily petty politics. Noisy statements might
serve some, but not the overall interests involved. And there are many at stake. It is not only about energy security in times of
transition, namely moving away from nuclear, but much wider matters.
As a legal scholar, I deem the loss of trust in contracts. Vertragstreue, as we call it in German – loyalty to the contract –
will be the biggest collateral damage if the pipeline is abandoned for political reasons. This fundamental principle of every civilization
was coined as pacta sunt servanda by the Romans – agreements must be kept. Our legal system is based on this. Who would still conclude
contracts of such volumes with German companies if politics can change the terms of trade overnight?
In June 2014, construction sites on the coasts of the Black sea, both in Russia and Bulgaria, were ready for starting the gas
pipeline South Stream. After pressure from the European Commission, the work never started. The political reason was the dispute
on Ukraine – in particular, the annexation of the Crimea. However, the legal argument was that the tenders for the contracts were
in contradiction with EU regulations on competition. Tens of thousands of work permits, which had been issued from Bulgaria to Serbia
etc., were withdrawn. The economic consequence was the rise of China's influence in the region. South Stream was redirected to Turkey.
So here we are in the midst of a diplomatic standoff. It is a genuine dilemma, but it could also turn into a watershed. Will contracts
be respected or will we move into a further cycle of uncertainty on all levels? Germany is built on contracts, norms (probably much
too many) and not on arbitrariness.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
silvermoon 5 hours ago
All these weeks have passed and Germany has still not shown shared actual evidence of their Navalny tests
with Russia though. That is the same as saying we found the gun with your finger prints on it but never showing it.
Count_Cash
silvermoon 3 hours ago
Correct, Germany has only since 10th September (if confirmed) shared any 'evidence'. That is sufficient intervening
time to concoct any test result and associated materials that they want - another Diesel scandal. Indeed people will ask why when
you had the patient on 22nd of august, it took you so long to send samples to the OPCW, despite almost immediately yelling Poison!
gainwmn silvermoon 5 hours ago
U stupid sheep: Germany did show it to the OPCW, i.e. the organization RF is the member of,
and therefore the latter gets the full access to all the data provided by Germany, as well as any other of 192 members. Kremlin lies
and demands in this regard is more than ridiculous, they completely destroy any shred of trust left to all RF governmental structures
and regime itself.
Teodor Nitu gainwmn 3 hours ago
Riiight!...Those Russians...not only their chemical
weapons are no longer working, but they are no longer capable to choose the proper time to use them, or so the story goes. Think
about it; they 'used' novichok to kill the Skripals and they are still alive and well (supposedly), now they (Russians) 'used' novichok
again to kill Navalny and he is alive and getting better.
Besides, they chose the absolutely wrong time to do it. With Skripals it
was just before the opening of the World Cup in Russia and now, just before the finishing of the North Stream 2 pipeline.
It sounds
that they are sabotaging their own interests, aren't they? Are they (Russians) that stup!d? Some 'smart' posters here seem to believe
it. But lets get real, one has to be able to see beyond the length of his nose, in order to understand what is really going on.
silvermoon Teodor Nitu 2 hours ago
Russia had all their chemical weapons legally destroyed. Along with hundreds of countries. The
US, UK and Israel never did. Navalny the innocent anti Putin. Can't win one way try another.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
So why is Russia still asking for it? Clearly, something is being withheld. As for
the OPCW, their credibility has been shot for years with all their fake Syrian chem weapon attack reports.
seawolf 6 hours ago
Even if there was not Navalny's story, they could invent another to stop the project.
Abraxas79 seawolf 4 hours ago
Exactly.
I hope Russia is the one that abandons it. Let Germany be the one that decides to cancel it and go along with it. Concentrate on
supplying China and other Asian nations and internal consumption. Forget about Europe. You don't have to turn off the current supply,
just charge more for it when the market allows. Looks like the next German leader according to this article is quite the Russophobe,
which means relations will only get worse.
Pro_RussiaPole Abraxas79 2 hours ago
If this navalny farce does end up cancelling the NS2 project, Russia should stop all gas transit to western Europe through
Poland and Ukraine by spring of next year. Tell those countries that will be cut off that Russia can either sell them LNG, or
that they will have to connect to other sources of gas. Because if certain countries are so against Russian gas, then why are
they not doing anything against Russian gas going through Poland and Ukraine, and why isn't Trump threatening sanctions on
these countries for doing so?
Blue8ball713 RTjackanory 3 hours ago
Its a far longer list
and it have the fingerprints of GB secret services all over it.
Reply Gabriel Delpino seawolf 46 seconds ago It is not in the interest
of Germany to stop de project. Reply
magicmirror 6 hours ago
Europe should have nothing to do with the USA ....... proved time and
time again they cannot be trusted. All they want is markets, resources and consumers. They lie, they cheat, they steal...... (quoting mr Pompeo, I think). A big opportunity to win Europe's independence.
SmellLaRata
5 hours ago
All due respect for Mr. Navalny but since when does an individual fate of one person dictates the fate for millions ?
And c' mon Germany. Your hypocrisy is so utterly laughable. You ignore the Assange and Snowden cases, the slaughter of Kashoggi,
the brutal beating of yellow vests, the brutal actions against the Catalans ... but Navalni. Not even a hint of a proof of government
involvemen. But it fits the agenda, does it? The agenda which is dictated by the deep state agitators who so much flourished under
Obama.
gainwmn SmellLaRata
4 hours ago
Even being not a fan (to say the least) of the US foreign and some of the domestic policy, I have to point out that tried
by U analogy is largely out of balance: first, the issue in Navalny (as well as in Scripals' and others cases acted on with poisons)
case is not so much the assassination attempt on a person's life, as the banned use of chemical weapons, the ban RF's signature has
been under since 1993. And that conclusion (Russia's guilt) has not been made by the UK or Germany or any other country alone, but
the OPCW - the organization not only RF is the member of, but also 191(!) other countries, out of which not a single country (except
RF) rejected that conclusion!; second, the US did not made attempt on either Snowden's or Assange's life, with any kind of weapon,
not already mentioning the weapons banned by the international agreements American government(s) signed. This is a large - I would
say - decisive difference! As far as Kashoggi's case or other cases sited by U, RF did not react with sanctions against the respective
perpetrators either, thus demonstrating the same disregard for the law and order as the US did... therefore making all lies about
innocent RF and evil US, foolish, at the least.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
The US and its lackeys are killing Assange. They are doing it slowly. And many voices going along with a lie does not make
the lie true. Because these poisoning allegations are lies. The accused were never allowed to see the evidence or challenge
it. And there is the whole issue of politicized reports coming out of the OPCW that contradicted evidence and reality.
Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago
After completing the pipe and
it start running Russia must turn off all Ukraine pipes. No more gas for free from Russia, Ukraine must start importing LNG from thier reliable partner USA. I think imports from USA will be good for Ukrainian Nazi people
Abraxas79 Nathi Sibbs 4 hours
ago
How are they going to pay for it? Ukraine's only exports these days are its women to various brothels across Europe and North
America.
Hilarous 5 hours ago
The German leaders know very well that the case of Navalny will never be resolved and exists
for no other reason than to seize a pretext to demonize Russia and to end Nord Stream 2 in exchange for US freedom gas
magicmirror
Hilarous 4 hours ago
freedom gas and handsome presents .....
SandythePole 3 hours ago
This is an excellent account by Dr Karin Kneissl. It is a genuine dilemma for 'occupied'
Europe. Its occupying master does NOT want NS2 and will do anything to stop it. Russia suffers sanctions upon sanctions, but still
gallantly tries to maintain friendly and honourable business relations with its implacable neighbours. For how much longer is this
to continue? Surely there must be some limit to the endless provocations of occupied Europe and its Western master. Perhaps it is
time to shut off the oil and gas and leave Germany to sail under its own wind.
dunkie56 3 hours ago
Perhaps Russia should disengage
with Germany/EU totally and forge ahead in partnership with China and India and whoever wants to do business. let the EU tie it's
ship to the sinking US ship and drown along with it's protection racket partner! Then Russia should build a new iron curtain between
itself and all countries who want to align with the EU..in the long run Russia has tried to forge a partnership with the West but
it just has not born any fruit and even as pragmatic as Russia is they must be coming to the conclusion they are flogging a dead
horse!
Blue8ball713 dunkie56 2 hours ago With 146 million citizen Russia is too small to be a real partner to anyone like
China or India. Best fit is the EU, but the EU is controlled or better said occupied by the USA. Its part of their hegemonial system.
So Russia is left out in the rain..
micktaketo 5 hours ago
I am not sure if it is the right thing to do but I think Russia
should sue the German authorities if this deal is withdrawn and if it is have nothing to do with Germany again along with other corrupt
countries that cannot prove or at the least bring forth their evidence to be seen, to be transparent to all even Russia the first,
because Russia is the one being accused. These countries must think we the people are all completely stupid and Russia more so. This
corruption stinks to high heaven and is obvious to all sane people who love fairness. You cannot trust an entity that believes in
getting what they want by hook or by crook. Russia learn your lesson ! So you countries that love whats good for you and your people
do not cheat them for they voted for you to help them. Germany do not kick yourself, it will hurt your people. Saying, There is more
than one way to skin a cat, they say.
Mutlu Ozer 3 hours ago
There is a simple concept to investigate a crime to find the criminals: Just look at whose benefit the crime is? EU
politicians are certainly smart people to know this basic concept of criminal investigation. However, now they are playing a
new strategy about how to domesticate(!) not only Russia China as well... Germans are the main actors in the stage of the WW-I
and WW-II. I surely claim that Germans would be the main architect of the last war, WW-III.
The foreign policy elite dislikes Russia, always has, and will do anything to keep
this "adversary" front and center because their prospects for prestige, power and position
depend upon the presence of an enemy. As an example see Strobe Talbot and Michael
McFaul.
Notable quotes:
"... Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic senator who never met a war he didn't like. ..."
"... It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings. ..."
"... To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group. ..."
"... She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship with fraudsters. ..."
"... On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen. ..."
"... Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died. ..."
"... How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal ..."
"... Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act. ..."
"... Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky legislation, we will strongly oppose the lifting of Jackson-Vanik." ..."
"... The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate. ..."
"... It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of the law to see how it is based on the fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.) ..."
As the Democratic Convention is in progress, it is fitting to look at how Democrats in Congress and the White House, with Republican
collaboration, were responsible for the
Magnitsky Act , the law that protects tax fraudster William Browder and his henchman Mikhail Khodorkovsky by erecting a wall
against their having to face justice for their financial crimes. And ramps up hostility against Russia.
The fraudster William Browder .
This is a half-hour interview about this I did today on this subject
for Fault Lines . And a 15-minute
interview for The Critical
Hour . Here is an expanded version of what I said.
William Browder in the mid-1990s became manager of the Hermitage Fund, set up with $25 million from Lebanese-Brazilian banker
Edmond Safra and Israeli mining investor Beny Steinmez to buy shares in Russian companies.
He says he started the fund, but that is a lie. He was brought in to manage other people's money. But after some years, when the
two investors either died or confronted major financial problems, Browder gained control.
Browder doesn't like paying taxes.
Browder was an American who traded his citizenship for a UK passport in 1998 so he could avoid paying U.S. taxes on his stock
profits. ( CBS called
him a tax expatriate.)
He didn't like paying Russian taxes either. In an early rip-off, he and his partners billionaire Kenneth Dart of Dart cups and
New York investor Francis Baker bought a majority of Avisma, a titanium company, that produces material used in airplanes.
They cheated
minority investors and the Russian tax collector of profits by using transfer pricing.
You sell your production to a fake company at a low price, then your fake company sells it at the world price. You book lower
dividends to cheat minority shareholders, report lower taxes to cheat the Russian people.
Browder and partners bought Avisma from infamous oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the basis of continuing his transfer
pricing scam. It was revealed by documents in a lawsuit when Browder and partners sued another infamous guy, Peter Bond, the Isle
of man crook handling the rake-offs for not passing on the full amount of the skim. (No honor among thieves!) The legal documents
where Browder admits to the scam are linked in this
story
.
Browder cheats bigtime on Russia taxes
Browder's next corruption was to
cheat the Russians of taxes from his stock buys in Russia, to the tune of about $100million. That included claiming as deductions
disabled workers who didn't work for him, local investments he never made, profits from stock buys of Gazprom the Russian energy
conglomerate that non-Russians were not allowed to buy in Russia.
Investigations started in the early 2000s for $40 mil in evaded takes and led to legal judgments in 2004. When he refused to pay,
in November 2005 he was denied a Russian visa and in 2006 he moved all his assets out of Russia. But the Russian tax evasion investigations
continued.
Browder's accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for investigation of the tax evasion in 2008, and the European Commission on
Human Rights
ruled last year that was correct because of the evidence and because he was a flight risk. Browder's fake narrative was that
Magnitsky, who he lied was his lawyer , had been arrested because he blew the whistle on a scheme by Russian officials to
embezzle money from the Russian Treasury. In his own U.S. federal
court deposition
, Browder admits Magnitsky didn't go to law school or have a law license. See his brief
video on
that.
Browder gives speeches that he didn't know how Magnitsky died
Then Magnitsky died of heart failure exacerbated by stomach disease which forensic reports say was not properly treated. Browder
first said (in talks at the British foreign policy association
Chatham House , London, a month after he died, and San Diego Law School
-- video at minute 6:20 -- a year later) he didn't know how Magnitsky died, but after a few years he invented a story that he
had been beaten to death.
Jonathan Winer, who helped Browder with his scam.
That story was developed by Jonathan Winer, a former assistant to Senator John Kerry and then a State Department official. Winer
was working for APCO, an international public relations company one of whose major clients was the same Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They
correctly assumed the western media would do no research. Or at least would not be allowed to report it. And the mainstream media
never did, except much later
Der Spiegel in Germany, which the rest of the western press ignored.
The plan was to get a U.S. law that would in effect block the Russians from going after certain Americans who had cheated on taxes.
They would be Browder and Khodorkovsky, who is actually named in the law.
Khodorkovsky would spend several hundred thousand dollars to buy Congressional support for the Magnitsky Act, clearly money
well spent. He duly reported it as lobbying expenses.
Here is how the Democrats and Republicans colluded in the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Much of this comes from Browder's own writings
in his mostly fake book "Red Notice." Note the corruption of both parties.
Magnitsky died in November 2009. Only four months later in March 2010, Browder was plotting his Magnitsky hoax, attacking Russians
he would claim were responsible for Magnitsky's death. But the bizarre part of the story is that he continued throughout 2010 to
say he didn't know how Magnitsky died, including in a videoed Dec 2010
San Diego law school talk. He obviously assumed U.S. media and politicians would not notice or care about the contradictions.
Ben Cardin, senator who signed on to Browder hoax.
Browder got Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin to send a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2010 urging
her to ban visas for 60 people Browder had listed (without evidence) as complicit in Magnitsky's death. (Remember 9 months later
in a videoed talk at San Diego Law School Browder says he didn't know how Magnitsky died.)
The letter to Hillary Clinton, written (Browder says in his book) by Browder acolyte Kyle Parker, a staffer at the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, said, I "urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the U.S. visa privileges of all those involved
in this crime, along with their dependents and family members." Immediately? No due process, not even for children and grandparents?
Cousins?
Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials Browder accused, without evidence, of involvement in Magnitsky's death
and a tax fraud against the Treasury.
Browder's fake tax refund fraud
The tax refund fraud was a scheme in which shell companies were set up to sue Browder's Hermitage companies claiming contract
violations and damages of $1billion. The Hermitage companies immediately agreed to pay (no evidence of actual bank transfers), then
demanded the Treasury pay a tax refund of $230million because they now had zero profits.
Viktor Markelov, tried and jailed for the scam,
said he worked with a Sergei Leonidovich, which is Magnitsky's name and patronymic. Other evidence, including an inexplicable
delay of months between Browder learning about the his companies being re-registered in other names and him reporting that as
"theft," indicates he was part of the scam too.
Note this: Hermitage trustee HSBC filed a financial document in July 2007 saying it was putting aside $7 million for legal
costs that might be required to get back the companies. This was five months before the tax refund fraud occurred. Albert
Dabbah, chief financial controller for HSBC, confirmed the
document's authenticity in U.S.
federal court. But Browder and Magnitsky (in his
testimony
) said they didn't learn about the "theft" till October 2007.
Theft of his companies? The best defense is a good offense. Accuse others of the crime you committed.
Senator Cardin was requesting that all sixty of Browder's accused have their U.S. travel privileges permanently revoked.
But Hillary didn't buy it. Then House staffer Parker arranged for Browder to
testify about the Magnitsky case May 6 th at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, not an official House body but
a pressure group set up in the name of a Russophobic former congressman from Hungary.
Congressman Jim McGovern would not send the evidence he promised, because he couldn't. There wasn't any.
The commission chairman was Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern, who runs liberal but is a Russophobe who pretends
to be a human rights advocate.
Now what is really interesting is that seven months after this May 6 testimony, on December 6, 2010, Browder was telling the
San Diego law school (video 6:20 in) that "they put him in a straight
jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited outside the door until he died." Nothing about torture or killing. Had Browder forgotten
his dramatic beating story?
McGovern at the Lantos Commission hearing asked for no evidence. He said he would introduce legislation, put the 60 names Browder
cited in it, move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, then pass it on the floor.
McGovern lies about sending evidence
Kimberly Stanton, who runs a propaganda operation and refused to provide evidence.
In July 2019, almost a decade later, I saw McGovern when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked if he would send
me evidence backing the claim that Magnitsky was tortured and killed. He agreed and introduced me to an aide. The aide referred me
to Kimberly Stanton, director of the Lantos Commission, who refused in an
email
to provide any information. And said evidence against targeted people is not required!
I also wrote McGovern's press secretary Matt Bonaccorsi and legislative director Cindy Buhl. They ignored repeated requests, never
sent me anything. I conclude that Jim McGovern, who pretends to be a liberal civil rights promoter, is a fake and a fraud.
McGovern introduces a Magnitsky bill in the House.
John McCain, he loved fraudsters and wars.
Ben Cardin agreed to be the cosponsor of a Magnitsky Act in the Senate. He sought a Republican cosponsor, John McCain, a Russophobic
senator who never met a war he didn't like.
It wasn't the first time McCain helped a fraudster. McCain was one of the corrupt "Keating Five" senators who improperly intervened
in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., corrupt chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989
at a cost of $3.4 billion to the federal government (and thus taxpayers). Many investors lost their life savings.
Keating was the target of a regulatory investigation. With powerful senators like McCain advocating his cause, the regulator
backed off taking action against Lincoln. Though Keating went to jail. McCain was cited only for exercising "poor judgment." Helping
a crook doesn't get you thrown out of the Senate.
To get to McCain and others, Browder hired lobbyist Juleanna Glover, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney's press secretary
and then Attorney General John Ashcroft's senior policy adviser. She went with Ashcroft when he left government to run the Washington
office of his law firm, the Ashcroft Group.
Juleanna Glover, former aide to Dick Cheney. She can buy you a bill .
She got Browder a meeting with McCain who agreed to sponsor the Magnitsky Act. It fit with his Russophobia and friendship
with fraudsters.
On September 29, 2010, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat
of Connecticut) introduced the bill in the Senate. Anyone involved in the false arrest, torture or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or
the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their U.S. assets frozen.
Remember again that a few months later Browder would tell the San Diego
law school he didn't know how Magnitsky died.
Now here is how the law got passed. The Jackson-Vanick amendment put in place in the mid-1970s imposed trade sanctions on the
Soviet Union to punish it for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Well, nobody could emigrate. Eventually 1.5 million Jews were
allowed to leave the country.
How the Browder-Magnitsky hoax law got passed in a trade deal
Thirty-seven years later the Soviet Union no longer existed, and everybody could emigrate, but Jackson-Vanik was still on the
books. It blocked American corporations from enjoying the same trade benefits with Russia as the world's other WTO members.
So, the U.S. business community said Jackson-Vanik had to go, and the Obama administration agreed. So did John Kerry, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They needed an act of Congress.
Meanwhile, Kerry opposed the Magnitsky Act which he considered untoward interference in Russia (is that like saying meddling?)
and had been delaying bringing it to vote in committee.
Browder got Senator Joe Lieberman, conservative Democrat from Connecticut, to agree to block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless the
administration stopped blocking his Magnitsky Act.
Lieberman and the other cosponsors of the Magnitsky Act sent a letter to Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, chairman of
the Senate Finance Committee. The letter said, "In the absence of the passage of the Magnitsky legislation, we will strongly oppose
the lifting of Jackson-Vanik."
John Kerry had good instincts, forced to make bad compromise.
So, Kerry stopped his opposition to the Magnitsky Act.
The two bills were combined. First the bill would be brought up at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass Magnitsky, then
it would go before the Finance Committee to repeal Jackson-Vanik, and then, it would go before the full Senate for a vote.
Kerry called for a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2012, with the purpose of approving the Magnitsky
Act.
At the hearing, Kerry said that America was not a perfect country, and that the people in that room should be "very mindful of
the need for the United States not to always be pointing fingers and lecturing and to be somewhat introspective as we think about
these things." (Such nuance would obviously not be allowed today.)
He was "worried about the unintended consequences of requiring that kind of detailed reporting that implicates a broader range
of intelligence." He didn't have to worry. Reporting? Intelligence? Actual evidence would never be required! The U.S. was
setting up a kangaroo court and calling it a human rights tribunal!
The bill passed the House 365 to 43 on November 16, 2012. Voting "No" were 37 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Among them Maxine
Waters and Ron Paul. And surprisingly New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler who since then became a Russophobe. Tulsi Gabbard had not
yet been elected.
Kyle Parker told Browder, "There are a number of senators who are insisting on keeping Magnitsky global instead of Russia-only."
One was Cardin, but also Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan – a political giant who spent many years fighting, holding hearings, about
offshore tax evasion and must have known very well how Browder was a poster child for offshore tax-evading crooks. Also Jon Kyl,
Republican from Arizona. Of course, Browder wanted "Russia only," because the purpose of the law was to attack Russia, not to promote
global human rights. Cardin withdrew his objection, and the bill was "Russia only."
The Senate vote
The final count December 6, 2012 was 92-4. Levin and three other Democrats – Bernie Sanders as well as Jack Reed and Sheldon
Whitehouse, both of Rhode Island – were the only Senators to vote against it. Elizabeth Warren was not yet in the Senate.
It was signed by Obama a week later. Read Title IV of
the law to see how it is based on the
fake claims the chief sponsors would not, could not prove. Including "he was beaten by 8 guards with rubber batons on the last
day of his life" based on zero evidence, just Browder's lies. (I also wrote to Cardin's office and got no reply.)
It was the first pillar of Russiagate, where Cold Warrior Democrats joined forces with Cold Warrior Republicans. The result would
be to build a wall against Russia bringing Browder to justice, including getting Interpol to refuse to issue a red notice that would
require other countries to arrest him. He would name his book Red Notice as a jab at the Russians.
And the crooks Browder and Khodorkovsky, protected from the rule of law, laughed all the way to their offshore banks. Here's the
link to Browder's Mossack Fonseca (on Panama Papers fame) bank.
(Speaking of the rule of law, it doesn't apply to offshore banks, with secret owners of companies and accounts. They are largely
run by western banks that make big profits from laundering the money of the world's crooks. Note on any SEC filing where banks have
their subsidiaries: Caymans, Isle of Man, Guernsey, BVI, etc. No local clients, just financial fakery: letterbox companies, tax evasion.
It's okay. When there's corruption, only the little people go to jail. In the offshore system, the corrupt financial oligarchy rules.)
One of the comments made following Trump's decision to relocate some 12,000 troops from
Germany was made by retired Admiral James ('Zorba') Stavridis, who in 2009-2013 was US Supreme
Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of Nato). He declared
that the action, among other things, "hurts NATO solidarity and is a gift to Putin." This was a
most serious pronouncement, which was echoed
by Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a
rich Republican and
Mormon cleric, who
said the redeployment was a "gift to Russia." These sentiments were well-reported and
endorsed by US media outlets which continue to be relentlessly anti-Russia.
Stavridis is the man who wrote that
the seven-month bombing and rocketing of Libya by the US-Nato military grouping in 2011 "has
rightly been hailed as a model intervention. The alliance responded rapidly to a deteriorating
situation that threatened hundreds of thousands of civilians rebelling against an oppressive
regime. It succeeded in protecting those civilians and, ultimately, in providing the time and
space necessary for local forces to overthrow Muammar al-Gaddafi."
On June 22 Human Rights Watch noted that
"over the past years" in Libya their investigators have "documented systematic and gross human
rights and humanitarian law violations
by armed groups on all sides, including torture and ill-treatment, rape and other acts of
sexual violence, arbitrary arrests and detention, forced displacement, unlawful killings and
enforced disappearances
." Amnesty International's current Report also
details the chaos in the shattered country where Nato conducted its "model intervention."
The Libya catastrophe illustrates the desperation of Nato in its continuing search for
international situations in which it might be able to intervene, to try to provide some sort of
justification for its existence. And the calibre of its leadership can be judged from the
pronouncements of such as Stavridis, who was unsurprisingly
considered a possibility for the post of Secretary of State by Donald Trump.
It is not explained how relocation of US troops from Germany could hurt Nato's "solidarity"
but Defence Secretary Esper was more revealing about the situation as he sees it, when
interviewed by balanced and
objective Fox News on August 9. He
declared "we basically are moving troops further east, closer to Russia's border to deter
them. Most of the allies I've either spoken to, heard from or my staff has spoken to, see this
as a good move. It will accomplish all of those objectives that have been laid out. And
frankly, look, we still have 24,000 plus troops in Germany, so it will still be the largest
recipient of US troops. The bottom line is the border has shifted as the alliance has grown."
(It is intriguing that this important policy statement was not covered by US mainstream media
and cannot be found on the Pentagon's Newsroom website -- the "one-stop shop for Defense
Department news and information.")
No matter the spin from the Pentagon and what is now appearing in the US media, Trump's July
29 decision to move troops from Germany had no basis in strategy. It was not the result of a
reappraisal of the regional or wider international situation. And it was not discussed with any
of Washington's allies, causing Nato Secretary General Stoltenberg
to say plaintively that it was "not yet decided how and when this decision will be
implemented."
The BBC reported that "President Donald Trump
said the move was a response to Germany failing to meet Nato targets on defence spending."
Trump was quoted as telling reporters that "We don't want to be the suckers anymore. We're
reducing the force because they're not paying their bills; it's very simple." It could not have
been made clearer than that. The whole charade is the result of Trumpian petulance and has
nothing to do with military strategy, no matter what is belatedly claimed by the Pentagon's
Esper.
The German government was not consulted before Trump's contemptuous announcement, and
defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer
criticised Washington, saying "Nato is not a trade organisation, and security is not a
commodity." But so far as Trump is concerned, security is indeed a commodity that can be traded
as he sees fit, irrespective of relevance to national policy or anything other than his
ego.
In trying to pick up the pieces following Trump's candid explanation of his orders to
"reduce the force" in Germany, the Pentagon has conjured up a jumbled but confrontational plan
intended to convince those who are interested (who do not
include the German public), that it is all part of a grand scheme to extend the power of
the US-Nato alliance. To this end, Esper
announced he is "confident that the alliance will be all the better and stronger for it,"
because the redeployment involves reinforcement of the US military in Poland. He is moving 200
staff of the army's 5 corps to Krakow where, as reported by
Military.com on August 5, "In a ceremony Army Chief of Staff General James McConville
promoted John Kolasheski, the Army's V Corps commander, to the rank of lieutenant general and
officially unfurled the headquarters' flag for the first time on Polish soil."
In addition to Washington's move of the advance HQ of V Corps to Krakow, there is a
agreement that Poland will engage in what the Military Times
reports as "a host of construction projects designed to support more US troops in that
country" and Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Tom Campbell said that the Warsaw government "has
agreed to fund infrastructure and logistical support to US forces," which should please the
White House.
These initiatives are part of the US-Poland Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement
completed on August 3, which Esper
stated "will enhance deterrence against Russia, strengthen NATO, reassure our Allies, and
our forward presence in Poland on NATO's eastern flank will improve our strategic and
operational flexibility." Then on August 15 Secretary of State Pompeo visited Poland to
formally
ink the accord which was warmly welcomed by Polish President Duda who recently visited
Trump in Washington.
Duda's declaration
that "our soldiers are going to stand arm-in-arm" is consistent with the existing situation in
Poland, where the Pentagon has other elements already deployed,
including in Redzikowo, where a base is being built for
Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence systems, and the Air Force's 52nd Fighter Wing
detachments at Polish Air Force bases at Lask and Miroslawiec, where there is a unit
operating MQ-9
attack drones.
Defence Secretary Esper has emphasised that "the border has shifted as the alliance has
grown" -- and the border to which he refers is that of US-Nato as it moves more menacingly
eastwards. That's the gift that Trump has given Russia.
"... IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons. ..."
"... Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really? ..."
"... The kind of symmetrical disinterest described in Timothy's article will encourage the end of Atlanticism ..."
"There are, then, two ways in which a Biden presidency will remove the Europeans' veil of
smug superiority. First, he will follow some Trump-era objectives, because that is what
American interests demand, thus showing that Trump was no extremist on China . And second,
where he does change approach, he will expose European indifference to the Western Alliance as
driven, not by distaste for Trump's policies, but by Europe's own cynicism, short-termism and
willingness to freeload off US military budgets.
In both respects, Biden's election will reveal Europe's dirty secret. It was never Donald
Trump who stopped the Europeans being their better selves, taking responsibility for the
security of their own citizens, and protecting long-term Western interests. It was always
Europe itself." Nick Timothy in The Telegraph.
------------
I was struck earlier today by English Outsider's admonition (on SST) directed to
ConfusedPonderer (archetype of the Teutons) in which EO said that it was vainglorious and
vacuous to bitterly claim that the US "occupies" Germany as it did in 1945 while at the same
time relying on US funding of Germany's defense through the USA's enormous military
expenditures.
IMO NATO should have ended with the fall of the USSR. It now "confronts" a largely imaginary
threat, concocted for the purpose of maintaining the status quo in US government expenditures
for defense and supporting the imperial dreams of the neocons.
Does anyone really think Russia is going to invade the Baltics? Really?
The US faces a rapidly escalating political crisis. The losing party in November will
undoubtedly go to the federal courts to claim that their opponents cheated in the process.
These charges will eventually reach SCOTUS. In this environment US interest in European affairs
will decline radically.
The kind of symmetrical disinterest described in Timothy's article will encourage the end of
Atlanticism. pl
@onebornfree
w.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science">https://www.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science
What is labelled socialism today is nowhere near what the original socialists would consider
socialism, which is closer to the co-operative movement and anarchy than communism.
On the other hand, Marxism (communism) is about complete state control and was
international in scope. One (of many) reason for the breakdown of the USSR, was that it was,
in fact, becoming socialistic in many countries, starting with Hungary in 1956 then
Czechoslovakia in 1968 becoming nationalist. Even Russia was becoming more nationalistic.
@Druid
unknown in Russia 1917. It wasn't really understood. In contrast Neo-Bolshevism USA 2020 has
the prior example of Bolshevism Russia 1917 to learn from and check the mechanism.
– The Russian population 1917 held some arms (which were immediately made illegal
– retention carrying the death penalty). But nothing at all like the vast armoury
presently held by the US public.
– The Bolsheviks successful subverted the demoralized and badly organized Russian
Imperial Army (at least in Petrograd where it mattered). The US military is in a much better
state, and is maybe not so attracted by SJW/BLM/Antifa (middle and lower ranks).
@onebornfree
w.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science">https://www.britannica.com/topic/commonwealth-political-science
What is labelled socialism today is nowhere near what the original socialists would consider
socialism, which is closer to the co-operative movement and anarchy than communism.
On the other hand, Marxism (communism) is about complete state control and was
international in scope. One (of many) reason for the breakdown of the USSR, was that it was,
in fact, becoming socialistic in many countries, starting with Hungary in 1956 then
Czechoslovakia in 1968 becoming nationalist. Even Russia was becoming more nationalistic.
@Druid
unknown in Russia 1917. It wasn't really understood. In contrast Neo-Bolshevism USA 2020 has
the prior example of Bolshevism Russia 1917 to learn from and check the mechanism.
– The Russian population 1917 held some arms (which were immediately made illegal
– retention carrying the death penalty). But nothing at all like the vast armoury
presently held by the US public.
– The Bolsheviks successful subverted the demoralized and badly organized Russian
Imperial Army (at least in Petrograd where it mattered). The US military is in a much better
state, and is maybe not so attracted by SJW/BLM/Antifa (middle and lower ranks).
CAIRO (AP) -- Egypt's parliament on Monday authorized the deployment of troops outside the
country, a move that could escalate the spiraling war in Libya after the president threatened
military action against Turkish-backed forces in the oil-rich country.
A troop deployment in Libya could bring Egypt and Turkey, close U.S. allies that support
rival sides in the conflict, into direct confrontation.
"... I seem to recall William "Bill" Browder, AKA "Putin's Number-One Enemy" was briefly detained in Spain on an Interpol warrant or something. ..."
"... And courtesy of today's Independent, the words of that most noble and trustworthy lying cnut Browder as regards "Russian Meddling" in the affairs of my pathetic Motherland: ..."
"... Spoken by a person who changed his citizenship so as to dodge paying tax. What a slimy toad Browder is! ..."
"... Of course, though, Browder is not an oligarch himself. He's an 'investment firm boss'. And naturally he does not himself engage 'basically in intelligence and influence work'. He only single-handedly managed to get the Magnitsky Act on the books, where it will stay forever although the German press is belatedly owning up that Magnitsky was not the pink-faced legal cherub Browder portrayed. If that's not influence, I don't know what is. ..."
"... The west is so fixed on 'getting' Russia that it must simply make things up when it cannot find real reasons for its hatred. You could say that the USA with its marble-this-and-that secret algorithms is making up online traffic and attributing it to Russia, but I'm pretty sure other western countries are not complete oafs themselves in the computer world, and if you know what you're looking for I'm sure that their analysts can separate fantasy-land gifts like 'Kremlin Assassination Plan for American Soldiers' from actual Russian plans. ..."
I think the only Spanish connection it is a convenient location for whatever they were
up to off-shore. We are expected to trust the intelligence services word that
Litvinenko/Skripal/whomever were investigating the 'Russian Mafia' in Spain, so in reality it
could be anything.
What we do know is that Spain signed an updated SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement) with the
United States in 2012 (Second Amendment) and 2015 (Third Amendment). Why should this be
linked to UK Russian assets like Litvinenko & Skripal? Because we know that when the
United States wants to do something off the books , i.e. that is techincally illegal
for their citizens to do on their soil, the UK more than happy to oblige (sic. the choice of
Steele's Orbis company in the UK to peddle lies for the Democrats to say that they only lost
the US election because of someone else. Everybody else's fault but not theirs.
And courtesy of today's Independent, the words of that most noble and trustworthy lying
cnut Browder as regards "Russian Meddling" in the affairs of my pathetic Motherland:
Will the Russia report 'follow the money'?
Russia is operating in the UK through "oligarchs" who "spend their money on highly
placed people", according to British investment firm boss Bill Browder.
Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital, who gave evidence for the report, told the BBC
said these figures "would basically do intelligence and influence work".
How far will the report delve into the influence of Russian money in British politics?
Although this morning's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) 50-page document is
expected to cover political donations from wealthy Russians, reports suggest it won't
actually name any names.
Spoken by a person who changed his citizenship so as to dodge paying tax. What a slimy toad Browder is!
I shouldn't have said that: toads are very useful creatures.
See -- or better: do not, see unless you have a vomit bag near at hand:
UK politics news live: Latest updates as long-awaited Russia report to be released
today | The Independent
Of course, though, Browder is not an oligarch himself. He's an 'investment firm boss'. And
naturally he does not himself engage 'basically in intelligence and influence work'. He only
single-handedly managed to get the Magnitsky Act on the books, where it will stay forever
although the German press is belatedly owning up that Magnitsky was not the pink-faced legal
cherub Browder portrayed. If that's not influence, I don't know what is.
The west is so fixed on 'getting' Russia that it must simply make things up when it cannot
find real reasons for its hatred. You could say that the USA with its marble-this-and-that
secret algorithms is making up online traffic and attributing it to Russia, but I'm pretty
sure other western countries are not complete oafs themselves in the computer world, and if
you know what you're looking for I'm sure that their analysts can separate fantasy-land gifts
like 'Kremlin Assassination Plan for American Soldiers' from actual Russian plans.
But they
pretend to be fooled. And the best they can come up with is that Russia is behind upsets like
the Black Lives Matter movement which are tearing the USA apart. If Russia always had such a
mysterious weapon, why did it wait so long to use it when the USA and UK spit in its face
every day?
The UK will later impose sanctions independently for the first time on dozens of
individuals accused of human rights abuses around the world.
Dominic Raab will name the first violators to have their assets frozen as part of a new
post-Brexit regime.
These are expected to include Russian officials thought to be implicated in the death
of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
The whistleblower's maltreatment while in custody has been condemned by the European
Court of Human Rights.
In the past, the UK has almost always imposed sanctions collectively as a member of the
United Nations or European Union but, after its departure from the EU in January, a new
framework is being put in place in UK law .
####
The UK is sanctimonious to a fault. The UK says Magnitsky was a crackerjack tax lawyer and
whistleblower who exposed a gigantic tax fraud by the Russian government. The Russian
government says Magnitsky was a crooked accountant who masterminded a tax-cheat scheme to
help a western crook set up tax shelters and buy Gazprom stock at the price accorded to
nationals only. The UK has been caught in lie after lie after lie, and the scenarios it has
constructed for wrongdoing by Russia on its own soil will barely withstand critical thinking
by alcoholics and farmyard animals. Who's got form here?
By John Ryan, Ph.D . – Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar, University of Winnipeg, Canada
If anyone has proven the adage that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on it shoes,"
it's Bill Browder. The mega-rich vulture capitalist has been spinning a yarn for years.
Intriguingly, after Germany's leading news magazine kiboshed his fake narrative, Anglo-American media ignored the revelations.
Browder's narrative suits the US/UK establishment as it provides a convenient excuse to sanction Russia, but the story has more
holes than Swiss cheese.
The billionaire vulture capitalist has been a figure of some prominence on the world scene for the past decade. A few months back,
Der Spiegel
published a major exposé on him and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, but the US/UK mainstream media failed to follow it up and so,
aside from Germany, few people are aware of Browder's background.
Browder had gone to Moscow in 1996 to take advantage of the privatization of state companies by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, a Moscow investment firm registered in offshore Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For
a time, it was the largest foreign investor in Russian securities. Hermitage Capital Management
was rated as extremely successful after
earning almost 3,000 percent in its operations between 1996 and December 2007.
During the corrupt Boris Yeltsin years, with his business partner's US$25 million, Browder
amassed a
fortune. Profiting from the large-scale privatizations in Russia from 1996 to 2006, his Hermitage firm eventually
grew to $4.5 billion.
When Browder encountered financial difficulties with Russian authorities, he portrayed himself as an anti-corruption activist
and became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, which resulted in economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials. However,
an examination of Browder's record in Russia and his testimony in court cases reveal contradictions with his statements to the public
and Congress, and raises questions about his motives in attacking corruption in Russia.
Although he has claimed that he was an 'activist shareholder' and campaigned for Russian companies to adopt Western-style governance,
it has been reported that he cleverly destabilized companies he was targeting for takeover. Canadian blogger Mark Chapman has
revealed that after Browder would buy a minority share in a company, he would resort to lawsuits against this company through
shell companies he controlled. This would destabilize the company with charges of corruption and insolvency. To prevent its collapse,
the Russian government would intervene by injecting capital into it, causing its stock to rise -- with the result that Browder's
profits would rise exponentially.
Later, through Browder's Russian-registered subsidiaries, his accountant Magnitsky
acquired extra shares in Russian gas companies such as Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft and Gazprom. This procedure enabled Browder's
companies to pay the residential tax rate of 5.5 percent instead of the 35 percent that foreigners would have to pay.
However, the procedure to bypass the Russian presidential decree that banned foreign companies and citizens from purchasing equities
in Gazprom was an illegal act. Because of this and other suspected transgressions, Magnitsky was interrogated in 2006 and later in
2008. Initially he was interviewed as a suspect and then as an accused. He was then arrested and charged by Russian prosecutors with
two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in conspiracy with Bill Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn, two of Browder's
shell companies to hold shares that he bought. Unfortunately, in 2009, Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention because of a
failure by
prison officials to provide prompt medical assistance.
Browder has challenged this account and for years he has maintained that Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted act of revenge
by Russian authorities against a heroic anti-corruption activist.
It's only recently that Browder's position was challenged by the European Court of Human Rights, which in its ruling on August
27, 2019 concluded that Magnitsky's "arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable suspicion of his having committed
a criminal offence." And as such, "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion."
"The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy,
started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts."
Prior to Magnitsky's arrest, because of what Russia considered to be questionable activities, Browder had been refused entry to
Russia in 2005. However, he did not take lightly his rebuff by the post-Yeltsin Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As succinctly
expressed
by Professor Halyna Mokrushyna at the University of Ottawa:
[Browder] began to engage in a worldwide campaign against the Russian authorities, accusing them of corruption and violation
of human rights. The death of his accountant and auditor Sergei Magnitsky while in prison became the occasion for Browder to launch
an international campaign presenting the death as a ruthless silencing of an anti-corruption whistleblower. But the case of Magnitsky
is anything but.
Despite Browder's claims that Magnitsky died as a result of torture and beatings, authentic documents and testimonies show that
Magnitsky died because of medical neglect – he was not provided adequate treatment for a gallstone condition. It was negligence typical
at that time of prison bureaucracy, not a premeditated killing. Because of the resulting investigation, many high-level functionaries
in the prison system were fired or demoted.
For the past 10 years, Browder has maintained that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by prison guards. Without any verifiable
evidence he has asserted that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards over 1 hour and 18 minutes. This was never corroborated
by anybody, including by autopsy reports. It was even denied by Magnitsky's mother in a video interview.
Nevertheless, on the basis of his questionable beliefs, he has carried on a campaign to discredit and vilify Russia and its government
and leaders.
In addition to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Browder's basic underlying beliefs and assumptions are being
seriously challenged. Very recently, on May 5, 2020, an American investigative journalist, Lucy Komisar, published an article with
the heading
Forensic photos of Magnitsky show no marks on torso :
On Fault Lines today I revealed that I have obtained never published forensic photos of the body of Sergei Magnitsky, William
Browder's accountant, that show not a mark on his torso. Browder claims he was beaten to death by prison guards. Magnitsky died
at 9:30pm Nov 16, 2009, and the photos were taken the next day.
I noted on the broadcast that though the photos and documents are solid, several dozen U.S. media – both allegedly progressive
and mainstream -- have refused to publish this information. And if that McCarthyite censorship continues, the result of rampant
fear-inducing Russophobia, I will publish it and the evidence on this website.
Despite evidence such as this, till this day Browder maintains that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death with rubber batons. It's
this narrative that has attracted the attention of the US Congress, members of parliament, diplomats and human rights activists.
To further refute his account, a 2011
analysis by the Physicians for Human Rights International Forensics Program of documents provided by Browder found no evidence
he was beaten to death.
In his writings, as supposed evidence, Browder provides links to two untranslated Russian documents. They were compiled immediately
after Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009. Recent investigative research has
revealed that one of these appears to be a forgery. The first document, D309, states that shortly before Magnitsky's death:
"Handcuffs were used in connection with the threat of committing an act of self-mutilation and suicide, and that the handcuffs
were removed after thirty minutes." To further support this, a forensic review states that while in the prison hospital, "Magnitsky
exhibited behavior diagnosed as 'acute psychosis' by Dr. A. V. Gaus at which point the doctor ordered Mr. Magnitsky to be restrained
with handcuffs."
The second document, D310, is identically worded to D309 except for a change in part of the preceding sentence. The sentence in
D309 has the phrase "special means were" is changed in D310 to "a rubber baton was."
As such, while D309 is perfectly coherent, in D310 the reference to a rubber baton makes no sense whatsoever, given the title
and text it shares with D309. This and other inconsistencies, including signatures on these documents, make it apparent that D310
was copied from D309 and that D310 is a forgery. Furthermore, there is no logical reason for two almost identical reports to have
been created, with only a slight difference in one sentence. There is no way of knowing who forged it and when, but this forged document
forms a major basis for Browder's claim that Magnitsky was clubbed to death.
The fact that there is no credible evidence to indicate that Magnitsky was subjected to a baton attack, combined with forensic
photos of Magnitsky's body shortly after death that show no marks on it, provides evidence that appears to repudiate Browder's decade-long
assertions that Magnitsky was viciously murdered while in jail.
With evidence such as this, it repeatedly becomes clear that Browder's narrative contains mistakes and inconsistencies that distort
the overall view of the events leading to Magnitsky's death.
Despite Magnitsky's death, the case against him continued in Russia and he was found guilty of corruption in a posthumous trial.
Actually, the trial's main purpose was to investigate alleged fraud by Bill Browder, but to proceed with this they had to include
the accountant Magnitsky as well. The Russian court found both of them guilty of fraud. Afterwards, the case against Magnitsky was
closed because of his death.
After Browder was refused entry to Russia in November of 2005, he launched a campaign insisting that his departure from Russia
resulted from his anti-corruption activities. However, the real reason for the cancellation of his visa that he never mentions is
that in 2003, a Russian provincial court had convicted Browder of evading $40 million in taxes. In addition, his illegal
purchases of shares in Gazprom through the use of offshore shell companies
were reportedly valued at another $30 million, bringing the total figure of tax evasion to $70 million.
It's after this that the Russian federal government next took up the case and initially went after Magnitsky, the accountant who
carried out Browder's schemes.
But back in the US, Browder portrayed himself as the ultimate truth-teller, and embellished his tale by asserting that Sergei
Magnitsky was a whistleblowing "tax lawyer," rather than one of Browder's accountants implicated in tax fraud. As his case
got more involved, he presented a convoluted explanation that he was not responsible for bogus claims made by his companies. This
is indeed an extremely complicated matter and as such only a summary of some of this will be presented.
The essence of the case is that in 2007, three shell companies that had once been owned by Browder were used to claim a $232 million
tax refund based on trumped-up financial loses. Browder has stated that the companies were stolen from him, and that in a murky operation
organized by a convicted fraudster, they were re-registered in the names of others. There is evidence, however, that Magnitsky and
Browder may have been part of this convoluted scheme.
Browder's main company in Russia was Hermitage Capital Management, and associated with this firm were a large number of shell
companies, some in the Russian republic of Kalmykia and some in the British Virgin Islands. A law firm in Moscow, Firestone Duncan,
owned by Americans, did the legal work for Browder's Hermitage. Sergei Magnitsky was one of the accountants for Firestone Duncan
and was assigned to work for Hermitage.
An accountant colleague of Magnitsky's at Firestone Duncan, Konstantin Ponomarev, was interviewed in 2017 by Komisar, who said:
According to Ponomarev, the firm – and Magnitsky -- set up an offshore structure that Russian investigators would later
say was used for tax evasion and illegal share purchases by Hermitage the structure helped Browder execute tax-evasion and illegal
share purchase schemes.
He said the holdings were layered to conceal ownership: The companies were 'owned' by Cyprus shells Glendora and Kone, which,
in turn, were 'owned' by an HSBC Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. Ponomarev said the real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund.
He said the structure allowed money to move through Cyprus to Guernsey with little or no taxes paid along the way. Profits could
get cashed out in Guernsey by investors of the Hermitage Fund and HSBC.
Ponomarev said that in 1996, the firm developed for Browder 'a strategy of how to buy Gazprom shares in the local market,
which was restricted for foreign investors.'
In the course of their investigation, on June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the offices of Hermitage and Firestone
Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers and corporate stamps and seals. They were looking for evidence to support
Russian charges of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares of Gazprom.
In a statement to US senators on July 27, 2017, Browder
stated that Russian Interior Ministry officials "seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies
of the funds that I advised. I didn't know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old
named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials
had."
Contrary to what Browder claims, Magnitsky had been his accountant for a decade. He had never acted as a lawyer, nor did he have
the qualifications to do so. In fact, in 2006, when questioned by Russian investigators, Magnitsky
said he was an
auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. In Browder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, he claimed Magnitsky
was his lawyer, but in 2015, in his testimony under oath in the US government's Prevezon case, Browder told a different story, as
will now be related.
On Browder's initiative, in December 2012, he presented documents to the New York District Attorney alleging that a Russian company,
Prevezon, had "benefitted from part of the $230 million dollar theft uncovered by Magnitsky and used those funds to buy a number
of luxury apartments in Manhattan." In September 2013, the New York District Attorney's office filed money-laundering charges
against Prevezon. The company hired high-profile New York-based lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
As reported by Der Spiegel, Browder would not voluntarily agree to testify in court, so Prevezon's lawyers sent process servers
to present him with a subpoena, which he refused to accept and was caught on video literally running away. In March 2015, the judge
in the Prevezon case ruled that Browder would have to give testimony as part of pre-trial discovery. Later, while in court and under
oath and confronted with numerous documents, Browder was totally evasive. Lawyer Mark Cymrot spent six hours examining him, beginning
with the following exchange:
Cymrot asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?
"No."
Critically important, during the court case, the responsible US investigator admitted during questioning that his findings were
based exclusively on statements and documents from Browder and his team. Under oath, Browder was unable to explain how he and his
people managed to track the flow of money and make the accusation against Prevezon. In his 2012 letter that launched the court case,
Browder referred to "corrupt schemes" used by Prevezon, but when questioned under oath, he admitted he didn't know of any. In fact,
to almost every question put forth by Mark Cymrot, Browder replied that he didn't know or didn't remember.
(Read the next part of The Real Bill Browder story on Thursday, here on RT)
20 Saudi nationals involved in the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi;
25 Russian nationals involved in the mistreatment and death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky,
who uncovered widespread corruption;
two high-ranking Myanmar generals involved in violence against Rohingya people and
other ethnic minorities
Two organisations involved in forced labour, torture and murder in North Korea's gulags
have also been listed
The new autonomous regime will allow the UK to work independently with allies such as
the US, Canada, Australia and the EU
####
But not Mohammed Bin Salman, obvs. Those weapons aren't going to sell themselves!
Can the UK government put itself on the list for arbitary detention and expulsion of Brits
born in Jamaica but resident in the UK for decades and asked to come to the UK due to
the shortage of national labor, aka the Windrush scandal? The latest news on that is there is
no automatic redress for those screwed over by Theresa May+. They have to prove they that
they had been unfairly targeted!
'Suspected' killers. That's good enough for sanctions these days. Hopefully the rest of
the EU will take Brexit as an opportunity to break with the Russophobic policies of the loony
UK and its crackpot big brother, and re-orient its economy on a separate trajectory from
theirs. We're already going to end up with two distinct trading blocs who operate largely
outside one another, to the detriment of both but much more so to the United States. We don't
need three. I'm watching in appalled fascination to see what happens to the American airliner
market when it doesn't get any more Chinese orders. Once I would have said it was impossible
that Boeing would go under, but now I'm not so sure.
Speaking of Boeing, no more 747's will be built after the current order backlog is
completed, about 13 more planes. That'll be it for four-engine airliners – too
expensive to run. Twin-engine planes can achieve almost the same range for less outlay. And
economy is going to have to be the watchword of the aviation industry for awhile if it is to
survive: air travel in the USA is down about 80% in the past week. Of course Boeing stock
rose, though, because the investor class lives in a different reality.
I can't help noting that this will mean Boeing will rely even more heavily on the 737.
"... Browder testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee ..."
"... claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards ..."
"... Browder's Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it. ..."
"... She says there has been a violation of Article 165 of the criminal code. ..."
"... Browder translates that into Starova accusing his companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his testimony , Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. ..."
"... Magnitsky's body on a cot in the hospital ward. ..."
"... Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Script: The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door. ..."
"... Magnitsky face shoulders on hospital-bed ..."
"... Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Browder doctored report claims a section illegible, third line. ..."
"... Russian document shows nothing is illegible. ..."
"... Dr. Robert Bux ..."
"... They do exist, but Browder did not give them to PHR. ..."
"... Forensic photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee ..."
"... Forensic schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries. ..."
"... closed craniocerebral injury ..."
"... No signs of a violent death detected." ..."
"... Magnitsky death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected ..."
Browder
testimony
to
Senate Judiciary Committee
claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards
.
The U.S. and UK are intensifying their collaborative Cold War against Russia. In Washington, calls for sanctions are based on
the fake "bountygate," and the UK has sanctioned selected Russians based on William Browder's Magnitsky hoax.
The "bountygate" charge that Russia paid militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is unproved by U.S. intelligence
agencies and even discounted by the international wire-tapping National Security Agency (NSA). The UK
sanctions
against
25 Russians, judges and court officials, tax investigators, and prison doctors, are based on disproved claims by billionaire
investor William Browder that they were responsible for the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
Browder's Magnitsky story is a pillar of America's Russiagate, which has five. Before bountygate, there was the 2019 Mueller
Report which found no evidence that President Trump had colluded with the Russians, the Jan 2017 intelligence agencies'
charge
of
Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election which concludes with the admission that they had no proof; and the 2016
accusation that Russians had stolen Democratic National Committee emails, made by the private security group CrowdStrike,
later walked back by CrowdStrike's president
Shawn
Henry
at a secret House hearing in Dec 2017, but not revealed till this May.
With the UK, we return to the first pillar of the U.S. Russiagate story, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which targeted many on the
U.S. list. The Magnitsky Act is recognized as the beginning of the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations. It is based on a
hoax invented by Browder and easily disproved by documentary evidence, if governments cared about that.
The European Court of Human Rights on Magnitsky's arrest
First, a few of the obvious fake charges. Three judges are accused of detaining Magnitsky, which the UK says "facilitated" his
mistreatment and denial of medical care. However, the European Court of Human Rights
ruled
in
August 2019, "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion." The Court said: "The
accusations were based on documentary evidence relating to the payment of taxes by those companies and statements by several
disabled persons who had confessed to sham work for the two companies."
The decision to arrest him was made after "investigating authorities noted that during a tax inquiry which had preceded the
criminal investigation, Mr Magnitskiy had influenced witnesses, and that he had been preparing to flee abroad. In particular,
he had applied for an entry visa to the United Kingdom and had booked a flight to Kyiv." He was a flight risk.
Several of the UK targets were said to have "facilitated" mistreatment of Magnitsky because they had been involved in a fraud
he exposed. The reference is to a $230-million tax refund scam against the Russian Treasury.
Back to the ECHR: "The Court observe[d] that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings
against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent
acts." The taxes were the real story; the fraud narrative was a cover-up.
The fake fraud story
Magnitsky did not uncover a massive fraud. That was the tax refund fraud in which companies engaged in collusive lawsuits,
"lost" the suits, and "agreed" to pay damages equal to their entire year's profits. They then requested a full refund of taxes
paid on the now zero gains. The fake lawsuits and payouts were first revealed to police by Russian shell company director
Rimma Starova
April
9
and
July
10,
2008. (Russian originals
April
and
July
.)
With investigators on the trail, Browder's Hermitage Fund director Paul Wrench filed a complaint about the fraud, and Browder
gave the story to The
NYTimes
and
the Russian paper
Vedomosti
,
which published it July 24, 2008, long before Magnitsky mentioned it in October 2008. His
testimony
did
not accuse any officials.
Browder's
Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his
narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it.
She says there has been a
violation of
Article
165
of the criminal code.
Browder translates that into Starova accusing his
companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his
testimony
,
Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky.
The main story at the center of the Magnitsky Acts in the U.S. and UK are not that he was mistreated or failed to get good
medical care, which is what is mostly alleged here. That would put dozens of U.S. prison officials in the crosshairs,
including recently those running state prison systems in
Alabama
and
Mississippi
.
It is that he was murdered. In the only reference to beating, the head of the Matrosskaya detention center is accused of
"ordering the handcuffing and beating" of Magnitsky before he died.
The U.S. Act, on which the British version is modeled, says that in detention Magnitsky "was beaten by 8 guards with rubber
batons on the last day of his life." But the alleged assailants' names are not on the list. A key argument made by sponsors
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md) and Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass) was that the people targeted – tax investigators, court officials,
hospital workers -- played a role in this claimed murder of Magnitsky. (Cardin and McGovern haven't responded to my requests
to comment on contradictory evidence.)
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab takes the same line, declaring, "You cannot set foot in this country, and we will seize your
blood-drenched ill-gotten gains if you try," as he announced the new sanctions. Blood-drenched? No evidence supplied for the
sanctioned Russians.
For Browder, the purpose of the Magnitsky Acts he promotes in the West is as a political tool to build a wall against Russia's
attempt to have him answer for documented financial frauds totaling at least $100 million, and with new evidence as much as
$400 million.
The death hoax: Forensic photos tell the truth
Here is the story of Magnitsky death hoax, with links to evidence, including how Browder forged and falsified documents.
Browder had the Russian forensic reports and photos that were made after Magnitsky's death but suppressed what did not support
his arguments. The photos in this forensic
report
show
that Magnitsky, allegedly beaten to death, didn't have a life-threatening mark on his body.
Magnitsky's
body on a cot in the hospital ward.
Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L.
Magnitsky.
Script:
The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door.
Magnitsky
face shoulders on hospital-bed
.
Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky.
Browder doctored part of another forensic
report
provided
in translation to the Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass., for its
analysis
of
Magnitsky's death. It notes as "illegible" words that show there were no beating marks on Magnitsky's body and that there was
no scalp damage. The deleted parts of the true translation are underlined.
"The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck, trunk, upper and lower
extremities,
with pressure on them
with a finger disappear and restore their original color after 8 minutes. Damage
not found on the scalp."
The doctored line reads, "The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck,
trunk, upper and lower extremities, (illegible) not found on the scalp."
Here in the report that Browder gave PHR:
Browder
doctored report claims a section illegible, third line.
The paragraph in the Russian
document
shows
nothing is illegible.
Russian
document shows nothing is illegible.
The Russian words omitted in the doctored English document are "при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают
свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено."
The full Russian text can be translated online: Трупные пятна обильные, синюшно-фиолетовые, разлитые, располагающиеся на
задней поверхности шеи, туловища, верхних и нижних конечностей, при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают
свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено. Кости лицевого скелета, хрящи
носа на ощупь целы. Глаза закрыты.
What the American pathologist who analyzed Browder's documents said
Dr.
Robert Bux
Dr. Robert C. Bux, then coroner/chief medical examiner for the El Paso County Coroner's Office in Colorado Springs, was the
forensic expert on the team that wrote the PHR
report
.
Bux told me, "I do not think that these spots are contusions. Contusions will not go away and can be demonstrated by incising
or cutting into the tissues under the skin. These are reportedly all on the posterior aspect of the neck, body and limbs and
may represent postmortem
lividity
when
the body was viewed by the prosecutor of the autopsy."
Dr. Bux said, "If this is lividity (red purple coloration of the skin) it is not yet fixed and will blanch to a pale skin
color and red purple coloration will disappear. If the body is then placed face up i.e. supine then after a few minutes then
it will appear again. This is simply due to blood settling in the small blood vessels and a function of gravity."
It's not what a layman reading Browder's forged "illegible" might think.
Dr. Bux added, "Having said all of this, I have never seen any
autopsy photographs demonstrating this, and while photographs should have been taken to document all skin abnormalities as
well as all surfaces of the body to document the presence or absence of trauma, I do not know if photographs were taken and
withheld or never taken
."
PHR said, "A full and independent review of the cause of death of S.L. Magnitsky is not possible given the documentation
presented and available to PHR." The document list is at its report pages
2-3
.
The PHR autopsy protocol claims that there are "photo tables on 2 sheets" and "schematic representation of injuries on 1
sheet. However, if they exist, they were not available for the present review."
They do exist, but Browder did not
give them to PHR.
Browder posted and widely distributed this composite of
photos
of
bruises on Magnitsky's hand and knee taken November 17
th
,
2009, the day after the accountant's death.
Forensic
photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee
He got them from Russian forensic
Report
2052.
Katie
Fisher
,
doing public relations for Hermitage,
posted
them,
but not the text, to Google Cloud.
The report cited "circular abrasions in the wrist area," a "bluish-violet bruise" and "multiple strip-like horizontally
located abrasions."
It said, "A bruise located on the inner surface of the right lower limb in the projection of the ankle joint appeared 3-6 days
before the time death."
It concluded, "[T]hese injuries in living persons do not entail a temporary disability or a significant permanent loss of
general disability and are not regarded as harm to health, they are not in a cause and effect relationship with death."
The forensic reports attribute bruises to Magnitsky wearing handcuffs and kicking and hitting against cell doors. Magnitsky's
lawyer Dmitri Kharitonov
told
filmmaker
Andrei Nekrasov, "I think he was simply banging on the door with all his force trying to make them let him out and none paid
attention."
No other injuries found
The same
report
includes
schematic drawings of Magnitsky's body on which to note other relevant marks or injuries.
The report said,
"There were no marks or injuries noted on his head
or torso No other injuries were found on the corpse
" Browder didn't send PHR these drawings or make them public.
Forensic
schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries.
Asked if there was evidence that Magnitsky was "beaten to death by
riot guards," Dr. Bux told me, "I have no evidence to suggest that this occurred."
For the record,
PHR
said
Magnitsky's
death was from untreated serious illness. Even without the body photos, its experts didn't claim a beating. Forensic analysts
never have.
Manipulating the death certificate
To promote his fabrication, Browder posted a deceptive PowerPoint of the death certificate that indicated a
"
closed
craniocerebral injury
?"
circled in red, with the other text too small to
read.
Magnitsky
death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected
"Closed" meant "past." Several forensic documents include an interview with Magnitsky's mother Natalya Magnitskaya. She
told
investigators,
"In 1993 – I can't say a more accurate date, S.L Magnitsky had a craniocerebral injury. He slipped on the street and as a
result hit his head, after which he had headaches for some time."
Investigators obtained full medical records including this on page 29 of
Report
555-10
in English, which Browder gave PHR: "
On February 4, 1993, at about
08:40 a.m.., in his house entrance he slipped and fell down hitting his head, lost consciousness for a short time, vomited,
attended for emergency help by an ambulance which took him to the City Clinic Hospital (GKB).
Was examined by the
neurosurgeon in the reception ward, craniogram without pathema. Diagnosis: brain concussion, recommended treatment to be taken
on an out-patient clinic basis."
Browder's assertion that the "closed craniocerebral injury" came from a beating was a lie.
Browder's changing stories on the death of Magnitsky
Browder did not initially claim Magnitsky had been murdered. He said Magnitsky, left alone uncared for in a room, had simply
died. After a few years, pushing the Magnitsky Act, he declared Magnitsky had been tied up and beaten by rubber baton-wielding
thugs until dead.
Graphic by Michael Thau.
Browder December 2009 tells
Chatham
House
, London, "I don't know what they were thinking. I don't know whether they killed him deliberately on the night of
the 16th, or if he died of neglect."
"They put him in a straight-jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited 1 hour and 18 minutes until he died." December
2010,
San
Diego Law School
.
Then, promoting the Magnitsky Act, "They put him in an isolation cell, tied him to a bed, then allowed eight guards guards
beat him with rubber batons for 118 min until he was dead." December 2011,
University
of Cambridge
Judge Business School.
" .they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons.
That night he was found dead on the cell floor." July 2017, U.S.
Senate
Judiciary Committee
.
What the Moscow Public Oversight Commission says really happened
The
Public
Oversight Commission
, an independent Russian NGO, reports Magnitsky's final day differently. November 16, 2009:
7:00pm. The patient behaves inadequately. Talks to a "voice," looks disorientated, and shouts that someone wants to kill him.
His condition is diagnosed as psychosis. The emergency doctor was called. There are no body damages apart from traces of
handcuffs on the wrists.
7:30pm. He was left unattended without medical support.
8:48pm. Emergency team arrived. When emergency doctors entered the special cell, Sergei was sitting on the cot, with his eyes
unfocused.
9:15pm. The patient was surveyed again as his condition deteriorated. He lost consciousness. The reanimation procedure was
started (indirect heart massage and ventilation of lungs using the Ambu pillow). The patient was transferred to the special
room where he received an artificial ventilation of lungs and a hormones injection.
9:50pm. The patient died."
The commission reported no evidence of beating. The Russian forensic and medical experts' conclusion was that Magnitsky had
heart disease (arteriosclerosis), diabetes, hepatitis, and pancreatitis, some illnesses predating arrest. They wrote detailed
criticism of the doctors' treatment, saying that it wasn't timely or adequate and that "the shortcomings in the provision of
the medical assistance to S.L. Magnitsky" caused his death.
But it's not the riot squad beating Browder, with no evidence, sold to the U.S. Congress, the State Department, the UK
Parliament, the Foreign Office and the media. Or that U.S. or UK authorities or media ever attempted to prove. Because like
the Tonkin Gulf "incident" and Iraq's WMD, the weaponized Russiagate stories have a foreign/military policy goal. Truth is
quite irrelevant.
The organisers projected an image of the cover of the Russian Constitution against the
background of Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and the inscription "1993. It was yours " Then
there is an image of the Russian people and the message "2020. It will be ours!", followed by
a call to come to vote, was projected on the building of the US Embassy. The light projection
was organised by the art group "Re:Venge".
https://www.stalkerzone.org/the-russian-constitution-was-projected-onto-the-us-embassy-building-in-moscow/
Ha, I really like this one ! Would have loved to watch 'das dumme Gesicht' (something like
>>stupid face<< but stronger. like the Germans say) of the latest Trump's edition
of silly ambassadors, lol !!!
"... Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak. ..."
VK, re: Russia's grip on Europe is gradually tightening from the U.K.'s
INDEPENDENT
It's behind a paywall but I read just enough to be curious as to how someone could
possibly justify a clickbait title like that.
I suspect that the rest of the article is just
going to recap Russia's alleged sins in order to fan hatred but how can someone objectively
say that Russia is tightening its grip on Europe?
FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no
reinstatement on horizon.
FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large
commercial relationship w/Germany.
What is the 'overwhelming' evidence that the Russians poisoned the Skripal's, Novichok can be
made by just about anyone.
Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia
has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is
'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak.
Interesting history Browder has. I suspect he has a history with Putin before Putin became
President , but its hard to find anything on a connection. Anyways lots of interesting
connections, meaningful or not, I cant say.
[Hide MORE]
1985 - bugged version of PROMIS was sold for Soviet government use, with the media mogul
Robert Maxwell as a conduit.
1990 - just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in
Poland for Boston Consulting Group. The government had begun privatizing state-owned
companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations.
1991 - Anatoly Sobchak, a former law professor of Putin's at Leningrad State, became mayor
of Leningrad.* Sobchak hired Vladimir Putin, whom he had known when Putin worked at Leningrad
State. Putin was still on active reserve with the KGB.
Putin's tenure in Sobchak's office was so rife with scandal that it led to a host of
investigations into illegal assignment of licenses and contracts . Putin was head of the
Committee for Foreign Liaison; collaborated with criminal gangs in regulating gambling; a
money-laundering operation by the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company, where Kumarin
was involved and Putin served on the advisory board; Putin's role in providing a monopoly for
the Petersburg Fuel Company, then controlled by the Tambov criminal organization; and much,
much more -- virtually all of which was whitewashed. While he was in St. Petersburg in the
nineties, Putin signed many hundreds of contracts doling out funds to his cronies.
1991 - November 5, Robert Maxwell, allegedly drowned after falling off his yacht in the
Canary Islands near the northwest coast of Africa. Billions were missing from his pension
funds
Maxwell's investment bankers included Salomon Brothers. Eventually, the pension funds were
replenished with monies from investment banks Shearson Lehman and Goldman Sachs, as well as
the British government.
It was March 1991 when William Browder went to work for British billionaire Robert Maxwell
as his "investment manager". Just how deep into the investment decisions of Maxwell did
Browder participate as an investment manager?
1991 November 10, Maxwell's funeral took place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the
resting place for the nation's most revered heroes. Prime Minister Shamir eulogized: "He has
done more Israel than can today be said."
1992 - Interestingly, after Maxwell died, Bill Browder went to work for the Salomon
Brothers in the middle of their own scandal. Browder was put in charge of the Russian
proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers. He was given 25 million to invest and used
it by paying cash for vouchers in Russian companies the government had issued to citizens ,
and used them to buy shared at public auction. In a short period he turned that into 125
million
The scandal at Salomon Brothers was the manipulation of the US Treasury auctions back
then.After that scandal where the government was threatening to shut down Salomon Brothers
who was the biggest bond dealer in the USA for manipulating markets, all of a sudden, people
from Goldman Sachs started taking posts in government.
1996-Browder left Salomon Brothers and with Edmond Safra founded Hermitage Capital
Management for the purpose of investing initial seed capital of $25 million in Russia during
the period of the mass privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union. Beny Steinmetz was
another of the original investors in Hermitage, the Israeli diamond billionaire.
Cyprus is a favorite place for Russian to launder money. Thats probably why Browder and
his accounting advisor Jamison Firestone chose it to launder Browder's Russian profits.
Browder from about 1997 to the mid-2000s used Cyprus shell companies to move money out of
Russia to cheat the country of multi-millions of dollars in taxes. He used the Russian shells
to invest in shares, including Gazprom shares that were illegal for foreigners to buy in
Russia, then moved the shares to Cyprus shells
1996 article entitled, "The Money Plane," published by New York Magazine detailed how the
"Russian mob gets a shipment of up to a billion dollars in fresh $100 bills," Edmond Safra's
bank, Republic National, was directly implicated.
Guess we know where Browder got the cash money to pay for the vouchers
1998 - If Salomon had not been merged with Travelers Group in 1997 (which owned retail
brokerage, Smith Barney), no doubt Salomon Brothers would have collapsed in the 1998
Long-Term Capital Management debacle created by one of their own – Salomons John
Meriwether.
Safra lost $1 billion in Russia during the 1998 Long-Term Capital Management crisis over
Russian bonds and investments which was why he put his bank, Republic National Bank, up for
sale to HSBC in 1999.
1999 - Following the Russian financial crisis of 1998, despite significant outflows from
the fund, Hermitage became a prominent shareholder in the Russian oil and gas. It was in 1999
when VSMPO-AVISMA Corporation (Russian:
ВСМПО-АВИСМА) – the
world's largest titanium producer - filed a RICO lawsuit against Browder and other Avisma
investors including Kenneth Dart, alleging they illegally siphoned company assets into
offshore accounts and then transferred the funds to U.S. accounts at Barclays.
Browder and his co-defendants settled with Avisma in 2000; they sold their Avisma shares
as part of the confidential settlement agreement.
1999 - Republican National Bank was owned by Safra . On May 11, HSBC, announced a $10.3
billion deal to purchase Edmond Safra's holdings including the Republic National Bank of New
York and Safra's shares in Bill Browder's firm, Hermitage Capital. The announcement came only
nine months after Russia's economy collapsed and Browder's clients, lost over $900 million.
It was also nine months after $4.8 billion in IMF funds was deposited in an undisclosed
account at Safra's bank and well before the public became aware that that same money was
dispersed and stolen through the Bank of New York, off-shore companies, and foreign financial
institutions.
HSBC then became Browders partner of the Heritage Fund . Browder's shell companies were
registered in Cyprus but owned by HSBC (Guernsey) as the trustee for his Hermitage Capital
Management.
Cypriot shells Glendora and Kone were part of his offshore network "owned" by an HSBC
Private Bank Guernsey Ltd trust. The real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. Assets (stocks
and money) went from Russia to Cyprus and then to parts unknown.
Republic International Trust, registered by Mossack Fonseca of Panama Papers fame and
listed on the Glendora document, was in the offshore network of Republic National Bank owner
Edmond Safra, an early investor who then held 51% of Hermitage Fund shares.
1999 December 3 - Safra was killed in suspicious fire that broke out in his Monte Carlo
home. Although some believe that Safra was killed by the Russian mafia, Lurie reported that a
Swiss prosecutor investigating the missing IMF money believed that Safra was killed "because
of his revelations to the FBI and the Swiss Prosecutor's Office investigating the
disappearance and laundering of $4.8 billion of the IMF stablilization loan." One of the more
interesting things to note here is that the prosecutor implied that Safra not only spoke with
the FBI about the missing IMF funds but with Swiss authorities as well.
Funny how Browders bosses/partners get killed
1999 - the bombings that killed nearly three hundred innocent Russians were likely the
product of a "false flag" operation that enabled Putin to consolidate power.
Putin promised to stop the plundering of the Russian state by rich oligarchs. But very few
Russians knew that Putin had been a primary actor in the same kind of activity in St.
Petersburg. And as for cleaning up corruption, one of Putin's first acts as president was to
pardon Boris Yeltsin, thereby guaranteeing immunity from prosecution to the outgoing
president.-
Putin recruited two oligarchs who were among his closest confidants, Roman Abramovich and
Lev Leviev, to undertake the highly unlikely mission of creating a new religious organization
called the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Rabbi Berel
Lazar, a leader in the Hasidic movement called Chabad-Lubavitch.
Founded in the late eighteenth century, the tiny, Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitcher
movement is a fundamentalist Hasidic sect centered on the teaching of the late Rabbi Menachem
Schneerson, who is sometimes referred to as a messiah -- moshiach -- a savior and liberator
of the Jewish people. It is antiabortion, views homosexuality as a perversion, and often
aligns itself politically with other fundamentalist groups on the right.
Its biggest donors included Leviev, an Israeli billionaire who was an Uzbek native and was
known as the "King of Diamonds" thanks to his success in the diamond trade, and Charles
Kushner, an American real estate developer who was later jailed for illegal campaign
contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Kushner is also the father of Jared
Kushner, who married Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and later became a senior adviser to
President Trump. Leviev's friendship with Lazar dates back to 1992 and, according to Haaretz,
made Leviev "the most influential, most active and most connected person in the Jewish
community of Russia and made Lazar the country's chief rabbi."
Roman Abramovich, controlled the trading arm of one of Russia's largest oil companies
through an Isle of Man company that had figured in the Bank of New York affair. Mr.
Abramovich ran the Siberian oil giant Sibneft, which sold its oil through a company called
Runicom.
His name emerged after speculation that Swiss investigators were looking into the role of
Runicom as part of the widening investigation into the laundering of up to $15 billion of
Russian money through American banks. Runicom is owned by at least two offshore companies set
up by the Valmet Group, a financial services concern partly owned by Menatep, a failed
Russian bank that used the Bank of New York."
2001- Salomon Brothers Building (WTC 7) collapses. Tenants include the Department of
Defense, the Secret Service, the IRS, and the Securities and Exchange Commission
2005 - Steinmetz of Browders Heritage Fund teamed up with another diamond magnate, Putins
buddy Lev Leviev, to purchase the top ten floors of Israel's Diamond Tower which also houses
the Israeli Diamond Exchange. Haaretz.com reported that "the buyers intend to build a
connector from the 10 floors – the top 10 floors of the building – to the diamond
exchange itself in order to benefit from the security regime of the other offices within the
exchange." And benefit they did.
According to one website reporting on a Channel 10 (Israel) news story, from 2005 –
2011, an "underground" bank was set up to provide "loans to firms using money taken from
other companies while pretending it was legally buying and selling diamonds." The bank
apparently washed over $100 million in illicit funds over the course of six years and both
Steinmetz and Leviev were directly implicated as "customers" of the bank but Neither of them
were charged in the case.
Then there's HSBC's involvement in the diamond industry and Leviev's ties not only to arms
dealer Arcadi Gaydamak via Africa-Israeli Investments but Roman Abramovich and Kushner
2007 - Browders Hermitage Capital Management, was raided by Russian interior ministry
officers, who confiscated stamps and documents. These were then used to file bogus tax
returns to the Russian Treasury, which were paid out to bank accounts controlled by Klyuev
and his associates, according to the U.S. government.
Browder claimed Organized crime carried out the tax refund fraud against the Russian
Treasury under which criminals used collusive lawsuits to fake damages and get refunds of
company taxes. The tax refund fraud using Browder's companies netted $230 million.
2008 - HSBC (Guersey) director Paul Wrench filed a complaint about the tax refund fraud in
July on behalf of Hermitage (after Starova's complaints) .
Maginitsky was arrested for being the accountant (not a lawyer) of Browder's tax evasion
schemes.
2008 - A lawsuit alleged Bayrock's projected profits were "to be laundered, untaxed
through a sham Delaware entity" to the FL Group, Iceland's largest private investment fund,
the first major firm to collapse in 2008 when Iceland's financial bubble burst, and a favored
financial instrument for loans to Russia-connected oligarchs who were, court papers claim, in
favor with Vladimir Putin. According to Bloomberg, Eva Joly, who assisted Iceland's special
prosecutor in the investigation of the financial collapse, said, "There was a huge amount of
money that came into these banks that wasn't entirely explained by central bank lending. Only
Mafia-like groups fill a gap like that."
Another significant Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal,
Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship with Semyon Kislin, the commodities trader who was
tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI, to Vyacheslav Ivankov's gang in
Brighton Beach.
In addition to being wired into the Kremlin, Sapir's son-in-law, Rotem Rosen, was a
supporter of Chabad along with Sater, Sapir, and others at Bayrock, and, as a result, was
part of an extraordinarily powerful channel between Trump and Putin. After all, the ascent of
Chabad in Russia had been part of Putin's plan to replace older Jewish institutions in Russia
with corresponding organizations that were loyal to him.
The biggest contributor to Chabad in the world was Leviev, the billionaire "King of
Diamonds" who had a direct line to Rabbi Berel Lazar, aka "Putin's rabbi," to Donald Trump,
and to Putin himself dating back to the Russian leader's early days in St. Petersburg.
Indeed, one of the biggest contributors to Chabad of Port Washington, Long Island, was
Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born Turk with a Muslim name who was not Jewish, but
nonetheless won entry into its Chai Circle as a top donor.
2013-The Hermitage Fund, an HSBC-backed vehicle that invested in Russia and became
embroiled in a diplomatic war with the Kremlin over the death of one of its accountants,
closes down..
2014, Vekselberg's Renova Group became a partner with Wilbur Ross in the takeover of the
Bank of Cyprus, which had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians.
Back in early 90's Trump found himself in financial trouble when his three casinos in
Atlantic City were under foreclosure threat from lenders. He was bailed-out by senior
managing director of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, Wilbur Ross, who Trump would later appoint
as Secretary of Commerce. Ross, who is known as the "King of Bankruptcy," specializes in
leveraged buyouts of distressed businesses.
Along with Blackstones Carl Icahn, Ross convinced bondholders to strike a deal with Trump
that allowed Trump to keep control of the casinos.
By the mid-1990s, Ross was a prominent figure in New York Democratic Party politics and
had caught the attention President Bill Clinton who appointed him to lead the U.S.-Russia
Investment Fund.
2015 - Donald Trump, after emerging from a decade of litigation, multiple bankruptcies,
and $ 4 billion in debt, had risen from the near-dead with the help of Bayrock and its
alleged ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia. "They saved his bacon," said
Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor
2015 - Kushner paid $295 million for some of the floors in the old New York Times
building, purchased in 2015 from the US branch of Israeli-Russian oligarch Leviev's company,
Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and partner, Five Mile Capital.
Kushner later borrowed $285 million from the German financial company Deutsche Bank, which
has also been linked to Russian money laundering,
Jared and Ivanka were also close to another of Putins oligarchs, Roman Abramovich and his
wife, Dasha Zhukova.
2015-While Wilbur Ross served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the bank's
Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who
had ties to both the Russian president and Russia's largest bank, Sberbank. At the time,
Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Avetisyan had earlier been selected by Putin to head a new business branch of the Russian
president's strategic initiative agency, which was tasked with improving business and
government ties.
Avetisyan's business partner, Oleg Gref, is the son of Herman Gref, Sberbank's chief
executive officer, and their consultancy has served as a "partner" to Sberbank, according to
their website. Ross had described the Russian businesses – including 120 bank branches
in Russia – as being worth "hundreds of millions of euros" in 2014 but they were sold
with other assets to Avetisyan for €7m (£6m).
Ross resigned from the Bank of Cyprus board after he was confirmed as commerce secretary
in 2017
2018 - Cyprus suspended cooperation with Russia, which had been seeking assistance from
the government in Moscow's alleged case of tax evasion against Hermitage Capital Founder Bill
Browder.
William "Bill" Browder has been a figure of some prominence on the world scene for the past
decade. A few months back, Der Spiegel published a major exposé on him and the case of Sergei Magnitsky
but the mainstream media completely ignored this report and so aside from Germany few people
are aware of Browder's background and the Magnitsky issue which resulted in sanctions on
Russia.
Browder had gone to Moscow in 1996 to take advantage of the privatization of state companies
by Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management, a Moscow
investment firm registered in offshore Guernsey in the Channel Islands. For a time, it was the
largest foreign investor in Russian securities. Hermitage Capital Management was rated as extremely
successful after earning almost 3,000 percent in its operations between 1996 and December
2007.
During the corrupt Yeltsin years, with his business partner's US $25 million, Browder
amassed a fortune . Profiting from the large-scale privatizations in Russia from 1996 to
2006 his Hermitage firm eventually grew to $4.5 billion .
When Browder encountered financial difficulties with Russian authorities he portrayed
himself as an anti-corruption activist and became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act,
which resulted in economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials. However, an examination of
Browder's record in Russia and his testimony in court cases reveals contradictions with his
statements to the public and Congress, and raises questions about his motives in attacking
corruption in Russia.
Although he has claimed that he was an 'activist shareholder' and campaigned for Russian
companies to adopt Western-style governance, it has been reported that he cleverly destabilized
companies he was targeting for takeover.
Canadian blogger Mark Chapman has revealed that after Browder would buy a minority share in
a company he would resort to lawsuits against this company through shell companies he
controlled. This would destabilize the company with charges of corruption and insolvency. To
prevent its collapse the Russian government would intervene by injecting capital into it,
causing its stock market to rise -- with the result that Browder's profits would rise
exponentially.
Later, through Browder's Russian-registered subsidiaries, his accountant
Magnitsky acquired extra shares in Russian gas companies such as Surgutneftegaz, Rosneft
and Gazprom. This procedure enabled Browder's companies to pay the residential tax rate of 5.5%
instead of the 35% that foreigners would have to pay.
However, the procedure to bypass the Russian presidential decree that banned foreign
companies and citizens from purchasing equities in Gazprom was an illegal act. Because of this
and other suspected transgressions, Magnitsky was interrogated in 2006 and later in 2008.
Initially he was interviewed as a suspect and then as an accused. He was then arrested and
charged by Russian prosecutors with two counts of aggravated tax evasion committed in
conspiracy with Bill Browder in respect of Dalnyaya Step and Saturn, two of Browder's shell
companies to hold shares that he bought. Unfortunately, in 2009 Magnitsky died in pre-trial
detention because
of a failure by prison officials to provide prompt medical assistance.
Browder has challenged this account and for years he has maintained that Magnitsky's arrest
and death were a targeted act of revenge by Russian authorities against a heroic
anti-corruption activist.
It's only recently that Browder's position was
challenged by the European Court of Human Rights who in its ruling on August 27, 2019
concluded that Magnitsky's "arrest was not arbitrary, and that it was based on reasonable
suspicion of his having committed a criminal offence." And as such "The Russians had good
reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion."
"The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal
proceedings against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that
prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent acts."
Prior to Magnitsky's arrest, because of what Russia considered to be questionable
activities, Browder had been refused entry to Russia in 2005. However, he did not take lightly
his rebuff by the post-Yeltsin Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As succinctly
expressed by Professor Halyna Mokrushyna at the University of Ottawa:
[Browder] began to engage in a worldwide campaign against the Russian authorities,
accusing them of corruption and violation of human rights. The death of his accountant and
auditor Sergei Magnitsky while in prison became the occasion for Browder to launch an
international campaign presenting the death as a ruthless silencing of an anti-corruption
whistleblower. But the case of Magnitsky is anything but.
Despite Brower's claims that Magnitsky died as a result of torture and beatings, authentic
documents
and testimonies show that Magnitsky
died because of medical neglect – he was not provided adequate treatment for a
gallstone condition. It was negligence typical at that time of prison bureaucracy, not a
premeditated killing. Because of the resulting investigation, many high level functionaries in
the prison system were fired or demoted.
For the past ten years Browder has maintained that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered by
prison guards. Without any verifiable evidence
he has asserted that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards over 1 hour and 18
minutes. This was never corroborated by anybody, including by autopsy reports. It was even
denied by Magnitsky's mother in a video interview.
Nevertheless, on the basis of his questionable beliefs, he has carried on a campaign to
discredit and vilify Russia and its government and leaders.
In addition to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, Browder's basic underlying
beliefs and assumptions are being seriously challenged. Very recently, on May 5, 2020, an
American investigative journalist, Lucy Komisar, published an article with the heading
Forensic photos of Magnitsky show no marks on torso :
On Fault Lines today I
revealed that I have obtained never published forensic photos of the body of Sergei
Magnitsky, William Browder's accountant, that show not a mark on his torso. Browder claims he
was beaten to death by prison guards. Magnitsky died at 9:30pm Nov 16, 2009, and the photos
were taken the next day.
Later in her report she states:
I noted on the broadcast that though the photos and documents are solid, several dozen
U.S. media – both allegedly progressive and mainstream -- have refused to publish this
information. And if that McCarthyite censorship continues, the result of rampant
fear-inducing Russophobia, I will publish it and the evidence on this website.
Despite evidence such as this, till this day Browder maintains that Sergei Magnitsky was
beaten to death with rubber batons. It's this narrative that has attracted the attention of the
US Congress, members of parliament, diplomats and human rights activists. To further refute his
account, a 2011 analysis by the
Physicians for Human Rights International Forensics Program of documents provided by Browder
found no evidence he was beaten to death.
In his writings, as supposed evidence, Browder provides links to two untranslated Russian
documents. They were compiled immediately after Magnitsky died on November 16, 2009.
Recent investigative research has revealed that one of these appears to be a forgery. The
first document D309 states that shortly before Magnitsky's death: "Handcuffs were used in
connection with the threat of committing an act of self-mutilation and suicide, and that the
handcuffs were removed after thirty minutes." To further support this, a
forensic review states that while in the prison hospital "Magnitsky exhibited behavior
diagnosed as "acute psychosis" by Dr. A. V. Gaus at which point the doctor ordered Mr.
Magnitsky to be restrained with handcuffs."
The second document D310 is identically worded to D309 except for a change in part of the
preceding sentence. The sentence in D309 has the phrase "special means were" is
changed in D310 to " a rubber baton was."
As such, while D309 is perfectly coherent, in D310 the reference to a rubber baton makes no
sense whatsoever, given the title and text it shares with D309. This and other inconsistences,
including signatures on these documents, make it apparent that D310 was copied from D309 and
that D310 is a forgery. Furthermore, there is no logical reason for two almost identical
reports to have been created, with only a slight difference in one sentence. There is no way of
knowing who forged it and when, but this forged document forms a major basis for Browder's
claim that Magnitsky was clubbed to death.
The fact that there is no credible evidence to indicate that Magnitsky was subjected to a
baton attack, combined with forensic photos of Magnitsky's body shortly after death that show
no marks on it, provides evidence that appears to repudiate Browder's decade-long assertions
that Magnitsky was viciously murdered while in jail.
With evidence such as this, it repeatedly becomes clear that Browder's narrative contains
mistakes and inconsistencies that distort the overall view of the events leading to Magnitsky's
death.
Despite Magnitsky's death the case against him continued in Russia and he was found guilty
of corruption in a posthumous trial. Actually, the trial's main purpose was to investigate
alleged fraud by Bill Browder, but to proceed with this they had to include the accountant
Magnitsky as well. The Russian court found both of them guilty of fraud. Afterwards, the case
against Magnitsky was closed because of his death.
After Browder was refused entry to Russia in November of 2005, he launched a campaign
insisting that his departure from Russia resulted from his anti-corruption activities. However,
the real reason for the cancellation of his visa that he never mentions is that in 2003 a
Russian provincial court had convicted Browder of evading $40 million in taxes. In addition,
his illegal purchases of shares in
Gazprom through the use of offshore shell companies were reportedly valued at another $30
million, bringing the total figure of tax evasion to $70 million.
It's after this that the Russian federal government next took up the case and initially went
after Magnitsky, the accountant who carried out Browder's schemes.
But back in the USA Browder portrayed himself as the ultimate truth-teller, and embellished
his tale by asserting that Sergei Magnitsky was a whistleblowing "tax lawyer," rather than one
of Browder's accountants implicated in tax fraud. As his case got more involved, he presented a
convoluted explanation that he was not responsible for bogus claims made by his companies. This
is indeed an extremely complicated matter and as such only a summary of some of this will be
presented.
The essence of the case is that in 2007 three shell companies that had once been owned by
Browder were used to claim a $232 million tax refund based on trumped-up financial loses.
Browder has stated that the
companies were stolen from him, and that in a murky operation organized by a convicted
fraudster, they were re-registered in the names of others. There is evidence however that
Magnitsky and Browder may have been part of this convoluted scheme.
Browder's main company in Russia was Hermitage Capital Management, and associated with this
firm were a large number of shell companies, some in the Russian republic of Kalmykia and some
in the British Virgin Islands. A law firm in Moscow, Firestone Duncan, owned by Americans, did
the legal work for Browder's Hermitage. Sergei Magnitsky was one of the accountants for
Firestone Duncan and was assigned to work for Hermitage.
An accountant colleague of Magnitsky's at Firestone Duncan, Konstantin Ponomarev, was
interviewed in 2017 by Lucy Komisar, an investigative journalist, who was doing research on
Browder's operations in Russia. In the ensuing report on this , Komisar states:
"According to Ponomarev, the firm – and Magnitsky -- set up an offshore structure
that Russian investigators would later say was used for tax evasion and illegal share
purchases by Hermitage. . .
the structure helped Browder execute tax-evasion and illegal share purchase schemes.
"He said the holdings were layered to conceal ownership: The companies were "owned" by
Cyprus shells Glendora and Kone, which, in turn, were "owned" by an HSBC Private Bank
Guernsey Ltd trust. Ponomarev said the real owner was Browder's Hermitage Fund. He said the
structure allowed money to move through Cyprus to Guernsey with little or no taxes paid along
the way. Profits could get cashed out in Guernsey by investors of the Hermitage Fund and
HSBC.
"Ponomarev said that in 1996, the firm developed for Browder 'a strategy of how to buy
Gazprom shares in the local market, which was restricted for foreign investors.'"
In the course of their investigation, on June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the
offices of Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers
and corporate stamps and seals. They were looking for evidence to support Russian charges of
tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares of Gazprom.
In a
statement to US senators on July 27, 2017, Browder stated that Russian interior ministry
officials "seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of
the funds that I advised. I didn't know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest
Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the
purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had."
Contrary to what Browder claims, Magnitsky had been his accountant for a decade. He
had never acted as a lawyer, nor did he have the qualifications to do so. In fact in 2006 when
questioned by Russian investigators, Magnitsky
said he was an auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. In Browder's testimony before the
Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 he claimed Magnitsky was his lawyer, but in 2015 in his
testimony under oath in the US government's Prevezon case, Browder told a different story, as
will now be related.
On Browder's initiative , in December 2012 he presented documents to the New York District
Attorney alleging that a Russian company Prevezon had "benefitted from part of the $230 million
dollar theft uncovered by Magnitsky and used those funds to buy a number of luxury apartments
in Manhattan." In September 2013, the New York District Attorney's office filed
money-laundering charges against Prevezon. The company hired high-profile New York-based
lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
As reported by Der Spiegel , Browder would not voluntarily agree to testify in court
so Prevezon's lawyers sent process servers to present him with a subpoena, which he refused to
accept and was caught on video literally running away. In March 2015, the judge in the Prevezon
case ruled that Browder would have to give testimony as part of pre-trial discovery. Later
while in court and under oath and confronted with numerous documents, Browder was totally
evasive. Lawyer Mark Cymrot spent six hours examining him, beginning with the following
exchange:
Cymrot asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law
degree?
"No."
Critically important, during the court case, the responsible U.S. investigator admitted
during questioning that his findings were based exclusively on statements and documents from
Browder and his team. Under oath, Browder was unable to explain how he and his people managed
to track the flow of money and make the accusation against Prevezon. In his 2012 letter that
launched the court case, Browder referred to "corrupt schemes" used by Prevezon, but when
questioned under oath he admitted he didn't know of any. In fact, to almost every question put
forth by Mark Cymrot, Browder replied that he didn't know or didn't remember.
The case finally ended in May 2017 when the two sides reached a settlement. Denis Katsyv,
the company's sole shareholder, on a related matter agreed to pay nearly six million dollars to
the US government, but would not have to admit any wrongdoing. Also the settlement contained an
explicit mention that neither Katsyv nor his company Prevezon had anything to do with the
Magnitsky case. Afterwards, one of Katsyv's, lawyers, Natalia Veselnitskaya, exclaimed: "For
the first time, the U.S. recognized that the Russians were in the right!"
A major exposé of the Browder-Russia story is presented in a film that came out in
June 2016 The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the well-known independent filmmaker
Andrei Nekrasov .
Reference to this film will be made later but to provide a summary of the Browder tax evasion
case some critical information can be obtained from
a report by Eric Zuesse , an investigative historian, who managed to get a private viewing
of the film by the film's Production Manager.
In the film Nekrasov proceeds to unravel Browder's story, which was designed to conceal his
own corporate responsibility for the criminal theft of the money. As Browder's widely accepted
story collapses, Magnitsky is revealed not to be a whistleblower but a likely abettor to the
fraud who died in prison not from an official assassination but from banal neglect of his
medical condition. The film cleverly allows William Browder to self-destruct under the weight
of his own lies and the contradictions in his story-telling at various times.
Following the raid by tax officials on the Moscow Hermitage office on June 2, 2007, nothing
further on these matters was reported until April 9, 2008 when Ms Rimma Starlova, the
figurehead director of the three supposedly stolen Browder shell companies, filed a criminal
complaint with the Russian Interior Ministry in Kazan accusing representatives of Browder
companies of the theft of state funds, i.e., $232 million in a tax-rebate fraud. Although
Hermitage was aware of this report they kept quiet about it because they claimed it as a false
accusation against themselves.
On September 23, 2008, there was a news report about a theft of USD 232 million from the
Russian state treasury, and the police probe into it. On October 7, 2008, Magnitsky was
questioned by tax investigators about the $232 million fraud because he was the accountant for
Browder's companies.
The central issue was that during September of 2007 three of Browder's shell companies had
changed owners and that afterwards fraud against Russian treasury had been conducted by the new
owners of these companies.
According to Magnitsky the way that ownership changed was through powers of attorney. This
is a matter that Browder never mentioned. The Nekrasov film shows a document: "Purchase
agreement based on this power of attorney, Gasanov represents Glendora Holdings Ltd."
Glendora Holdings is another shell company owned by Browder. This shows that Gasanov, the
middleman, had the power of attorney connecting the new nominees to the real beneficiaries.
However, Gasanov could not be questioned on whose orders he was doing this because shortly
afterwards, he mysteriously died. No one proved that it was murder, but if that death was a
coincidence, it wasn't the only one.
During September 2007 the three Hermitage shell companies, Rilend, Parfenion and Mahaon,
were re-registered by Gasanov to a company called Pluton that was registered in Kazan, and
owned by Viktor Markelov, a Russian citizen with a criminal record. Markelov through a series
of sham arbitration judgments conducted fake lawsuits that demanded damages for alleged
contract violations. Once the damages were paid, in December 2007 the companies filed for tax
refunds that came to $232 million. These were taxes that had been paid by these companies in
2006.
On February 5, 2008 the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor's Office
opened a criminal case to investigate the fraud committed by Markelov and other
individuals.
Markelov had hired a Moscow lawyer, Andrey Pavlov, to conduct these complex operations.
Afterwards Pavlov was questioned by Russian authorities and revealed what had happened.
Markelov was convicted and
sentenced to five years for the scam . At his trial Markelov testified that he was not in
possession of the $232 million tax refund and that he did not know the identity of the client
who would benefit from the refund scheme. And till this day no one knows! However, Russian tax
authorities suspect it is William Browder.
At his trial, Markelov testified that one of the people he worked with to secure the
fraudulent tax refund was Sergei Leonidovich. Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich
Magnitsky. Also when questioned by the police, Markelov named Browder's associates Khairetdinov
and Kleiner as people involved in the company's re-registration.
So this provides evidence that Magnitsky and Browder's other officials were involved in the
re-registration scheme – which Browder later called theft. In his film Nekrasov states
that Browder's team had set things up to look as if outsiders -- not Browder's team -- had
transferred the assets.
According to Nekrasov's film documentation, Russian courts have established that it was the
representatives of the Hermitage investment fund who had themselves voluntarily re-registered
the Makhaon, Parfenion and Rilend companies in the name of other individuals, a fact that Mr
Browder is seeking to conceal by shifting the blame, without any foundation, onto the law
enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation.
Indeed there is cause to be skeptical of the Browder narrative, and that the fraud was in
fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court has
supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December 2013 that Browder had
deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. On the basis of this he was
sentenced to nine years prison in absentia.
In the meantime, over all these years, Browder has maintained and convinced the public at
large that the $232 million fraud against the Russian treasury had been perpetrated by
Magnitsky's interrogators and Russian police. With respect to the "theft" of his three
companies (or "vehicles as he refers to them) on September 16, 2008
he stated on his Hermitage website : "The theft of the vehicles was only possible using
the vehicles' original corporate documents seized by the Moscow Interior Ministry in its raid
on Hermitage's law firm in Moscow on 4 June 2007."
As such, Browder is accusing Russian tax authorities and police for conducting this entire
fraudulent operation.
In his film Nekrasov says that the Browder version is: "Yes, the crime took place [$232
million fraud against the public treasury but, according to Browder, actually against Browder's
firm], but somebody else did it -- the police did it."
In this convoluted tale, it should be recalled that the fraud against the Russian treasury
had first been reported to the police by Rimma Starlova on April 9, 2008. This had been
recorded on the Hermitage website. In preparing the material for his film, Nekrasov noted
that
"In March 2009, Starlova's report disappeared from Hermitage's website. . . . This is the
same time that Magnitsky started to be treated as an analyst . . . who discovered the $232
million fraud. Thus the Magnitsky-the-whistleblower story was born, almost a year after the
matter had been reported to the police."
Nekrasov's film also undermines the basis of Browder's case that Magnitsky had been killed
by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov, but this is
questionable since documents show Magnitsky had not accused anyone. As Nekrasov states in the
film: "The problem is, he [Magnitsky] made no accusations. In that testimony, its record
contains no accusations. Mr. Magnitsky did not actually testify against the two officers
[Karpov and Kuznetsov]." So this factual evidence should destroy Browder's accusations.
It should be noted Magnitsky's original interview with authorities was as a suspect, not a
whistleblower. Also contradicting Browder's claims, Nekrasov notes that Magnitsky does not even
mention the names of the police officers in a key statement to authorities.
In his film Nekrasov includes an interview that he had with Browder regarding the issues
about Magnitsky. Nekrasov confronts Browder with the core contradictions of his story.
Incensed, Browder rises up and threatens the filmmaker:
" Anybody who says that Sergei Magnitsky didn't expose the crime before he was arrested
is just trying to whitewash the Russian Government. Are you trying to say that Pavel Karpov is
innocent? I'd really be careful about your going out and saying that Magnitsky wasn't a
whistleblower. That's not going to do well for your credibility." Browder then walks off in
a huff.
Nekrasov claims to be especially struck that the basis of Browder's case -- that Magnitsky
had been killed by the police because he had accused two police officials, Karpov and Kuznetsov
-- is a lie because there is documentary evidence that Magnitsky had not accused anyone.
Because of Browder's accusations, Nekrasov interviewed Pavel Karpov, the police officer who
Browder accused of being involved in Magnitsky's alleged murder, despite the fact that Karpov
was not on duty the day Magnitsky died.
Karpov presents Nekrasov with documents that Browder's case was built on. These original
documents are actually fundamentally different from the way Browder had described them. This
documentary evidence further exposes Browder's story for what it is.
Nekrasov asks Karpov why Browder wants to demonize him. Karpov explains that he had pursued
Browder in 2004 for tax evasion, so that seems to be the reason why Browder smears him. And
then Karpov says, "Having made billions here, Browder forgot to tell how he did it. So it
suits him to pose as a victim. He is wanted here, but Interpol is not looking for him."
Afterwards in 2013, Karpov had tried to sue Browder for libel in a London court, but was not
able to on the basis of procedural grounds since he was a resident of Russia and not the UK.
However at the conclusion of the case, set out in his Judgment the presiding judge,
Justice Simon, made some interesting comments.
"The causal link which one would expect from such a serious charge is wholly lacking; and
nothing is said about torture or murder. In my view these are inadequate particulars to
justify the charge that the Claimant was a primary or secondary party to Sergei Magnitsky's
torture and murder, and that he would continue to commit or 'cause' murder, as pleaded in
§60 of the Defence.
The Defendants have not come close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the
sting of the libel."
In other words – in plain English – in the judge's view, Karpov was not in any
sense party to Magnitsky's death, and Browder's claim that he was is not valid.
On the basis of the evidence that has been presented, it is undeniable that Browder's case
appears to be a total misrepresentation, not only of Magnitsky's statements, but of just about
everything else that's important in the case .
On a separate matter, on April 15, 2015 in a New York court
case involving the US government and a Russian company, Previzon Holdings, Bill Browder had
been ordered by a judge to give a deposition to Prevezon's lawyers.
Throughout this deposition, Browder (now under oath) contradicted virtually every aspect of
his Magnitsky narrative and stated "I don't recall" when pressed about key portions of his
narrative that he had previously repeated unabashedly in his testimonies to Congress and
interviews with Western media. Browder "remembered nothing" and could not even deny asking
Magnitsky to take responsibility for his (Browder's) crimes.
As a further example of Browder's dishonesty, in one of his publications, he shows a photo
of an alleged employee of Browder's law firm, Firestone Duncan, named "Victor Poryugin" with
vicious facial wounds from allegedly being tortured and beaten by police. However, the person
shown was never with Browder's firm. Instead, this is a photo of "an American human rights
campaigner beaten up during a street protest in 1961." It was Jim Zwerg, civil-rights
demonstrator, during the 1960s, in the American South. Nekrasov was appalled and found it
almost unimaginable that Browder would switch photos like that to demonize Russia and its
police.
Browder
was arrested by the Spanish policein June 2018. Even though Russia has on six occasions
requested Browder's arrest through Interpol for tax fraud, the Spanish national police
determined that Browder had been detained in error because the international warrant was no
longer valid and released him.
A further matter that reflects on his character, William Browder, the American-born
co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management is now a British citizen. The US taxes offshore
earnings, but the UK does not. Highly likely because of this, in 1998 he gave up his American
citizenship and became a British citizen and thereby has avoided paying US taxes on foreign
investments. Nevertheless, he still has his family home in Princeton, NJ and also
owns a $11 million dollar vacation home in Aspen, Colorado.
To put this in political context, Browder's narrative served a strong geopolitical purpose
to demonize Russia at the dawn of the New Cold War. As such, Browder played a major role in
this. In fact, the late celebrated American journalist Robert
Parry thought that Browder single-handedly
deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War.
Browder's campaign was so effective that in December 2012 he exploited Congressional
willingness to demonize Russia, and as a result the US Congress passed a bipartisan bill, the
Magnitsky Act, which was then signed by President Obama. U.S. Senators Ben Cardin and John
McCain were instrumental in pushing through the Magnitsky Act, based on Browder's
presentations.
However, key parts of the argument that passed into law in this act have been shown to be
based on fraud and fabrication of 'evidence.' This bill
blacklisted Russian officials who were accused of being involved in human-rights
abuses.
"A problem with the Magnitsky Act is that there is no due process. The targets are not
told the evidence against them, they cannot challenge accusations or evidence in a court of
law in order to get off the list. This "human rights law" violates the rule of law. There is
an International Court with judges and lawyers to deal with human rights violators, but the
US has not ratified its jurisdiction. Because it does not want to be subject to the rules it
applies to others."
In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enables the U.S. to impose
sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.
In a move that history will show to be ill-advised, on October 18, 2017 Canada's Parliament
and Senate
unanimously approved Bill 226, a 'Magnitsky Act.' It mimics the US counterpart and targets
Russia for further economic sanctions. Russia
immediately denounced Canada's actions as being counter-productive, pointless and
reprehensible. Actually an act of this type had been opposed by Stéphane Dion while he
was Canada's minister of foreign affairs because he viewed it as a needless provocation against
Russia.
Dion also stated that adoption of a 'Magnitsky Act' would hurt the interests of Canadian
businesses dealing with Russia and would thwart Canada's attempt's to normalize relations with
Russia. However, Dion was replaced by Chrystia Freeland who immediately pushed this through.
This is not surprising considering her well-documented Nazi family
background and who is persona non grata in Russia.
A version of the Magnitsky Act was enacted in the UK and the Baltic republics in 1917.
In early 2020 a proposal to enact a version of the Magnitsky Act was presented to the
Australian parliament and it is still under consideration. There has been considerable
opposition to it including a
detailed report by their Citizens Party, which exposes the full extent of Browder's fraud
and chicanery.
The investigation into Browder's business activities in Russia is still an ongoing
endeavour. On October 24, 2017 the
Russian Prosecutor
General , Yuri Chaika, requested the US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a probe
into alleged tax evasion by Bill Browder, who in 2013 had already been sentenced in absentia to
9 years in prison in Russia for a similar crime.
Browder at that time was still being tried in Russia for suspected large-scale money
laundering, also in absentia. Chaika added that Russian law enforcement possesses information
that over $1 billion was illegally transferred from the country into structures
connected with Bill Browder.
The Prosecutor General also asked Sessions to reconsider the Magnitsky Act. As he put
it,
" from our standpoint, the act was adopted for no actual reason, while it was lobbied by
people who had committed crimes in Russia. In our view, there are grounds to claim that this
law lacks real foundation and that its passing was prompted by criminals' actions."
It's not known if Sessions ever responded to the Russian Prosecutor General. In any event,
President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on November 7, 2018. As such it's evident
that Russia's concerns about Browder's dishonest activities are stymied.
Extensive reference has already been made to the film that came out in June 2016 The
Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes by the independent filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov . When Nekrasov started the film
he had fully believed Browder's story but as he delved into what really happened, to his
surprise, he discovered that the case documents and other incontrovertible facts revealed
Browder to be a fraud and a liar. The ensuing film presents a powerful deconstruction of the
Magnitsky myth, but because of Browder's political connections and threats of lawsuits, the
film has been
blacklisted in the entire "free world." So much for the "free world's" freedom of the press
and media. This film is not available on YouTube.
https://www.bitchute.com/embed/oJsWUlkjN6Gf/
The documentary was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016,
but at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians
cancelled the showing.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed.
Despite the frantic attempts by Browder's lawyers to block this documentary film from being
shown anywhere, Washington's Newseum, to its credit, had a one-time showing on June 13, 2016,
including a question-and-answer session with Andrei Nekrasov, moderated by journalist Seymour
Hersh. Except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been
essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth
to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War.
Nekrasov's powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film's subsequent
blacklisting throughout the "free world" – recall other instances in which the West's
propaganda lines don't stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the
weapons of choice to defend " perception
management ."
Other than the New
York Times that had a lukewarm review , the mainstream media condemned the film and its
showing. As such, with the exception of that one audience, the public in the USA, Canada and
Europe has been shielded from the documentary's discoveries. The censorship of this film has
made it a good example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we
used to call "the other side of the story."
Andrei Nekrasov is still prepared to go to court to defend the findings of his film, but
Bill Browder has refused to do this and simply keeps maligning the film and Mr. Nekrasov.
Recent Developments
Although for almost the past ten years Browder's self-serving story had been accepted almost
worldwide and served to help vilify Russia, in the past few months there has been an awakening
to the true state of affairs about Browder.
The first such article"The Case of Sergei Magnitsky: Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S.
Sanctions" written by Benjamin Bidder, a German journalist, appeared on November 26, 2019
in Der Spiegel. At the outset Bidder states:
"Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not have
been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be. Did the
perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan
whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair
becomes muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The
Russian authorities' take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill
Browder's.
But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist Browder used a noble cause
to manipulate Western governments."
In summation, the article raises serious questions about many aspects of Browder's account.
It concluded that his narrative was riddled with lies and said Western nations have fallen for
a "convenient" story made up by a "fraudster. "
The report provoked Browder's fury, and he swiftly filed a complaint against Der
Spiegel with the German Press Council as well as a complaint to the editor of Der
Spiegel .
On December 17, 2019 Der Spiegel responded : " Why DER SPIEGEL Stands Behind Its Magnitsky
Reporting." In a lengthy detailed response the journal rejects all aspects of Browder's
complaint. They point out the inconsistencies in Browder's version of events and demonstrate
that he is unable to present sufficient proof for his claims. They state: We believe his
complaint has no basis and would like to review why we have considerable doubts about Browder's
story and why we felt it necessary to present those doubts publicly."
Their report is highly enlightening and will have long-term consequences. It is one of the
best refutations of Browder's falsified accounts that led to the Magnitsky Act. It exposes
Browder as a fraud and his Magnitsky story as a fake. Despite all this, this exposé was
ignored in the mainstream media so most people are unaware of these revelations.
A good review of it is presented by Lucy Komisar in her article The Der Spiegel
exposé of Bill Browder, December 6, 2019.
The German Press Council rejected Browder's complaint against Der Spiegel in January
2020 but Browder did not disclose this so it became known only in early May.
Lucy Komisar reported this on May 12 and the main points of the Council's rejection are
presented in her account. Browder had complained that the article had serious factual errors.
The Press Council stated that Browder's position lacks proof and there could be no objection to
Der Spiegel's examination of events leading to Magnitsky's death. All other Browder
objections were rejected as well. In summation the Council stated: "Overall, we could not find
a violation of journalistic principles."
But the action of the press council has not been reported in the Canadian, U.S. or UK media.
Nor was the November Der Spiegel report.
The German Press Council ruling follows a December 2019 Danish Press Board ruling against
another Browder complaint over an article by a Danish financial news outlet, Finans.dk, on
his tax evasion and invented Magnitsky story. Significantly, both the Danish and German cases
involve mainstream media, which usually toe the US-UK-NATO strategic line against Russia, which
Browder's story serves. And these press complaint rulings follow a September 2019
European Court of Human Rights ruling that there was credible evidence that Magnitsky and
Browder were engaged in a conspiracy to commit tax fraud and that Magnitsky was rightfully
charged.
In summation, for ten years or more, no one in the West ever seriously challenged Bill
Browder's account of what happened to his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky and his stories of
corruption and malfeasance in Russia. This is what allowed him to get such influence that the
Magnitsky Act was passed, despite Russia's attempts to clarify matters.
But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most
influential journals Der Spiegel published an investigative bombshell picking apart
Browder's story about his auditor Sergei Magnitsky's death. Browder immediately lashed out at
Der Spiegel , accusing it of "misrepresenting the facts." However, his outraged
objections backfired and resulted in a further even more damaging Der Spiegel article
and a rebuke from the German Press Council.
At long last, thanks to Der Spiegel , its investigative reports have effectively
rejected and discredited Browder's claim that Magnitsky was a courageous whistleblower who
exposed corruption in Russia and was mercilessly killed by authorities out of revenge.
Despite this important and significant course of events, because of its imbedded
Russophobia, the mainstream media have completely ignored the Der Spiegel exposé
and almost nowhere has this been reported. To some extent this is because Browder has used his
fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively
silencing many critics. Hence aside from people in Germany, this has been a non-event and the
Browder hoax still prevails. Given this, it is important for us to publicize this revelation as
best we can.
John, great article but we know that what you call "large-scale privatizations in Russia "
was a large scale robbery. Even Magnitsky's mother stated that Browder is a fraud. Mr.
Nekrasov whose film has been banned in many countries due to Browder's legal challenges has a
reputation as a Putin critic -- After interviewing Mr. Browder in 2010 Nekrasov says he set
out to make a "Magnitsky the hero" film. But as filming proceeded he "began to have doubts".
More accurate would be that he smelled a rat. John, I have read many of your articles you
never disappoint with your research and evidence.
Outstanding article sir. I remember when Browder popped up in the news a couple of years ago
and made TV appearances on all three big networks in the same day. I was astonished that this
lowlife wielded such influence in America.
Indeed – and very likely more than one! It should be obvious that the ease with
which Browder (a complete nonentity) was able to get away with what he got away with in
Russia and remain a virtually untouchable, protected free man to this day, in spite of the
very significant evidence against him, would very much seem to indicate that he, much like
Paul Bremer later in Iraq, was a tool of higher powers.
Excellent article. There is a misperception that these pathological liars are believed, since
their critics are silenced. It has been my experience that that is not the case. The
pathological liars are not believed. They just keep lying, sabotaging, fining, legal system
stalking, shouting down their oppenents, black listing those who doubt or know that they are
lying as conspiracy theorists. I've been witnessing this for far to long. It is obviously not
limited to the Magnitsky Act. This country is really nothing more than a sick joke at this
point. These individuals do not behave like people. They behave like mercury poisoned
monsters. Maybe they are. There is no logical excuse for this insanity. However, if they were
mercury poisoned monsters, they would not all always have the same insane delusions. They are
extremely corrupt sadistic terrorist criminal psychopaths that have destroyed America and the
rest of the world too.
They are not The Resistance, they are The Persistence! Something has to be done about
them. Freedom of the press does not give people the freedom to deliberately lie. You may
doubt that, however, slander, libel, and defamation of charcter suits will prove you to be
wrong, in addition to providing false information that endangers human life and national
security, in the case of a non person like covid that is being used to deprive people of
every liberty and rights that exists, including life. They are terrorists. They cannot claim
to be news journalists or investigative reporters if they simply say whatever their
advertisers or the government tells them to say. If they are unable to get to the bottom of
the story, when so many in the alternative media are, then they are either unqualified to do
their jobs, or are simply full of shit.
I really believe that the primary intention of covid and the response to it is to get
people to voluntarily give up cell phones, particularly since 5-G is so hazardous. That way,
the industries will never have to admit any wrong doing about the health hazards related to
cell phones and Wi-Fi.That
is what I believe. Also, you can be damn sure that the government and corporations do not
like the fact that they can be embarrassed by people that they cannot prevent from
embarrassing them without being accused of human rights abuses like vault7 technology.
"Did they expect us to treat them with any respect?!" – Pink Floyd Fletcher Memorial
Home For Incurable Tyants
@Vuki I had at one time a copy of a book titled "The murder of Bill Browder" by an
Eastern European journalist which I have, unfortunately, misplaced. As well as being an
exposè of the nefarious Mr Browder it also exposes far more serious wrongdoing against
him. This book has vanished from the Google search engine (I wonder why?) so if anyone can
tell me where to get a copy i would really value it
While most American's were distracted by the emerging World Wide Web, our elite were
raping Russia. I'll say it again, America's "elite" raped Russia. In internet time twenty
five years past puts you in prehistoric times. This is critical history that most of us
missed, or more accurately wasn't available -- to the majority of us.
This was the Clinton era -- with just that you know this story can't be good. With Slick
Willie's taste for skanks in a period where there is a story of beautiful impoverished young
Russian women (teens likely) forming a line for one of our "elite" who was peeling off
Benjamins for blowjobs in a club frequented by their foreign "advisors." Yep, I'm sure this
was of no interest to William Jefferson Blythe III.
Harvard University was given a significant role in this "helping" of Russia (pardon the
pun), due to the prestige of this institution, long-gone and unbeknownst to Russian elite,
but hey they weren't "connected" yet. Geez, sorry about your luck. The Harvard you got was
the Harvard we've been getting also, a race privileged hot bed for educating global "rapists"
(or was that Brandeis University I'm thinking of?). Six of one
William Browder is a highly educated Jew (not certain about either) who's grandfather was
Earl Browder, the former General Secretary of the CPUSA (that's the "Communist Party of the
United States of America" for those of you who didn't know we had one). Bill Browder crowed
about the irony in his grandfather being an activist for communism here in the U.S., while HE
was an activist for capitalism in Russia! No, he was doing to Russia what Jews did to Russia
when they hijacked the real Russian's revolution -- fucking them.
Billy Browder's book, "Red Notice," seems at first heartfelt story from a genuine American
do-gooder. Oops! I missed the "A true story " tip-off. It's a self engrandizing fairy tale of
a rapist's plea of innocence because "she didn't say NO."
There is MUCH more to this most interesting, world impacting historical event, that I
believe is the most understated and least understood of the twentieth century, but that said,
who fucked up? Certainly Yeltsin with his alcohol addled brain (likely rooted for by Russian
Jews, who are the MOST notorious criminals world-wide) in trusting and believing America
would help Russia! More significantly I feel America did, big-time, for acting so damn
un-American. Unfortunately the America I'm dreaming of is as long-gone as Harvard and now,
like Harvard has a Zionist occupied governance (if you didn't know what "ZOG" stood for).
Come to think of it, we're acting much like Israel. God save America!
I can tell you one person who did not, Vladimir Ilyich Putin. Yeltsin threw Russia's doors
open to the west and Putin slammed them shut. You can quibble about how he got and keeps his
office, or how he enriched himself through the process, but he had a job to do and he did it
well -- he saved Russia from what the west was going to continue doing to it. You may not
agree with his ideology, but he is the most formidable leader the world has. I pray he leaves
Russia and Russians in a better place than we're headed.
So, here we are today, where Trump is currently in the position to decide whether Russia
should be invited to the next G-whatever summit:
I say we're damn lucky it isn't Putin deciding whether to include Trump and the U.S., as
some day it very well may be.
P.S. This is a rant of mine burning a long time for a window. Thank you John Ryan. Thank
you Billy Browder. Most of all, Thank YOU Mr. Unz!
UNZ has provided a platform for authors, journalists and "knowers" from all over the
world. All converging on the same theme -- there is a "they" and there is a plan. This
seeming runaway train has awakened plain folks with uncommon sense and giants of intellect
alike. Kudos, Ron Unz.
" The western Governments are easily moved or manipulated" and have been Gang Banged –
time and time again by the corrupt mafia corporations, Zionists inc., and a dozen other
international gangs that are in charge of things – today. Not to mention the corrupt,
treasonist nationals that work for the Western Governments. Browder's Hermitage scam just
shows how easily the US Gov and others are bought and paid for – that's why the true
Magnitsky lie , has to be covered up , from the public. PS – notice all the tax money
Browder skimmed off the US – very visible to anyone that can smell a Rat.
I became aware of the Browder case when known controlled asset, Brandon Martinez, used his
claims as a refutation of Putin which he seemed unbelievably obsessed about.
As I perused you-tube for videos on Browder, I saw that he was welcomed into all approved
western media to make his case with the questioners rarely going into the material to dispute
his claims. I determined at that time that Browder was part of a deep state campaign to
demonize Russia under Putin leadership.
It surprises me not to hear no MSM News organization will print these latest findings since
in 2012 I realized the free world and press are anything but free and lie as much or more
than the most demonized communist outlets.
Not mentioned in the article that I recall is the fact that Browder's dad was the head of the
Communist party in the USA before and during WWII which should be enough by itself for a
legitimate news outlet to scrutinize with great vigor any claims made by the man but then we
know WWII was really a war against any country willing to exercise goyim rule independent of
Jewish advisors and that the US was on the side of Jewish power in that war as much as all
the other wars it has engaged in.
(Its interesting that my spell check keeps telling me that there is no such word as "goyem")
"But when pressure was exerted on Germany to install a Magnitsky Act, one of their most
influential journals "
Der Spiegel is known as a craven Atlanticist rag. Somebody high up – possibly as a
snub to the Trump admin – must have provided ass cover for it to be upheld.
Useful summary of browder's scam. The man managered to wield a great amount of influence in
american/uk media and government, yet is only a minor player by western oligarch standards.
For that he must have substantial backing. By whom?
Well he definitely is closely defended by these sources:
British Jewish businessman who challenged Putin is put on Interpol wanted list
Bill Browder is a thief, a typical representative of a flock of Western vultures that landed
in 1990s Russia to steal state assets. When his thievery was curbed by Putin, he got angry
and vengeful, like a scorned lover. He manufactured and spread lies to whip up an anti-Putin
campaign in the West. His "narrative" was eagerly supported by the neocons and other scum, as
it was in line with their "narrative". Naturally, the first things about Browder any honest
investigator or journalist would unearth were lies and fraud. Just as naturally, the scum and
scum-controlled Western MSM keep spreading lies supporting their "narrative", and ignoring
numerous facts that contradict it.
There is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey
Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"
There are many more revealing articles on Martin Armstrong's blog. Browder is one of the
biggest scumbags to ever walk on this earth. He is trying to start a war against Russia
– because they took away some of the things he had stolen. An absolute arsehole.
Ben Cardin must feel like a schmuck given Ben Bidder's exposé in the Der Spiegel but
having suborned the late drama queen Johnny McCain in supporting him in his efforts to
protect a fellow tribesman, the noodge won't make any effort to rescind the illicit bill now
that's the power of corruption!
There is an interesting connection between Bill Bowder, Robert Maxwell, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey
Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others. They are all members of "CLUB"
There are many more revealing articles on Martin Armstrong's blog. Browder is one of the
biggest scumbags to ever walk on this earth. He is trying to start a war against Russia
– because they took away some of the things he had stolen. An absolute arsehole.
Ben Cardin must feel like a schmuck given Ben Bidder's exposé in the Der Spiegel but
having suborned the late drama queen Johnny McCain in supporting him in his efforts to
protect a fellow tribesman, the noodge won't make any effort to rescind the illicit bill now
that's the power of corruption!
@Saggy Many thanks for posting this. Halfway through the film I began to suspect that
Browder had Magnitsky killed: "Dead Men Tell No Tales", and an accountant can tell very
important tales for the procecution. I had no idea that several guys connected with Browder
shell companies convienently turned up dead. Looks like the "cleanup" scenes in Scorcese's
"Casino".
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
program to arm and finance the mujahideen (jihadists) in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, prior
to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of its client, the Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted
separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups
that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than
other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the
Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan regime since before the Soviet
intervention.[1]
Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever
undertaken.[2] Funding officially began with $695,000 in 1979,[3][4] was increased dramatically
to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987,[1][5][6]
described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency."[7] Funding continued (albeit
reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal as the mujahideen continued to battle the forces of
President Mohammad Najibullah's army during the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992).[8]
And what is your evidence for claiming that the EU and USA want to break up Russia into
'smaller statelets'? That smells a bit fishy. It would make the world a more dangerous
place.
One of distinctive features, the hallmark of neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment is rabid, often paranoid Russophobia which includes active,
unapologetic support of separatist movements within Russia.
I think the evidence of the USA and EU (especially GB, but also Poland, Sweden, and
Germany) multi-level (PR, MSM, financial, diplomatic and sometimes military) support of
Islamic separatists in Russia is well known: support of separatist movements in Russia is
just a continuation of the support of separatist movement within the USSR, which actually
helped to blow up the USSR from within (along the key role of KGB changing sides along with a
part of Politburo who deciding to privatize Russia's economy)
Here is old but still relevant list of "who is who" in the USA foreign policy
establishment in promoting separatism in Russia. You will see many prominent neocons in the
list.
The foreign policy of the USA toward Russia to a considerable extent is driven by emigres
from Eastern Europe and people who were accepted to the USA before and, especially, after
WWII from filtration camps. This "diaspora lobby" includes older generation of emigrants such
as late Brzezinski, Madeline Allbright, as well as more recent such as Farkas, Chalupa,
Appelebaum, etc. The same is true for Canada (Freeland). All of them are rabid, sometimes
paranoid (Brzezinski) Russophobs. They consistently use the USA as a leverage to settle the
"ancient hatred".
"... First, our imperialists are the direct descendants intellectually, spiritually, and morally of the first WASP Empire, the first Anglo-Zionist Empire: the British Empire. And they have used their high IQs that are focused on grasping the One Ring to Rule Them All to locate where the Brit WASP Empire failed to achieve its goals, which allowed the collapse starting with World War 1. They are obsessed with that because they believe that if they can achieve what the Brit WASPs failed to achieve, then they can make the Anglo-Zionist Empire 2.0 as permanent as the Roman Empire – a Thousand Year Reich. ..."
"... And that is spiritually what all WASP imperialism, all Anglo-Zionist imperialism back to at least the Anglo-Saxon Puritans, is about: replacing the Roman Empire, which means replacing that which culturally led to, and was absolutely indispensable to, Christendom. ..."
"... Our 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire. ..."
"... The "foreign interventionists" want two things: Russia's mineral riches and its good gene pool (how do you think Middle Eastern Semites became blonde hair-blue eyed people who can easily blend into the West to undermine it from within in the first place to begin with?) ..."
Why do our 'foreign interventionists,' our 'permanent war for globalist perpetual peace'
crusaders, our Neocons, hate Russia so thoroughly and so centrally to their very beings?
First, our imperialists are the direct descendants intellectually, spiritually, and
morally of the first WASP Empire, the first Anglo-Zionist Empire: the British Empire. And
they have used their high IQs that are focused on grasping the One Ring to Rule Them All to
locate where the Brit WASP Empire failed to achieve its goals, which allowed the collapse
starting with World War 1. They are obsessed with that because they believe that if they can
achieve what the Brit WASPs failed to achieve, then they can make the Anglo-Zionist Empire
2.0 as permanent as the Roman Empire – a Thousand Year Reich.
And that is spiritually what all WASP imperialism, all Anglo-Zionist imperialism back to
at least the Anglo-Saxon Puritans, is about: replacing the Roman Empire, which means
replacing that which culturally led to, and was absolutely indispensable to, Christendom.
What they wish to redo and achieve that the Brit WASPs failed in is winning The Great
Game: becoming total master of Eur-Asia. And that requires taking out Russia and China. In
the 19th century, China was sicker than even the Ottoman Turkish Empire. To play the long
game to destroy Russia, the Brit WASPs allied with the Turks to prevent Russia acting to push
the Ottomans out of Europe. Brit WASP secret service in eastern Europe was focused on
reducing Russia significantly right through the Bolshevik Revolution, even with Russia
naively, stupidly allied with the British Empire in World War 1.
Our 'foreign interventionists' have seen Russia under Putin rise from the ashes, and they
intend to destroy Russia once and for all, so they then can reduce China and win The Great
Game. And thus make Anglo-Zionist Empire greater than Roman Empire.
Second, our Neocons are the spiritual and intellectual descendants not just of
Trotskyites, but of all Russia-hating Jews with ties to Central and/or Eastern Europe. For
them, Russia always is the evil that must be destroyed for the good of Jews.
Everything at its bedrock is about theology, is about the choice between Christ and
Christendom or the Chaos of anti-Christendom.
The "foreign interventionists" want two things: Russia's mineral riches and its good gene
pool (how do you think Middle Eastern Semites became blonde hair-blue eyed people who can
easily blend into the West to undermine it from within in the first place to begin with?)
And they won't stop until they get what they want, by hook or crook!
davidhabakkuk says: May
25, 2020 at 12:22 pm The kind of view of the end of the Cold War which underpins
Billingslea's notion that the United States can spend Russia and China into 'oblivion' is
that championed by people who totally failed to anticipate what happened in the Soviet
Union in the 'Eighties, and have not seen this fact as reason for rethinking the
assumptions that caused them to get things so radically wrong.
The extent of the incompetence involved is vividly apparent in the collection of
documents from the American and Soviet sides published by the 'National Security Archive'
in January 2017, under the title 'The Last Superpower Summits.'
Particularly revealing, to my mind, is Document 12, the transcript of the closed-door
testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by the top three CIA analysts of the Soviet
Union, Doug MacEachin, Robert Blackwell, and Paul Ericson, at the precise moment, in
December 1988, when Gorbachev announced his 500,000 troop cut at the U.N.
The editors comment:
'And MacEachin offers a true confession in an extraordinary passage that demonstrates
how prior assumptions about Soviet behavior, rather than actual intelligence data points,
actually drove intelligence findings: "Now, we spend megadollars studying political
instability in various places around the world, but we never really looked at the Soviet
Union as a political entity in which there were factors building which could lead to the
kind of – at least the initiation of political transformation that we seem to see. It
does not exist to my knowledge. Moreover, had it existed inside the government, we never
would have been able to publish it anyway, quite frankly. And had we done so, people would
have been calling for my head. And I wouldn't have published it. In all honesty, had we
said a week ago that Gorbachev might come to the UN and offer a unilateral cut of 500,000
in the military, we would have been told we were crazy. We had a difficult enough time
getting air space for the prospect of some unilateral cuts of 50 to 60,000."
Actually, it was quite possible to do much better, without spending 'megadollars', if
one simply went to the Chatham House Library and/or the London Library and looked at what
competent analysts, like those working for the Foreign Policy Studies Program then run by
the late, great John Steinbruner at Brookings – a very different place then from
now.
Among those he employed were two of the best former intelligence analysts of Soviet
military strategy: Ambassador Raymond Garthoff and Commander Michael MccGwire, R.N., to
give them their titles when in government service.
These has devoted a great deal of effort to explaining that Professor Richard Pipes of
Harvard, a key influence in creating the 'groupthink' MacEachin described, had missed a
crucial transition away from nuclear war planning to conventional 'deep operations' in the
late 'Sixties and 'Seventies.
Inturn, this led Garthoff and MccGwire to grasp that the Gorbachev-era 'new thinkers'
had decided that the conventional 'deep operations' posture in turn needed to be abandoned.
For a summary of the latter's arguments, see article entitled 'Rethinking War: The Soviets
and European Security', published in the Spring 1988 edition of the 'Brookings Review',
available on the 'Unz Review' site.
Also associated with Brookings at the time was the Duke University Sovietologist Jerry
Hough, who had read his way through the writings of academics in the institutes associated
with the Academy of Sciences on development economics, and talked extensively to many of
their authors.
In the 'Conclusion' to his 1986 study, 'The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates
and American Options', Hough wrote:
'Or what is one to say about the argument – now very widely accepted – among
Soviet economists – that countries with "capitalist-oriented" economies in the third
world have a natural tendency to grow more rapidly than countries with a "socialist
orientation" because well-rounded development seems to be dependent on foreign investment
and integration into the world market? A quarter of a century ago, let alone in the Stalin
period, it was just as widely accepted that integration into the capitalist world economy
doomed a third world country to slow, deformed growth and that foreign investment exploited
a local economy.'
One thing one could say is that this recognition that fundamental premises of the
Marxist-Leninist view of the world had turned out wrong was simple an acknowledgement of
the ways that the world had changed. And that view of the world had defined the political
framework in which Soviet contingency planning for war had developed.
Central to this had been the premise of a 'natural' teleology of history towards
socialism, with the risk of war in the international system arising from the attempts of
the 'imperialist' powers to resist this.
So there were profound pressures, which really were not simply created by the Reagan
military build-up and SDI, for radical changes in the Soviet security posture. Questions
were obviously raised, however, as to whether these – together with radical domestic
reform – would defuse Western hostility.
Fascinating here is Document 11, a memo to Gorbachev from a key advisor, Georgy Arbatov,
the director of the 'Institute for U.S.A. and Canada' from the previous June. This sets the
plan for the 500,000 troop reduction in the context both of the wider conception of
liquidating the capability for large-scale offensive operations described MccGwire, and
also of the perceived importance of breaking the 'image of the enemy' in the West.
While both Gorbachev, and Arbatov, were widely perceived in the West as engaged in a
particularly dangerous 'active measures' campaign, it is striking how closely the thinking
set out in the memo echoes that the latter had articulated the previous December in a
letter to the 'New York Times', in response to a column by William Safire.
Headlined 'It Takes Two to Make a Cold War', it expresses key assumptions underlying the
'new thinking.' Two crucial paragraphs:
'If the Soviet Union should accept the proposed rules of the game and devotedly continue
the cold war, then, of course, sooner or later, the whole thing would end in a calamity.
But at least Mr. Safire's plan would work. The only problem I see here is that the Soviet
Union will not pick up the challenge and accept the proposed rules of the game. And then
Americans would find themselves in exactly the same position Mr. Safire and his ilk, as he
himself writes, are finding themselves in now: history would pass them by, and years from
now they would be "regarded as foot-draggers and sourpusses," because almost no one in the
world is willing to play the games of the American right. Least of all, the Soviet
Union.
'And here we have a "secret weapon" that will work almost regardless of the American
response e would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the
military expenditures that bleed the American economy white, a policy that draws America
into dangerous adventures overseas and drives wedges between the United States and its
allies, not to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries? Wouldn't such a
policy in the absence of The Enemy put America in the position of an outcast in the
international community?'
There was however another question which was raised by the patent bankrupcy of
Marxism-Leninism, which bore very directly upon what Arbatov, in his memorandum to
Gorbachev.
If one accepted that Soviet-style economics had led to a dead end, and that integration
into the U.S. dominated global economic order was the road to successful development,
questions obviously arose about not simply about how far, and how rapidly, one should
attempt to dismantle not simply the command economy.
But they also arose about whether it was prudent to dismantle the authoritarian
political system with which it was associated, at the same time.
In a lecture given in 2010, entitled 'The Cold War: A View from Russia', the historian
Vladimir O. Pechatnov, himself a product of Arbatov's institute, would provide a vivid
picture of the disillusion felt by 'liberalising' intellectuals within the Soviet
apparatus, like himself.
However, he also made the – rather interesting – suggestion that, had logic
of central arguments by George F. Kennan, the figure generally, if in my own view somewhat
misleadingly, regarded as the principal architect of post-war American strategy, actually
pointed rather decisively away from the assumption that a rapid dismantling of the
authoritarian system was wise.
And Pechatnov pointed to the very ambivalent implications of the view of the latent
instability of Soviet society expressed in Kennan's famous July 1947 'X-article':
'So, if Communist Party is incapacitated, the Soviet Russia, I quote, "would almost
overnight turn from one of the mightiest into one of the weakest and miserable nations of
the world "). Had Gorbachev read Kennan and realized this causal connection (as Deng and
his colleagues most definitely had), he might have thought twice before abruptly
terminating the Communist monopoly on power.'
What is involved here is a rather fundamental fact – that in their more optimistic
assumptions, people like Arbatov and Gorbachev turned out to be simply wrong.
Crucially, rather than marginalising people like Pipes, and Safire, and Billingslea, an
effect of the retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to convince a very substantial part
of what had been the 'Peace Movement' coalition that their erstwhile opponents had been
vindicated.
However, the enthusiasm of people like Billingslea for a retry of the supposed
successful 'Reagan recipe' brings another irony.
As to SDI, it was well-known at the time that it could easily be countered, at
relatively low cost, with 'asymetric' measures.
This is well brought out in Garthoff's discussion in his 2001 Memoir 'A Journey through
the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence' (see p. 356.) For a more recent
discussion, in the light of declassified materials, which reaches the same conclusion, see
a piece in the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' by Pavel Podvig from April 2013,
entitled 'Shooting down the Star Wars myth' at
And if one bothers to follow the way that arguments have been developing outside the
'bubble' in which most inhabitants of Washington D.C., and London exist, it is evident that
people in Moscow, and Beijing, have thought about the lessons of this history. Those who
think that they are going to be suckered into an arms race that the United States can win
are quite patently delusional.
"Foglesong's book provides a panoramic view of American popular attitudes toward Russia, one that is illustrated with many
arresting cartoons and magazine covers. It should provoke a wider debate about the rationality of evaluating Russia with reference
to an idealized view of the United States, as well as the deeper sources of this tendency." -Deborah Welch Larson, H-Diplo
"In the 21st century, the American debate on the prospects of modernizing Russia and on the Americans' role in this process is
still going strong even though it began more than a century ago. This is why David Foglesong's book aimed at elucidating the
mechanisms of misrepresentations which threaten both Russian-American relations and the world security as a whole is of equal
importance for the academic community and for the policy makers in both Russia and the United States."
-Victoria Zhuravleva, H-Diplo
"Foglesong demonstrates that powerful Americans have again and again seen the possibility, even necessity, of spreading the word
to Russia, and then, when Russia fails to transform itself into something resembling the US, have recoiled and condemned Russia's perfidious
national character or its leaders-most recently Putin. The author's singular achievement is to show that well before the cold war, Russia
served as America's dark double, an object of wishful thinking, condescension and self-righteousness in a quest for American purpose-without
much to show for such efforts inside Russia. The author thereby places in context the cold war, when pamphleteers like William F Buckley
Jr and politicians like Ronald Reagan pushed a crusade to revitalise the American spirit. Russia then was a threat but also a means
to America's end (some fixed on a rollback of the alleged Soviet "spawn" inside the US-the welfare state-while others, after the Vietnam
debacle, wanted to restore "faith in the United States as a virtuous nation with a unique historical mission"). Foglesong's exposé of
Americans' "heady sense of their country's unique blessings" helps make sense of the giddiness, followed by rank disillusionment, vis-...-vis
the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s and 2000s." -Stephen Kotkin, Prospect Magazine -Stephen Kotkin, Prospect Magazine
Notable quotes:
"... For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal." ..."
"... By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia, more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip." ..."
"... The usefulness of Russia as bogeyman for all that is wrong in the world - a contrasting foil to the virtues of "us" - has defined this relationship ever since the first democratic stirrings in Russia following the Emancipation of '61. In this it followed Britain, who'd long demonized Russia since imperial rivalries over the Crimea. ..."
"... This trope was also successful for reactionaries in blocking progressive legislation at home. Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most successful in this linkmanship: "socialized medicine" was the first step to the gulags. ..."
"... T he flak over Pus*y Riot following this book's publication - while ignoring the crucifixion of the Dixie Chicks - demonstrates the double standard is too convenient to be allowed to wither. The empire must always be evil, precisely because it reflects our own image like a Buddhist truth mirror. ..."
"By 1905," Foglesong stated, "this fundamental reorientation of American views of Russia had set up a historical pattern in which
missionary zeal and messianic euphoria would be followed by disenchantment and embittered denunciation of Russia's evil and oppressive
rulers." The first cycle, according to Foglesong, culminated in 1905, when the October Manifesto, perceived initially by Americans
as a transformation to democracy, gave way to a violent socialist revolt. Foglesong observed similar cycles of euphoria to despair
during the collapse of the tsarist government in 1917, during the partial religious revival of World War II, and during the dissolution
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s
Crucial to Foglesong's analysis was how these cycles coincided with a contemporaneous need to deflect attention away from America's
own blemishes and enhance America's claim to its global mission.
For example, Foglesong argued that "a vital factor in the revival of the crusade in the 1970s was the need to expunge doubts
about American virtue instilled by the Vietnam War, revelations about CIA covert actions, and the Watergate scandal."
By tracing American representations of Russia over the last 130 years, Foglesong illuminated three of the strongest notions
that have informed American attitudes toward Russia: (1) a messianic faith that America could inspire sweeping overnight transformation
from autocracy to democracy; (2) a notion that despite historic differences, Russia and America are very much akin, so that Russia,
more than any other country, is America's "dark double;" (3) an extreme antipathy to "evil" leaders who Americans blame for thwarting
what they believe to be the natural triumph of the American mission. These expectations and emotions continue to effect how American
journalists and politicians write and talk about Russia. "My hope," Foglesong concluded, "is that by seeing how these attitudes have
distorted American views of Russia for more than a century, we may begin to be able to escape their grip."
The Adventures of Straw Man Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2013 This has been the essential function of US
Russia policy, as David Foglesong shows in his century-long tour.
The usefulness of Russia as bogeyman for all that is wrong in the world - a contrasting foil to the virtues of "us" - has
defined this relationship ever since the first democratic stirrings in Russia following the Emancipation of '61. In this it followed
Britain, who'd long demonized Russia since imperial rivalries over the Crimea.
This trope was also successful for reactionaries in blocking progressive legislation at home. Ronald Reagan was perhaps
the most successful in this linkmanship: "socialized medicine" was the first step to the gulags.
The crusade against US civil rights - of which Reagan was also a part in his early career - as Communist-inspired tinkering
with the Constitution was much less successful. His support for free trade unions in the Soviet Bloc while crushing them at home
underscored the irony.
But Foglesong is much too generous in evaluating Reagan's human decency as a policy motive. Reagan pursued his grand rollback
strategy by any means necessary, mixing hard tactics (contras, death-squad funding, mujahadin, Star Wars) with soft (democracy-enhancement,
human rights, meeting with Gorbachev). Solidarity activists in Poland might remember his crusading fondly; survivors of the Salvadoran
civil war will not.
The "crisis" with the Putin regime currently empowered shows the missionary impulse yet alive: projecting one's reforming instincts
upon others rather than at home. T he flak over Pus*y Riot following this book's publication - while ignoring the crucifixion
of the Dixie Chicks - demonstrates the double standard is too convenient to be allowed to wither. The empire must always be evil,
precisely because it reflects our own image like a Buddhist truth mirror.
I do find it puzzling that Foglesong made no mention of Maurice Hindus, the prolific popular "explainer" of Russia in over
a dozen mid-century books; and the notorious defector Victor Kravchenko and his best-selling memoir of the 1940s (ghost-written
by Eugene Lyons, another popular anti-Soviet scribe). Both were much more influential in the public and political mind than many
of the more obscure missionary authors Foglesong does cite. Nevertheless, Foglesong has offered a generous helping of cultural/political
history that shows no signs of growing stale.
>
indah nuritasari , Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2012
This book tells a fascinating story of American efforts to liberate and remake Russia since the 1880s. It starts with the story
of Tsar Alexander II's asasination on March 1, 1881 and how James William Buel, a Missoury Journalist wrote it in his book "Russian
Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia."
The story continues until The Reagan era and "the Evil Empire," 1981-1989.
This book is very interesting and useful for history lovers, students, journalists, or general public. Here you can find all
the "dark and exciting stuff" about the cold war, including the involvement of the journalists, political activists, diplomats,
and even engineers.
It is really helpful for me as a new immigrant in the US to help me understand the US position and role in the Cold War Era.
The language used in this book, though, is " kind of dry". A little editing for the next edition could be really helpful!!
Bill Browder's complaint against Der Spiegel for questioning the story he used to push
for anti-Russian sanctions has backfired, with Germany's Press Council concluding his own
position is far from being an "indisputable fact."
"We cannot agree with your analysis, in which you criticize the allegations made by the
author," the German Press Council – a monitoring organization formed by major German
publishers and journalistic associations – said in its response to Browder's team, as it
rejected the complaint against one of Germany's major news media outlets
What's the world come to when the world's most influential
ex-American-vulture-capitalist-turned-British-human-rights-crusader can't crush free speech
in every NATO country, only some NATO countries? A blow to all the London-DC human rights
apparatchiks on Browder's payroll. https://t.co/774OihXK8T
VK #2
Yet you are fooled by the phony Socialism of "Red" China, which is really Neoliberalism in
disguise (I highly doubt Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or even the confused, Pro-U$ Mao would believe
Sweatshops, Stock Exchanges, and Billionaires represents the Socialist model of production).
I agree with you that Bernie Sanders is a gutless fraud and faux Socialist (he's merely a
Centre-Left Social Democrat yet he portrayed his movement as some sort of "Revolution", LOL),
who sadly represents the best you would ever get in the White House, in the sense that at
least he wouldn't have started any new wars, wouldn't have given any tax cuts to corporations
and the wealthy, and wouldn't have outsourced any more jobs in new free trade agreements
(these are the reasons I would have held my nose and voted for him if he had been nominated,
despite my much more Leftist beliefs).
However, I believe it smells of intense hypocrisy to call out Bernie Sanders as faux
Socialism (he is), while simultaneously bowing at the alter of Xi Jinping thought, which
along with being yet another form of faux Socialism like Bernies Social Democracy, isn't just
due to the naivety of believing that the phony Liberal Democratic process (in Marxist terms
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), can actually achieve meaningful reforms for the Working
class and not just pacify them. In reality, it represents something much more devious, a
country that had a Communist Revolution and established a Planned Socialist economic system,
yet decided to sell out its citizens for an alliance with the U$ and massive wealth for the
Communist Party leadership, who proceeded to turn their formerly Socialist country into a
Neoliberal, Neocolonial, Sweatshop, that by giving 15 Trillion dollars in surplus value to
Wall Street is one of the biggest sponsors of U$ Imperialism (remember, according to Lenin
Imperialism is not just launching Wars against small countries, but includes when Western
Corporation exploit third world populations for massive super profits through resource
extraction and cheap labor sweatshops). In reality their are only two countries today (Cuba
and North Korea) that are in the Socialist mode of production according to the
Marxist-Leninist definition, sadly their used to be many more (the USSR, the other Eastern
Bloc countries, Maoist China, etc.) which all succumb to Capitalist counterrevolution (the
USSR and the other Eastern Bloc countries etc.), or the ruling Communist Party embracing such
extreme revisionism that over time they basically restored the Capitalist mode of production
and Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in all but name only. The reason for both of these
tragic events was the fact that due to a long-term revisionist trend after the death of
Stalin and Maos ridiculous Sino-Soviet split, the leadership of these countries became
corrupted by the desire for the U$-style "Good life" of mass consumerism and hedonistic
materialism (not Dialectical Materialism), thus proving that the real threat to Socialism is
the Neoliberal culture of decedent consumerism which corrupt the leadership and enchants the
masses of nations around the world.
In an op-ed in the Financial Times on March 4th, he [Soros] urged that "Europe must
stand with Turkey over Putin's war crimes in Syria," an astonishing misreading of the
situation in the region as Turkey is the aggressor while Russia is fighting to eliminate
the last major terrorist enclave in Idlibt.
" Defender 2020" is a "maneuvre of shame"
by Willy Wimmer
former State Secretary at the German Ministry of Defence
"The German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, is breaking a taboo by allowing German soldiers to
participate in the biggest NATO manoeuvre since the end of the Cold War against Russia
.
It is therefore no wonder that the German Federal Government in May 2019 did not
commemorate the "Versailles" of one hundred years ago, nor did the German President do so in
a commemoration ceremony for which he can be held accountable. Versailles does not only mean
"the demon of revenge", but also a deliberate inability to strive for peace.
This way of thinking is expressed once again in the NATO major manoeuvre, deliberately
planned for the 9 May, the day the war ended in 1945. As if the fact had needed further
proof that the "NATO West" cannot make peace, it can only make war, be that war cold or
hot.
The American conference in Bratislava in the Slovak Republic in April 2000 made the
American goal for Europe clear: An Iron Curtain between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea,
Russia can stay anywhichwhere, and be divided or broken up into smaller states. The NATO
manoeuvre called "Defender 2020" is a "manoeuvre of shame" that only serves the
warmongers . "
by Ellen Taylor At this very moment
thousands of US soldiers are disembarking from troop transports in six European countries and
rushing toward prepositioned munitions around Europe, to deploy weapons as swiftly as possible.
This excitement marks the beginning of "Defender Europe 2020", the largest military
exercises to be staged in Europe in over 25 years. Strategists will record how swiftly our
forces can reach the Russian border, and test our NATO allies.
There has already been a massive US build-up in the countries bordering Russia.
In the words of Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, "The last 18 years of conflict built muscle
memory in counterinsurgency, but with this came atrophy in other areas. We are now engaging
these other muscle groups."
General Tod Wolters, Commander of US forces in Europe and of NATO, has stated, "I'm in favor
of a flexible first-use (nuclear weapon) policy."
The US has withdrawn from the INF treaty.
Most diabolical and chilling of all: the exercises will come to a climax in June, which is
the 75 th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet
Union in 1941, which killed 27 million people. Russians born in 1930 turn 90 this year. They
remember. The heart and soul of Russia remembers as well.
Russian Chief General Gerasimov is convinced the US is preparing for war. All it would take
for an attack is one false-flag operation.
The people of the world lie in helpless ignorance. And the Doomsday clock moves 20 seconds
closer to midnight.
"... Deanna Spingola's articles are copyrighted but may be republished, reposted, or emailed. However, the person or organization must not charge for subscriptions or advertising. The article must be copied intact and full credit given. Deanna's web site address must also be included. ..."
In 1989 President George H. W. Bush began the multi-billion dollar Project Hammer program using an investment strategy to bring
about the economic destruction of the Soviet Union including the theft of the Soviet treasury, the destabilization of the ruble,
funding a KGB coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and the seizure of major energy and munitions industries in the Soviet Union.
Those resources would subsequently be turned over to international bankers and corporations. On November 1, 2001, the second operative
in the Bush regime, President George W. Bush, issued Executive Order 13233 on the basis of "national security" and concealed the
records of past presidents, especially his father's spurious activities during 1990 and 1991. Consequently, those records are no
longer accessible to the public. [1] The Russian
coup plot was discussed in June 1991 when Yeltsin visited with Bush in conjunction with his visit to the United States. On that same
visit, Yeltsin met discreetly with Gerald Corrigan, the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve.
[2]
Because of numerous Presidential Executive Orders, the ethically questionable Project Hammer was deemed legal. Many of Reagan's
executive orders were actually authored by Vice President Bush or his legal associates, and it is possible that Project Hammer was
created by Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, who had directed OSS operations through Alan Dulles in Europe during World War II.
Prior to his OSS affiliation, Casey worked for the Board of Economic Warfare which allegedly targeted "Hitler's economic jugular."
[3] Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles,
was the Director of the CIA (1953-1961). He was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented
the Rockefeller Empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels.
Project Hammer was staffed with CIA operatives and others associated with the National Security apparatus. Covert channels were
already in place as a result of other illegal Bush activities. Thus, it was a given (1) that the project would use secret, illegal
funds for unapproved covert operations, and (2) that the American public and Congress would not be informed about the illegal actions
perpetrated in foreign countries. The first objective was allegedly to crush Communism, a growing political philosophy and social
movement that was initially funded by the usual group of international bankers who now supported their demise. To this end, the "Vulcans,"
under George H. W. Bush, waged war against the Soviet Union.
[4]
The Return of the Vulcans
In their reincarnation in the administration of George W. Bush, the Vulcans functioned as a supposedly benign group, led by Council
of Foreign Relations (CFR) member Condoleezza Rice, who attempted to augment and compensate for the Bush's lack of experience and
education concerning foreign policy during his presidential campaign. Rice had been President George H. W. Bush's Soviet and East
European Affairs Advisor in the National Security Council during the Soviet Union's dissolution and during the German reunification
(July 1, 1990). The resurrected Vulcan group included Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Rabbi Dov
S. Zakheim, Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz. Other key campaign figures included Dick Cheney, George P. Shultz and Colin Powell,
all influential but not actually a part of the Vulcan Group. All of these people, associated with the George H. W. Bush administration,
returned to powerful, strategic positions in George W. Bush's administration.
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have been accused of being agents for the Israeli government. Investigations by Congress and
the FBI have substantiated those allegations. Zakheim and his family were heavily involved in Yeshivat Sha'alvim, an educational
organization in which students are taught to render absolute commitment to the State of Israel.
[5]
Many of these individuals were also members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which was established in the spring
of 1997 with the intention of promoting American Global leadership at any cost. The chairman and co-founder was William Kristol,
son of Irving Kristol (CFR), considered the godfather of neo-conservatism which promotes the ideas of Max Shachtman and Leo Strauss,
a noted Zionist and professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Kristol's co-founder was Robert W. Kagan (CFR).
Kristol is also the editor and co-founder, along with John Podhoretz, of the Weekly Standard Magazine , established September
17, 1995 and owned by Rupert Murdoch until August 2009. This "conservative" magazine is edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes
and promotes Middle East warfare and a huge military budget, a mentality that infects the most popular "conservative" talk show radio
hosts. Kristol is a trustee for the Manhattan Institute which was founded by CIA Director William Casey and was staffed with former
CIA officers.
The Vulcans had almost limitless financing from a cache known by several names – the Black Eagle Trust, the Marcos gold, Yamashita's
Gold, the Golden Lily Treasure, or the Durham Trust. Japan, under Emperor Hirohito, appointed a brother, Prince Chichibu, to head
Golden Lily, established in November 1937 before Japan's infamous Rape of Nanking , to accompany and follow the military. The Golden
Lily operation carried out massive plunder throughout Asia and included an army of jewelers, financial experts and smelters.
[6] The Japanese were allegedly very organized
and methodical. After the Allied blockade, Golden Lily headquarters were moved from Singapore to Manila where 175 storage sites were
built by slave laborers and POWs. Billions of dollars worth of gold and other plundered treasures were stockpiled in these underground
caverns, some of which were dis covered by the notorious Cold Warrior, Edward G. Lansdale who directed the recovery of some of the
vaults. Truman and subsequent presidents, without congressional knowledge, have used those resources to finance the CIA's chaotic
clandestine activities throughout the world. Much of the Middle East chaos is financed by those pillaged funds. A tiny portion of
that treasure was the source of Ferdinand Marcos' vast wealth. Marcos worked with the CIA for decades using Golden Lily funds to
bribe nations to support the Vietnam War. In return, Marcos was allowed to sell over $1 trillion in gold through Australian brokers.
[7]
In July 1944, the leaders of forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to plan the post-war economy and to discuss
organizing a global political action fund which would use the Black Eagle Trust ostensibly to fight communism, bribe political leaders,
enhance the treasuries of U.S. allies, and manipulate elections in foreign countries and other unconstitutional covert operations.
Certainly, those politicos who managed the funds also received financial benefits. This trust was headed by Secretary of War Henry
Stimson, assisted by John J. McCloy (later head of the World Bank) and Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense) and consultant
Robert B. Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury).
[8] Anderson later operated the Commercial Exchange
Bank of Anguilla in the British West Indies and was convicted of running illegal offshore banking operations and tax evasion. Investors
lost about $4.4 million. Consequently, he was sent to prison for a token amount of time, one month. He was also under house arrest
for five years. He could have received a ten-year sentence but Judge Palmieri considered Anderson's "distinguished service" to the
country in the "top levels of Government." [9]
Between 1945 and 1947 huge quantities of gold and platinum were deposited in prominent banks throughout the world. These deposits
came to be known as the Black Eagle Trust. Swiss banks, because of their neutrality, were pivotal in maintaining these funds. These
funds were allocated to fighting communism and paying bribes and fixing elections in places like Italy, Greece, and Japan.
[10] Stimson and McCloy, both retired from government
service, continued their involvement in the management of the Black Eagle Trust. Robert B. Anderson, who toured the treasure sites
with Douglas MacArthur, set up the Black Eagle Trust and later became a member of Eisenhower's cabinet.
[11] In order to maintain secrecy about the
Trust, Washington officials insisted that the Japanese did not plunder the countries they invaded. Japanese officials who wanted
to divulge the facts were imprisoned or murdered in a way that made it look like suicide, a common CIA tactic.
[12] The Germans paid reparations to thousands
of victims while the Japanese paid next to nothing. Military leaders who opposed foreign policies that embraced exploitation of third
world countries were suicided or died from mysterious causes, which includes individuals such as George S. Patton, Smedley D. Butler
and James V. Forrestal.
The Vulcan's effort to crush Communism and end the Cold War was largely funded by that Japanese plunder. The Vulcans were resurrected
when George W. Bush was installed as president in 2000, facilitated by election maneuvers, probably lots of payoffs, and Jeb Bush's
purge of Florida voters. They conducted other illegal operations, like securities fraud and money laundering. This entailed murder
and false imprisonment to prevent penitent participants from divulging the activities of the group. During the process of accomplishing
the main objective of destroying the Soviet Union, the operatives made massive profits. In September 1991, George H. W. Bush and
Alan Greenspan, both Pilgrims Society members, financed $240
billion in illegal bonds to economically decimate the Soviet Union and bring Soviet oil and gas resources under the control of Western
investors, backed by the Black Eagle Trust and supported later by Putin who for the right price purged certain oligarchs. The $240
billion in illegal bonds were apparently replaced with Treasury notes backed by U.S. taxpayers.
[13] To conceal the clearance of $240 billion
in securities, the Federal Reserve, within two months, increased the money supply to pre-9/11 numbers which resulted in the American
taxpayer refinancing the $240 billion. [14]
The Takeover of Russia's Oil Industry
BP Amoco became the largest foreign direct investor in Russia in 1997 when it paid a half-billion dollars to buy a 10 percent
stake in the Russian oil conglomerate Sidanko. Then in 1999, Tyumen Oil bought Sidanko's prize unit, Chernogorneft which allegedly
made BP Amoco's investment worthless. Tyumen offered to cooperate with BP Amoco on the development of Chernogorneft but BP Amoco
was not interested. [15] In October 1998, Halliburton
Energy Services had entered into an agreement with Moscow-based Tyumen Oil Company (TNK). Their efforts were focused on the four
western Siberia fields, the first one being the Samotlorskoye field.
[16] TNK has proven oil reserves of 4.3 billion
barrels and possibly as many as 6.1 billion barrels, with crude oil production and refining capabilities of 420,000 barrels/day and
230,000 barrels/day, respectively. TNK markets gasoline through 400 retail outlets.
[17] In 2002 Halliburton and Sibneft, Russia's
fifth largest crude oil producer, signed an agreement. Sibneft will use Halliburton's new technologies to improve well construction
and processing while Halliburton directs all project management.
[18]
Tyumenskaya Neftyanaya Kompaniya (Tyumen Oil Company) was established in 1995 by government decree. It is now TNK-BP, the leading
Russian oil company and ranks among the top ten privately owned oil companies worldwide in terms of crude oil production. The company,
formed in 2003, resulted from the merger of BP's Russian oil and gas assets and the oil and gas assets of Alfa, Access/Renova group
(AAR). BP and AAR each own fifty percent of TNK-BP. The shareholders of TNK-BP own almost fifty percent of Slavneft, a vertically
integrated Russian oil company. [19] This transaction
was the biggest in Russian corporate history and was managed by Vladimir Lechtman, the Moscow partner for Jones Day, a global law
firm with thirty offices and 2,200 lawyers worldwide. TNK-BP, Russia's second-largest oil company employs almost 100,000 people and
operates in Samotlor. [20]
Reportedly, Putin was financially rewarded by the collaborators and was happy to purge some annoying industrialists who stood
in the way. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the manager of Yukos, the company that he built into Russia's second-largest oil company after
acquiring it for $168 million when his Bank MENATEP, the first privately owned but notoriously corrupt bank since 1917 and wiped
out in August 1998, purchased it through a controversial government privatization auction in 1995. MENATEP was named as a defendant
in the Avisma lawsuit which was filed on August 19, 1999.
[21] The bank may have facilitated the large-scale
theft of Soviet Treasury funds before and following the USSR's collapse in 1991.
[22] His company had borrowed hundreds of millions
of dollars from western banks. [23] He was arrested
on October 25, 2003 and sentenced in June 2005 to eight years on fraud and tax evasion charges. He was allegedly targeted as a political
enemy by President Vladimir Putin who went after other big business owners who apparently made money by acquiring states assets.
Yukos was sold piecemeal to pay off $28 billion in back tax charges. Yukos was seized and given to Rosneft.
[24]
When Khodorkovsky was arrested, his secretive business arrangement with the Rothschild family was exposed as Jacob Rothschild
assumed Khodorkovsky's 26% control of Yukos while Khodorkovsky's directorial seat on the Yukos board went to Edgar Ortiz, a former
Halliburton vice president during Dick Cheney's reign as CEO at Halliburton. Cheney, as President and CEO of Halliburton, automatically
had an association with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) .
[25] In November 1997, Dick Cheney, in anticipation
of imminent events, had appointed Edgar Ortiz as president of Halliburton Energy Services, their global division.
[26]
The Yukos Oil Company merged with the smaller Sibneft Oil Company on October 3, 2003 which created Russia's largest oil and gas
business and the world's fourth-largest private oil company.
[27] On May 11, 2007 Halliburton announced they
had made an agreement with the Tyumen State Oil and Gas University to open a new employee-training center in Russia to grow their
business in that country and in the surrounding region. They are currently training students from five countries, Kazakhstan, the
Netherlands, Norway, Russia and the United Kingdom.
[28] Halliburton was awarded a $33 million contract
by TNK-BP to provide oil field services to develop the Ust-Vakh field in Western Siberia.
[29]
September 11 – Black Op Cover-up
Three top securities brokers had offices in the World Trade Center, Cantor Fitzgerald, Euro Brokers and Garbon
Inter Capital. Flight 11 struck just under the floors where Cantor Fitzgerald was located. Cantor Fitzgerald, with possible
connections to the U.S. Intelligence apparatus, was America's biggest securities broker and apparently the main target. Within
minutes, an explosion in the North Tower's vacant 23 rd floor, right under the offices of the FBI and Garbon Inter
Capital on the 25 th floor caused a huge fire from the 22 nd through the 25 th floors. At
the same time, there was an explosion in the basement of the North Tower.
[30] A vault in the North Tower basement
held less than $1 billion in gold, much of which was reportedly moved before 9/11. However, the government had hundreds of
billions of dollars of securities which were summarily destroyed. The Federal Reserve, untouched by the crisis at its downtown
offices (as they had everything backed up to a remote location), assumed emergency powers that afternoon. The $240 billion
in securities were electronically cleared.
[31] Then, at 9:03, Flight 175 slammed into the 78 th floor of the South Tower just below the 84 th
floor where Euro Brokers were located. [32]
Brian Clark, the manager at Euro Brokers, heard numerous explosions, apparently unrelated to what he referred to as the oxygen-starved
fire caused by the plane crash.
The September 11 attacks related to the financial improprieties during the preceding ten years which spurred at least nine federal
investigations which were initiated in 1997-1998, about the same time that Osama bin Laden, after twenty years as a CIA asset, announced
a fatwa against the U.S. The records of many of those investigations were held in the Buildings Six and Seven and on the 23
rd floor of the North Tower. Those investigations were sure to reveal the black Eagle Trust shenanigans.
[33] Building Seven, not hit by a plane, collapsed
at 5:20:33 p.m. but was vacated as early as 9:00 when evacuees claimed to see dead bodies and sporadic fires within the building.
By 2008 and even earlier the covert securities were worth trillions. The securities used to decimate the Soviets
and end the Cold War were stored in certain broker's vaults in the World Trade Center where they were destroyed on September
11, 2001. They would have come due for settlement and clearing on September 12, 2001.
[34] The federal agency investigating
these bonds, the Office of Naval Intelligence was in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed on September 11. Renovations
at the Pentagon were due to be completed on September 16, 2001. However, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the entity
that often monitors war games, was hurriedly moved. If they were monitoring the simultaneous war games that morning, they would
have realized that the games were used as a distraction from the actual assault. Whatever hit the pentagon struck the Navy
Command Center and the offices of the Chief of Naval Operations Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP).
[35] There were 125 fatalities in the
Pentagon, thirty-one percent of them were people who worked in the Naval Command Center, the location of the Office of Naval
Intelligence. Thirty-nine of the forty people who worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence died .
[36]
On September 10, 2001 Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon couldn't account for $2.3 trillion, "We are, as they say, tangled in
our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.
We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems that are
inaccessible or incompatible." [37] It was forgotten
the following morning. Accountants, bookkeepers and budget analysts who were in the section of the Pentagon being renovated met their
unexpected deaths. The destruction of accounting facts and figures will prevent discovery of where that money went. I am quite certain
someone knows where it is. Certainly this is not merely gross incompetence but private seizure of public funds.
[38] At the time Rabbi Dov Zakheim was chief-financial
officer for the Department of Defense. [39]
In 1993, Zakheim worked for SPS International, part of System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor. His firm's subsidiary,
Tridata Corporation directed the investigation of the first "terrorist" attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
[40]
Certain National Security officials who had participated in the Cold War victory in 1991 thus comprised the collateral damage
of the Cold War. They, along with hundreds of innocent people were in the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Their deaths
were presumably required to conceal the existence of the Black Eagle Trust, along with the numerous illegal activities it had funded
for over 50 years. This massive destruction, and the lost lives, constitutes a massive cover-up and continued lawlessness by the
brotherhood of death, Skull and Bones, and their accomplices, the Enterprise.
[41] The Enterprise was established in the 1980s
as a covert fascist Cold Warriors faction working with other groups like Halliburton's private security forces and the Moonies. Citibank
is connected to the Enterprise, along with all the CIA front banks, Nugen Hand and BCCI.
Double Dipping
Alvin B. "Buzzy" Krongard was elected Chief Executive Officer of Alexander Brown and Sons in 1991 and Chairman of the Board in
1994. Bankers Trust purchased Alexander Brown and Sons in 1997 to form BT Alex Brown. Krongard relinquished his investments in Alex
Brown to Banker's Trust as part of the merger. He became Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust where he personally interacted with wealthy
clients who were intimately linked to drug money laundering. After a year of possible networking, Krongard joined (or as Michael
Ruppert suggests, rejoined ) the CIA in 1998 where his friend, Director George Tenet, concentrated his skills on private banking
ventures within the elite moneyed community. Senate investigations verify that private banking firms frequently engage in money laundering
from illicit drugs and corporate crime operations.
[42] On January 28, 2000 the Reginald Howe and
GATA Lawsuit was filed which accused certain U.S. bullion banks of illegally dumping U.S. Treasury gold on the market. The lawsuit
named Deutsche bank Alex Brown, the U.S. Treasury, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve, and Citibank, Chase, as defendants. Gerald
Corrigan was accused of having private knowledge of the scheme.
[43] Krongard became the Executive Director
of the CIA, essentially the Chief Operating Officer, and the number three man on March 16, 2001. Krongard, while at the CIA, arranged
for Blackwater's Erik Prince to get his first contract with the U.S. government, and later joined its board.
Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert, estimated that more than $100 million in illegal transactions appeared to have rushed
through the WTC computers before and during the disaster on September 11, 2001. A Deutsche Bank employee verified that approximately
five minutes before the first plane hit the tower that the Deutsche Bank computer system in their WTC office was seized by an outside,
unknown entity. Every single file was swiftly uploaded to an unidentified locality. This employee escaped from the building, but
lost many of his friends. He knew, from his position in the company, that Alex Brown, the Deutsche Bank subsidiary participated in
insider trading. Senator Carl Levin claimed that Alex Brown was just one of twenty prominent U.S. banks associated with money laundering.
[44]
Andreas von Bülow, a Social Democratic Party member of the German parliament (1969-1994), was on the parliamentary committee on
intelligence services, a group that has access to classified information. Von Bülow was also a member of the Schalck-Golodkowski
investigation committee which investigates white-collar crime. He has estimated that inside trader profits surrounding 9/11 totaled
approximately $15 billion. Von Bülow told The Daily Telegraph "If what I say is right, the whole US government should end
up behind bars." Further, he said, "They have hidden behind a veil of secrecy and destroyed the evidence they invented the story
of 19 Muslims working within Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda in order to hide the truth of their own covert operation." He also said,
"I'm convinced that the US apparatus must have played a role and my theory is backed up by the [Washington] government's refusal
to present any proof whatsoever of what happened."
[45]
On September 26, CBS reported that the amount was more than $100 million and that seven countries were investigating the irregular
trades. Two newspapers, Reuters and the New York Times, and other mainstream media reported that the CIA regularly
monitors extraordinary trades and economic irregularities to ascertain possible criminal activities or financial assaults. In fact,
the CIA uses specialized software, PROMIS, to scrutinize trades.
[46]
Numerous researchers believe, with justification, that the transactions in the financial markets are indicative of foreknowledge
of the events of 9/11, the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon. One of the trades, for $2.5 million, a pittance compared
to the total, went unclaimed. Alex Brown, once managed by Krongard, was the firm that placed the put options on United Airlines stock.
President Bush awarded Krongard by appointing him as CIA Executive Director in 2004.
[47]
Between September 6 and 7, 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange received purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines
and only 396 call options. If 4,000 of those options were purchased by people with foreknowledge, they would have accrued about $5
million. On September 10, the Chicago exchange received 4,516 put options on American Airlines compared to 748 calls. The implications
are that some insiders might profit by about $4 million. These two incidents were wholly irregular and at least six times higher
than normal. [48]
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company, who occupied floors 43-46, 56, 59-74 of the World Trade Center, Tower 2, saw 2,157 of its
October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday. This compares to an average of 27 contracts per day
before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000
of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at
least $1.2 million. The U.S. government never again mentioned the trade irregularities after October 12, 2001.
[49] Catastrophic events serve two purposes
for the top criminal element in society – the perpetrators seize resources while their legislative accomplices impose burdensome
restrictions on the citizens to make them more submissive and silent.
[1] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, pp. 4-5 [2] Ibid, p. 20 [3] Ibid, pp. 4-5 [4] Ibid [5] September 11 Commission Report by E. P.
Heidner, 2008, p. 108 [6] Gold Warriors, America's Secret Recovery
of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Verso Publishing, 2003, pp. 32-43 [7] Ibid, pp. 318 [8] Ibid, pp. 14-15 [9] Ex-Treasury Chief Gets 1-Month Term in
Bank Fraud Case by Frank J. Prial, New York Times, June 28, 1987 [10] Gold Warriors, America's Secret Recovery
of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Verso Publishing, 2003, p. 5 [11] Ibid, p. 98 [12] Ibid, p. 102 [13] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, pp. 4-6 [14] Ibid, p. 29 [15] Tyumen Oil of Russia Seeks Links to
Old Foes After Winning Fight By Neela Banerjee, New York Times, December 2, 1999 [16] Halliburton Energy Services Enters Into
Alliance Agreement With Tyumen Oil Company, Press Release, October 15, 1998,
http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1998/hesnws_101598.jsp [17] Ibid [18] Halliburton Press Release, Halliburton
And Russian Oil Company Sibneft Sign Framework Agreement, February 7, 2002,
http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/2002/corpnws_020702.jsp [19] TNK-BP, Our company,
http://www.tnk-bp.com/company/ [20] Russia's largest field is far from depleted
By Jerome R. Corsi, Word Net Daily, November 04, 2005,
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47219 [21] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, p. 28 [22] Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Source Watch,
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mikhail_B._Khodorkovsky [23] Russia's Ruling Robbers by Mark Ames,
Consortium News, March 11, 1999, http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/c031199a.html [24] "Sovest" Group Campaign for Granting
Political Prisoner Status to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, February 7, 2008 [25] Halliburton Man to Sub for Khodorkovsky,
Simon Ostrovsky, Moscow Times, April 30, 2004 as noted in the September 11 Commission Report, p. 233; See also Arrested Oil Tycoon
Passed Shares to Banker, Washington Times, November 2, 2003 [26] Halliburton Press Release, Ortiz Named
President Of Halliburton Energy Services, November 19, 1997,
http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1997/hesnws_111997.jsp [27] Russia: Yukos-Sibneft union forms world's
No. 4 oil producer, Global Finance, Jun 2003, http://mikhail_khodorkovsky_society.blogspot.com/ [28] Halliburton Opens Russia Training Center,
International Business Times, May 11, 2007,
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20070511/halliburton-training.htm [29] Halliburton gets Russia work, Oil Daily,
January 26, 2006, http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-5579583_ITM [30] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 2 [31] Ibid, p. 29 [32] Ibid, pp. 2 [33] Ibid, p. 28-29 [34] "Sioux City, Iowa, July 25, 2005 TomFlocco.com
, According to leaked documents from an intelligence file obtained through a military source in the Office of Naval Intelligence
(ONI), on or about September 12, 1991 non-performing and unauthorized gold-backed debt instruments were used to purchase ten-year
"Brady" bonds. The bonds in turn were illegally employed as collateral to borrow $240 billion--120 in Japanese Yen and 120 in
Deutsch Marks--exchanged for U.S. currency under false pretenses; or counterfeit and unlawful conversion of collateral against which
an unlimited amount of money could be created in derivatives and debt instruments " from Cash payoffs, bonds and murder linked to
White House 9/11 finance, Tom Flocco, tomflocco.com [35] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E.P. Heidner, p. 45 [36] Ibid, p. 2 [37] Rumsfeld's comments were on the Department
of defense web site but have been understandably removed,
http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2001/s20010910-secdef.ht [38] The War On Waste Defense Department
Cannot Account For 25% Of Funds -- $2.3 Trillion,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml [39] September 11 Commission Report by E.
P. Heidner, 2008, p. 108 [40] Following Zakheim and Pentagon Trillions
to Israel and 9-11By Jerry Mazza, July 31, 2006, http://www.rense.com/general75/latest.htm [41] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 6 [42] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of
the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, p. 56 [43] Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations
and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001 by E. P. Heidner, p. 28 [44] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of
the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, pp. 243-247 [45] USA staged 9/11 Attacks, German best-seller
by Kate Connolly, National Post & London Telegraph, November 20, 2003 [46] Crossing the Rubicon, the Decline of
the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil by Michael C. Ruppert, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2004, pp. 243-247 [47] Ibid, pp. 243-247 [48] Ibid, pp. 243-247 [49] Ibid, pp. 243-247
Comments: deannaATspingola.email
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"... The NATO alliance was established to protect war-devastated Western European nations against a possible Soviet threat until they got on their feet economically again. Dwight Eisenhower even said that if American troops remained in Europe too long, NATO would have failed. Yet long after the European economic miracle -- amazing prosperity achieved during a robust recovery in the decade or so after the war -- and long after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO, instead of going away, has expanded its territory and mission. The American military remains in Europe to guarantee the security of nations that have a combined GDP greater than that of the United States. Meanwhile, Russia, the successor "threat" to the Soviet Union, has a GDP equivalent to that of Spain. The overextended United States also has a staggering national debt of $23 trillion and eye-popping unfunded government mandates at all levels that amount to between $150 and $200 trillion. ..."
Bossing, bullying, and nickel-and-diming won't make for an easy divorce. Donald Trump at
NATO Summit, Brussels, in 2018
According to Politico , the American delegation to the
illustrious Munich Security Conference -- the security counterpart to the elite World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland -- was apparently "dumbfounded" by the hostile reaction they
received from European speakers, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Steinmeier even took aim at the Trump administration's
hallowed "Make America Great Again" slogan, accusing the United States of "rejecting the idea
of the international community." Steinmeier characterized Trump's position this way: "Every
country should fend for itself and put its own interests over all others 'great again' -- even
at the expense of neighbors and partners."
Ironically, Steinmeier's acerbic comments seem to conclude that if the United States becomes
uncomfortable with continuing to effectively subsidize the defense of wealthy European states,
which have long been capable of being at least the first line of defense for themselves, it is
inflicting suffering on its allies and doesn't even believe in the "international community."
Steinmeier's grumbling is akin to that of an entitled young adult still living at home after
being told by his parents to get a job.
The NATO alliance was established to protect war-devastated Western European nations
against a possible Soviet threat until they got on their feet economically again. Dwight
Eisenhower even said that if American troops remained in Europe too long, NATO would have
failed. Yet long after the European economic miracle -- amazing prosperity achieved during a
robust recovery in the decade or so after the war -- and long after the Soviet Union collapsed,
NATO, instead of going away, has expanded its territory and mission. The American military
remains in Europe to guarantee the security of nations that have a combined GDP greater than
that of the United States. Meanwhile, Russia, the successor "threat" to the Soviet Union, has a
GDP equivalent to that of Spain. The overextended United States also has a staggering national
debt of $23 trillion and eye-popping unfunded government mandates at all levels that amount to
between $150 and $200 trillion.
One might conclude from this that Trump's policy of angrily haranguing and belittling his
NATO allies into coughing up a few more dollars for their own defense is the right one. Trump
crudely understands the problem but has come up with the wrong solution. The many Eurocentric
analysts, who dominated the American foreign policy elite during the Cold War and are now
trying to hang on to relevance, keep hyping the general Russia threat by excessively demonizing
its president, Vladimir Putin, who is really just another tin-pot dictator.
A third way is still possible, one that avoids both placating the hand-wringing Eurocentric
establishment and the nickel-and-diming of NATO allies that Trump desires.
The worst fear of the Eurocentrics is that Trump will, before leaving office, withdraw from
the NATO alliance, much as he did with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, the
international agreement on climate change, and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. Yet this
is the proper, though radical, approach. It needs to be done immediately, so that it can't be
reversed by the next president. The problem is that Trump has been rude and obnoxious enough to
the Europeans that the divorce might very well make Britain's exit from the European Union look
like a walk in the park. The ideal would have been to have had a previously cordial
relationship with Europe, followed by a U.S. statement that the European economic miracle has
allowed them to withstand a stagnant Russia and they need to finally take primary
responsibility for their own defense.
This would have allowed the United States rebuild its dissipated power by reducing
government spending and debt and reallocating the remaining military forces to the Pacific to
hedge against a rising China. Such a change is critical, and it remains to be seen whether it
can be achieved.
Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and director of the
Independent Institute's Center on Peace & Liberty. His new book, War and the Rogue
Presidency: Restoring the Republic After Congressional Failure, was released in May
2019.
"Trump Should Get Out Of NATO Now, But Nicely" is spot on. The Obama Administration pivot to
the Pacific could have be continued in a cordial fashion but that is not the Donald way. The
US needs to make a treaty with Russia and leave Europe with the possible exception of
Ramstein AFB.
These goofy neocon statements won't buy you anything. Stop giving legitimacy to the
establishment's false narrative, it won't make the foreign policy elites accept you, you
can't oppose the elite and at the same time work within the confines of the paradigm they
created. Not only are such statements untrue, it's self defeating.
Is it really false to say that Russia is stagnant though? After all, Russia has a falling
population (population peaked in the early 1990s), a relatively low life-expectancy, an
economy that is smaller than that of Italy's in terms of nominal GDP, and a conventional
military capability that is a mere shadow of what it once was in Soviet times. Other
countries (China, the U.S. etc..) may have a low fertility rate as well, but China has a
massive population to start with, and the U.S. can attract immigrants fairly well. Note: I am
not saying that immigration is necessarily a good thing when it is used as a means of
demographic replacement to make up for a low fertility rate, but it is one way to cope with
the geopolitical and economic implications of a low birth rate, at least for a time.
Certainly, Russia is not doing too badly by Third World standards, and,to be fair, I do
think Putin has utilized a fundamentally weak geopolitical hand rather well. It's also pretty
clear that Putin played a significant role in bringing Russia back from the brink
economically and culturally following the degradation it suffered in the 1990s. For that
matter, I think his popularity is likely genuine among many people in Russia, even if he is a
dictator of sorts. Still, if you look at the fundamental, long-term economic, demographic,
and military trends, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Russia is a declining power.
Over a long enough time frame, it almost certainly is.
Given the fact that Russia has not had an above replacement fertility rate since the fall of
the USSR, and given that it's ability to attract immigrants is rather limited (how many third
world immigrants would choose Russia, over, say, Germany?), I don't see how a falling
population is not inevitable for Russia in the long term. This is especially a problem for
Russia given the vastness of its eastern regions, as well as how few people live in those
regions to begin with.
A consistent theme of Pat Buchanan's columns about Russia is that-- given the vast
population disparities involved--China is likely to start slowly colonizing Siberia at some
point, at least in an implicit, economic sort of way. I do wonder if this is a likely
outcome.
I said that it's doing well by Third World standards, not that it necessarily is itself a
Third World nation. Historically, Russia was considered a Second World country, which makes
sense.
Russia has an excellent education system, its medical services are good, it has a high
literacy rate, it is white and Christian, with conservative values, and it has few gun
massacres.
Leaving NATO is a no-brainer. The US and Russia have a common foe - the Chicoms.
The problem with disbanding NATO is that no one knows what will follow.
Would Europe go back to the intra power politics of the early 20th Century? In which case the
US will likely sucked into their next war.
Or would the EU integrate it's defense and foreign policy and create a Federal Europe? And if
they did, how long would it take Europe to be a peer competitor to the US?
How many European countries have territorial claims on each other? Few to none.
How many European countries are in competition for colonies? Few to none.
You don't need territorial issues for war, the US had no territorial issues with Iraq nor
Afghanistan in 2001, it didn't prevent the US from invading both countries.
I can easily see something like social dumping starting a cascade that takes Europe to
war. That is the main European fear about BREXIT.
I think Russia is more worried about its southern flank than its western one in the long term
especially once the US and its ambition is gone. Russia badly needs to get closer to Europe.
Germany will rule the E.U. just as they would have If Hitler had won the 2cd World war It
will be national socialist which the Muslims will like .. The remaining Jews will have to
leave or die
NATO should have been mothballed after the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. But the
vested interests of the military-industrial-financial complex have kept it expanding,
antagonizing Russia in its sphere of influence, seeking out new monsters (such as the unjust
and illegal war on Serbia), and it mainly exists now to enrich arms producers and to support
bureaucrats in Brussels with sinecures in their fancy headquarters building.
As an anti-war lefty, I just love this destruction of the intelligence community and hope
Trump really does abandon NATO... right before we drag him out of White House in shackles...
or some such thing.
It's curious the complaint about debt in this post... didn't everyone just agree to
increase the defense budget last year... again?
This would have allowed the United States rebuild its dissipated power by reducing
government spending and debt and reallocating the remaining military forces to the Pacific to
hedge against a rising China.
Why must the US hedge against a rising China in the Pacific ?
How is this a realistic plan of action?
China's rise has been through voluntary economic endeavors with other nations not through
force of arms. Asian issues must be solved via Asian nations engaging in dialectical dialogue
not US government gun-boat diplomacy.
The same logic that allows for a reduced US role in NATO (ie defending Europe) clearly
shows that America's allies in the Pacific (eg Japan, S.Korea, Indonesia, etc) have more than
recovered (eg Japan world's 3rd largest economy, S.Korea 12th largest, Indonesia 16th
largest) from the devastation of WWII and the Korea War and are quite capable of defending
themselves.
To paraphrase George Washington - trade with all entangling alliances with none.
The US has been running trillion dollar yearly deficits for over a decade with an
acknowledged 23 trillion dollar debt (as of 2020) along with hundreds of trillions of dollars
in unfunded future liabilities and deteriorating national infrastructure in need of over 3
trillion dollars in upgrades.
In order to meet these pressing issues the US government needs to stop garrisoning (ie
empire) the world under the tissue paper thin veneer of providing global stability and
security (of which it can not even provide in Baltimore Md 50 miles from DC) and return it's
myopic/megalomaniacal gaze to America.
I don't think Trump is really interested in leaving NATO. US has a stable & a dependable
market in Europe. US' presence in Europe prevents China & Russia spreading their wings
there. It will also assist US in containing these major powers along side its efforts in
South China Sea & the Info-Pacific. Internationally US gets the support of 27 Countries
in all international fora. To my mind, the very reason why US continually keeps projecting
Russia as an enemy is to ensure that the European countries remain tied to US.
Even if US is unwilling to let go Europe from the alliance, it is time EU abandons US
& takes responsibility for itself. Europe has the potential to become an important &
a powerful pole in a Multipolar world.
Russia presents more of a danger today than during the height of the Cold War: then the
Kremlin had a proper buffer zone, today it has not. There is the existential threat: the
reason nations to war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
While I agree that NATO is now irrelevant and a significant waste of US tax dollars, shifting
that expenditure to fight China might be an even bigger mistake. The US should withdraw its
military forces from the Western Pacific for the same reason we should leave NATO. Japan,
Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines should be made responsible for making their own
accommodations with China.
NATO is marketed as providing each member nation with the benefit that the other member
nations are committed to coming to its aid militarily in the event of an attack by another
nation, especially Russia .
However, Pew Research Center poll results released Sunday indicate that the majority or
plurality of people in 11 of 16 NATO countries where individuals were questioned oppose their
respective governments meeting this commitment, at least if the military adversary were
Russia.
These poll results indicate that serious thought should be given to disbanding NATO , an
organization with a primary objective that appears to be at odds with public opinion in many
NATO countries.
When asked if their respective countries' governments should use military force to defend a
NATO ally country neighboring Russia with which "Russia got into a serious military conflict,"
people living in the 16 NATO countries tended to answer in the negative.
"No" was the answer for the majority of polled individuals in eight countries -- France,
Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Turkey.
In three more NATO countries -- the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland -- a plurality
rejected military intervention.
Only in five countries -- the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,
and Lithuania -- did more people (a majority in each case) support such military intervention
than reject it.
"... How did they do it? Reading the reports and contemporary press (1924), plus the "Western" governments plots now with the Germans also part of the gang, everyone predicted the Soviets' experiment – who could not run a chicken raffle, let alone a huge country – would collapse by itself and the Russian wealthy emigres in Paris were preparing their return home on the back of the Great Powers armies under the command of Gen. Hoffmann. ..."
"... How did they do it? Perhaps the answer is revealed if we ask: what is different now? And the answer is that the Russian people were building a new country from the ruins of the old for themselves. In the process they were building Socialism. For the many detractors of the USSR here, that is the greatest sin. In their view, people should work as slaves for their masters: the capitalist class, coincidentally mostly Jewish, to rub salt into the wound. ..."
@FB What I find most surprising (and revolting) is the virulent rancour of many
commenters towards the Revolutionary and WWII Russians for (and I can't see any other
plausible explanation) having deposed Tsarism and Nazism respectively and, subsequently,
constructing a successful competitor to the economic orthodoxy of Capitalism.
All that done
from scratch within a short span of time on their own by their own efforts, a feat unequal in
human history.
How they did it? After all, Russia had long been the butt of jokes by other Europeans
about its backwardness, "Asiatic" crudeness and atavistic religiosity and when news of the
Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905 reached Europe they expressed openly their
schadenfreude and glee for Russia's distress in hard times, especially for "dishonouring"
European arms for being defeated by an Asiatic nation. Not only that, by 1917 Russia was
literally on its knees, the people starving, the soldiers at the front neglected, the
countryside devastated, the German armies outside Petrograd and the Kerensky government
making plans to leave the capital. Then the foreign invasions at Murmansk, Archangel, Baku,
Manchuria and Vladivostok by Entente powers, Finland, Poland, US and Japan all ganged up in
support of the Whites in the civil war that further devastated the countryside to the point
that it ceased to function as a country without money and the economy ran on "war Communism"
(the state had to provided all the basic needs to everyone). Famine ensued.
From that disaster that Russia was, gradually emerged a nation licking its wounds and
grieving its ten million plus dead (perhaps then the greatest calamity visiting a nation
ever) by putting its back to the wall and rebuilding itself, on their own and facing the
hostility of all the Great Powers through sanctions and blockades.
How did they do it? Reading the reports and contemporary press (1924), plus the "Western"
governments plots now with the Germans also part of the gang, everyone predicted the Soviets'
experiment – who could not run a chicken raffle, let alone a huge country – would
collapse by itself and the Russian wealthy emigres in Paris were preparing their return home
on the back of the Great Powers armies under the command of Gen. Hoffmann.
How did they do it? Perhaps the answer is revealed if we ask: what is different now? And
the answer is that the Russian people were building a new country from the ruins of the old
for themselves. In the process they were building Socialism. For the many detractors of the
USSR here, that is the greatest sin. In their view, people should work as slaves for their
masters: the capitalist class, coincidentally mostly Jewish, to rub salt into the wound.
Read wagelaborer (3) because what he says is the core to the understanding US Foreign
policy, everything else is unimportant, a side dish, a noise. One possible thing missing is
that in Europe the prime objective for the US is to prevent Russia and Germany coupling up,
keeping the two tribes separate is the goal, at whatever cost.
The pricing of oil (and oil derivatives) in dollars is a replacement for the gold-backed
dollar scrapped by Nixon in early 70s. The pricing is a must, losing it would undermine the
dollar as a reserve currency. Each year, those who need to buy oil plus oil derivates have to
find trillions for the buy the black gold.
Consider: Each day some 100ml barrels are produced, that's 36bn barrels a year, at a cost
of $75 per barrel it's some $2.7tr needed to buy the stuff. And that's just the crude. Add
the derivatives (per barrel more expensive than crude), and one's talking some $5-7tr to be
found. That's what allows the US to print either IOU's i.e. the Treasuries or actual cash
without any worry whatever the IOU's will ever be brought back to the mainland US in haunting
inflation.
The time the pricing of oil in dollars goes, the US hegemony gets a fatal knock, from
which it would be near impossible to recover bar staring a war.
It's clear that Trump does not understand - or has not understood until recently - the true
goals of US foreign policy (maintaining the dollar hegemony first, promoting US business
interests second). His notion of winning a war is apparently being able to send the troops
home. This is at odds with the "deep state", which has no problem spending money that it sees
as coming from others, as long as that money keeps coming in and it's being spent in the
furtherance of geopolitical goals. Hence the continued US military presence in Afghanistan
must be furthering, if not fulfilling, one or more geopolitical goals. Those goals most
likely do not include "defeating terrorism". Trump may well not be aware of what the goals
are.
It may be useful to draw a comparison between the US military presence in Afghanistan and
its presence in Vietnam. Like Afghanistan, Vietnam seems to have been a near-pointless
expenditure of resources and people - on the surface. From the "deep state's" point of view,
however, Vietnam served as a bulwark against encroachment by the non-dollar-aligned part of
the world. Vietnam was only abandoned once a much bigger prize became available - China.
Given Afghanistan's location, it stands to reason that it too is serving as a bulwark and
that its importance in the "deep state's" eyes will diminish (if not disappear) once Iran
and/or Russia experiences a "change of heart".
Yalensis, earlier you said that Russia should restore communism to remove poverty.
How did that work the last time in 1917-1991? The Soviet Union collapsed and historical
Russia was split into many different parts.
I expect that if Russia would experiment communism the second time the outcome would be
another split of Russia. This time it would be the North Caucasus, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan
and possible Siberia and the Far East breaking away from Moscow.
And why is that? Because communism doesn't work, period. It has been tried several times
in many different parts of the world, and it has always failed.
The basics are simple. Once private ownership is banned people stop caring. Motivation to
work hard is gone If you are deprived of the possibility to make money and own private
property.
Say what you want about America but there is a good reason why basically all the greatest
companies in the world are American, or at least from countries that have practiced
capitalism for centuries: Microsoft, Apple, Exxon, Shell, Amazon, Intel, Ford, Mercedez Benz,
Toyota, Samsung etc.
You can compare how a middle class American and a middle class Soviet citizen lived in the
1980s. While a typical middle class American lived in a big house in a suburb with two cars
in the household, a typical Soviet middle class citizen lived in a "kommunalka" apartment
where many families had to share the same bathroom and kitchen and a Soviet citizen had to
work a certain amount of years before being allowed a right to own his or her own car,
usually a Soviet made Lada. Most of the Soviet citizens never had a chance to get their own
car but instead of to rely on public transport.
I know you are going to say that China is a good example that communism can work. But
there is one problem: China is not really a communist country anymore. Actually the rise of
China began at the same moment when Deng Xiaoping allowed private property and private
enterprise. The horrendous communist policies of Mao Tse Tung killed tens of millions of
Chinese people before that. Allowing people to work for their own well being was that made
China what it is today (China is still a poor country compared to the West, but at least
hundreds of millions of people are not starving anymore as was the case during Mao's
rule).
If Russia ever restored communism again it would be the end of Russia.
a typical Soviet middle class citizen lived in a "kommunalka" apartment
Really?
I lived in a modern, built in the 1970s block in Voronezh in 1989.: 3 large rooms, largish
kitchen, bathroom and toilet, 2 balconies , 11th floor.
I live in a similar flat now, but on the 3rd floor, built 1976, central Administrative
District, Taganskiy precinct, Moskva.
The only thing communal about those 2 dwellings is the central heating, which is turned on
in October and turned off in May.
In England, during my childhood I lived in a slum street built in the 1850s: no central
heating, no hot water, no bathroom, no toilet. The toilet was in the yard at the back. The
dewelling had 2 downstairs rooms and 2 upstairs room, a so-called "two-up, two-down". I lived
there until 1960.
Wilson St. in my home town, 1969
My hometown is situated in the first capitalist country in the world.
God that picture brings back memories – we lived in similar property in Birmingham
until 1978. My family came over from Ireland in the 1960s and these type of houses were
common place for working class families.
You can still find them in the midlands and the north, although they have been modernised
to include bathrooms.
Capitalism and economic Nirvana are known to be one in the same in the minds of morons.
"Indications of this failure of capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment
punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes
the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its counterpart in
the declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for most
workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising
productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job
have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and more meaningless
due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of contract labor in the gig
economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as capitalism has
asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies,
social democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of "liberated capitalism."7
The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest
regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational
corporations, is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of
the world economy and relative poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore
funds are currently lodged in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting
"the fortified refuge of Big Finance."9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the
global-communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based
financial capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed to the
riches of today's "1 percent." Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the
world's population, while the three richest men in the United States -- Jeff Bezos, Bill
Gates, and Warren Buffett -- have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10 In every
region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per
capita income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant
trend for centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More than 60 percent of the world's
employed population, some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector,
forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent
larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.
Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of
reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and
Europe, while transportation is becoming more difficult in the United States and many other
countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on the automobile and disinvestment
in public transportation. Urban structures are more and more characterized by gentrification
and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized
populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are
homeless on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat
infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the world."
Comrade Karl, the vast majority of poverty in this world is in capitalist countries. Latin
America and Africa will toss your silly assertions in the trash bin of history.
And saying China is not communist is equivalent to saying the US is not capitalist. I
leave it to your to figure out what the foregoing means.
There is a silver lining to that. If another term of Trump inspires the Europeans to
abrogate NATO and put an end to that alliance and create their own NEATO ( North East
Atlantic Treaty Organization) withOUT America and withOUT Canada and maybe withOUT some of
those no-great-bargain East European countries; then NEATO Europe could reach its own
Separate Peace with Russia and lower that tension point.
And America could bring its hundred thousand hostages ( "soldiers") back home from
not-NATO-anymore Europe.
The US is trying to stop Eurasia's economic and political integration in order to delay its
own demise, say international observers, explaining what message the US sent to the
Russia-China-Iran "triumvirate" by killing Quds Commander Qasem Soleimani. The assassination of
Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and
commander of the Quds Force, in a targeted US air strike on 3 January came on the heels of
joint naval exercise launched by Russia, Iran and China in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of
Oman.
The "growing Russia-China-Iran trilateral convergence", as The Diplomat
dubbed it in late December, is seemingly
hitting a raw nerve in Washington :
speaking to Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) on 2 January, Rear Admiral
Khanzadi, the Iranian navy commander, said that Washington and its allies had held an emergency
meeting aimed at disrupting the drills.
US Opposes Rapprochement of Russia, China and
Iran Amid Policy of 'Maximum Pressure'
"Recent violent US attacks against Iranian allies in Iraq and Syria, culminating in the
killing of Iran's Major General Qasem Soleimani, are, in the wider geopolitical sense, meant
to send signals to the building Eurasian triumvirate to cease their collaborative activities,
let alone longer-term strategic and Belt and Road Initiative-linked designs," says Pye Ian,
an American economic analyst and private equity executive.
According to Ian, the US decision to step up pressure on Tehran might be stemming from
Washington's apparent belief that Iran is "the 'weakest link' in the strengthening Eurasian
alliance".
However, "Russia, China and Iran cannot be attacked overtly, let alone invaded, occupied or
'regime changed'," the economic analyst highlights.
Christopher C. Black, a Toronto-based international criminal lawyer with 20 years of
experience in war crimes and international relations, echoes the American economist.
"It is in response to the close relationship between Russia, Iran and China and it is no
coincidence that this murder took place just as the joint naval exercises in the Persian Gulf
came to an end," he said. "Further, it is a threat to Russian strategic interests in Syria
and to Syria itself."
Apart from this, the move indicates that "one of the reasons for US pressure on Iran is to
control the oil supply to China in order to cripple China's development," Black suggests.
Russia and its military successes in the region have become yet another irritant for
Washington, according to Max Parry, an independent American journalist and geopolitical
analyst.
"The US likely feels the need to re-assert itself as a hegemonic power in the region,
considering it is Moscow that emerged as the new honest peace broker in the Middle East with
the Syrian conflict," Parry notes. "Russia completely outmanoeuvred Washington and by the end
of the war, Turkey was practically in Moscow's camp. Trump has reset US foreign policy with
the withdrawal from Syria and the targeting of Iran."
By killing Soleimani, the US "has completely overplayed its hand and this could be the
beginning of the end for Washington because a war with Iran would be no cakewalk", he
emphasises.
According to Ian, in addition to being a thorn in Washington's flesh, Moscow, Beijing and
Tehran have something else in common: the three nations have increasingly been drifting away
from the US dollar.
The trend followed the Trump administration's:
· unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA) in
May 2018;
· trade war waged against the People's Republic of China by Washington since March
2018;
· series of anti-Russian sanctions imposed against Moscow under the pretext of the
latter's interference in the US 2016 presidential elections, something that Russia resolutely
denies.
The economic analyst explains that "the dollar's universal confidence trick requires uniform
adherence, by natural adoption or by force". While the US allies remain obedient to the dollar-
dominated system, those who resisted it such as Iraq under Saddam, Libya under Gaddafi and
Venezuela under Chavez "triggered some Atlanticist force, either overtly or clandestinely, in
order to try and put those nations back on a compliant page."
However, "the current state of dollar printing by the US Fed ad infinitum cannot last
forever," Ian stresses.
"The global East and South are already ahead of Transatlantic banking, in a sense, by
shifting further out of the dollar and Treasury securities into their own, or bilateral,
currency exchanges, gold, and/or domestic or collaborative cryptocurrency endeavours," he
says.
Russia, China, Iran, as well as India and some other Eurasian nations are switching to
trading in local currencies and
continuing to amass gold at a steady pace . Thus, for instance, Russia produced over 185.1
tonnes of gold in the first six months of 2019; the country's bullion reserves reached 72.7
million troy ounces (2,261 tonnes) as of 1 December 2019. For its part, the People's Bank of
China (PBoC) has accumulated 1,948.3 tonnes of the precious metal as of December 2019,
according to World Gold Council.
Ian foresees that if the world's nations continue to shift
out of US Treasury obligations and choose alternative currencies for energy pricing,
trading and reserves recycling, it may "cause US interest rates to fly higher, cratering
consumer, institutional and public debt obligations and re-importing an obscene level of
inflation back into the US".
The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of
Sputnik.
On the one hand he is a creature of the technocratic neo-liberal order which is committed to
unilateralism and "post-nation-statism". On the other hand he is a creature of France – a
nation with strong (though easily forgotten) nationalist traditions stretching back to King
Louis XI, the founder of the first modern nation state, Cardinal Mazarin who organized the
Peace of Westphalia that established modern thoughts on nation states, Jean-Baptiste Colbert
who's economic theories gave meaning to economic sovereignty in the modern era, to Sadi Carnot
who's application of Colbertist economics and resistance to British manipulation got him killed
in 1895, to Charles de Gaulle, who established the 5 th Republic and devoted his
life to resisting the Deep State on the basis of peaceful relations with Russia and China.
Then there is the populist rage of the French which dates back to the colorful days of the
French revolution which established a unique tradition of mass revolts against the established
order when it becomes abusive of the people this provides a "bottom up" factor which any
politician desirous of keeping their heads attached to their necks must keep in mind.
For these two reasons (top down traditions of statecraft and bottom up traditions of freeing
corrupt leaders' of their heads from their bodies), Macron has found himself joining President
Trump's call to re-introduce Russia back into the G8, and has made major maneuvers to re-orient
France towards a pro-China policy becoming the guest of honor at China's International
Expo where $15 billion of deals were signed on energy, aerospace and agricultural
initiatives.
Macron has even enraged Europe's technocratic elite by questioning the foundations of the
European Union's viability while at the same time aptly
criticizing NATO of 'brain death' . The crisis caused by the unravelling of the globalist
vision of a post-nation state world order has resulted in an emergency conference in London to
figure out how NATO can be saved from its total irrelevance. Faced with the anti-NATO sentiment
expressed by Macron and Trump in recent months, and the emergence of the new multipolar order
which is attracting ever more nation states (including NATO members) into its sphere of
influence, Jens Stoltenberg
made the desperate assertion that China must be made a target of the military alliance
saying that China "is coming closer to us, investing heavily in infrastructure. We see them
in Africa, we see them in the Arctic, we see them in cyber space and China now has the
second-largest defense budget in the world."
The NATO Disorder and the Economic
Meltdown
Today, after decades of neoliberal practices have undermined the once powerful
agro-industrial capacities of France under the "post-industrial" Euro, it has become evident
that austerity and increased taxes are the only solutions which the technocrats running the
European Central Bank will permit. Since Euro membership forbids any nation to create a debt
which is greater than 3% of GDP, the means to generate sufficient state credit to build large
scale projects needed for an economic recovery do not exist.
In other words, from the standpoint of the Trans-Atlantic rules of the game, the situation
is hopeless.
For all of his problems, Macron isn't blind to this fact and can see that Russia and China
have successfully transformed the international order with the advent of the Belt and Road
Initiative. He can see that this system uniquely offers western leaders (who wish to keep their
heads in the face of the oncoming economic collapse), the only viable means to provide jobs,
security and long term economic growth to their people since it is rooted in long term, open
system thinking which is not connected to Hobbesian closed system geopolitics. De Gaulle would
be happy to see this shift.
The Revival of de
Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle was among a network of leaders who fought valiantly against the cancerous
deep state that had formerly supported fascism in WWII. While Franklin Roosevelt had to
do battle with such pro-fascist organizations such as the JP Morgan-funded Liberty League
and Council on Foreign Relations from 1933-1945, President De Gaulle had to contend with the
pro-Nazi Petain government whose agents immediately took over controls of France in the wake of
WWII, and didn't go away upon the General's ascension to the Presidency during the near
collapse of the 5 th republic in 1959.
De Gaulle strategically fought tooth and nail against the pro-NATO fascists led by General
Challe who attempted two coup attempts against De Gaulle in
1960 and 1961 and later worked with MI6 and the CIA using private contractors like Permindex to
arrange over
30 assassination attempts from 1961-1969.
De Gaulle was not only successful at taking France out of
the NATO cage in 1966 , but he had organized to ensure Algeria's independence against the
will of the entire deep state of France who often worked with Dulles' State Department to
preserve France's colonial possessions. De Gaulle also recognized the importance of breaking
the bipolar rules of the Cold War by reaching out to Russia calling for a renewed Europe "
from the Atlantic to the Urals " and also an alliance with China with the intent of
resolving the fires lit by western arsonists in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam whose independence
he was committed to guaranteeing. De Gaulle wrote of his plan in his Memoires:
"My aim, then, was to disengage France, not from the Atlantic Alliance, which I intended
to maintain by way of ultimate precaution, but from the integration carried out by NATO under
American command; to establish relations with each of the states of the East bloc, first and
foremost Russia, with the object of bringing about a détente, followed by understanding
and cooperation; to do likewise, when the time was ripe, with China"
After arranging a treaty with China's Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, India's Prime Minster Nehru
and the leadership of Cambodia in 1963 to create a China led block to resolve the crisis in
Southeast Asia with France's help, De Gaulle became the first western head of state to
recognize China and establish diplomatic relations with the Mainland on January 31, 1964. He
saw that China's growth would become a driving force of world development and saw a friendship
based on scientific and technological progress to be a source of France's renewal. Attacking
the false dichotomy of "Free liberal capitalism" vs "totalitarian communism", De Gaulle
expressed the Colbertist traditions of "dirigisme" which have historically driven France's
progress since the 17 th century when he said "We are not going to commit
ourselves to the empire of liberal capitalism, and nobody can believe that we are ever going to
submit to the crushing totalitarianism of communism."
The De Gaulle-Kennedy
Alliance
De Gaulle had great hopes to find like-minded anti-colonialist leaders and collaborators who
were fighting against the deep state in other countries. In America he was inspired by the
fresh leadership of the young John F. Kennedy whom he first met in Paris in May 1961. Of
Kennedy he wrote "The new President was determined to devote himself to the cause of
freedom, justice, and progress. It is true that, persuaded that it was the duty of the United
States and himself to redress wrongs, he would be drawn into ill-advised interventions. But the
experience of the statesman would no doubt have gradually restrained the impulsiveness of the
idealist. John Kennedy had the ability, and had it not been for the crime which killed him,
might have had the time to leave his mark on our age."
De Gaulle's advice to Kennedy was instrumental in the young President's decision to stay out
of a land war in Vietnam and led to Kennedy's
National Security Action Memorandum 263 to begin a phase out of American military from
Vietnam on October 2, 1963. Kenney and De Gaulle both shared the view (alongside Italian
industrialist Enrico Mattei with whom both collaborated) that Africa, Asia and South America
needed advanced scientific and technological progress, energy sovereignty and sanitation in
order to be fully liberated by the colonial structures of Europe. All three fought openly for
this vision and all three fell in the line of battle (one to a plane crash in 1961, another to
several shooters in Dallas in 1963 and the last to a staged "colour revolution" in 1969.)
[1]
If De Gaulle, Kennedy and Mattei were alive today, it is guaranteed they would recognize in
the Belt and Road Initiative and broader Eurasian alliance, the only viable pathway to a future
worth living in and the only means to save the souls of their own nations. The question is:
Will Macron continue on this Gaullist path and will other nations grow the balls to follow
suite, or will those imperial fascists who overthrew De Gaulle's vision in 1969 succeed once
more?
Footnote
[1] It is noteworthy that thesame
Montreal-based Permindex Corporationwhich was expelled from France for having
orchestrated at least two attempts on De Gaulle's life was found by New Orleans D.A. Jim
Garrison to be at the heart of the November 22, 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Barbara Boyd correctly called Kent testimony "obsine" becase it was one grad neocon
gallisination, which has nothing to do with real facts on the ground.
She attributed those dirty games not only to the USA but also to London.
If you want to stop the coup against the President, you must understand how Joe Biden and
Hillary Clinton's State Department carried out a coup against the democratically elected
government of Ukraine in 2014.
In a November 16 webcast, LaRouche PAC's Barbara Boyd presented the real story behind the
present impeachment farce: how the very forces running the attack on President Trump, used
thugs as their enforcers, in order to turn Ukraine into a pawn in the British geopolitical war
drive against Russia.
Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they
never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way
that first appears.
Stephen Fry / @stephenfry
You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find
out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun
12th Jan
Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn
12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes
Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.
Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.
It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.
Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.
Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella
Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian
Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner
Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.
The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose.
Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.
The USSR was no workers' paradise. For all its formal allegiance to Marx and Engels, it was a
militantly hierarchical class society ruled by a tyrannical state. After World War Two, it
held brutal military power over Eastern Europe and East Germany. Still, Soviet-era Russia
created an urban and industrialized society with real civilizational accomplishments
(including cradle-to-grave health-care, housing, and food security and an impressive
educational system and cultural apparatus) outside capitalism. It pursued an independent path
to modernity without a capitalist class, devoid of a bourgeoisie, in the name of socialism.
It therefore posed a political and ideological challenge to U.S-led Western capitalism
– and to Washington's related plans for the Third World periphery, which was supposed
to subordinate its developmental path to the needs of the rich nations (the U.S., Western
Europe, and honorarily white Japan) of the world-capitalist core.
Honest U.S. Cold Warriors knew that it was the political threat of "communism" – its
appeal to poor nations and people (including the lower and working classes within rich/core
states) – and not any serious military danger that constituted the true "Soviet
menace." Contrary to U.S. "containment" doctrine after World War II, the ruling Soviet
bureaucracy was concerned above all with keeping an iron grip on its internal and regional
empire, not global expansion and "world revolution." It did, however "deter the worst of
Western violence" (Noam Chomsky) by providing military and other assistance to Third World
targets of U.S. and Western attack (including China, Korea, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Cuba,
Vietnam, and Laos). Along the way, it provided an example of independent development outside
and against the capitalist world system advanced by the superpower headquartered in
Washington.
To make matters worse from Washington's "Open Door" perspective, the Soviet Empire kept a
vast swath of the world's natural and human resources walled off from profitable exploitation
by global capital.
All of this was more than enough to mark the Soviet Union as global public enemy number
one for the post-WWII U.S. power elite, which had truly planet-wide imperial ambitions,
unlike Moscow.
The Soviet deterrent and alternative to U.S.-led capitalism-imperialism collapsed once and
for all in the early 1990s. Washington celebrated with unchallenged invasions of Panama and
Iraq. The blood-drenched U.S. President George H.W. Bush exulted that "what we say goes" in a
newly unipolar, post-Soviet world. Russia reverted to not-so "free market" capitalism under
U.S.-led Western financial supervision and in accord with the savage austerity and inequality
imposed by the neoliberal "Washington consensus." Chomsky got it right in 1991. "With the
collapse of Soviet tyranny," he wrote, "much of the region can be expected to return to its
traditional [subordinate] status, with the former high echelons of the bureaucracy playing
the role of the Third World elites that enrich themselves while serving the interests of
foreign investors." The consequences were disastrous for many millions of ordinary
Russians.
@Kevin #18
"Can anyone recommend a good book on the privatization of state assets of the former USSR?
Particularly one that focuses on how mid-level technocrats, often of a persecuted minority,
were able to get the capital to purchase these assets."
PUTIN from Chris
Hutchins is a good read that also describes the rise of the oligarchs and how Putin dealt
with them. Like one oligarch made a small fortune selling the first western cars in the
country and how they bought up cheap shares from the Yeltsin privatisation scheme. Privatized
companies changed ownership under threats or even at gunpoint. The oligarchs were simple
mobsters at the time. That is about what i vaguely remember reading the book a few years back
but there is a lot more detail.
TG #29
Replacement level fertility" is the total fertility rate -- the average number of children
born per woman -- at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the
next, without migration. This rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman for most countries,
although it may modestly vary with mortality rates'
Russia 1.61 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Canada 1.6 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Japan 1.42 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Italy 1.45 children born/woman (2018 est.)
France 2.06 children born/woman (2018 est.)
@Kevin #18
I would suggest looking at articles in the Exile: www.exile.ru
Unfortunately, these are no longer free.
The short story: the most successful "privatizations" involved getting control of a bank,
then using the bank's deposits to buy up companies.
The most successful scheme was getting control of a bank which was partly used by the Russian
government for payments; I recall one example where one bank was used to clear funds paid for
state enterprises - so the "privatizers" were literally pushing money out for assets and
getting them back.
Further down the scale - there was all manner of chicanery including kidnapping, extortion,
murder and what not.
The problem with books published in English is that you're almost guaranteed to run into
thinly disguised agitprop ranging from the usual American and British academics taking the
national security dime, to Khodorkovsky and the other O.G. Jewish oligarchs attempting to
whitewash history: Gusinski, Berezofsky, etc.
Try this: Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia – May 15,
2017
by Thane Gustafson
A review @ Amazon:
Thane masterfully succeeded in uncovering the fundamental drivers of the Russian oil
industry and its interdependency with the political complex through a comprehensive and
convincing historical analysis, with plenty of meaningful insights and endearing anecdotes.
Rooted in Soviet legacy and having gone through the 90s bust-boom roller coaster and 2000s
state reconsolidation the industry is a unique globally isolated eco system, and, with
Russia as a whole, is at a crossroads. A must read for any decision maker in the O&G
business.
Just a quick take, the separation of the Russian government/ruling elites from Russian
culture suggests foreign influence as in Russia's elites looking to the West and aping
Western ideas – think of Peter the Great or Gorbachev. That was a betrayal of Russian
values and a historical mistake of immense proportions. Russia is learning to how to minimize
the core values of the West – greed, deception and narcissism.
China has done a better job than Russia in that regard but on the other hand it has a
vastly different history and enjoyed more isolation from Western meddling if not outright
invasions.
I would make a distinction here. Mastering Western technology is not necessarily the same
thing as "aping Western ideas". Also would distinguish between Peter the Great who won some
remarkable geopolitical victories for Russia (think Poltava); vs Gorbachov, who completely
betrayed Russia. To the extent he even left Russia vulnerable to American nuclear attack for
a window of 2 whole hours, or more.
As I showed in
this old post .
Gorby in phone conversation to George W. Bush Daddy:
"And now concerning Russia – this is the second most important theme of our
conversations. In front of me, on the table, lies the Decree of the President of the USSR,
concerning my resignation. I am hereby also relieving myself of the duties of the
Commander-in-Chief and handing over my responsibilities for employing nuclear weapons ,
to the President of the Russian Federation. In other words, I continue to manage these
affairs right up until the completion of the constitutional process. I can assure you, that
everything is under strict control. The moment I announce my resignation, these orders will
become effective. There will not be any kind of dispute about this. You can spend your
Christmas evening in complete peace of mind."
In other words, Gorby not only left the Soviet Union completely vulnerable to nuclear
attack for a period of 2 hours or so; but even announced that fact to their greatest enemy.
What kind of national leader does something like that? The only reason any Russians are even
around today, is because George Bush Daddy was either too kind, or too dull-witted to take
advantage of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
"... To use Krushchev's granddaugher as a source was also a very low blow: she's herself an op-ed "journalist" coopted by the western MSM (I remember reading her pieces when she worked for the Asia Times, and she's for sure not a specialist/expert). ..."
"... It's also false when the NYT stated Russia is some kind of last refuge for oligarchs, mafiosos and terrorists in the world. No, this refuge's name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ..."
"... The USA is also the last refuge of Latin American dictators. More than 3,000 enemies of the State from Latin American countries live in Florida under officially recognized political asylum. Many of them are ex-generals and bankers. ..."
"... There's also a macabre message in the headline of the NYT article: that it is weird, from the American point of view, that Russia was somehow able to survive the absolute destruction that should have happened with its Shock Therapy during the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The author indeed seems genuinely puzzled as to why didn't Russia degenerate to a Third World banana republic after the capitalist charge on the newly founded nation sponsored by the USA; after all, it worked in Latin America and many other countries. I've already discussed it here many times, and I stand by my hypothesis: Russia is still able to rest on the laurels of the good ol' Soviet Union. That windfall will soon end, so Putin must think a viable succession scheme and viabilize the five-year plans. ..."
The worst thing about the NYT piece is that it is not in the "Opinion" section, but right
in the Front Page, as if it were genuine investigative journalism.
To use Krushchev's granddaugher as a source was also a very low blow: she's herself
an op-ed "journalist" coopted by the western MSM (I remember reading her pieces when she
worked for the Asia Times, and she's for sure not a specialist/expert).
I disagree with b about the "hidden economy" thing. Every capitalist country has a
hidden economy; the USA, for example, has by far the largest shadow banking system in the
world, which could easily rise its GDP by 50%. Italy recently considered including the
mafia business in the GDP calculation so they could officially get out of recession. Having
20-30% of your economy "hidden", therefore, is not an excuse for the Russian Federation for
the dire state of its own people.
The NYT is also wrong when it infers Yeltsin was "fixing" the Soviet economy by making
it take the bitter pill. The Soviet economy begun to unravel precisely because of
Gorbachev's Perestroika - which was the policy designed precisely to reform the system in
the first place. Yeltsin made things even worse - far worse than a linear extrapolation
even from the Gorbachev era. Indeed, that's why he was toppled in the first place.
It's also false when the NYT stated Russia is some kind of last refuge for
oligarchs, mafiosos and terrorists in the world. No, this refuge's name is the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Thanks to its inumerous tax havens (of
which the Cayman Islands are, by far, the largest), many traffickers, terrorists and
oligarchs are able to roam freely around the world, with their money laundered. Many of
them even buy residence in London and a British Green Card, so they can also enjoy the
protections the Crown gives to its subjects. In their free time, they also buy some English
football clubs, but that's another story. Switzerland also enjoy many of the perks of being
a tax haven.
The USA is also the last refuge of Latin American dictators. More than 3,000 enemies
of the State from Latin American countries live in Florida under officially recognized
political asylum. Many of them are ex-generals and bankers.
Indeed, Russia is considered a "not free" nation precisely because this kind of
financial promiscuity doesn't exist on a systemic-cultural level. Freedom, for the
liberals, is nothing more nothing less than being able to freely purchase and use the
commodities you bought on the free market with a certain amount of money. Russia (but
mainly China) doesn't allow the western oligarchs to do that, so it is kind of a
disappointment to the "vital center".
There's also a macabre message in the headline of the NYT article: that it is weird,
from the American point of view, that Russia was somehow able to survive the absolute
destruction that should have happened with its Shock Therapy during the Yeltsin
era.
The author indeed seems genuinely puzzled as to why didn't Russia degenerate to a
Third World banana republic after the capitalist charge on the newly founded nation
sponsored by the USA; after all, it worked in Latin America and many other countries. I've
already discussed it here many times, and I stand by my hypothesis: Russia is still able to
rest on the laurels of the good ol' Soviet Union. That windfall will soon end, so Putin
must think a viable succession scheme and viabilize the five-year plans.
@FSD:
Agreed, but I think we are seeing a strange form of mass psychogenic illness in the West (
https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/trigger-warnings-and-mass-psychogenic-illness/),
and in the EU and US in particular. I strongly suspect that the farther an farther the mass
media push the willingly ignorant bulk of people out into a fictional and counterfactual
mental reservation, the more and more people crave distraction that, like a junkie's fix,
needs to always get bigger to reach the same effect. I turned on the TV the other day and
happened on a show called Masked Singer, which struck me as so insanely manic in its
subject and its presentation -- loud music, flashing lights, cartoonish hosts, junkie-like
pacing -- that I wondered that anyone can function anymore inside this pin-ball machine
world. It's like the entire West is having, especially in its so-called cultural nodes, a
collective manic episode with very real danger of self-harm.
Because Russia's population is relatively stable, every small uptick in economic growth
is pure profit. With a stable population, even 1% annual growth, compounded every year, can
result in substantial prosperity before too long.
But in the United States, with open-borders cheap-labor immigration pushing the
population ever higher, the numbers are different. When a population ir forced upwards, the
economic demands are even higher than the population growth itself. That's because you need
to not just grow the ongoing population, but provide massive investments in new
infrastructure. Russia is like a person who's paid off his mortgage, and can devote all
income to living and making progress. The United States is like a homeowner with a massive
mortgage and who also has to pay massive taxes to pay for more sewers and roads and energy
conservation etc.
So 1% annual sustained economic growth in Russia means Russia is making progress, while
even 3% annual economic growth in the United States means it is falling behind.
Don't believe me? From 1950 to the present, immigration increased California's
population from 10 million to about 40 million. On paper the economy boomed, but the
average person is much worse off, the quality of life has tanked, roads are choked, rents
are sky-high while wages are stagnant, air quality is down even with massive spending on
pollution controls, poverty is the worst in the nation, homelessness is booming, etc.
It's my guess Putin doesn't waste time reading the NYTs. Why should he, and for that
matter why should anyone? The Times and the other Oligarch rags should be ignored by all.
Break the chains. Focusing on God and family a young couple may try homesteading. Ignore
the rest.
The imperial lie machine sure is disgruntled that the 1990s attempt to economically and
biologically crush Russia once and for all was a failure and Russia has since been
reasserting itself. It wasn't "the end of history" after all.
That was the source of the underlying current of Russia Derangement among the US
elite classes (political, economic, media, academia, professional etc.), the many
provocations, and then the total meltdown beginning in late 2016.
Since it really seems to be a collective mental illness (I mean that literally)
afflicting a power group which is already psychotic and violent, and since it coincides
with the accelerating erosion of the US imperial position, it's looking more and more
likely that this must eventually lead to all-out war. I just can't imagine the US stepping
back, any more than I could imagine Hitler doing so.
America's obsessive bashing of Russia (and now China) is suggestive of a deep
psychological disorder.
Though the Americans and their allied apologists will insist that it is sincerely
motivated by a humanitarian concern for Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights(TM), that is
quite laughable given America's concentration camps for undocumented immigrants; its
incarceration of immigrant children in cages; or the US Prison Industrial Complex in
general, which has been called America's new Jim Crow in that it imprisons millions of
African Americans and other minorities and relegates them to a new racist caste system.
No, cut through the barrage of American Moral Supremacism and other delusions, the
United States is enraged that, despite its attempt to economically rape Russia in the 1990s
through American-promoted Free Market reforms and Neoliberal "shock therapy," Russia is
still standing and indeed resurgent.
THAT is what enrages the Americans and triggers them in rug-chewing fits of frenzy.
Have any of you read Bill Browder's book Red Notice?
It's a great read.
The grandson of the General Secretary of the United States Communist Party, whose great
auntie worked for the NKVD. His brother, Lev, is a great mathematician.
Browder worked with Robert Maxwell as an intern. That's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell,
Jeffrey Epstein's facilitator.
Browder went on to Salomen Brothers and ended up being one of the largest capitalists in
Eastern Europe.
For some reason the Russians believed that Browder was using front companies to aquire
stakes in Russian strategic assets, then remove billions without paying taxes, apparently
worth in excess of 4 billion. If Russian 'propaganda' is to be believed.
They must have wrong because Browder was able to achieve the Magnitsky Act in
response.
It seemed the Russians unfairly seized shares from Browder he acquired in Gazprom,
Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco.
In July 2017, Browder testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Russia's alleged
interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As everyone knows, this claim about Russian collusion by Trump is 100% true, and supports
the veracity of all his other claims. As the number one capitalist in Russia following the
fall of the Soviet Union.
And he was a hero too. Speaking out about how Jewish Oligarchs defenestrated Russia with
Yeltsin in the early 2000s and late 90s. He spoke out against his fellow Jews in what most
regard as conspiracy theories. Putin even praised him for assisting in liberation from the
Oligarchs.
What the Russians did was terrifying. They established a precedent where Jewish
international assets and capital could be seized for interference with affairs of state.
Of course what they apparently did was steal $230m off of Browder's fund shareholders.
Russia is of course very corrupt. And Browder's testimony against Trump for alleged Russia
collusion given what everyone knows speaks for his utmost veracity.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder. He did his best in
Poland with depressed assets, and he had a grand adventure. He's clearly amazingly good at
finance.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
"... After a Western-backed coup overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian president in February 2014, it brought to power a government largely picked by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. People in the Donbass region did not accept the new government and made two conditions for remaining a part of Ukraine: special autonomy status and two state languages. This is exactly what Canada provides for its large French-speaking minority. ..."
"... Those with even rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian history and its huge ethnic Russian population would agree that these demands are not unreasonable, but the post-coup government called the separatist forces terrorists, sent aviation and tanks, and started a civil war that has been raging for five years. Washington, which was in total control of the Ukrainian political class, could have resolved this crisis easily by telling the new government to accept these modest conditions. Instead, the U.S. supported Kyiv with money, weapons, military training and political support. ..."
At a time of one of the greatest political upheavals in American history that could spill
over into foreign affairs, especially U.S.-Russian relations with unpredictable and devastating
results, I thought Christmas might offer a chance for all
of us to take a pause and search for an exit from the megacrisis.
Many people believe miracles do happen at Christmastime. However, it looks like we need
President Trump , Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to perform
at least three of them.
Those who wonder why Mr. Zelensky is on this list
should recall that the Trump impeachment process started
because of his phone call with this guy whose country the Democrats and their pathetic
witnesses deem no less than vital to America's national security.
Let us start with Mr. Putin because someone has to take the first difficult step and he is
the only one in a clear position to do it.
Dear Mr. Putin, please make a public statement that Russia pledges not to interfere in the
next and future American elections. It would be good if the two chambers of the Russian
parliament, the Duma and Federation Council, ratify this pledge as well. Please do it
unilaterally without asking Mr. Trump and the U.S. Congress to
respond in kind.
Dear Mr. Trump , please return to your
earlier thinking about NATO as an obsolete organization that lost its purpose in 1991 after the
collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw military bloc. Since then, it has been searching
desperately for new missions and enemies to justify its existence.
Recall that NATO's continuous expansion drive is the major factor that squandered the
exceptional opportunity for U.S.-Russian rapprochement that all Russian leaders, starting with
Mikhail Gorbachev, kept proposing. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat, and 18
other senators voted against President Clinton's first round of NATO expansion. "We'll be back
on a hair-trigger. We're talking about nuclear war," they said.
At the same time, NATO has failed to counter international terrorism -- the real threat to
European and American security. It is NATO that boosted the jihadi peril by overthrowing
Libya's government, allowing that prosperous country to morph into a terrorist playground and
staging point for millions of unvetted migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.
Is NATO making America and our allies more secure? During the Cold War, when NATO allowed
the West to stand firm against Soviet communist designs on Europe, the answer was an easy yes,
but today, with NATO's reckless poking of the Russian bear, the answer is a resounding no.
A rebuilt NATO or a new organization, IATO -- International Anti-Terrorist Organization --
specifically targeting global jihad, would have a future with new partners including Russia,
for which terrorism represents a major security threat. Georgia and Ukraine could join IATO as
well, thus taking the first step toward reconciliation with Russia that NATO's insatiable
expansion drive helped destroy.
French President Emmanuel Macron is the first Western leader who agrees with this point of view
and is not afraid to say that "NATO's brain is dead." However, the U.S. president must take the
lead to move past legacy NATO.
Dear Mr. Zelensky , I believe that you
sincerely want to end the war in your country. It is not an easy job since you face a strong
and vocal radical nationalistic opposition with strong neo-Nazi overtones that declares that
any compromise on your side will be met with the violent resistance and another "Maidan
revolution" that may lead to your overthrow. The leader of this opposition is former President
Petro Poroshenko, whom Washington supported all these years and who was given a rare privilege
to speak at a joint session of Congress, where members greeted him with numerous standing
ovations. At the same time, Ukrainian people hated him so much that they decided to replace him
with a Jewish comic actor with no political experience.
Mr. Zelensky , I wonder if you
have read the book "Shooting Stars" by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, which describes some
important episodes in which fate gave an individual a chance at a historical turning point.
Zweig says fate usually chooses for this purpose a strong personality, but sometimes it falls
to mediocrities who fail miserably.
You are in a position to decide which you will be, and the pass to historical Olympus is
obvious.
After a Western-backed coup overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian president in February 2014,
it brought to power a government largely picked by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria
Nuland. People in the Donbass region did not accept the new government and made two conditions
for remaining a part of Ukraine: special autonomy status and two state languages. This is
exactly what Canada provides for its large French-speaking minority.
Those with even rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian history and its huge ethnic Russian
population would agree that these demands are not unreasonable, but the post-coup government
called the separatist forces terrorists, sent aviation and tanks, and started a civil war that
has been raging for five years.
Washington, which was in total control of the Ukrainian political class, could have resolved
this crisis easily by telling the new government to accept these modest conditions. Instead,
the U.S. supported Kyiv with money, weapons, military training and political support.
Mr. Zelensky , nowadays you and
your country are used as pawns in the attempts to impeach Mr. Trump , but your prime
responsibility is before Ukrainian people who dismissed the party of war and placed the fate of
your country and its people in your hands. They expect you to make the right decision by
choosing the road to peace.
While waiting for these miracles to materialize, I wish all a merry Christmas , happy Hanukkah and peace on
earth in 2020.
Edward Lozansky is president of American University in Moscow.
Investor Bill Browder's allegations –Why Spiegel
is sticking to Magnitsky research
By Lucy Komisar
Dec 15, 2019
This is German news magazine Der Spiegel's response to a complaint by William Browder to its
editor
and to the
German Press Commission
about its exposé that proved he was a fraudster and his Magnitsky story a fabrication.
Key parts are marked in bold. The text and documents show the Spiegel story to be correct and Browder to be a conman.
Former major investor Bill Browder accuses SPIEGEL of misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the
death of Russian Sergei Magnitsky. SPIEGEL rejects this – and lists the arguments and facts.
Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, photo Luke MacGregor / Bloomberg / Getty Images
Friday,
13.12.2019
8:21 p.m.
SPIEGEL reported on the background of the so-called Magnitsky sanctions on November 23. These punitive measures,
which were imposed on Russian officials by the United States, are mainly based on the account of the former major
investor Bill Browder and relate to the fate of his colleague Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky died in a prison in Moscow in 2009 in circumstances that were not fully understood. Browder claims
Magnitsky was murdered for uncovering a tax scandal.
The SPIEGEL report describes the contradictions in
Browder's statements and states that he cannot provide sufficient evidence for his thesis.
Browder has now made a complaint against the text public, in the form of a letter to the editor-in-chief and a
complaint to the German Press Council. In his letter, he accuses SPIEGEL of distorting the facts.
We consider the complaint to be unfounded and therefore want to make it clear once again where our considerable
doubts about Brudder's story come from and why we consider it necessary to discuss it publicly. We have also made
the
text
freely available to all SPIEGEL readers (
you
can find the text here
). In this statement, we also link some of the sources to which we referred in our
research.
We have corrected an error in the English version of the SPIEGEL report. There we had the information that a rubber
truncheon was used, wrongly assigned to a report from 2009. In fact, it only appears in another report from 2011. The
German version was correct from the start.
NOTE FROM LK: That is Der Spiegel's only mistake. The claim that a rubber truncheon was used is a Browder
forgery. See this by reporter Michael Thau with whom I collaborated on exposing this very complex Browder
fakery
, which included inventing a form that doesn't exist and tracing a signature.
No doubt Magnitsky died a terrible death. As it was said in the SPIEGEL report, "horrible injustice" happened to
him. In our view, it is also appropriate to speak of a "mercilessly omitted assistance". The "use of a rubber stick"
is also
indisputable
. At no point in the SPIEGEL report is the issue of exonerating the Russian state from guilt for
Magnitsky's death. It is about showing
the inconsistencies, contradictions, and unsubstantiated claims in the
story that Browder has been coming and going to Western governments for years – and which have become the basis for
Western sanctions against Russian officials.
Browder's account of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky's death consists of several key elements:
How it all started:
According to Browder, tax inquiries were launched in Moscow in 2007, which he
described as clearly "criminal and politically motivated". The proceedings were fictitious, initiated only for the
purpose of confiscating important documents from some of his letterbox companies during a search. On June 4, 2007,
searches were conducted in Moscow. Numerous company documents were confiscated.
Magnitsky becomes a whistleblower:
Browder claims that he entrusted Magnitsky with the
investigation in 2007: three mailbox companies were hijacked after the search. According to Browder, Magnitsky
reported these events to the State Investigation Committee on June 5 and October 7, 2008, and explicitly accused two
police officers of the crime, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. According to Browder, this advertisement gives a
clear motive for the later arrest and murder of Magnitsky.
Arrest and death
: A trial against Magnitsky will open in autumn 2008. The allegation is tax
evasion. Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008. He died in Russian custody on November 16, 2009. Browder repeatedly
describes the death as a targeted murder plot.
Browder's presentation of the exact events varied
. The campaign videos that he published on
Youtube are exemplary.
Among other things, it states:
"?? After Sergei Magnitsky testified against the same criminal group for an even larger crime, the same
officers arrested, tortured and eventually killed Sergei to hide their crime."
"Instead of supporting Sergei Magnitsky and recognizing him as a hero, the government allowed interior
ministry officers, Kuznetsov, Karpov to arrest, torture and kill him."
At every stage of this presentation, numerous points do not stand up to scrutiny. A London court came to
the conclusion that Browder did not even begin to substantiate his allegations against Karpov (the
full
court order can be viewed here
)
Again and again it becomes clear that Browder's story contains errors and inconsistencies that distort the
overall picture of the events surrounding Magnitsky's death.
1. The tax investigation
The investigation started much earlier than Browder claims. While he has repeatedly stressed that he first
heard the name of the investigator Artyom Kuznetsov in 2007, the opposite is well documented. Kusnezov's name is
already on a letter from the tax investigator from June 2006, which went to Browder's companies.
That Browder's team was aware of the process also results from Magnitsky's statement of June 5, 2008.
There he describes that Kusnetzov requested company and bank documents at the end of May 2006. This mid-2006
investigation is also mentioned in complaints that Browder's people sent to the authorities in December 2007.
In addition, Magnitsky himself was questioned by the authorities in 2006 about tax inquiries.
Investigations into tax evasion by mailbox companies in the vicinity of Browder, including the company "Saturn
Investment", which Magnitsky was concerned with, also date from before 2004.
Several court rulings were brought against Browder's companies, then the proceedings were closed, but reopened in
2008.
SPIEGEL does not adopt the views of the Russian judiciary. A final clarification on whether the allegations of tax
evasion were valid would be up to an independent court, in a fair trial. It becomes clear, however, that
the
investigation did not suddenly start in 2007 as Browder claims, apparently recognizable without any basis. The
investigation has a well-documented history. The European Court of Human Rights concluded in its judgment on the case
that Magnitsky was not "arbitrarily" detained:
"
The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings
against Mr Magnitskyy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in
fraudulent acts."
(
Find
the verdict here
)
2. Magnitsky's role as a crucial whistleblower:
In Browder's account, Magnitsky's statement to investigators is the motive for his imprisonment and later targeted
murder: a corrupt clique team silenced the man who was dangerous to it. This is the core of the story spread by
Browder.
Browder describes Magnitsky as a decisive whistleblower. But this is a retrospective construction. Several
people from Browder's team have made the same or very similar allegations against the Russian authorities, some of
them earlier than Magnitsky:
Browder's lawyer Eduard Khairetdinov in complaints to the authorities in early December 2007 (PDF on
Browders
website
)
According to Browder, Magnitsky's first statement on the matter dates back to June 5, 2008.
He speaks about the search and confiscation of documents that, in his opinion, have been carefully used to hijack
the companies. He does not speak of the great tax fraud.
Magnitsky had "not yet discovered the scam",
writes Browder on his website.
A week earlier, however, on May 28, 2008, another Browder man named Grant Felgenhauer wrote in a
letter to the anti-corruption council of the Russian president about the suspicion that the attackers' real goal
was to refund hundreds of taxes Millions of dollars
(PDF
on
Browders website
– the corresponding passage is on top three, Felgenhauer speculates over $ 300 million).
The media had already reported the events. The business service
Bloomberg
,
the "Financial Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" reported in early April 2008.
The New York Times also made public the $ 230 million fraud on July 24, 2008 (link to
article
). Magnitsky,
in turn, did not speak to the authorities until his statement on October 7, 2008.
This chronological sequence is one reason why observers have doubts as to whether Magnitsky was actually
murdered so that the charges against the police officers are no longer raised. The allegations against the Russian
police were worldwide, regardless of Magnitsky's testimony.
Human rights activist Soya Svetova, who dealt with the case from the beginning, put it this way in conversation
with SPIEGEL last summer.
SPIEGEL
:
What about the version that was specifically targeted for being killed? Is
there evidence of this?
Svetova
:
No. There is no evidence of this. What was the point of killing him? No sense.
SPIEGEL
:
Because he knew about a $ 230 million fraud.
Svetova
:
Yes, but not only did he know about this fraud, the entire management and
colleagues also knew about it. It was written about in newspapers. He didn't reveal a secret.
SPIEGEL
: But your report mentions that pressure may have been put on him while in custody.
Svetova
: When he was in custody, people wanted statements from him against Bill Browder. But he
didn't do any. And probably he would never have made such a statement. But killing him would have been completely
pointless for them.
Svetova agreed to the interview and its recording in July 2019. In previous years, she had taken the position that
there was no evidence of a targeted murder. In 2014, for example, she wrote that she could not imagine that someone
had caused Magnitsky's death in a targeted manner ("Well, after five years have passed, I think this killing was not
intentional" –
original in
Russian
).
Shortly before the publication of the SPIEGEL report in November, she said that although that was her words, she
had meanwhile changed her mind and believed that targeted murder was possible. Svetova's change of heart is
transparently documented in the SPIEGEL.
3. The motive for Magnitsky's arrest
Browder claims that Magnitsky was arrested to force him to withdraw his statements against the police. He was
therefore tortured and murdered. Magnitsky's attorney at the time presented the situation differently right from the
start.
Dmitrij Kharitonov told SPIEGEL in autumn 2009 that his client was only a hostage, and that the
authorities actually wanted to put pressure on Bill Browder
(click here for the
article
).
Kharitonov has used the phrase "hostage" more often. In an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine,
he reported that Magnitsky said about himself in court: "Your honor, I was actually taken hostage. My person hardly
interests anyone, everyone is interested in the person of the Hermitage chiefs."(
Russian
text
).
Human rights activist Soya Svetova also argued in a similar fashion in an interview with SPIEGEL this summer.
Svetova
: The figure Magnitsky combines the two greatest grievances in the Russian judiciary and
the Russian investigative system. If a lawsuit is opened against a company and it is not possible to arrest its boss,
then they take his assistant or his deputy or simply a colleague hostage. We see that in many cases: It was the same
with Mikhail Khodorkovsky's group Yukos (??). First, they take hostages. Magnitsky was also a hostage. He was of no
interest to anyone, they wanted Browder.
SPIEGEL
: Although the Russian authorities had just thrown Browder out of the country.
Svetova
: You wanted Magnitsky to tell you what terrible things Browder did. They wanted him to
discredit him, that he was a fraud and tax evader. Even though they stole his companies from him.
Svetova has represented this position several times, in 2014, for example, "
Radio
Liberty
".
In the 2009 text report co-authored by Svetova, evidence is given that investigators, together with the prison
authorities, put pressure on Magnitsky. The report also contains a corresponding quote from Magnitsky. His conditions
of detention had deteriorated in coordination with the investigator of the case against him, Oleg Siltschenko.
Their
goal is "that I accept false accusations, burden myself and others". There is no mention of Browder's claim that
Magnitsky should have revoked his statements.
The Russian original of the report is available on Browder's website (
PDF
). While
the Russian text does not contain the name of the investigator Kuznetsov, the English translation also published on
Browder's website expressly refers to him
(
PDF
).
[LK: Browder posted the version with his forged paragraph at the top of page 3 to his
website
and distributed it to media, including to the
Wall Street Journal
,
which has it on its website. The
translation
filed in U.S. federal court in the Prevezon case does not have that paragraph.]
4. The alleged evidence of a targeted murder plot
As alleged evidence of his thesis of targeted murder, Browder cites photos of hematomas on the dead man's
hands. Some may have been handcuffed, others may have been from Magnitsky's desperate punches on a door. A fatal
injury cannot be seen in the pictures
.
This does not preclude Magnitsky from being killed by external violence, but
there is no evidence of a
targeted murder by beating eight prison guards over an hour and 18 minutes, as Browder has variously claimed.
The contradicting information about the cause of death of the Russian authorities is disturbing, it is not
sufficient evidence for a targeted murder. The use of a rubber stick was also mentioned in the SPIEGEL text.
[LK:
Again, that is incorrect, there is no evidence of use of a truncheon. And consider, do American police who beat up
prisoners write that in reports?]
5. Magnitsky's alleged statements against police officers Karpov and Kusnezov
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of embezzling the true content of Sergei Magnitsky's statements. That in fact, Magnitsky
clearly named police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov as guilty in the statements before his arrest.
Nowhere in the two documents does Magnitsky raise a direct personal accusation against Karpov and
Kusnezov.
6. The role of the police officer Karpov in the Magnitsky case
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of spreading Pavel Karpov's claim that it has nothing to do with Magnitsky's death and tax
fraud. However, it is part of the journalistic due diligence to give people who have been charged with serious crimes
the opportunity to comment. This also applies to Karpov.
Magnitsky's lawyer Dmitry Kharitonov has emphasized several times (for example
here
in
conversation with the Russian radio station Echo Moscow) that Pavel Karpov played no role in the prosecution of his
client.
Kharitonov repeated this statement to SPIEGEL twice. Human rights activist Soja Svetova also said in
the summer of 2019 with a view to Karpov: "But there is no evidence that Karpov put pressure on him (Magnitsky)."
In addition,
the London High Court has also
found
that
Browder's allegations against Karpov are insufficiently substantiated.
7. The question of money
The SPIEGEL report does not go any further into the course of
the $230 million fraud, of which Browder
complains.
He refers to the findings of US investigators in the New York trial (
PDF
).
LK: The Justice Department acted as Browder's proxy lawyer. Its chief investigator
admitted
under oath that he got all his information from Browder and "the internet." The complaint filed by
U.S. attorney Preet Bharara is full of fabrications and should not be believed.
However, this case is less clear than Browder claims. The responsible US investigator had to admit in a
survey that his findings are based solely on statements and documents from Browder and his team.
The process
ended with a compromise. The Russian Kazyv clan – accused by Browder of profiting from tax fraud – has enforced the
express written note that it has nothing to do with the Magnitsky case.
Browder has been interviewed in the case. Under oath, he is unable to explain how he and his people
followed the cash flows.
Video recordings of the statement have landed on Youtube, the transcript is
available on Pacer.gov, an electronic database for documents from US proceedings.
Browder was able to take a comprehensive position on SPIEGEL on all of the points covered in the report, including
two talks each lasting two hours in summer.
SPIEGEL also sent questions to Browder on November 21 that go beyond the text previously
published. Browder didn't respond.
(Note from the Editor – Over 20 years ago, I was working for a company while endeavoring to build a church in California [preachers
need to work many times] and in the process we worked on a transaction of enormous size – $26.5 Trillion Dollars and it was deeply
involved with the CIA and our Government. It was under code name "Project Hammer" and the actual code word for the project was "EFG
Jacobi." After the deal closed the US Government froze the money. Many people don't realize that they have two sets of books, one
for the public and one for their clandestine operations around the world. We never got paid. I met Ambassador Lee Wanta (
http://eagleonetowanta.com ) about this time and since we had similar experiences
with the Government theft of funds meant for the American People, I have stayed in touch with him for many years. This article is
from http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/projecthammerreload/titlepage1.htm
written by David Guyatt who has intimate knowledge of these matters as the article will show. I kept a daily log on this for
8 years until we felt it would never pay out. Ambassador Wanta has a Court Order to release his money but powers are still refusing
to do so. We are attempting to arrange a meetingh with him and President Trump so the new Treasury Secretary can seize the funds
he has [$32.5 Trillion] which will pay off the national debt and finance the infrastructure for this country. There is a desperate
attempt in the ESTABLISHMENT, the Democrat Party, some Republicans, and the Main Streem Media to divert our attention from the true
story that you can read here and on the website of the Ambassador.)
Beginning in 1988 and lasting until approximately 1992, "
Project Hammer " was the latest
in a series of highly secretive banking practices – known as "collateral trading" programs – that are used to create, as if by magic,
huge amounts of unaccountable funds for use in specific projects.
These vast pools of unvouchered slush funds are applied to finance a wide variety of clandestine activities that include:
secret military projects
geo-political requirements
development of infrastructure projects
It is also whispered that, in the case of the Project Hammer program at least, a percentage of the proceeds generated from this
secretive activity found its way into the pockets of VIPs and well-known politicians.
Names associated with such corrupt behavior are carried on the wind; but if one listens attentively, the names
George Bush, Sr , and Jim
Baker
III are just discernible to the trained ear.
An example of the type of project on which these funds are expended is the trading programme known as "EFG Jacobi" – a predecessor
of Hammer – that I understand was used largely to finance military facilities and related operations at the
top-secret US base located at Pine Gap near
Alice Springs in central Australia.
In order to maintain the secrecy that surrounds genuine activity, these trading programmes are routinely said not to exist. Enquiries
about them are deflected and attention is instead focused on the warnings issued by government agencies about fake programmes. This,
when combined with the numerous prosecutions that occur every year over fraudulent High Yield Investment Programme transactions,
serves to create the impression that authorized programmes do not occur.
The reasons for this deflection are many, but not least is the fact that the asset bases on which these programmes usually operate
are also said not to exist – at least in the quantities that they actually do. The assets in question are large volumes of gold and
lesser amounts of platinum plundered by the Nazis and Japanese during World War II.
The fact that gold has been the one stable commodity used to back and support the issuance of currency over the decades means
that it has been subject to considerable government and central bank secrecy. It was only in 1997 that the Bank of England decided
to lift this veil of secrecy and allow the London bullion market a degree of openness. But that openness did not include coming clean
about the true amount of gold in existence, which is far larger than official figures allow.
Because of this and the extremely covert nature of related trading programmes, comprehensive details of the programmes' operations
and the financing techniques employed have remained hidden from public view. At least this was the case prior to the publication
of part one of this series,
The Project Hammer File .
1 This essay is the result
of further examination of the techniques and activity of Project Hammer, and now places additional important material into the public
domain.
Project Hammer 2
(Reloaded ) remains a high-level state secret in a number of countries including the USA. This was confirmed de facto by the
CIA in its refusal to release any relevant information following my Freedom of Information Act request in February 2001. The exemption
used by the CIA to reject my request was that relevant material is "properly classified pursuant to an Executive Order in the interest
of national defense or foreign policy".
2
Project Hammer also stands out because proceeds from the trading activity were illegally diverted by major banks. Confirmation
of this is provided by Brigadier-General
Erle Cocke in his April 2000 affidavit . In this, General Cocke was asked about the involvement of former US Treasury Secretary
Lloyd Bentsen, who was retained to investigate what had happened to (and also to recover) the missing funds.
Asked if Bentsen "had the government's interest in closing this whole problem" and if he had "ever had a discussion" with Bentsen,
Cocke replied:
Many hours just trying to find out whether any agency, any group, Federal Reserve, Treasury, CIA, FBI, security agencies, and
so forth, all of them put together, whether any of which would really like to finish. And, quite frankly, nobody stepped up to
the plate.
Cocke was then asked if "they would like to finish it", and he responded:
I think they would like to finish it, but they all back away. It is not my cup of tea, or they have spent enough time with
it and are not going to realize anything, and therefore they just quit. They don't confirm, they don't deny, they just stop.
One can conclude that the banks that diverted this money were too powerful for any agency of the US government to tackle. It also
helped that suitable and substantial "incentives" were provided to former high-level Bush (Sr) Administration figures to bring their
influence to bear quietly to ensure that action against the banks was not taken.
Although not part of the sanctioned plan for Project Hammer – which was to generate funds to pay off debts on bullion certificates
issued by certain metal trusts – the funds were siphoned off surreptitiously in order to rescue numerous major US and other banks
that by the latter half of the 1980s were tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.
3
The banks only had themselves to blame for their imminent collapse. Reckless lending to Third World nations for over a decade
or more, combined with the raw greed of senior bank executives, had caused unparalleled damage to the world's banking system. The
inability of indebted Third World nations to repay their massive debts could have been – in fact, was – foreseen, but was ignored.
The spiral of gluttony had taken prisoner the faculty of prudence and reason as bank executives, seeking their next bonus and
promotion, pleaded with sovereign nations to take loans they did not need and ultimately could not repay. Nor was it unusual for
some of the funds on loan to find their way into the private bank accounts of corrupt state officials – "diversions" that were known
about in the boardrooms of the top banks, but ignored as "business as usual".
By the end of the 1980s, big banks including Citibank, Chase Manhattan, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC),
England's Midland Bank and many, many others were in dire straits. In all but name, they were bankrupt. The possibility of a prolonged
series of collapses of the world's top banks – a sort of "domino theory" of finance – was regarded in some quarters with palpable
fear. The entire Western banking system was rocking when it should have been rolling along nicely.
Somewhere, someone – nobody knows who (or at least no one is saying) – took the decision to bail out the banks and save the banking
system by diverting Project Hammer funds for this purpose. Those banking executives who caused the problem in the first place weren't
confronted by their mistakes or held to account by their shareholders but, instead, continued to collect their million-dollar pay
cheques, boost their bonus payments and profit shares, flick ash off their Cuban cigars, quaff bottles of expensive Cheval Blanc
and slap each other on the back in delighted relief.
One of those sighing relief was almost certainly Citibank's John Reed.
Another
one quite likely to have been cultivating a quiet exhalation was Hongkong and Shanghai Bank boss Sir William Purvis.
Meanwhile, many investors who had placed their money into Project Hammer in return for an agreed profit, as well as all those middle-men
who had worked hard for their promised commission, were relieved of their money in a twisted version of the well-known axiom, "One
man's loss is another banker's gain".
STEALING FROM THIEVES
The sanctioned purpose of Project Hammer was of a macro-economic nature, which is a nice way of saying that it was all to do with
"repatriating" the assets stolen earlier by someone else – except that when nations steal valuable assets during wartime, it's called
"plunder"; but when the victors in that war grab those same assets, they call it "recovery".
The assets in question were a vast horde of gold and lesser quantities of platinum plus not inconsiderable amounts of loose gemstones
which had been grabbed by the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II.
A large volume of this loot found its way to the Philippines where it was hidden in numerous treasure sites by the Japanese occupiers,
who planned to recover it after the war.
But it didn't quite work out the way the Japanese had planned. They lost the war, along with the Philippines – which, it seems,
they had been fairly confident of being allowed to keep in a negotiated truce with the Allies.
In their place, the OSS – the wartime forerunner of America's spy agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – began recovering
the bullion plundered from a dozen or so nations. This bullion formed what became known as the "Black Eagle" fund, which was part
of a secret agreement eclipsed behind the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement.
Consequently, the metal was placed under the care of OSS (and later CIA) operative Severino Garcia Santa Romana, who put it under
the control of numerous corporate entities he formed for the purpose. These entities, in turn, proceeded to establish 176 bank accounts
in 42 different countries in which to deposit these assets under private treaty agreement.
Confirmation of this came from General Cocke, after this was put to him:
"I have been advised that a chunk of the Hammer Project funds that were used to trade, to invest and reinvest, came from a
large block of assets that CIA put into the bank [Citibank]." Cocke replied: "And they pulled that several times from several
sources. Nobody is going to confirm it."
4
Santa Romana died in 1974, and following his death his former attorney and trustee was able to "acquire" considerable portions
of Santa Romana's estate by illicit means.
The lawyer was Ferdinand Marcos, who went on to become President of the Philippines and a favorite friend of the United States
until his overthrow in 1986. The acquisition of these assets helped give rise to stories of "Marcos gold" – a legend that was supplemented
by additional later recoveries of WWII gold and other loot using a Filipino Army battalion under the overall command of Marcos henchman
General Fabian Ver.
But Marcos was not the sole illegitimate beneficiary of war loot once controlled by Santa Romana.
Another was the late Baron Krupp who, I have
been told, also gained access to some of these assets. Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning that Santa Romana, prior to his death, was
apparently associated with former US President and head of the CIA,
George H. W. Bush , and "had some contact" with Jeb
Bush, the Governor of Florida.
In any event, this bullion has collectively given rise to a whole class of gold and platinum certificates issued over the decades,
mainly by top-drawer European banks.
(See the history of the Global Collateral Accounts HERE
)
The certificates bear the names of prominent, and in some cases infamous, individuals – usually heads of state – as beneficiaries.
However, these named owners were and are not the legal beneficiaries but, rather, were cat's-paws used to muddy the waters concerning
the true origin of the bullion. Nor did the banks that held the assets own them, but they could and did use them in support of their
off-balance sheet activity – to the point of irresponsibility.
It should not be forgotten that this gold and platinum hoard was stolen and that, under international law, every effort should
have been made to return it to its rightful owners – rather than secretly stash it in bank vaults for use in Cold War covert operations.
And although it can reasonably be argued that the true owners could never be traced – since the greater quantity of the bullion was
privately owned (rather than being central bank bullion) – it is clear that the ends dictated the means.
And even though numerous nations around the world were to benefit from post-war reconstruction based on the use and application
of this war booty, the price of this apparent largesse was for these nations to be moulded into Uncle Sam's image. As they say in
America's boardrooms, "There's no such thing as a free lunch".
In examining the techniques employed in setting up Project Hammer, one is struck not just by the complexity of it but also by
the way the banks and intelligence agencies involved structured things to shield themselves from responsibility (and lawsuits, no
doubt) by utilizing subterranean networks, each working at "arm's length".
Piecing these techniques and networks together has been an arduous, painstaking task, but the process has further unveiled a shadow
world of parallel finance usually only known to those initiated into it.
THE EMPIRE STATE CONNECTION
During his April 2000 deposition, just days before his death from cancer, Brigadier-General Erle Cocke, when asked about the overall
objective of Project Hammer, replied:
Well, it was mainly to bring back monies to the United States from all types of activities, both legitimately and illegitimately.
Not that they were in the smuggling business per se, but they were all in the arms business, they were all retracing dollars of
one description or another that had accumulated all through the '40s and '50s, really. And that probably is as broad a definition
as I can give you
General Cocke then added that involvement in
Project Hammer extended to:
the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agencies of all types, Pentagon in the broad sense of it and as such, the Treasury,
Federal Reserve. Nobody got out of the act, everybody wanted to get in on the act."
5
Cocke's involvement with clandestine CIA activities dates back many years. At the very least, he is known to have been involved
with the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank. For example, US Treasury records obtained by veteran journalist and author Jonathan Kwitny show Cocke
as the registered "person in charge" of Nugan Hand's Washington office.
6
Cocke also indicated in his affidavit that he was regularly contacted by the CIA for expert assistance over the years and was
usually debriefed by them following overseas travel. Despite this, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA made on behalf
of this writer was dismissed with the statement that "no records responsive to your request were located" – which is not entirely
the same thing as saying that no records exist.
7
It also appears that the CIA is not the only one that cares to deny knowledge of General Cocke. Another is former Citibank CEO
and Chairman John Reed, who, in a sworn affidavit dated 5 December 2000, stated he had "no knowledge of any persons named Erle Cocke,
Jr, or Barrie D. Wamboldt". Both the CIA and Citibank's John Reed hold at least one major advantage over General Cocke: they are
alive and he is dead; and while it is true that the dead can't lie, it is also true that they can't rebut anyone's testimony–sworn
or otherwise. 8
In his deposition, Cocke states that although he had never "met" John Reed, he had attempted on numerous occasions to speak with
him, but was continually rejected:
We did our best to make the normal approaches, but I can see the President of the United States with no trouble. I cannot see
Reed. 9
The "we" Cocke was referring to, besides himself, was Paul Green, a "long-time real estate lawyer in New York" with "50 years
practice", who "had done most of his real estate dealings through Citibank".
10
Green also did some of his banking business with Citibank at its Fifth Avenue, New York, branch under account FOCUS #946 963 94.
According to Cocke, Paul Green was an outside counsel for Citibank and went back,
"30-odd years with large transactions through that bank, buying and selling big buildings. He was very much involved buying
and selling the Empire State Building one time."
11
Asked if Green was involved in the purchase and sale of collateral instruments, Cocke replied:
Probably not as an individual. But he represented the clients that certainly wanted to do the same thing.
12
News in late March 2003 revealed that the Empire State Building had just been sold by casino king Donald Trump and the heirs of
shady Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi for US$57.5 million.
Yokoi (who, at the time, was serving a prison sentence and had secretly negotiated the transaction through a middleman) and his
partner Trump had gained ownership of the building in 1991 for US$42 million. Little is known about Yokoi's World War II activities.
The building last changed hands four decades earlier in 1961, when it was acquired by real estate tycoon Harry Helmsley from the
Prudential Insurance Company in a sale-leaseback deal. The world-renowned skyscraper was built on land owned by the
Astor family and sold to
the DuPonts in 1929.
Construction of the Empire State Building began in 1930. John Jacob Astor was one of the first Americans to become involved in
the opium trade, from which his later fortune derived. This he invested in Manhattan real estate. The architects of the Empire State
Building were Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates – designers of One Bankers Trust Plaza, the HQ of Bankers Trust, together with
the Credit Lyonnais building in New York City.
It is of more than passing interest that one law firm represents many of the "actors" who appear in this story. That firm is White
& Case. Amongst numerous notable achievements listed on its website background/history is its representation of the DuPont Group
in its sale of the Empire State Building in 1954 for the princely sum of US$51.5 million.
As we noted earlier, almost 40 years later, in 1991, the building sold for the less than princely sum of US$42 million. I am not
certain how the real estate investors define investment performance over the years, but an aggregate loss of US$9.5 million over
the course of 37 years doesn't usually constitute an investment accomplishment by any standard I know.
13
Meanwhile, a brief review of White & Case's client list tell us that they also represented,
the First National Bank (the forerunner of Citibank)
Seagram Company Ltd of Canada, controlled by the Bronfman family – regarded by some as the kings of the Canadian mafia
15
But White & Case's most "enduring" client is Bankers Trust Company, a J. P. Morgan-controlled bank which the law firm was "centrally
involved" in forming back in 1903.
The ancestor of all trust companies is England's Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust, which dates back to 1868 and was conceived
by one of the foremost legal minds of the day, Lord Westbury. The current Lord Westbury, Richard Bethell, will appear later in this
story.
But first, let's step through the looking glass and examine one of the early Hammer deals, which General Cocke believed:
It was one of the very early transactions, as far as I am concerned, with Hammer. I think he [Dan Hughes] is the one who expanded
Hammer in the sense that we moved from one hundred million [dollars] to a billion-type movement, and now we are doubling, about
a trillion. He is the one who enhanced it, is the best way of saying.
THE HUGHES PORTAL
Dan Hughes , Jr , the nephew of US Representative William J. Hughes from New Jersey, made a considerable fortune in
the construction business in Florida during his early working life.
By the mid-1980s, with paper assets nearing US$100 million, he became involved in collateral trading and by late 1989 entered
the realm of Project Hammer.
During the autumn of 1989, Hughes was approached by Peter Seaman, the President and Chairman of a small investment bank called
Nantucket Holding Company. Seaman had developed an arrangement with Ecoban Limited, a small merchant bank with offices in London
and New York City that specialized in emerging market-debt and the A'forfait market.
16
Seaman, using Nantucket Holding Company , concluded an agreement by which Ecoban would purchase US$100 million worth of
documentary letters of credit issued by the head offices of Citibank NA and the Chase Manhattan Bank NA. Hughes had access to these
bank credits via a US$50 billion "commitment" extended to him by the Bankers Trust Company.
To fund the purchase, Ecoban needed the support of a bank and turned to Midland Bank Aval Limited (MidAval), the forfaiting subsidiary
of Midland Bank Group International Trade Services (MiBGITS).
MidAval, once wholly owned by Midland Bank, had, shortly before commencing with the Hammer transaction, concluded a private agreement
with Sir William Purvis, Chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation , wherein HSBC purchased a controlling
equity stake in MidAval. This meant that MidAval was 60% owned by HSBC and 40% owned by Midland Bank.
17
Accordingly, on 12 October 1989, MidAval issued a letter agreeing to purchase "$100 million with rolls until funds are exhausted
of documentary letters of credit"
18
An earlier MidAval letter (dated 25 September 1989) stated that they,
"irrevocably commit to purchase the above letters of credit and pay the amount agreed between you and Ecoban Limited ('the
purchase price') to Citibank NA, Lugano".
The reference to "Lugano" was deleted in later letters at the specific request of Nantucket's Peter Seaman, as detailed in his
11 October 1989, letter to Brian Fitzpatrick, the Managing Director of Ecoban Limited. Lugano was of some considerable importance
– as we shall see later – but not least because it was at Union Bank of Switzerland in Lugano where, according to Dan Hughes, the
actual trading of the Hammer programme took place.
Meanwhile, MidAval's letter was addressed to Jardine, Emett & Chandler, New England, Inc., in Boston, USA, which
acted as an agent for MidAval. On the strength of MidAval's signed and authorized letter, Jardine, Emett & Chandler issued its own
"Request for collateral instruments" under its letterhead. This letter, dated 12 October 1989, bore the reference "Midland Bank Aval
Limited for Ecoban Limited".
To close the circle, Dan Hughes had earlier instructed his attorney, Oswald (Ozzie) Howe, Jr, of the Miami law firm Mershon,
Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole , to cause to be issued a sight draft, dated 6 October 1989, drawn on the Southeast Bank NA,
Miami, and payable to Bankers Trust Company, for the sum of US$50,000. A further sight draft was issued in the amount of US$25,000,
at the request of Bankers Trust.
Following this sequence of events, nothing happened and no draws were made against the sight drafts issued by Southeast Bank in
favour of Bankers Trust.
But on 18 October 1989, Hughes received a time and sequence confirmation from Joan Johnson, Vice President and Operations Manager
of the Security Pacific bank in Los Angeles, which Hughes believes activated his transaction through a "back door" arrangement which
would cut him out of his commission.
19 Thereafter, Peter Seaman
point-blank and inexplicably refused to speak with Hughes again.
General Cocke was an experienced banker from a long line of bankers and was a former full-time US representative at the World
Bank.
Intimately familiar with the operational techniques of trading programmes, he was asked:
"Can you explain in a general way how it [Hammer] functioned, that it was a trade programme, for those of us that are not familiar?"
The stock way all big banks, all central banks, change within themselves and curtail their balances, build up their peaks and
then sell it.
He went on to explain that "most of it is done in a four-week program to be technically correct" and involved the trading of banking
instruments – usually known as "collateral" – that are heavily discounted and then sold off.
MAPPING THE COVERT CONNECTIONS
To appreciate the subtleties of how the diversion of this particular "portal" into Project Hammer may have occurred, it is instructive
to look at the connections and associations of the principal players.
20
Ecoban:
In addition to Ecob an Limited in London, there was the affiliated Ecoban Finance Limited that conducted business out
of an address on Third Avenue in New York City.
A one-time President and CEO of Ecoban Finance Limited in New York was Jim Demitrieus, who more recently was the President
and Chief Operating Officer of Ixnet/IPC, which was acquired by Global Crossing in June 2000.
Global Crossing was one of the US firms that recently suffered a spectacular collapse together with Worldcom, Enron and the accountancy
firm Arthur Andersen. All were subjected to a welter of media attention for what was believed to have been unparalleled insider trading
activities by senior executives.
Earlier in his career, Demitrieus,
"served as senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Commodity Division of Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc., responsible
for the precious metals, energy products, foreign exchange trading subsidiary and institutional brokerage division".
Of interest here is the little known fact that Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, New York , was a recipient of gold bullion from
Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in January 1984.
It is not clear from Mr Demitrieus's available vitae if this was the same time period he was the Senior Vice President of Drexel's
bullion business, but I am informed this is probably the case. Before that, Demitrieus "held senior-level financial positions with
Freeport-McMoRan, ITT and Arthur Andersen".
21
Significantly, Freeport-McMoRan, back when it was Freeport Sulphur , positively heaved with CIA and elite heavy-hitters
– not to mention persistent whispers of its involvement in the recovery of plundered gold stashed in Indonesia, where Freeport had
the world's largest copper mining operation.
Over the years, the Freeport senior management has included such luminaries as Augustus "Gus" Long, Chairman of Texaco, who did
"prodigious volunteer work for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital" – which has been described as a "hotbed of CIA activity".
22
Another director was Robert Lovett, who has been described as a "Cold War architect" and was once an executive at the old Wall
Street bank of Brown Brothers Harriman. He also served as an Under Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of War and Secretary of
Defense. He was a best friend of Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman (and Warren Commission member) John J. McCloy.
The Chase Manhattan and Citibank connection to Freeport was further enhanced by the board appointment of Godfrey Rockefeller,
brother of James Stillman Rockefeller who was appointed Chairman of Citibank (then known as First National City Bank, or FNCB for
short) in 1959. (Note, too, that Chase Manhattan and Citibank are the exact same two banks that were to issue the Project Hammer
documentary letters of credit.)
Godfrey Rockefeller was a one-time trustee of the Fairfield Foundation that financed a variety of CIA "fronts". Meanwhile, Stillman's
cousin, David Rockefeller , was Chairman
of Chase Manhattan and regarded as the "goliath of American banking".
23
By a strange coincidence of fate, it was Robert Lovett and John J. McCloy who, together with Robert B. Anderson, formed Secretary
of War Henry L. Stimson's team of financial experts concerned with tracking WWII gold looted by the Axis powers.
Indeed, Lovett and McCloy were responsible for negotiating the secret agreement hidden behind the Bretton Woods Agreement
concerning the establishment of the Black Eagle trust
that was to make use of plundered WWII bullion in the postwar years.
24
Midland Bank:
When looking at MidAval's parent, Midland Bank Group International Trade Services (MiBGITS), one could do worse than read the
very informative book by former arms company chairman Gerald James, entitled In the Public Interest. James recounts numerous chilling
accounts of Her Majesty's intelligence service MI6's deep involvement with the MiBGITS special defense unit.
Included are details of Stephan Kock, who James claims to have been a former head of the Foreign Office's so-called assassination
squad, Group 13.
Another intelligence-connected individual named in James's book is Sir John Cuckney, who was a non-executive director of Midland
Bank from 1978 until 1988 and was responsible for having formed the defense unit in the first place.
Gerald James and his munitions company Astra also had dealings with, and a private account at, MidAval.
25
Kock's boss at Midland was Comte Herve de Carmoy, a Frenchman and a leading light on the
Trilateral Commission . He left Midland in
1988 to take up the position as the most senior executive of Belgium's massive transnational company, Société Générale.
portrait serre
He was replaced as head of Midland International by John Louden, a multilinguist who had an unfortunate speech impediment – leading
wags in the bank to say of him that he could stutter in seven languages. De Carmoy's departure was followed by that of both Cuckney
and Kock, after what Gerald James describes as "funny practices" relating to a loss of £100 million involving all three men.
26
Although a similar amount to the MidAval's Project Hammer transaction, this sum of £100 million cannot have been the same money
for two reasons. Firstly, the Hammer amount was in dollars and not pounds, and was discounted at approximately 4% over the prevailing
one-year interest rate (LIBOR–the London Interbank Borrowing Rate).
For US banks of the standing of Chase and Citibank, at that time a market rate of perhaps one quarter of 1% – or, at most, one
half of 1% – was applicable. Four per cent was unheard of by a very long shot indeed. Secondly, at least a year separated the two
movements of money.
Even so, there are notable connections between the MidAval CEO Ian Guild and Herve de Carmoy (who was known in the bank as "Herve
the Swerve").
Firstly, de Carmoy was Guild's overall boss.
Secondly, shortly after de Carmoy moved to Société Générale, a valued employee of MidAval (also a Frenchman, referred to
in-house by the affectionate nickname of "Froggy") left MidAval employment to take up the post of Chef du Cabinet at the specific
invitation of de Carmoy.
Thirdly, Guild and the other two senior executives, plus some other staff, left Midland in 1990 to form IndoSuez Aval Limited.
IndoSuez Bank was directly owned by Société Générale and negotiations between de Carmoy, his Chef du Cabinet – the former MidAval
employee – and the three senior MidAval executives had been ongoing for almost a year before satisfactory terms were settled.
Following the takeover of Midland Bank by HSBC, MidAval had its name changed to HSBC Forfaiting Limited. It was dissolved in February
2000. Former staff had long since scattered with the four winds. IndoSuez Aval Limited is likewise now defunct.
Note
Documents and other exhibits in support of this story are available
HERE .
2. See Project Hammer
part one, "The Project Hammer File",
HERE
3. Information about
Project Hammer has been garnered from numerous sources. Those sources that I am able to name are named in the text. The remainder
remain confidential.
4. Page 51 of General
Cocke's affidavit. One of the CIA "sources" was the slush fund controlled by Japanese Liberal Democrat Party bosses and known
as the "M-fund", after General MacArthur's economic supremo in Tokyo, General Marquat.
6. See Jonathan Kwitny's
excellent book, The Crimes of Patriots (Touchstone Books, New York, 1987), for a detailed background on the Nugan Hand Bank affair.
13. If one includes
the inflationary effect over this time period, it would reveal that the sale price is, in fact, a great deal less now than it
was almost 50 years ago, which is more than curious. Nor does the leasing agreement over this same period seem especially lucrative.
14. It is not clear
from the banking records I have viewed online, but it looks as though the Astor Trust Company was absorbed into an entity that
formed part of the Bankers Trust Company.
16. Forfaiting is
the discounting of bank-guaranteed receivables (Aval) on a non-recourse basis.
17. I use the term
"private agreement" under advice–following a recent telephone conversation with a representative of Companies House, who told
me that no change of ownership notification had been made for MidAval at that time. MidAval had first been registered as a limited
company under the shelf registration name of "Diplema Twenty Nine Limited" in June 1983. A change of name to Midland Bank Aval
Limited was formally notified to Companies House in April 1996–although the firm had been trading in the name of Midland Bank
Aval Limited from day one. Following the full buy-out of Midland Bank PLC by the HSBC Group, MidAval had its name changed to HSBC
Forfaiting Limited. The company was dissolved in February 2000.
19. Sworn and notarized
affidavit of Dan Hughes, dated December 31, 1990.
20. There are believed
to have been numerous different "portals" providing access into Project Hammer over the period of its life. The Dan Hughes transaction
was one of these–albeit a significant and "early" one, according to the testimony of General Erle Cocke.
21. Demitrieus's vitae
is drawn from that published on the Global Crossing website.
22. For details concerning
the Freeport Board of Directors, see Internet report entitled "Freeport Sulphur's Powerful Board of Directors".
23. See Phillip Zweig's
massive book, Wriston (Crown Publishers, New York, 1995) for comprehensive background on Citibank and Chase.
24. For details of
these three gentlemen's involvement in the Black Eagle Trust, see Seagrave's self-published book, Gold Warriors; details are available
on my website, under the heading of " The Seagrave Affair
"
25. I know much of
the inner workings of MidAval for the simple reason that I was the Treasurer and an Associate Director of that firm until 1991.
However, I knew nothing of the Project Hammer deal that was strictly handled by the three principal executive directors.
26. See details on
page 164 of Gerald James's book, In the Public Interest (Warner Books/Little, Brown, London, 1996).
Project Hammer Reloaded – Part 2
Part 2
MAPPING THE COVERT CONNECTIONS
Peter
Seaman:
In addition to being the President and Chairman of Nantucket Holding Company, Peter Seaman was a successful businessman
and involved in a number of other enterprises. These included an entity called Harbor Fuel Holdings Co., Inc. of Westchester
County, in which Seaman was a partner with attorney Stuart Root.
Both Root and Seaman were clients of attorney Kenneth C. Ellis. Root was a director of another firm called Bowery Advisors
Subsidiary Corporation, which was registered in Florida with a principal mailing address of Kenneth C. Ellis "care of" the
Southeast First National Bank building, located at Biscayne Boulevard, Miami. Seaman had a residence in Greenwich, Connecticut,
where, by another odd coincidence, his next-door neighbor was Citibank's John Reed.
Following his close association with Dan Hughes in setting up the MidAval Hammer deal in October 1989, Seaman thereafter
refused to speak with Hughes ever again. Whether it was guilt for diverting Hughes's commission or some other factor that caused
this extraordinary vow of silence, we shall never know. Peter Seaman died, taking all his secrets with him.
Oswald
Howe, Jr:
Dan Hughes's attorney throughout the Hammer deal and the subsequent years of investigation was Oswald (Ozzie) Howe, Jr,
of the Miami law firm of Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole, whose offices were located in the Southeast Bank
building at the Southeast Financial Center.
According to Dan Hughes, it was Howe who introduced him to Southeast Bank, and Howe did a lot of real estate work for the
bank. Hughes also feels that his ongoing law case would be a great deal more effective if several vital documents had not mysteriously
disappeared from Howe's office. In any event, Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole is now defunct, and Howe practices
law and is the senior partner for Howe, Robinson & Watkins LLP in Miami.
Southeast
Bank:
Southeast Bank NA was declared insolvent on 19 September 1991; it exists no more. Over the years it could boast some famous,
if not infamous, clients – but one suspects that such boasting was the last thing the bank's board of directors had in mind.
One such account "holder" was Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who used his henchman and former law school classmate Roberto
Benedicto to front for him.
In addition to being appointed by Marcos as the Philippines Ambassador to Japan, Benedicto was a signatory to Marcos's Credit
Suisse accounts and was clearly content to be used by Marcos as a cat's-paw to hide his money and gold bullion.
27 Benedicto died
in May 2000, following a heart attack.
Other illustrious clients of Southeast Bank over the years have included such criminal luminaries as Licio Gelli and Michele
Sindona, named by author Luigi DiFonzo in his book,
St Peter's Banker . DiFonzo reveals that US$34 million of the "lost" money of Robert Calvi's collapsed bank, the Banco
Ambrosiano, was traced to that bank's subsidiary in Nassau, where it was withdrawn and smuggled to two Miami banks, one of
these being the Southeast First National Bank (of Miami)–where it was deposited in account number 18221465.
28
Bankers Trust:
Bankers Trust International, a subsidiary of Bankers Trust, was the other Miami bank named in St Peter's Banker as having
funds stolen from Banco Ambrosiano deposited with it. According to DiFonzo, these funds were deposited into account number
001050018, which was also controlled by Licio Gelli and Michel Sindons (i.e., Michele Sindona).
In 1982, Ferdinand Marcos arranged via his right-hand man, General Fabian Ver, to transfer 50 tonnes of gold bullion to
Switzerland via two chartered 747 aircraft. These were arranged by an individual using the name Ron Lusk, who had been retained
by Ver to deliver the gold to Bankers Trust, Zurich.
29
Bankers Trust is of considerable interest for other reasons, too. Firstly, readers will recall that Dan Hughes caused two
sight drafts to be issued in favour of Bankers Trust for the collateral commitment relative to the Chase and Citibank debenture
instruments – an activity which, as we have already seen, caused General Erle Cocke to believe kicked off the Project Hammer
programme in a big way.
Secondly, the lawyers and investigators who were building a lawsuit for Dan Hughes and other clients cheated out of their
money were quietly negotiating with the Central Intelligence Agency in an attempt to settle privately and quietly out of court.
According to Dan Hughes, these negotiations were taking place with the office of Buzzy Krongard, the then No. 3 man in the
CIA hierarchy.
By profession, Krongard is a banker and formerly was the Chairman and CEO of investment bank Alex. Brown, Inc. In September
1997, Krongard engineered the merger of Alex. Brown with Bankers Trust and became the Vice Chairman of the board of directors
of Bankers Trust. A few months later, in January 1998, he was recruited as a "counsellor" to CIA boss George Tenet. In March
2001, he was promoted to Executive Director, making him the No. 2 man of the spy agency.
But the strange coincidences don't end there. South African intelligence operatives Rolf van Rooyen and Riaan Stander,
30 who are both
deeply enmeshed in the Project Hammer (
1 and
2 ) story,
were working closely with Gregory Serras, the President/CEO of the San Diego brokerage firm, Vanguard Capital.
This involved discussions for Vanguard to act on their behalf in the private placement of Argentinian government-approved
debenture instruments that formed part of a trading programme that van Rooyen and Stander had been working on. In a signed
letter, Serras – acting on behalf of his bank, Morgan Stanley & Co. – requested confirmation that the debentures in question
were "legal securities authorized and approved by the government of Argentina"
Vanguard appears to change its banking relationships from time to time. In the period that Serras was in contact with van
Rooyen, its relationship was with Morgan Stanley & Co. Today it is with the Bank of New York, Inc. – itself no stranger to
front-page scandals, such as those involving money-laundering activities for Russian crime syndicates and political figures.
31 Of interest is
the fact that Vanguard was earlier affiliated with Buzzy Krongard's old firm, Alex. Brown, which, following the takeover of
Bankers Trust by Germany's Deutsche Bank, changed its name to Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, Inc.
The fact is that when it comes to the fraternity of banking, one can often disregard the supposed rivalry that is said to
exist, because incestuous relationships are commonplace. In the past, at least, the big banks owned significant chunks of each
other's stock, whereas nowadays they just tend to merge. Take, for example, the Bank of America, whose second-largest stockholder
was J. P. Morgan. In third place was Citibank.
Meanwhile, Citibank's largest stockholder was J. P. Morgan, which in December 2000 merged with Chase Manhattan to form the
all-powerful J. P. Morgan Chase.
32 Bankers Trust
was a J. P. Morgan creation from day one.
White
& Case:
No doubt by sheer coincidence alone, the Marcos account held by Roberto Benedicto at Southeast Bank was a White & Case Trust
account (number 018-410191).
It may also have been mere coincidence that Peter Seaman's and Stuart Root's attorney, Kenneth C. Ellis – who was the registered
addressee at Southeast Bank building for the Bowery Advisors Subsidiary Corporation – is also listed on the
White & Case website as a partner of that firm, who specializes in
financial matters and who now works out of its Singapore office.
UBS,
Lugano:
One of the more flamboyant financiers of recent decades undoubtedly is the Italian, Florio Fiorini, the former finance director
of the Italian state-owned oil company, ENI. Fiorini is best known for his failed attempt to rescue Roberto Calvi's bankrupt
private bank, Banco Ambrosiano – an affair that also involved Mafia financier Michele Sindona and, of course, Licio Gelli,
the Grandmaster of the secret masonic lodge, P2, that was a parallel de facto government of Italy.
Unlike others, Fiorini spilled the beans, and he did so in two books that he wrote while in Champ-Dollon prison, Switzerland,
for "fraudulent bankruptcy". Of the many secrets he revealed, one of the most explosive was the now infamous conto protezione
(protection account), used to launder profits derived from myriad insider-dealing activities by some of the largest and
most prestigious banks and transnational corporations in Europe.
A significant slice of the profits was paid to what Fiorini amusingly described as "the starving of the parties". In plain
words, these allocations were kickbacks paid to the various political parties.
The administrator of the secret kickback account (number 633369) was a member of P2 and also a former Minister of Justice
of disgraced Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who went by the name of Claudius Hammerings – and if one deletes the last four letters
of his name, coincidence throws up the word "Hammer".
33 Readers will
by now have guessed that the account was held at UBS, Lugano.
Fiorini's name also appears prominently in the story of the looting of MGM, the famous Hollywood film studio, by Italian
Mafia "thug" Giancarlo Paretti. The MGM affair was an event that almost brought France's state-owned bank, Credit Lyonnais,
crashing to its knees. Without intervention and an infusion of considerable sums of money from the French taxpayer, France's
once proud bank would have folded.
This is not the place to recount the MGM/Credit Lyonnais story, but it is of passing interest only to note that Credit Lyonnais
recruited attorney Charles Meeker to join MGM as president, to handle negotiations with Paretti. Prior to joining MGM, Meeker
was with the law firm of White & Case.
34 Following a warrant
issued by France, Paretti was eventually arrested and cuffed by US federal agents in a conference room in the downtown Los
Angeles office of White & Case.
Credit Lyonnais has also been deeply involved in Black Eagle gold transactions. In one transaction I am familiar with, a
large block of bullion was to be purchased by a representative operating on behalf of Credit Lyonnais Rouse Limited, London,
the precious metals trading arm of the bank.
35
It is also interesting to note that UBS, Lugano, was not only the bank of choice for those running the secret insider trading
protection account; it was also the bank of choice for former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The numerous confidential
accounts he had at that bank have been dubbed the "Mother" money-laundering account for the Marcos family by Marcos gold investigator
Reiner Jacobi. 36
But the UBS connections don't end there. The Honorary Chairman of UBS (now part of the Swiss Bank Corporation Group) is
Nicholaus Senn, who was also the Chairman of the enormous transnational corporation, Compagnie Financière Richemont AG
, until his retirement in September 2002. Senn was also the senior partner of the Swiss-based international law and consultancy
firm of Senn, Christians and Letemeyer , which, coincidentally, acted for the late Baron Arndt Krupp.
In particular, Carl Letemeyer and Nicholaus Senn worked hard on behalf of the Krupp Estate in regard to the Krupp Heritage
& World Peace Foundation (Singapore), which received a legacy of US$97 billion from
Baron Krupp . This was a cash gift. According
to documents I have in my possession, Krupp's "secret" properties and businesses did not form part of this legacy. However,
the most interesting fact is that, prior to his death, Baron Arndt Krupp controlled some of the Santa Romana "Black Eagle"
fund assets. Of the $97 billion gifted, $47 billion was on deposit in account number 4 77 22 P with the Trust Department of
the Standard & Chartered Bank, London.
Indosuez:
This is one of those banks which are barely visible but consistently circle the waters of black gold and Project Hammer
– like a prowling shark with just the tip of its dorsel fin showing. For example, in one bullion transaction being negotiated
by Dr A. Konig, the Swiss representative of Rolf van Rooyen's Eastcorp Syndicate, the nominated closing bank for the transaction
was Indosuez, Lugano – where Eastcorp Holdings maintained an account.
This is in addition to the migration of some MidAval staff to Indosuez following their involvement in the Project Hammer
trading programme, as outlined earlier. With the closure of Indosuez Aval, a rump of former MidAval employees (now unfortunately
ex-Indosuez Aval as well), including MidAval's former CEO, found a new berth for their abilities. This was at Standard & Chartered
Bank in London. Standard Bank Nominees, meanwhile, is the second largest shareholder of Oppenheimer's Anglo American, with
a stake of 11.74 per cent.
37
While knowledge of the hidden connections of the Hughes "portal" into Project Hammer is vital for an understanding of how
the world of parallel finance operates, there are still deeper "rhythms" at work. An examination of these "rhythms" leads to
the companies, people and intelligence assets that sit at the heart of the so-called Anglo-American relationship.
THE KESWICK-JARDINE CONNECTION
A few days after I published part one of Project Hammer in late October 2001, I was alerted to an anonymous posting at the
Cryptome.org website of a document produced by the South African National
Intelligence Agency in 1998.
The document describes plans, then alleged to be in preparation, for a coup to occur during the 1999 South African general election.
Whilst the coup did not happen, the document is of significance because it describes members of – and entities aligned with – the
group who wished to disrupt the ruling African National Congress (ANC) political party.
38
A large part of this document outlines the alleged involvement of Executive Outcomes (EO), the British-based private security
company that is part of the Palace Group of companies. A few days prior to this document being made available, I had published charts
showing the "network" of the Palace Group that formed the London end of the associated South African intelligence group known as
the Eastcorp Syndicate.
This group was headed by Rolf van Rooyen and Riaan Stander – both South African intelligence operatives who were deeply involved
in Project Hammer. Not only were the London and South African networks closely aligned, but in some cases they also shared the same
executives. 39
One of the entities appearing on the Cryptome.org document as a member of the London network/Palace Group is Jardine Fleming of
Hong Kong, listed under "Banking and Investments". Two lines beneath appears the name Defense Systems Ltd – a division of the arms
manufacturer, Vickers.
Jardine
Fleming is also listed in the same document as a "role player", a few lines beneath the name of Tony Buckingham – the high-profile
head of Executive Outcomes. In an accompanying financial report it is revealed that EO used account number 600774426 at Jardine Fleming
Bank Limited, located at Port Moresby, Hong Kong. The account, rendered as at 15 May 1998, held a balance of US$36 million, and included
Tony Buckingham among those authorized to sign cheques on the account.
Jardine Fleming Bank Limited was established in 1970 as a joint venture between the huge transnational company, Jardine Matheson
Limited, and British merchant bank, Robert Fleming. Jardine's 50% stake in this Hong Kong bank was exchanged in 1999 for a direct
18% stake in Robert Fleming, which in April 2000 was sold to the Chase Manhattan Corporation – the holding company of what is now
the huge US bank of J. P. Morgan Chase.
But a year later, in May 2001, the magicians' musical chairs were in use again when it was announced that Jardine Fleming Bank
was to be sold by J. P. Morgan Chase to Standard Bank. The transfer of ownership occurred on 3 July 2001, with the renaming of
Jardine Fleming Bank to Standard Bank Asia Limited, but trading was under the new name of Standard Jardine Fleming Bank Limited.
Of considerable significance is the fact that, at the time that Jardine, Emett & Chandler – the firm of Boston insurance
brokers mentioned earlier – issued its letter on behalf of MidAval, seeking collateral instruments, it was owned by Jardine Matheson
Limited. Meanwhile, Jardine Resources Limited, with an address in the Isle of Man, was a business entity used by Rolf van Rooyen
for collateral trading programme and other activities. The Isle of Man also boasted a branch of Jardine Fleming Bank Limited.
Jardine Matheson Limited, originally formed over 170 years ago, created a fortune from the China opium business. Since that time
it has diversified enormously and remains the family fiefdom of the Keswick family, descendants of the firm's co-founder, William
Jardine.
The Keswick clan, in addition to having had family members awarded the chairmanship or directorship of such notable international
companies as Hongkong & Shanghai Bank , Rio Tinto Zinc and Samuel Montagu (the London merchant bank that was
part of the Midland Bank Group, itself now owned by HSBC), is also able to boast having had family members as the head of Britain's
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and decades-long membership of the Court of the Bank of England.
Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) was founded in 1873 by Hugh Matheson, the co-founder of Jardine Matheson. In 1995, RTZ acquired a minority
ownership in Freeport McMoRan. Anglo American (which has long had very close ties with RTZ), together with De Beers, is the fiefdom
of the Oppenheimer family, which owns a significant piece of Lonrho. These three intertwined conglomerates dominate the precious
metals and mining world – amongst achieving other notable accomplishments. For example, the Oppenheimers' Minorco holding company
is believed to be the single largest investor in the United States.
Minorco, founded in 1981, was quick to obtain an interest in America's then biggest bank, Citibank, whose CEO, Walter Wriston,
together with Citibank's principal attorney, Robert Clare, a partner of the powerful law firm of Shearson & Sterling, both accepted
invitations to sit on the Minorco board.
40
According to the authors of the book
Dope, Inc ., the Keswick family
controls a substantial part of the world's narcotics trade and uses HSBC, the bank it is said to control, to "provide centralized
rediscounting facilities for the financing of the drugs trade".
41
How true this is remains unknown to this writer, but it is known that Li Ka-shing – the Chinese billionaire who owns a 3% stake
in Jardine Matheson Limited and has sat on the board of HSBC – has been accused of being a member of Chinese intelligence as well
as being associated with the narcotics trade.
42
Indeed, the latter allegation arose repeatedly during my investigation of Project Hammer, while the use of HSBC as an "authorized
six-point laundry" was also mentioned. Meanwhile, the description of "centralized rediscounting facilities" referenced by the authors
of Dope, Inc . is suggestive,
to this writer at least, of collateral trading techniques.
Such connections are almost endless, it seems. Take, for example, the rise to fortune of Peter Munk, Chairman of Barrick Gold
which was formed in Toronto, Canada, in 1983, with the majority stake being held by the Saudi royal family middleman and arms dealer,
Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi had long been associated with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and the so-called Marcos gold.
Indeed, so trusted was he that Marcos had him fronting for two "eclipsed" Marcos accounts – one in the name of Etablissement
Mabari with the private Swiss bank of Lombard Odier & Cie, and the other in the name of Etablissement Gladiator
at COGES Corraterie Gestion SA , Geneva.
Of interest, too, is the fact that Sir Henry Keswick is reported to have been responsible for "lifting" Munk to a new career,
although he also received patronage from Australia's now-deceased multi-billionaire businessman Sir Peter Abeles.
43
Sir Peter received considerable attention in Jonathan Kwitny's excellent book,
The
Crimes of Patriots , because of his alleged Mafia connections and close association with Bernie Houghton and Michael Hand in
the CIA drug smuggling laundry, the Nugan Hand Bank – which also arranged to ship gold bullion surreptitiously for Marcos.
At this point, it is worth reminding readers that Brigadier-General Erle Cocke – whom I referenced earlier concerning his affidavit
detailing his knowledge and involvement in Project Hammer – was reported by Kwitny to be a key player in the Nugan Hand Bank.
And Project Hammer is said to be a general continuation of Nugan Hand Bank activity.
MARITIME FINANCING
The ties that bind are kept hidden from public view.
Activities such as the one we have been discussing are made to operate on an "arms length" basis to confuse and also to ensure
deniability.
Following these subterranean and diverse threads can easily perplex the investigator, and patience and persistence are required
to arrive at the reality that is hidden behind all the smoke and mirrors. The story of Puffin Investments is a case in point.
During a number of extensive telephone interviews with the Canadian, Barrie Wamboldt, it was hinted that it would be worthwhile
to look into the activities of an Alan Shepherd and a firm of his called Puffin Investments. Readers will remember that Barrie Wamboldt
was involved with Project Hammer and had worked with General Cocke and Paul Green to recover Project Hammer funds.
Puffin Investment Company Limited, a Bahamas company, was owned by Old Harrovian Alan Shepherd, who had connections to the British
royal family resulting from generous donations he made to the Royal Windsor Horse Show, of which he was vice president.
In March 2001, Shepherd and Puffin Investments were involved in a High Court action initiated by the Financial Services Authority
– the government watchdog – for enticing investors to put up money for a "sham" investment trading programme. According to the
Sunday Express newspaper, reporting on the court case, up-front fees paid by investors on the promise of massive returns were
not repaid. 44
A week later, on 1 April 2001, the Sunday Express carried a further report detailing a lawsuit against Alan Shepherd, his American
wife Sherry and previous Conservative Party "grandee" Sir Edward du Cann, who was the former Chairman of City merchant bank Keyser
Ullman.
Sir Edward was earlier involved in Tradeswind, an arms trading company in which he was a director with Tiny Rowland of Lonrho
fame and the Egyptian, Ashraf Marwan – known as "Dr Death". Earlier in his career, du Cann served as Chairman of Lonrho, thus working
alongside board directors such as British MI6 luminary Nicholas Elliot.
45
Shepherd, his wife Sherry and du Cann were being sued for £1.25 million in a dispute involving the search for "one of the world's
most fabulous buried treasures". The treasure in question was "30 tons of gold statues, bullion, doubloons and precious stones",
stolen by Scottish pirate Captain William Thompson. The treasure was currently valued at £500 million.
The lawsuit was brought by Richard Bethell of the Bermuda-based Hart Group , who alleged that Shepherd and du Cann were
guilty of "misrepresentations" over an agreement for the provision of various "services" to Shepherd's planned treasure hunt.
One cannot help but be reminded of stories that have circulated in the past concerning gold plundered by the Japanese during WWII
and hidden in the Philippines – later to be recovered and "laundered" as treasure retrieved from Spanish galleons that had sunk while
traveling from Peru to Spain. A variation of this story is the recovery of lost "pirate treasure" – otherwise known as gold – on
the Cocos Islands.
Richard Bethell – elevated to Lord Westbury following the recent death of his father – is a former SAS and Scots Guards officer
and, like Alan Shepherd, an Old Harrovian. The Hart Group, of which he is the Chief Executive Officer, is one of a number of companies
that form the Global Marine Security Systems Company (GMSSCO).
A distinct cynic – as this writer has become – would easily conclude that a marked similarity in structure exists between GMSSCO
and Rolf van Rooyen's South African Eastcorp Syndicate that was closely allied with the London network of Executive Outcomes.
For example, companies belonging to the Eastcorp Syndicate also had a maritime and security theme.
APARTHEID'S
MISSING BILLIONS
But the similarity doesn't end there.
Lord Westbury is currently serving as Chief Executive Officer of Defense Systems Limited (DSL), which, as we have already seen,
is an integral member of the London network of the Palace Group (named so because of its close proximity to the royal family's official
London residence, Buckingham Palace).
46
Moreover, Executive Outcomes has been described as "the advance guard for major business interests engaged in a latter-day scramble
for the mineral wealth of Africa".
47
This is a particularly incisive description, and readers of the first part of this series will recall that one aspect of Project
Hammer apparently involved the disappearance of substantial quantities of gold reserves, as well as stocks of De Beers diamonds,
just prior to the takeover of the Republic of South Africa in 1994 by Nelson Mandela and the ANC. This theft has become known as
"apartheid's missing billions".
Defense Systems Limited has a client list that comes straight from the top drawer and includes oil and gas companies like British
Petroleum, Shell and British Gas of the UK and Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Texaco of the United States. Major mining and mineral
extraction companies such as Canada's Cambior and De Beers and Anglo American of South Africa also feature, as does the giant US
construction firm, Bechtel.
Another client is Canadian-based Ranger Oil, which by happy coincidence is the same name as an entity that forms part of the Palace
Group and which is run by arms trader Mick Ranger.
By miraculous good fortune, Mick Ranger was also a board member of Bridge SA – one of the entities formed and run by Rolf van
Rooyen and Riaan Stander. Meanwhile, Sandline, which many knowledgeable insiders believe is Executive Outcomes by another name, has
a client base that includes Rio Tinto Zinc.
DSL is now owned by Armor Holdings, Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida, but is still headquartered in London. This affiliation seems,
on the face of it, to be a particularly binding one, for Armor Holdings is said to have its very own US spook-type "network".
48
The senior executives of Armor Holdings are predominantly bankers of one strain or another. Take, for example, Thomas W. Strauss,
formerly a Vice Chairman of Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank that was once minority owned by the Oppenheimers' Anglo
American and De Beers strategic holding company, Minorco.
49
Until 1993, Salomons owned the controlling interest in the Bank of New York, which, as you will recall, is the current affiliated
clearing bank of Gregory Serras's Vanguard Capital. Today, Salomons is owned by Citigroup.
50
We might also mention Armor Holdings director Burtt R. Ehrlich, whose family securities firm, Ehrlich and Boger , is owned
by Cater Allen Bank of the Channel Islands, which specializes in "offshore finance"; likewise, Nicholas Sokolow, formerly
a partner in the Wall Street firm of Coudert Brothers , and Warren B. Canders, a former Senior Vice President of Orion
Bank Ltd , a merchant bank owned by the Royal Bank of Canada.
A subsidiary of Armor Holdings is the very shadowy United States Defense Systems, Inc. (USDS), which on paper is based
in Chantilly, Virginia, although its real operating headquarters are in Manassas, Virginia.
Staff recruited by USDS are usually former military types or specialists with criminal intelligence backgrounds and possessing
surveillance skills. They are usually told they will be working in support of Department of Defense programmes and will require a
DoD security clearance.
Operations in the past have included surveillance of US citizens during Fourth of July events at Capitol Mall in DC.
51
BIN LADEN AND SAUDI ARABIAN LINKS
A Google Internet search using the search term "Armor Holdings, Inc." revealed a curious message dated September 2001 from
an aggrieved investor:
"I'm horrified to find one of my investments is in a company with links to bin Laden. Apparently it is common knowledge in
London that a senior figure in Armor, Ambrose Cary, has familial ties to bin Laden and uses those in his work.
How can it be allowed that a US company providing security to US companies, embassies and airports round the world can deal
simultaneously with this type of person? Does anyone else have further information on this?"
Unsurprisingly, no answer to the question has been posted.
52
Had this been the first bin Laden connection, it is likely I would have ignored it. However, the name had already arisen during
a deposition given by Rolf van Rooyen to German police in 1995, following his detention and questioning. At that time, he admitted
to being "involved" with a Jean Ruiz, of Saudi Finance.
53
Saudi Finance (Saudifin), headquartered in Geneva, owned a controlling interest in Banque Al Saoudi via the Paris-based holding
company, Saudi Arab Finance Corporation . Banque Al Saoudi was, according to a 1999 PBS Online Frontline story, one of the
principal international financing vehicles for the bin Laden family.
Interestingly, in 1989 – in the early stages of Project Hammer's timeline – Banque Al Saoudi would have collapsed in bankruptcy
had it not been for the timely intervention of the French central bank, the Banque de France, which shored it up prior to a partial
takeover by none other than Banque Indosuez, which decided to change its name to Banque Française pour l'Orient.
A year later, the bank merged with the Mediterranée Group. Of note is the fact that a subsidiary, Saudifin SA, was active in Panama
until 1997, when it was dissolved.
54
Moreover, the Frontline story revealed that both Banque Al Saoudi and Banque Indosuez were "instrumental" in financing a portion
of Middle East weapons contracts during the 1970s and 1980s.
Meanwhile, those who are familiar with the story of black gold will recall that Dr Ole Bay was the controller on behalf of the
CIA and US Treasury in the YAB/42 bullion transaction that involved then President Marcos of the Philippines. This transaction was
structured to use cut-outs including Navegocian Global SA and DuPont , along with other CIA conduits, to make it ostensibly
a private, non-government transaction.
The transaction code YAB/42 is also instructive. Not only does "YAB" spelled backwards yield the name "BAY" but, altogether, 42
"major trusts were tapped to help fund" the deal. Coincidentally, 42 is also the number of countries in which Santa Romana gold was
deposited in the immediate post-WWII years to form the Black Eagle fund, discussed earlier.
55
One of the more salient facts about the Puffin Investments fiasco is that Alan Shepherd's American wife, Sherry, is the daughter
of Dr Ole Bay. Dr Bay is known to have been the "Master Wizard" who arranged and ran the Project Hammer trading programme.
According to one former intelligence source familiar with the inner workings of Project Hammer, Dr Bay had told him that the ultimate
responsibility for Hammer lay with the CIA and the US Treasury, and that Robert Rubin – who later became US Treasury Secretary –
acted as Dr Bay's "gofer" on the project. Robert Rubin is now a director and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup.
If one had to choose a word to describe these apparently diverse connections, that word would surely have to be "incestuous".
Currently, Li Ka-shing (whom we mentioned earlier) is bidding to purchase control of the global communication network giant, Global
Crossing (which was also mentioned earlier), via a joint venture of Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies
Telemedia . Representing Ka-Shing's bid to take control of Global Crossing was the powerful neo-conservative attorney, Richard
Perle, who sought a nod of approval from the Pentagon for the deal.
Perle, who is one of the present Bush Administration "think-masters", is close to Bush Senior, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
and to others on the Defense Policy Board , which he chaired. A recent story by legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh
revealed that Perle had furtively met with a leading Saudi investor in Marseille, France, on 3 January 2003, in what was seen as
an attempt to gain private financial advantage from the planned war on Iraq.
A furious Perle responded to the report by calling Hersh a "terrorist". The meeting was arranged on Perle's behalf by none other
than Adnan Khashoggi (whom we mentioned earlier). Khashoggi also attended the meeting.
Khashoggi, a trusted adviser to the Saudi royal family, is one of the "high net worth individuals" whose past investments have
been handled by Mayo Shattuck, formerly head of Alex. Brown (also mentioned earlier). It is of passing interest that Saudi
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz took a 10% stake in Citigroup (also mentioned earlier) back in 1991, following a cash "infusion"
of US$400 million, which was eclipsed from view by The
Carlyle Group which acted as the
facilitator for the investment.
In 1997, Mayo Shattuck was made Trustee of the Bronfman (also mentioned earlier) family fortune. He resigned as CEO of Deutsche
Banc Alex. Brown on 12 September 2001, the day following the tragic events in New York City and Washington, DC – the day that
has come to be known as "9-11".
56
On 13 September 2001, news reports began circulating of suspicious stock market transactions that suggested prior knowledge of
the events that were to take place on 9-11 .
Short sales of airline and insurance stocks that sharply fell in price in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy were later traced back
to Alex. Brown.
Author's Note
Documents and other exhibits in support of this story are available
HERE .
Endnotes
27. See
http//www.marcosbillions.com
for some additional background on Roberto Benedicto and his willingness to front for Marcos. Additionally, I have a two-page
Marcos document listing details of the numerous bank accounts he controlled either directly or through others.
28. See Luigi DiFonzo's
St Peter's Banker (Franklin Watts, New York, 1983).
29. See William Scott
Malone's Golden Fleece (Regardies, October 1988).
30. See "
The Project Hammer File
" part one for background on van Rooyen and Stander's involvement in Project Hammer.
31. See news reports
circa 2000 of BoNY involvement in illegal money laundering activities with IMF funds on behalf of Russian criminal and political
figures.
32. See Everybody's
Business: An Almanac – The Irreverent Guide to Corporate America, edited by Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering
(Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980).
33. Although this
may, of course, just be pure coincidence, it is worth noting.
34. For a comprehensive
account of the MGM/Credit Lyonnais affair, see David McClintick and Anne Faircloth's informative "Predator", which is freely available
on the Internet.
The USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine requires weakening and, if possible, partitioning Russia.
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin tells the audience that Skripals poisoning was a false flag operation. 7:00
He also point several weak points in Western politicians narrative about MH17
Notable quotes:
"... Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America ..."
"... Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it. ..."
"... The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans). ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause". ..."
"... Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic. ..."
"... "Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily
determined to undermine Russia.
A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign
to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff
when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation
with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating
a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy
Vogan.
Putin & the Russian citizenry play chess on this 3-dimensional world.! The Americas and their inane elites attempt checkers
on their flat Earth . Pity, some such as Noam Chomsky are admirable world citizens..! Pity again.! WE will miss men of this honest
calibre and down- to-earth intelligence. Bob Carr is of this cohort.
Eugenie Basile , December 10, 2019 at 03:36
The 'Russia did it' mantra is a gift for the powers in the Kremlin. It rallies most Russians behind their leaders because they
are proud of their country and don't accept the West's moral hypocrite grandstanding.
Just recently the WADA proclaimed sporting ban against Russia is a perfect example. It excludes all Russian athletes because
they happen to represent their country while U.S. athletes who have been caught cheating in the past are allowed to participate
.
It is very encouraging to know there are good people like Mr. Tony Kevin and Mr. Bob Carr alive and sharing their powerful
wisdom at this dangerous historical point on planet Earth. Mr. Kevin and Mr. Carr's immensely important and courageously honest
discussion should become – immediately, and for many years to come – required study in university classrooms and government halls
around this world.
Peace.
ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest
possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking
about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer
we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now
so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then,
it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of
nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.
Lois Gagnon , December 9, 2019 at 17:30
I agree. Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are
unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed
oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events
including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase
Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's
source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of
course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among
the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the
undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise
have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally
conceived and constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how
either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the
neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters
are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile
the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military,
thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic
and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world
stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world"
political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely
assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said
any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to
do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that
doesn't.
SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's
expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better
than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in
any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live
and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing
a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the
light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus.
Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more.
(The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by
killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive
campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating
the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian
citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election
interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a
very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all
of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international
conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
John Brewster - 90
Did you by chance confuse Russia with Italy? Because Russia has close to 150M people, not
65M, significantly more than Germany. Granted, less than USSR back in 1939, but militarily
more powerful compared to Germany - and possibly with more exploited resources.
vk - 79
I tend to agree with the view that the key factor in USSR's demise was that it couldn't
sustain the competition with the Kapital and wasn't able to develop, "progress", "grow" at
the rate the West was showing off. US and USSR levels were far closer back in 1950 than in
1980, and the discrepancy was only growing. Reagan fanboys might argue that he sped up the
decaying process, but troubles and upheavals were going to happen, no matter what. Now, why
this rate of progress was so different is another matter, and probably the most important one
- both for 20th century history and for the fate of the West in this century.
It's also painfully obvious that the only path outside downright servitude for Europe is to
distance itself from the USA and seek if not a direct alliance at least a clear partnership
with Russia and a "detente" with clear rules on their borders and a common declaration of
neutrality over Ukraine - as in: no side will try to annex the whole country, which either
would be split up or ideally would have a heavy dose of decentralization and localism. But it
is of vital importance for the actual survival of Europe that atlanticists and Russiaphobes
be hunted down and expelled from any position of power or influence - be it from economy,
media, politics.
"... Lavrov told reporters Thursday: "I think that it is difficult to unbalance us and China. We are well aware of what is happening. We have an answer to all the threats that the Alliance is multiplying in this world." He also said the West is seeking to dominate the Middle East under the guise of NATO as well. ..."
"... "Naturally, we cannot but feel worried over what has been happening within NATO," Lavrov stated. "The problem is NATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only NATO is in the position to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West dislikes for some reason ." ..."
"... NATO still exists, according to Lavrov, in order to "eliminate competitors" and ensure a West-dominated global system in search of new official enemies. ..."
"... I'm wondering how many NATO states don't have US Military Bases positioned in them. It's a small distance between a forward operating base and an occupying forces. ..."
"... What NATO is doing is called racketeering. Only the problem of Europe is not Russia, but the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same Americans and NATO. ..."
"... Children sometimes need a made-up friend, and these bastards need a made-up enemy. Russia is perfect for this. ..."
"... LOL. The NATO ONLY serves US interests. It has the same function as always. Keep the US in, Russia out and Germany down. ..."
"... The collapse of the US empire has been underway for years. Nobody is excited about it because, instead of gracefully adapting to change with the dignity of a great nation, the US will continue to cling to denial, lashing out at all and sundry as reality intrudes upon the myth of American exceptionalism. ..."
"... US geopolitics has created a foe it cannot defeat without itself being destroyed. ..."
"... Technocratic sociopaths, doing a CYA for their incompetence. ..."
"... ZATO cries out in pain as it strikes you. ..."
NATO Seeking To "Dominate The World" & Eliminate Competitors: Russia's Lavrov by
Tyler Durden Mon,
12/09/2019 - 02:45 0 SHARES
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has charged NATO with wanting to "dominate the world"
a day after 70th anniversary events of the alliance concluded in London.
"We absolutely understand that NATO wants to dominate the world and wants to eliminate any
competitors, including resorting to an information war, trying to unbalance us and China,"
Lavrov said from Bratislava,
the capital of Slovakia, while attending the 26th Ministerial Council of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
He seized upon NATO leaders' comments this week, specifically Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg, naming China as a new enemy alongside Russia . Stoltenberg declared
at the summit that NATO has to "tackle the issue" of China's growing
capabilities.
Lavrov told reporters Thursday: "I think that it is difficult to unbalance us and China. We
are well aware of what is happening. We have an answer to all the threats that the Alliance is
multiplying in this world." He also said the West is seeking to dominate the Middle East under
the guise of NATO as well.
The new accusation of 'world domination'
comes at a crisis moment of growing and deep divisions over the future of the Cold War era
military alliance, including back-and-forth comments on Macron's "brain death" remarks, and
looming questions over Turkey's fitness to remain in NATO, and the ongoing debate over cost
sharing burdens and the scope of the mission.
"Naturally, we cannot but feel worried over what has been happening within NATO," Lavrov
stated. "The problem is NATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to
persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only NATO is in the position
to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West dislikes for
some reason ."
A consistent theme of Lavrov's has been
to call for a "post-West world order" but that NATO has "remained a Cold War institution"
hindering balance in global relations where countries can pursue their own national
interests.
NATO still exists, according to Lavrov, in order to "eliminate competitors" and ensure a West-dominated global system in
search of new official enemies.
Remember the last Bilderberg meeting. Russia and China were not invited. The globalists
have planned this, and apparently, Russia has better intelligence to know what's going on,
and they will take the necessary precautions, along with China. Let's just hope it's not
going to lead us to WW3.
I'm wondering how many NATO states don't have US Military Bases positioned in them. It's a small distance between a forward operating base and an occupying forces.
NATO is not trying to dominate, NATO is trying to extend its profit from frightened
European donkeys who still believe that the USSR exists, and Uncle Joe sits in the Kremlin
and eats a Christian baby in garlic sauce for lunch.
What NATO is doing is called racketeering. Only the problem of Europe is not Russia, but
the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same Americans and NATO.
So there will
be a big "raspathosovka" with shooting and explosions, do not even doubt it.. Only the problem of
Europe is not Russia, but the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same
Americans and NATO. So there will be a big **** with shooting and explosions, do not even
doubt it.
I'll just repeat the erased: NATO - lovers of freebies and they don't refuse this
freebie voluntarily. Children sometimes need a made-up friend, and these bastards need a
made-up enemy. Russia is perfect for this.
NATO is obsolete. The organization no longer serves US interests, and quite frankly,
hasn't for some time. I respectfully suggest the USA move all forces out of Germany on day 1, and station them
at Fort Trump in Poland.
Day 2, the US forms a new "mutual defense pact" with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
(Former Eastern Bloc nations)
Russia and Germany can duke it out, just not where our guys are hanging out. Hades,
Germany and France can limp wrist at each other as they have done in the past so many
times. But insofar as US troops leaving continental Europe forever? Sorry Sergei, that ain't happening, no matter how much
propaganda you shove up western
europe's (willing) ***.
Meanwhile Vlad makes new friends around the world... Last year Putin signed accords with President Macri of Argentina which included Russia
recognizing Argentina's Falklands claim. (La Voz, 23 Jan 2018).
An Argentinian claim based upon 'usurpation' – meaningless in the 18th century and
inheritance from Spain just like Mexico inherited California and Texas.
The NATO advantage right now is of the least dirty shirt variety. As it stands, I am not
excited about the thought of the US empire collapsing. People have been predicting that for
a while and for the moment, I don't see a legit replacement stepping up to the plate. The
US is a crooked gangster, but the other countries are not exactly ready for the big
league.
The NATO advantage right now is of the least dirty shirt variety.
The NATO disadvantage right now is of the "sitting with pants full of **** and asking
others who farted" variety.
As it stands, I am not excited about the thought of the US empire collapsing.
The collapse of the US empire has been underway for years. Nobody is excited about it
because, instead of gracefully adapting to change with the dignity of a great nation, the
US will continue to cling to denial, lashing out at all and sundry as reality intrudes upon
the myth of American exceptionalism.
I don't see a legit replacement stepping up to the plate.
US imperial decline is reminiscent of Casey at the Bat.
but the other countries are not exactly ready for the big league.
Or they've decided the US game is not worth playing.
Since 2013 I have followed Russian foreign policy and actions in the middle east and
elsewhere,thanks to statesmen like Lavrov they have crossed every t and dotted every i
following international law and convention, true history will be a lot kinder to Russia than
N ot A nother T errorist O rganisation
What is happening to Europe is the same as what's happening to Russia, only Russia
didn't ask for it. Nevertheless, Azeris and Tatars are on the rise demographically, and
Russians are on the decline.
I don't think Russia ... or China for that matter ... need to worry much. The West is imploding and NATO will implode along with it. The West can't even depend on its technical superiority anymore ( see Boeing 737MAX
); it sure can't depend on (most of) its people to do any real fighting.
NATO is fading and becoming a contradictory mess. China and Russia will be the foe, with possibly India, and far more effective,
economically and militarily. Europe doesn't stand a chance against these no matter how they posture, their slope is
downward.
US geopolitics has created a foe it cannot defeat without itself being destroyed.
"The problem is ZATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to
persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only ZATO is in the
position to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West
dislikes for some reason ."
Israel Shamir quoting Prof Michael Brenner of Pittsburgh U, who has noted:
"Europe's political class is psychologically unable to break free of its
dominant/subordinate relationship with America. This pattern endures despite the presence of
a mentally impaired man in the White House. The prognosis, therefore: 'Wither thou goest, we
go!" American leaders have exploited this compulsive deference ruthlessly. It allows
Washington to ensure European fealty at virtually no cost. Moreover, they can extract
compliance across a wide array of non-security issues – commercial, financial, IT
(warring against Huawei), political, diplomatic – by drawing on the same free-floating
loyalties.
"Europe has been obedient to the siren call of Uncle Sam in following it over the cliff
time after time – in Afghanistan, in Iraq (France excepted), on Russia, on Iran (by
acquiescing in severe sanctions), on Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in embracing Bolsonaro (invited
Keynoter at Davos), even on Venezuela and Bolivia. The ultimate test will come were
Washington to pick a fight with China that it, and the West, cannot win; will Europe then
take the final, fatal leap hand-in-hand?"
First Worlders commenting here seem to have the illusion Christianism is the good brother
of the three Abrahamic religions. Although I understand the pro-Christian bias coming from
the Europeans (since Christianism is an inextricable aspect of European identity), this
opinion is a myth: we have already tasted this in the Bolivian coup, but it's also a Latin
American phenomenon.
Christians are wolves under sheep skins.
--//--
@ Posted by: pogohere | Dec 9 2019 1:25 utc | 57
The USSR had a relatively backwards transportation system (specially railways), that still
used disproportional quantities of petroil to function, but that wasn't an existential threat
to the nation per se , it could be modernized.
Of all the theses I've read about the collapse of the USSR, the one that most convinced me
was Angelo Segrillo's "Decline of the USSR" - which I think only exists in Portuguese right
now. Segrillo covers all the arguments of the time used to explain the fall of the USSR and
refutes them all empirically before he lays out that the main cause of the fall of the USSR
was its structural inability to implement the Third Industrial Revolution ("toyotism").
When it became clear the USSR wouldn't be able to keep up technologically with the USA,
Gorbachev then decided (without knowing it) it would be preferrable for the USSR to disappear
than to continue to exist as a non-superpower.
In that sense, yes, the Soviet then relatively inneficient energy use was a symptom of the
underlying cause - but it wasn't the cause.
--//--
@ Posted by: bevin | Dec 9 2019 3:03 utc | 62
The problem with Europe is its geography: it is a tiny, depleted peninsula. In the 17th
Century, it was an advantage, since the lack of natural resources impelled it to aggressively
exploit other continents, giving birth to capitalism.
But capitalism is a global system, not a regional system. When it reached maturity, Europe
slowly, but inexorably, begun to lose its competitive advantages over purely capitalist
formations - the greatest of them all being the USA. Then what was an advantage became a
disadvantage.
This gordian knot was cut with WWI and WWII (both were only one war, in two parts) - a
last desperate attempt by British capitalism to preserve its imperialist status.
But History is unasailable: it is the saga of class struggle, of the contradictions
between the modes of production and the relations of production. The result couldn't be any
different: Western Europe was on its knees after WWII. The British Empire had just sold all
its assets to the Americans and German men were literally prostituting themselves to American
soldiers for on cigarette (and German children, for one chocolate bar). The USA was the
undisputed sovereign of the European Peninsula from 1945 on.
The last leverage the European Peninsula had, in that scenario, was the USSR itself: it
could ask the USA for good treatment and some dignity in exchange of not doing socialist
revolutions backed up by the Soviets. The result was the Marshall Plan and a permission to
revive their previous industrial parks.
That situation resulted in the rise of Atlanticism, the ideology that the USA is the
legitimate heir of Western Civilization. Andy Warhol was the successor to Michelangelo.
--//--
@ Posted by: john brewster | Dec 9 2019 4:35 utc | 65
The USSR stagnated during the period that spanned from the oil crisis of 1975 until its
fall in 1991.
But it only had a recession in two years of its history: the year after the Perestroika
and its last year of existence. Both were very mild recessions (by capitalist standards).
Even during the infamous "Brezhnev stagnation", growth was 1-3% per year - comparable to
the developed capitalist nations since the 1990s.
But the problem is that its successor states are doing objectively worse: Russia will
grown a little more than 1% this year; other ex-Soviet states are more or less in the same
situation (with Ukraine doing outright worse). The mircle promised to the Russians didn't
come: Putin's boom of the early 2000s was not comparable to the Soviet boom. Russia's status
today are completely dependent on China (which, ironically, has the Soviet system of
government) and the modernization from the old Soviet weapons and know-how it already
had.
"... The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate. ..."
"... Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured. ..."
"... It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is. ..."
"... Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency). ..."
"... Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing. ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... "From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global domination. " ..."
"... "At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign
Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily determined to undermine Russia. A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had
to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow
celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on
Russia," Kevin says in his conversation with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion
eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against
Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium
News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan.
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive
state of affairs deserve the widest possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed.
Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further
we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer we come to its revival.
Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States.
It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first.
Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world
war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence
doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation
is.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been,
are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK
wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the
upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be
untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase Russophobia) sort – about Russian
hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour
Party's source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally
destroy the NHS and replace it with (of course) US "health" insurance company
profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity
among many Tory party supporters among the working and lower middle classes prevented them
from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the undermining, via
installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds
that would otherwise have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money
– a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally conceived and
constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov
(Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in
France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of
western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the
Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny
them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the
neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the
Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what
I've read the man is the most diplomatic and intelligent politician (not just political
leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world stage. None
of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries.
Unlike their western "world" political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they
agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated
and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked
well. We're trying to do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it
is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that doesn't. SIPIRI tags US military
spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the
energy department or our veteran's expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing
from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better than we can sustain
our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there
was NEVER a surrender, intended in any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships.
For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live and work in peace.
(By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear
as never before, a mad man throwing a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on
trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence
universally consulted), allowing the light in for the mass of the viewing and listening
public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as
the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK
obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who
is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian
citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a
nation which has been started by killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their
country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
Words are catalysts of connotations and connotations are functions of
expectations/framing..
Some conflate cause with purpose thereby limiting perception of cause and purpose.
Some understand that causation is interactive and in any lateral system the genesis of
causation is difficult to determine.
Some understand that evaluation is a function of purpose and that purpose can be evaluated
through such portals into wonderlands such as "What is the "United States of America" and how
is it facilitated?"
As thumb-nailed in the comments section of the article Capitalism's suicidal trajectory
– OlyaPola
December 6, 2019 at 07:46
"From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet
Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global
domination. "
From 1922 onwards various tactics have been attempted by the "West" to facilitate their
purpose, including attempts at "Orange revolution" in many areas which catalysed many lateral
trajectories including the process of transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian
Federation in the period from 1991 to 2005.
Consequently Mr. Suslov's observation re war of "The United States of America" can be
extended into present times and hence no "New cold war" exists.
""What is the "United States of America"
An initial step through the portal is that "The United States of America" is – a
regime of social relations to facilitate its purpose – the social relations not being
restricted to the "nation state" presently self designated "The United States of America" but
including classes in other "nation states".
Consequently alternative purposes and social relations pose an existential threat to "The
United States of America"; this being perceived of lesser significance in regard to "The
Soviet Union" and greater in regard to the Russian Federation.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country
on earth capable of obliterating the United States. Not even China has yet reached that
capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting,
and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the
scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The
Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met
with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment
for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin
seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last
two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems
to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
Trump is right about the NATO members inadequate military spending; the US expects NATO
members to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defence, the US however, does not require them
to purchase American made weapons, they can produce their own weapons, like French do, or buy
from each other like Germans -- they just have to make their military up and ready in case of
emergency, that's not an unreasonable expectation.
Among the NATO members however, Canada's case is unique; due to its closeness and joint
high command (NORAD) with the US -- and direct threat from Russian claim on the Canadian
Arctic, Canada needs and must increase its military spending significantly, Canada should
purchase modern Air force fleet, Advanced Surveillance equipment, Warships and Submarines for
the defence of the Arctic; F-35, F-22, AH-64 Apache, Nuclear powered Icebreaker and
Submarines etc. because all these equipment will we be partially built in Canada which bring
many high tech jobs and economic growth to the Canadian communities.
Trump is right, NATO and Canada should spend much more on their own defence, and buying
American advanced weapons is the best strategic choice for the Canadians forces, there
shouldn't be any doubt about that.
LOL to the first comment, Russia is *zero* threat to Canada ** . Russia is zero threat to the
US or Europe either. NATO has long outlived its purpose and needs to die.
** I suppose Russia could claim the north pole, and threaten to hold Santa hostage.
@Jmaie
Russian annexation of Crimea was a blatant assault on the International Law, yet it went off
without serious consequences to Russia -- it's not a secret that Russia has claims on
Canadian Arctic seabed, Russia has already planted its flag on the Arctic seabed; here is a
Link that you should want to see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/02/russia.arctic
I'd really be interested to understand how on earth the reintegration, by overwhelming
majority in a plebiscite acknowledged by all sides as free and unconstrained, of Crimea, a
Russian province for 300+ years, and a majority-Russian area for quite a long time, is "a
blatant assault on the International Law".
The "International Law" you quote must be a newcomer.
"I'd really be interested to understand how on earth "
It is very easy to understand. As Upton Sinclair observed "It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Alistair repeats typical neocon viewpoint. Nothing original here. Neocons make their
living off threat inflation and this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact.
Fiona Hill is a shining recent example here -- this intellectual prostitute of MIC is a
member of Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council and other MIC lobbing organization that
promote Cold War 2 and neoliberal globalization.
The real question is "Why we should believe any of these chickenhawks?" They has been
proven liars so many times that they deserve the rotten tomatoes to be thrown at them on any
of their public appearances or, which is sadly impossible, at their Internet posts
But again money do not smell: unless neocons start facing very real and very personal
consequences, nothing will change. And like with any sect there is small number of
intellectually deficient people who still believe them.
3. Restrainers Want Realistic Foreign Policy Goal s. Instead of engaging in
costly and futile efforts to remake the world in our image, restrainers want U.S. foreign
policy to pursue more feasible objectives. The U.S. military must be strong enough to deter
attacks on the U.S. homeland, a task that is relatively easy to accomplish. When necessary,
the United States can also help other states uphold the balance of power and deter war in a
few key strategic areas outside the Western Hemisphere. America's economic clout will also
give Washington considerable influence over the institutions that manage trade, investment
and other beneficial forms of international cooperation, and it should use that influence
to ensure these institutions are working properly. But the United States has neither the
need, the capacity, nor the wisdom to conduct massive social engineering projects
("nation-building") in deeply divided and conflict prone societies, and it should cease
trying.
4. Restrainers Want Credible Foreign Commitments . The United States keeps taking
on new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely
debates their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more
countries around the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these
states are hard to defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and
sometimes act in ways that damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less
visible military activities in dozens of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy.
Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the
slightest reduction in America's global presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden
rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having allowed itself to become overextended, the United
States ends up fighting endless wars in places with no strategic value in order to convince
allies and adversaries that it will still fight in places of greater importance.
The sooner the EU & Europe generally either discard NATO or create its own defence
force in parallel with NATO, the better.
Europe MUST take control of its own destiny. It can not have an external nation, the US,
with different, if not opposing interests, dictating European policy & action.
The “Russia” situation is a perfect example of this divergence of interests.
Europe’s future clearly lies with greater Eurasian integration. Energy, primary
products, & mercantile trade all lie to the East, through Russia to China, Vietnam etc.
Notably, some countries such as Italy are already pulling away from official EU policy &
turning East.
Unfortunately, The US has bribed & threatened (many) EU leaders, leaders who
couldn’t even imagine a change to the status quo. Thankfully, though, it seems that
many average Europeans are sick to their back-teeth with the status quo & Europe’s
“evermore” subservience to US imperialism.
German tax-payers, like most other Europeans, see no need to spend billions of
hard-earned euros against a non-existent threat from the East.
They don’t even want to spend their money turning back the actual threats spilling
across their borders, but climate change is way up there on the agenda. De-industrialised
Europe chock-full of third-world denizens is going to be heaven on earth.
The Case of Sergei Magnitsky
Questions
Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not
have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be.
Jahrgang 1981. Studium der Volkswirtschaftslehre in Bonn, Mannheim und St. Petersburg.
Absolvent der studienbegleitenden Journalistenausbildung des Institutes zur Förderung
publizistischen Nachwuchses (ifp). Sieben Jahre Moskau-Korrespondent von SPIEGEL ONLINE. Autor
des Buchs "Generation Putin - Das neue Russland verstehen". Seit September 2016 Mitglied der
Wirtschaftsredaktion von SPIEGEL ONLINE.
There's a tombstone in northeastern Moscow that bears the portrait of a man with a friendly yet somewhat uneasy smile. His
name is Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. He was born in April 1972 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died in November
2009 in Moscow. To this day, 10 years after the fact, the circumstances of his death in a Russian pretrial
detention facility remain unclear.
There are two versions of what happened to Magnitsky. The more well-known version has all the makings of
a conspiracy thriller. It's been repeated in thousands of articles, TV interviews and in parliamentary
hearings. In this version of the story, the man from the Moscow cemetery fought nobly against a corrupt
system and was murdered for it.
The other version is more complicated. In it, nobody is a hero.
The first version has had geopolitical implications. In 2012, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act,
which imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were believed to have played a role in his death. The
measure was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama after receiving a broad bipartisan majority. Back
then, if there was one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle could agree on, it was their
opposition to a nefarious Russian state. In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled
the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.
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The facilitator behind these pieces of legislation is Bill Browder, Magnitsky's former boss in Moscow.
"When he was put to the ultimate test, he became the ultimate hero," Browder says of Magnitsky. Browder was
born in the U.S.. For years, his company, Hermitage Capital Management, was one of the largest foreign
investors in Russia. At the time, Browder was an advocate for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the West.
That is, until he was prohibited from entering Russia in 2005.
Public Enemy No. 1
Today, Browder refers to himself as "Putin's No. 1 Enemy." From his office in London's Finsbury district,
Browder coordinates a campaign he calls "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky." His goal is to get other countries
to impose sanctions against Russia for what happened to his former employee. So far, four other countries
have followed the U.S.' lead. For now, Browder is concentrating on Europe. He has spoken to politicians in
Norway, Sweden and France. He came to Berlin in May and spoke with the chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Affairs in Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag. He also had an appointment at the Chancellery.
Browder tells a gripping story of how Magnitsky, the whistleblower, is believed to have died. This
narrative is his ticket into the political sphere. It's why he's received by members of parliament,
diplomats and human rights activists alike, often with open arms. They support his push for more legislation
because they see it as setting an important precedent: Corrupt regimes all over the world that are violating
their citizens' rights must be held accountable and made to suffer consequences in the form of entry bans
and frozen accounts as laid out by the Global Magnitsky Act. The law makes it more difficult, if only
slightly, for autocrats to sneer at and ignore human rights.
But there's another version of the Magnitsky saga, one that is more contradictory than Browder's telling
and more difficult to summarize. The legal documents that underpin it fill dozens of binders, not only in
Moscow, but also in London and New York. After sifting through thousands of pages, one might begin to
wonder: Did the perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan
whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair becomes
muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The Russian authorities'
take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill Browder's.
The cases raises uncomfortable questions for the West. In Europe and the U.S., critics of Russia often
argue from a position of moral superiority. But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist
Browder used a noble cause to manipulate Western governments.
One thing that stays the same no matter which version is told, is this: Magnitsky is dead and he was the
victim of a terrible injustice.
Magnitsky's Demise
On the evening of Nov. 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky died in a cell at Moscow's "Matrosskaya Tishina"
pretrial detention center. A prison doctor had diagnosed him with an inflammation of the pancreas four and a
half months prior, but shortly before Magnitsky was scheduled to undergo surgery, he was moved to another
prison -- one without the necessary medical equipment for such an invasive procedure. The reason given for
the move was that Magnitsky's cell needed to be renovated. Could that possibly be true? Even after the
whistleblower's death, work still hadn't commenced, according to an investigative commission. It began
looking into the case shortly after Magnitsky's death because the outrage in Moscow was so huge. The
commission counted among its members respected human rights activists and opponents of the Kremlin. They
analyzed notes and complaints filed while Magnitsky was in prison. They also interviewed the prison staffers
who, instead of helping Magnitsky, let him die.
The commission's 20-page report offered detailed insights into the sadistic, cold-hearted nature of
Russia's prison system. In the months before his death, Magnitsky was constantly moved from one cell to
another. His mother brought him medications that took 18 days to reach him. In September, he was forced to
wear his jacket at night because his cell window lacked a pane of glass. His cell toilet often backed up.
One time Magnitsky's abdominal pains became so acute that his neighbor began desperately kicking against the
door of his cell and calling for help. It took prison staff five hours to get Magnitsky to a doctor.
Mischa Japaridze/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Sergei Magnitsky's grave at a cemetery in Moscow.
Magnitsky's condition worsened on his last day. He was transferred back to the prison where he was
originally supposed to be operated on months prior. There, the dying man began to panic. He was sedated and
restrained with handcuffs. The files analyzed by the commission note the "use of a rubber baton." Magnitsky
was left alone in his cell, unobserved, without a doctor. "An ill person in severe condition was effectively
left without medical attention for 1 hour and 18 minutes to die," the commission wrote in its report, a
chronology of merciless negligence. Yet it contains no evidence of a targeted murder.
According to Browder's more dramatic telling of the story, Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted
act of revenge by Russian authorities against an anti-corruption activist. Browder says he tapped "my lawyer
Magnitsky," to investigate a case in 2007. Over the course of his research, Magnitsky supposedly stumbled
onto a crime of unprecedented proportions -- the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, perpetrated by a
corrupt band of police officers and government officials.
The fraud involved a sum of $230 million (208 million euros) and a complex master plan, which, according
to Browder, was run by two Moscow police officers, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. The duo had initiated
a fraudulent tax investigation against Browder's Hermitage Capital Management and then seized three
letterbox firms that had originally been founded by Browder's people. With confiscated company deeds, the
firms were transferred to middlemen who fabricated massive losses and requested the reimbursement of $230
million in taxes that Browder's company had previously paid. Karpov, the policeman, denies any involvement
in the fraud or Magnitsky's death. "Browder is a liar," he says. Kuznetsov could not be reached for a
statement.
Browder's Story
According to Browder, Magnitsky was onto Kuznetsov and Karpov. He also says the same officials had
arranged for Magnitsky to be imprisoned and killed. Browder has told this version of events countless times.
He testified in front of the U.S. Congress that Magnitsky had been "murdered." Browder told Canadian
parliamentarians: "Eight riot guards with rubber batons would beat him for one hour and 18 minutes. He was
subsequently found dead on the floor of that cell."
When asked, Browder cites the investigative committee's report as evidence. He does the same on his
website, where he also says the same officials incriminated by Magnitsky "intentionally tortured and
ultimately murdered him." The report, however, makes no such assertion of an intentional killing. The names
of the two police officers, Kuznetsov and Karpov, don't even appear in the original Russian version of the
commission's report. Kuznetsov is only mentioned in an English translation on Browder's website.
By now, Browder's campaign has created its own frame of reference and its own supposed evidence. Browder
has often cited reports by the Council of Europe in recent years, though these are largely based on his own
accounts. For instance, one Council rapporteur, former German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, referred to Magnitsky as an "independent lawyer." But one look at documents
readily available online is enough to discover that Magnitsky was employed as a tax expert at an auditing
firm and had worked for Browder for years.
Browder claims to be fighting for justice. One of the reasons he's so successful may be because he's
adept at aligning his story with the devastating image that Russia has been projecting for years. And many
media outlets believe him. Browder has given countless TV interviews on the subject. In some of the shots,
viewers can see articles from prominent international media Browder has hung on his office walls -- the
Washington Post
, the
Financial Times
and Russia's
Novaya Gazeta
. The reports are all
framed and appear to lend credibility to Browder's story. DER SPIEGEL has also
written about Browder's campaign
and conducted interviews with him. The
New York Times
won the
Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Russia's legal system, including on the Magnitsky case. There are films
and plays too.
But the question remains: Just how solid are the facts upon which politicians and the media are basing
their judgements of this case? Various inconsistencies and contradictions are apparent in some documents
that Browder's own people have published online. These include two photographs of interrogation protocols
that allegedly prove how Sergei Magnitsky courageously reported the tax fraud of $230 million after
discovering it. In his book, Browder writes, "Sergei set up an appointment at the Investigative Committee
for 5 June 2008. (...) He sat in the chair, provided the evidence and gave his witness statement, explicitly
naming Kuznetsov and Karpov."
Contradictions
The protocol itself tells a different story. Magnitsky does indeed mention the names of the two police
officers nearly 30 times and describes their role during a search. But at no point does he make a concrete
accusation against them personally. In a second protocol of a statement made on Oct. 7, Kuznetsov and Karpov
are not mentioned at all. The first document also shows that Magnitsky did not make his statements entirely
of his own free will, but as a witness in an ongoing investigation. According to other documents, the trial
had been underway since February. This was confirmed to DER SPIEGEL by Magnitsky's lawyer at the time,
Dmitry Kharitonov, who said his client had been summoned to testify.
Browder has a well-documented talent for selling a set of facts so that it supports his own version of
events. In Moscow, this was part of his business model as an investor. According to its own calculations,
Hermitage Capital Management generated a 1,500 percent return on its investments within just a few years.
According to Russian investigators, a company in Browder's fund structure had wrongly paid only 5 percent in
taxes, when in fact 15 percent should have been due. A double taxation agreement with Cyprus should not have
been applied. Browder denies this.
One way or the other, Browder's business model was lucrative. Hermitage bought cheap shares in Russian
state-owned corporations, such as Gazprom or Sberbank, from the late 1990s onward. Then he took on the
conglomerates' leadership, denounced the widespread corruption and demanded reforms. If these came to
fruition, the value of Browder's shares rose. If they didn't, at least the publicity of his fund grew.
Browder had his eye on Gazprom especially. In 1998, the company was worth $3.5 billion. Within seven
years, that number had jumped to $160 billion. Hermitage held many shares through shell companies. Several
of them perfunctorily hired mentally disabled people who they described on paper as, "analysis division
experts." In fact, the people had no knowledge of this field, as several courts would later discover.
The companies took advantage of tax breaks that were intended for firms with workplace disability rates
of at least 50 percent -- and not as a tax-saving model for Western investment funds. Over the course of
their years-long investigations into Hermitage, Russian authorities stumbled upon a man who was helping
Browder come up with his tax-saving models: Sergei Magnitsky. Browder says the practice of skirting taxes
was common at the time.
When Browder talks about his fate in front of Western audiences, he makes it sound as if the
investigations into Hermitage were completely arbitrary. In his book and during interviews, Browder claims
that Kuznetsov, the investigator, appeared out of nowhere in 2007. This is significant because it appears to
underscore that the trial was "politically motivated, fabricated" and initiated for the sole purpose of
obtaining the necessary documentation for the long-planned $230-million fraud.
'A Measure of Vindication'
But the date Browder provided is incorrect. Kuznetsov's name appeared in letters to Browder's company in
June 2006. At the time, the police had demanded the firm surrender its bank data. There is also proof that
Browder's team knew about the letters. Indeed, they were in Browder's possession.
There is another interrogation protocol that Browder did not prominently publish online like the other
two. It is from October 2006, long before Magnitsky is said to have first exposed the big tax fraud that
Browder says caused him to fall out of the authorities' good graces.
According to the protocol, Magnitsky was questioned by investigators about one of the dubious letterbox
firms that gave employment contracts to people with disabilities. He claims that Browder's people asked him
to "to 'be' CEO for a period of reorganization." Other documents show that Magnitsky was involved in the
companies as early as 2002.
Some of the people accused by Browder have begun to fight back against the allegations. The Moscow
policeman Pavel Karpov, for one, who Browder claims worked with Kuznetsov to have Magnitsky arrested and
killed in retaliation for his testimony, filed a defamation lawsuit against Browder in London in 2012.
The presiding judge, Justice Simon, ruled the British courts had no jurisdiction over the matter. But in
his written verdict, he also wrote scathingly about Browder, calling him a "story-teller" who did "not come
close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the sting of the libel." Simon also wrote that his
assessment was to be explicitly understood as "a measure of vindication" of Karpov.
The only problem was the judge's words hardly made it into the public discourse at the time. The
Guardian
and other British media wrote about Karpov's humiliating defeat in the courts. Some of the
language they used can be found in press releases from Browder's campaign.
A second trial in New York concerned the frozen accounts of a wealthy Russian political clan, the Katsyv
family. The U.S. government imposed the sanctions because Browder had insisted that money from the
million-dollar fraud had wound up with the Katsyvs. In response, the Russians hired star New York-based
lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of
DER SPIEGEL.
Browder, an otherwise talkative person, tried to avoid questioning. One video shows him running away when
someone tries to present him with a subpoena. In April 2015, he was required to appear in court. Under oath
and confronted with numerous documents, he answered meekly -- quite differently than during his public
appearances. Lawyer Mark Cymrot, a surly litigator with a moustache, spent six hours examining him. Cymrot
asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?
"No."
DER SPIEGEL visited Browder in London and asked him to clarify some inconsistencies and contradictions in
his story. The result was a four hour-long interview and a grudging search for information, facts and
details. The meeting, which took place in a glass conference room in Browder's Finsbury office, provided
insights into his tactics: Together with his Russian partners Ivan Cherkasov and Vadim Kleiner, Browder laid
out dozens of documents that supposedly corroborated his version of events. Not all of them would stand up
to further scrutiny.
One of the documents was a previously unpublished email from Sergei Magnitsky. It supposedly confirmed
that he went to the authorities of his own volition as a whistleblower. Yet the document also makes clear
that Magnitsky was instructed to come forward by a higher-ranking lawyer working for Browder. This lawyer, a
Russian, admitted during the interview in London that Magnitsky had been sent as a stand-in for the CEO of a
letterbox company who investigators in Moscow had actually wanted to speak to.
To further back up their story, Browder and his team also presented an article by an American journalist
who had spoken to Magnitsky shortly before his arrest. The police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov had
Magnitsky arrested "immediately" after the publication of the article. But nothing in the article would
explain why Magnitsky was arrested. In it, he doesn't mention Karpov or Kuznetsov. The author of the
article, when contacted, said he couldn't imagine that it was his piece that triggered Magnitsky's
persecution.
Charles Dharapak/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Former U.S. President Barack Obama signing the Magnitsky Act into law.
Browder's campaign has turned him into a global celebrity. His publisher advertises his book, "Red
Notice," as a
New York Times
bestseller. In interviews, he calls for Russia to be largely isolated.
He attacks politicians who disagree with him. He called John Kerry, the former U.S. secretary of state, a
"lapdog" and accused him of "appeasement." Browder has also called for Russia's banishment from the SWIFT
banking network, which would have devastating consequences for the Russian population. But is that really
necessary to ensure "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky?" Or has Browder's campaign turned into a personal
vendetta?
Too Good Not to Be True
Another strange thing about this case is that those involved sometimes change their stories completely
and begin saying the opposite of what they said before. Take Zoya Svetova, for instance: The Moscow-based
human rights activist co-wrote the investigative commission's report. She is a Kremlin opponent and writes
reports for MBKH News, the media project of the exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Svetova has
been intensively involved with the Magnitsky case and published regular articles about it. She is also
planning to write a book.
In July, Svetova said in an interview with DER SPIEGEL that even 10 years after Magnitsky's death, she
didn't think much of the theory that he was the victim of a murder plot. It was more likely that Magnitsky
got into an argument with the doctors and the staff because he wasn't being medically treated. "They were
beating him to pacify him," Svetova said, adding that the beatings in and of themselves did not indicate a
targeted murder. There was no evidence of this, she said. "What sense would it make to murder him?" So that
he wouldn't talk about the $230 million fraud anymore? By that point, news of the fraud was everywhere.
"Magnitsky did not reveal any secret," Svetova said in July.
The investigative commission report she helped co-write mentions that pressure had been placed on
Magnitsky while he was in prison. "They wanted testimonies against Browder. That was the motivation. He
should have accused Browder of not paying taxes. Magnitsky was a hostage. He himself was of no interest to
them. They wanted Browder," she said.
Svetova also said that while Magnitsky's fate was dreadful, it wasn't atypical. Failure to provide
assistance as well as abuse are common in Russian prisons, she said. She wrote an article on the subject in
2010. According to information from the Council of Europe, around 4,000 prisoners died in Russia in 2014. In
Germany, 150 died. "You have to know," Svetova said, "the Russian penitentiary system is very brutal."
Shortly before this article was published, however, Svetova suddenly changed her story. Now she had the
feeling "that he was moved deliberately to the 'Matrosskaya Tishina' prison to kill him." She said that
since July, she had gone back and re-examined all the old documents and that she now had a completely
different view of things.
In August, the European Court of Human Rights announced its ruling in the Magnitsky case: Russia must pay
the deceased's relatives 34,000 euros ($37,500) because the state should have protected the prisoner's life
and health. Nowhere in its verdict was there any mention of murder. The judges did, however, take apart the
claim that the whistleblower had been imprisoned out of revenge. Magnitsky's arrest was not without cause,
they wrote, nor were the authorities' actions malicious. The investigations into Magnitsky began in 2004,
long before he first approached the authorities, it says on page 39 of the court's written verdict. But that
didn't stop Browder from describing the ruling as a "resounding victory."
His campaign has created a kind of perpetual motion. Browder was recently received by diplomats in
Finland, which currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU. They summoned him to discuss a
European version of the U.S.' Magnitsky sanctions. "This law will become a reality in the EU," Browder
tweeted in mid-October. His chances of success aren't bad: His story is simply too good not to be true.
Chile - it's not just the level of inequality and austerity in the country that triggered
the social uprising against the elite. On the OECD's 'better life' index, Chile scores very
badly even compared to other Latin American countries.
The OECD index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the
OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of
life.
The Indian economy is heading into trouble - to all intent, in recession. The
second-largest country in the world by population grew only 4.5 percent year-on-year in the
third quarter of 2019, below 5 percent in the previous period and market expectations of
4.7 percent. That's the weakest pace since the first three months of 2013, mainly due to a
fall in factory output and exports and a slowdown in investment.
Investment, sluggish for nearly a decade, grew a mere 1 per cent year-on-year, down from
4 per cent in the previous quarter. Manufacturing output contracted 1 per cent.
Infrastructure investment has collapsed.
The government has announced several measures to boost growth including a reduction in
corporate taxes, concessions on vehicle purchases, bank recapitalisation. Meanwhile, the
central bank has already cut borrowing cost 5 times this year and is seen lowering rates
again next week.
This is a very interesting example of how Western (i.e. libera, capitalist) propaganda
works, and also a very illustrative example of how capitalism declined from the point of view
of a person who benefitted the most from it when it was at its apex:
The shock in the US was that the Russians were not only competitive, but had embarrassed US
science and engineering by being first. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the
National Defense Education Act, and this enabled talented students to flow into science and
engineering. The shock waves were felt throughout the entire educational system, from top
to bottom. Mathematics was more important than football.
He's right in the abovementioned paragraph. If you interviewed people who were 12-14 years
old between 1958 and 1963, and asked about what would be the future of the USA in the year
2000, most of them would have more or less the same answer: that the future of America was
scientific, bright, of high technology; a nation where scientists and engineers would be more
more venerated than tv celebrities and football/baseball players. It would be the world of
the infamous "flying cars" and space exploration and colonization.
Nobody in 1963 would imagine that the USA of the 2000s would be the USA of finance,
of Wall Street ; of football players, of the anti-vaxxers, of the flat earthers and of
the Kardashians.
But they should've. The reason this degeneration happened is the fact that the USA is a
capitalist society. In capitalism, scientific progress is accidental. What matters in the
capitalist system is the valorization process, not the process of use value creation. Like
any other societal formations, capitalism has a revolutionary period, an apex period, a
decline period and a collapse period. In my opinion, world capitalism has just exited its
apex phase and is now entering its decline phase.
Here's the propaganda part of the article:
As demonstrated by the USSR, socialism does not prohibit scientific prowess. There is a
difference, of course. Socialism's success in the USSR came at the expense of millions of
lives, the slave labor of millions more, and a lower standard of living. Nevertheless, the
fact is that Yuri Gagarin was the first person to orbit the earth. In comparison to the US
today, Soviet universities were not plagued by whining children – nor are today's
Chinese universities. The Soviets thought it wiser that their young study calculus and
physics.
This paragraph encapsulates all the elements of Cold War propaganda about the USSR. When I
read it, it felt like a blast from the past.
First, the image of the USSR as essentially a slavery society is a Western chimera. They
come from Weber -- who once theorized the USSR as a "modern Ancient Egypt" -- and the
propaganda from Solzhenitsyn, who hugely exagerated the number of prisoners in the USSR.
In fact, even at the height of the GULAG era, the USSR's jailed population never went
beyond 1.5% of its overall population (as we know now from Soviet official archives). That's
well within the world's average. If only 1.5% of the population is able to sustain the other
98.5%, then even I want to know how the Soviets operated such an economic miracle.
Besides, the USSR obviously didn't kill "millions of people" in order to send someone to
space. That's obviously absurd by any metric, logic included. First of all because this would
never gather political consensus among the population, second because it is impossible to do
rocket science with slave labor.
The quick rise of the Third Reich gave birth to the myth in the West that slave labor can
operate miracles. Nothing is further from the truth. In Ancient times, both the Greeks and
the Romans already knew slave labor was only economically viable in very basic and simple
tasks, such as agriculture, mining and other domestic services. Athens achieved naval
supremacy over Greece by using wage labor for its rowing and sailor crews, so that they could
be professionals with high morale in the battlefield. The reason for this is that maneuvering
triremes was an extremely complex art, too complex and valuable for the Athenians to trust to
slaves. They also had, by the nature and complexity of the task, a naturally high degree of
freedom from their "bosses". Either way, the task was simply too complex for a slave to
phisically learn, since a slave was kept into his/her place through physical deprivation and
domination, and a sailor had to be always fit physically and mentally to wage wars at sea.
The Spartans didn't slave their coastal colonies, giving them a much larger degree of freedom
(perioikoi), probably in exchange for a supply of sailors, ships. The Romans also did the
same: when a slave became specialized enough in the family business (such as acting as a
middle man in the paterfamilias' businesses in some coastal city), he usually "gifted" him
with his freedom.
In sum: even the ancients knew that, for more complex tasks, free people were a must.
Slavery was only economically viable for very simple and denigrating tasks (specially,
agriculture and mining).
As for the "lower quality of living", that's highly debatable. Surely, on average, the
USSR certainly didn't enjoy the same life quality than the top of the capitalist chain of the
time. But inequality was much, much lower (almost negligible) except for the rural-urban
divide, and there was no deprivation.
On average, life quality in the USSR was much better than the vast majority of the
capitalist nations with the benefit inequality was negligible (so the average approached the
median). Sure, it was no post-1980s Norway or Finland -- but those are microscopic capitalist
nations, with negligible population.
Thanks vk. The Soviet achievements in space were the achievements of a free people who had
to make superhuman sacrifices in order to preserve their freedom. Here's Boris Chertok, a
remarkable Soviet space designer whose experiences stretched from the crowds of 1917 and
Lenin's funeral to the construction of the international Space Station:
"I am part of the generation that suffered irredeemable losses, to whose lot in 20th
century fell the most arduous of tests. From childhood, a sense of duty was inculcated in
this generation - a duty to the people, to the Motherland, to our parents, to future
generations, and even to all humanity.
...
Currently ... it is ideological collapse that threatens the objective recounting of
[Soviet] science and technology ... motivated by the fact that its origins date back to the
Stalin epoch or to the period of the 'Brezhnev Stagnation'"
"... More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting at Brussels on November 19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda -- escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarization of space and countering China's rise. ..."
"... Stoltenberg said , "Space is also essential to the alliance's deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And around half of them are owned by NATO countries." ..."
"... "Is our enemy Russia or China as I sometimes hear?" he added at a press conference with Stoltenberg. "Is it the job of the Atlantic alliance to name them as enemies? I don't think so. Our common enemy, it seems, is the terrorism which is striking all our countries." ..."
"... The congruence of interests between Berlin and Washington vis-a-vis Macron manifested itself in the NATO's endorsement of the US-led escalation against Russia and China, with France rather isolated. However, this congruence will be put to test very soon at the summit meeting of the Normandy format over Ukraine, which France is hosting on December 9, following the NATO's London summit. France is helping Russia to negotiate a deal with Ukraine. ..."
"... With NATO being set up by Washington for a confrontationist posture, Russia and China won't let their guard down. Addressing a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council on November 22, Putin said , "There are many uncertainty factors competition and rivalry are growing stringer and morphing into new forms The leading countries are actively developing their offensive weapons the so-called 'nuclear club' is receiving new members, as we all know. We are also seriously concerned about the NATO infrastructure approaching our borders, as well as the attempts to militarise outer space." ..."
"... The Russian response is also visible on the ground. The share of modern weapons and equipment in the Russian Army and Navy has reached an impressive level of 70 percent. The first pilot batch of next-generation T-14 Armata tanks will arrive for the Russian troops in late 2019 – early 2020. ..."
The December 3-4 summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in London resembles
a family reunion after the acrimony over the issue of military spending by America's European
allies.
The trend is up for defence spending across European Allies and Canada. Over $100 billion is
expected to be added to the member states' defence budgets by end-2020.
More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting at Brussels on November
19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the
alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda --
escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarization of space and countering
China's rise.
The NATO will follow Washington's lead to establish a space command by officially regarding
space as "a new
operational domain" .
According to NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, this decision "can allow NATO planners
to make a request for allies to provide capabilities and services, such as satellite
communications and data imagery."
Stoltenberg said , "Space is also essential to
the alliance's deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather
intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And
around half of them are owned by NATO countries."
Equally, Washington has been urging the NATO to officially identify China's rise as a
long-term challenge. According to media reports, the Brussels meeting acceded to the US demand
and decided to officially begin military surveillance of China.
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hit out at
China after the Brussels meeting:
"Finally, our alliance must address the current and potential long-term threat posed by
the Chinese Communist Party. Seventy years ago, the founding nations of NATO came together
for the cause of freedom and democracy. We cannot ignore the fundamental differences and
beliefs in the – between our countries and those of the Chinese Communist Party."
So far so good.
However, it remains to be seen if Washington's grand design to draw NATO into its
"Indo-Pacific strategy" (read containment of China) will gain traction. Clearly, the US intends
to have a say in the European allies' growing business and economic relations with China to
delimit Chinese influence in Europe. The US campaign to block 5G technology from China met with
rebuff from several European countries.
On the other hand, the European project has unravelled and the Franco-German axis that was
its anchor sheet has become shaky. The rift between Paris and Berlin works to Washington's
advantage but, paradoxically, also hobbles the western alliance system.
The French President Emmanuel Macron annoyed Germany by his recent calls for better
relations with Russia "to prevent the world from going up in a conflagration"; his brutally
frank remarks about NATO being "brain dead" and the US policy on Russia being "governmental,
political and historical hysteria"; and his repeated emphasis on a European military policy
independent of the US.
"NATO is an organization of collective defense. Against what, against who is it defending
itself? Who is our common enemy? This question deserves clarification," Macron said after
talks in Paris with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary-general on Thursday, according to the
Times.
He argues that new talks with Russia are vital to European security and has pushed for
European involvement in a new deal to replace the defunct Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces
treaty between the U.S. and Russia.
"Is our enemy Russia or China as I sometimes hear?" he added at a press conference with
Stoltenberg. "Is it the job of the Atlantic alliance to name them as enemies? I don't think
so. Our common enemy, it seems, is the terrorism which is striking all our countries."
The congruence of interests between Berlin and Washington vis-a-vis Macron manifested itself
in the NATO's endorsement of the US-led escalation against Russia and China, with France rather
isolated. However, this congruence will be put to test very soon at the summit meeting of the
Normandy format over Ukraine, which France is hosting on December 9, following the NATO's
London summit. France is helping Russia to negotiate a deal with Ukraine.
The recent phone calls between
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky underscored
the growing interest in Moscow and Kiev at the leadership level to improve relations between
the two countries.
Moscow's breakthrough Avangard missile system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will
be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force in December 2019
In the final analysis, the Franco-German relations are of pivotal importance to not only
Europe's strategic future but the western alliance system as such. If anyone was in doubt, the
French veto in October
means sudden death for the proposal on European Union accession of the Balkan state of North
Macedonia, which NATO is inducting as its newest member. Berlin and Washington are livid, but a
veto is a veto.
With NATO being set up by Washington for a confrontationist posture, Russia and China won't
let their guard down. Addressing a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council on
November 22, Putin said , "There are many uncertainty
factors competition and rivalry are growing stringer and morphing into new forms The leading
countries are actively developing their offensive weapons the so-called 'nuclear club' is
receiving new members, as we all know. We are also seriously concerned about the NATO
infrastructure approaching our borders, as well as the attempts to militarise outer
space."
Putin stressed, "In these conditions, it is important to make adequate and accurate
forecasts, analyze the possible changes in the global situation, and to use the forecasts and
conclusions to develop our military potential."
Significantly, only four days before Putin made the above remarks, Chinese President Xi
Jinping told him at a meeting in Brasilia on the sidelines of the BRICS summit that "the
ongoing complex and profound changes in the current international situation with rising
instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination to
jointly uphold the basic norms governing international relations, oppose unilateralism,
bullying and interference in other countries' affairs, safeguard the respective sovereignty and
security, and create a fair and just international environment."
Putin responded by saying that "Russia and China have important consensus and common
interests in maintaining global strategic security and stability. Under the current situation,
the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication and firmly support each
other in safeguarding sovereignty, security, and development rights." ( Chinese MFA )
The Russian response is also visible on the ground. The share of modern weapons and
equipment in the Russian Army and Navy has reached an impressive level of 70 percent. The first
pilot batch of next-generation T-14
Armata tanks will arrive for the Russian troops in late 2019 – early 2020.
On November 26, Russian Defence Ministry stated that Moscow's breakthrough Avangard missile
system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force
in December.
For the first time, the electronic warfare systems at Russia's military base in Tajikistan will be reinforced
with the latest Pole-21 jamming station that can counter cruise missiles, drones and guided air
bombs and precision weapon guidance systems. Moscow is guarding against the US and NATO
presence in Afghanistan.
Video: How the U.S. Caused the Breakup of the Soviet UnionSean Gervasi 1992
Lecture By Sean
Gervasi and Dennis Riches Global Research,
November 30, 2019 Region: Russia and FSU , USA Theme: History
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the text of an unpublished Lecture
delivered in 1992 by the late Sean Gervasi on the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the US Strategy formulated during World War II to bring down the USSR.
The full transcript and video of Sean Gervasi's presentation is preceded by Dennis Riches
Introduction
Scroll down for the Video
Introduction
We defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously
We worked together in a completely bipartisan way to bring down communism So now we have to use
our political processes in our democracy, and then decide to act together to solve those
problems. But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It [global warming] is
different from any problem we have ever faced before [i] – Al Gore
These words above were spoken by former US vice-president Al Gore in 2007 in his film An
Inconvenient Truth . Because audiences at the time were in rapt awe of him, treating him as
a savior in the campaign to solve the global warming crisis, they never seemed to reflect on
the outrageous assumptions underlying his comments about "defeating totalitarianism" and
"bringing down communism." These are worth examining for what they say about perceptions of
world history among the American political class, and they even hint at how the errors in these
perceptions led Mr. Gore to being self-deceived about what would be necessary to solve the
problem he has devoted himself to since he has been out of power.
Although the United States played a crucial role in WWII, it was slow to get involved and it
let the Soviet Union do much of the heavy lifting and suffer the heaviest losses. The United
States had a lot of help in achieving the victory Mr. Gore claims for America, and we could
assume he knows this, so the way he chose to describe historical events is telling.
Perhaps acknowledging the reality would have detracted from his second point about "bringing
down communism." Everyone knows that what he is referring to so proudly is the destabilization
and destruction of the USSR, the Warsaw bloc nations, and Yugoslavia, not the abstract notion
of communism. He is referring to a "victory" which precipitated civil wars and a disastrous
collapse of the economy and social welfare systems in these countries, one that killed and
impoverished millions. In China, Cuba and the DPRK, contrary to what he stated, these nations'
versions of socialism haven't been brought down at all. [1992]
Explicitly describing the "bringing down of communism" as America's deliberate actions to
dismantle the USSR might run the risk of reminding the audience about the illegality of
interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and it might have reminded people of
what a betrayal this was of America's WWII ally and partner in the détente of the 1970s.
The inconvenient truth is that the USSR was the WWII ally that played a crucial role in the
victory that Mr. Gore claimed solely for America.
Nonetheless, the comment about "bringing down communism" is refreshingly, and maybe
accidentally, very honest. Most descriptions of the Soviet collapse, even those done by
historians specializing in this field, pay little attention to American efforts to undermine
the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The political class always denied that America had a
plan to dismantle the USSR, and denied having any significant influence on events which they
claim arose from domestic causes. If America's influence is addressed at all, it is considered
as a matter of speculation, a mystery hardly worth thinking about when one can more easily look
at the dramatic events that occurred on the surface within the Soviet Union in the last decade
of its existence. The following transcript of the lecture by Sean Gervasi, delivered in 1992,
shortly after the collapse, is unique and valuable for what it reveals about the significant,
and perhaps decisive, American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gervasi came to this judgment:
The Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out,
extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society
struggling through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the
kind that it was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think,
therefore, that Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation."
The journey to how he came to this conclusion is well worth the reader's time.
A final comment about Mr. Gore's remarks: He is oblivious to the inconvenient solution that
has been staring him in the face all these years: that the necessary reduction of carbon
emissions will require severe constraints on capitalism, a thesis developed by Jason W. Moore
in Capitalism in the Web of Life .[ii] Mr. Gore should know that a radical solution is
needed. In his recent sequel to An Inconvenient Truth he complains about the undue
influence of "money in politics" that has gotten so much worse over the last ten years, but
that's as deep as the class analysis and ideological exploration can go in America. He evinces
no awareness of the historical figures who developed answers to the problem of unaccountable
private control of a nation's government, resources and productive capacities. Gore is still
proud of having actively worked against a revolution in human affairs that aimed to curtail the
savage capitalism that led to the present ecological catastrophe.
In spite of the flaws one might see in what the Soviet Union actually became, flaws that
arose to a great extent because it had to fight against external threats throughout its
existence, the goals of the revolution of 1917 are still relevant to the crises of the 21st
century, and this is what makes Sean Gervasi's research so valuable now, after a quarter
century in which America doubled down on its "winning ways" and worsened the crises that were
evident long ago in 1992.
About Sean Gervasi
Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the
United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a
book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His
political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy
administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in the United States as an
economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London
School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school
refused to renew his contract in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the
Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational
corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN
Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from
the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique . He was a frequent
commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York. In 1976, Gervasi
broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the "full court
press," a basketball term for a highly aggressive "all in" strategy. In an article published in
the Covert Action Information Bulletin in early 1991[iii], when the breakup of the USSR
was imminent, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration's strategy of economic isolation, a
gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, overt funding of internal dissent,
and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR. Gervasi backed up his
analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left, but his views were
contrary to the fashionable dogma that attributed the USSR's collapse almost exclusively to
such things as failures of leadership, centralization of the economy, the black market,
Chernobyl, or independence movements, and not to external hostility. These are the subjects
which he addressed in the following lecture given to a small audience in January 1992. The
lecture can still be found on internet video sites, but the thesis of this lecture still
remains marginal and obscure two decades later, even though it is highly pertinent to the Cold
War replay that is underway in the second decade of the 21st century -- one in which Russia
stands accused of turning the tables and doing a comparatively very tame version of the
propaganda war waged on the USSR in the 1980s.
After 1992, Gervasi focused his attention on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which he discovered
was a replay of the strategy used to break up the Soviet Union. He became active in exposing
the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the
civil war in the Balkans. His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive
machinations these nations, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of
the liberal and progressive movement. Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would
no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the
Balkans, but some of his research on this topic can be found in the article "Why Is NATO In
Yugoslavia?"[iv] published by Global Research in 2001.[v]
Dennis Riches, November 2017
***
VIDEO
Scroll down for the full Transcript
https://www.youtube.com/embed/b9_aYcpxClA
Byline of the video:
Propaganda expert reveals details in 1992 of RAND Think Tank plan under Reagan to bring down
USSR, the major socialist challenge to capitalism in crisis, called Operation Full Court Press
when announced at a Reagan limited invitee press conference upon its launch. It involved
targeting mid-level Soviet bureaucrats with publications and Air America broadcasts pointing to
problems they were facing having better outcomes in the US, military provocations when they
were considering their budget in order to spend them into bankruptcy, luring them into
Afghanistan followed by arming the Mujahadeen with surface to air missiles and such; and
fanning flames of ethnic rivalries within the Soviet Union, like by sending publication
equipment to Baltic ethnic groups.
In first 20 minutes Sean prophetically lays out the impending crisis of capitalism that
drives their urgency to stamp out socialist competition. Sean died under mysterious
circumstances in Belgrad where he had set up shop pointing out a PR effort in the US Congress
by Ruder Finn hired by Croats and Kosovo Albanians to start a US war against Yugoslavia for
their secession.
Event January 26, 1992 arranged by Connie Hogarth of WESPAC, Camera: Beth
Lamont
Transcript
(edited by Dennis Riches)
Introduction
I've been speaking in the last year or so about developments in the Soviet Union from the
perspective of a person who follows the workings of the Western intelligence agencies,
something in which I was tutored while I was working at the United Nations, and was on the
receiving end of quite a lot of that activity.
That is an important theme that one needs to look at: the role of the West in developments
which have taken place in the Soviet Union, and it's one that I've been focusing on, but of
course the wider and more important issue is: how shall we understand the meaning of events in
the Soviet Union in the last five, six, ten years? That's really the critical question.
As you know, the developments, particularly the end or collapse of communist rule in the
Soviet Union, and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, have been presented in our
media insistently and incessantly as evidence that socialism or social democracy, or
what-have-you, which we'll discuss, is unworkable. And this, of course, in tandem with the
theme which has been disseminated so energetically by these same people in the last decade,
that capitalism:
a) is more or less the same thing as democracy, and
b) must be seen as the core and triumphant achievement of Western civilization
Hence the thesis that this is the end of history, that we have achieved everything that
there is to achieve, that the present system of institutions in which we live in the West
represents the pinnacle of human capacities, intellectually and organizationally, and is the
best of all possible worlds.
That's the thesis, or those are the twin theses which surround us and which have been, I
think, creating an enormous amount of confusion and consternation because I think people sense
there is something wrong with this idea, and the effort to close off all discussion about
alternatives to, what I would term, our "regime" in the United States today, and possibly in
Western Europe, which is a moving backward from the more enlightened and liberal capitalism,
liberal democracy and capitalism, which evolved after the Second World War in Western Europe
and the United States.
We are today, I think, living in an irrational and savage capitalism of the 19th-century
variety, which for particular reasons, people who have power in this society either have
acceded to or have energetically worked to institute.
Part 1 The Crisis in the United States
The question is whether this great wave of propaganda makes any sense, and so I think we
should examine whether the idea that socialism and alternatives to raw capitalism are
impossible, undesirable, and unworkable. I think we have to look at that in two ways. First of
all, we have to examine our own situation in the United States, historically, and we have to
also, I think, look at what has happened in the Soviet Union because what has happened in the
Soviet Union is really very different from what we are told by the mass media. We have not
merely witnessed a collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. We have seen something really
very different, but it has been systematically misrepresented in the Western media.
There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the kind of society that American democracy
really represents, and that misunderstanding is both historical and contemporary. There is a
tremendous tension which we are all aware of in our society. It is a tension between
egalitarianism and inequality. It is a tension born of the evolution in the in the 16th, 17th
and 18th century in England, and the transfer of a particular kind of society onto American
soil through British political traditions, notwithstanding our rebellion as colonists at the
end of the 18th century. And that is the particular set of institutions known as liberal
democracy. Liberal democracy is a combination of parliamentary government and capitalism, and
liberal democracy inevitably, therefore, contains some very serious tensions because the
progressive development of parliamentary democracy has tended to give greater and greater scope
to the principle of equality in human life and politics. That's why in the course of British
19th century political development there was a progressive expansion of the franchise. And
that's why in the United States there was also an expansion of the franchise. The United States
did not have the same encumbering property qualifications in the beginning, although we did
have property qualifications in the 18th century in the United States, but eventually we had
the full franchise extended to all adults, and we've been redefining adults most recently.
We've dropped the level of political maturity or political enfranchisement to 18 years.
Capitalism, on the contrary, is a system of economic and social institutions based on the
principle of inequality, and there's a rationale for that inequality which also comes from the
18th century, but the idea, essentially, is that it makes sense from the point of view of
efficiency, and indeed equity, given all the considerations that one must take into account, to
have a society based on the unequal distribution of property organized around that institution,
to have an economy based on private property because, in the final analysis, it is most
efficient, and in the long run holds the greatest promise of continuous progress. By the way,
that's an argument that Marx made at a certain point -- that at a certain stage of history a
capitalist society is extremely progressive, that it gathers the technical capacities of
mankind, personkind, and develops them and accumulates and accumulates until it creates
something new, which we won't talk about just now.
But historically and currently in the United States we very strongly sense this tension so
that we go back and forth between periods when we have enormous pressures to give predominance
to the principle of inequality, to pay attention to the rights of property, and periods when
egalitarian tendencies have been very strong. For instance, as in the turn of the century
during the expansive phase of American populism and during the antitrust of the great popular
movements that sought -- not just popular -- but that sought to contain the power of the
cartels and the trusts in the United States. And today we sense that too. We passed the law in
1946 that's called the Employment Act. By the way, it's not called the Full Employment Act. You
have to remember that legislation. And yet we realize that our adherence to the principle of
full employment was tenuous even in the 25 years which followed the Second World War, and
completely spurious today. Why is that? It's because of this tremendous tension between the
realities of power under capitalism and the rather fragile hold which democratic principles and
institutions have on that power.
Let's go back to the Constitution and the Philadelphia Convention. I've been rereading Beard
and I'm very impressed by his grasp of who predominates really in this delicate balance in
liberal democracy between the principles of egalitarianism, the principles of parliamentary
democracy and the enormous concentration of power, which even then was inherent in the
dominance of the institutions of private property. Beard's argument essentially is that in the
final analysis a small group of men, whom he refers to as one-sixth of the adult male
population -- the only people who ratified the Constitution, the participants in the ratifying
conventions who voted positively for the Constitution -- represented one-sixth of the adult
male population. That is to say 8% of the adult population in today's terms. Against our values
that represents 8% of today's population -- the equivalent.
Now, what was obtained in that framing of the Constitution? What was obtained was a system
of political science, a system of government which was so structured as to ensure the dominance
of private property, the power of private property in any contention between the forces of
democracy and the forces of private property, and the forces of inequality, if you like, so
that the structure which constitutes, at the founding of this republic, which constitutes the
framework within which we operate today, is one which ensures that predominance.
I know that Beard has been attacked by many people, and it's perfectly understandable when
you read Beard carefully, but it seems to me that today Beard becomes more illuminating. Why? I
say I pay attention to the Constitution, to the Philadelphia Convention, to its ratification,
to the numbers who ratified it and to the purposes which they saw themselves as furthering by
their framing and ratification of this constitution because that is the framework within which
the United States experienced the most successful and untrammeled Industrial Revolution in the
history of mankind. Untrammeled. We had a straight run of industrialization which was the first
to transform the condition of man in human society, by which I mean something very, very
specific. And here I speak to things which were said by people like [ John Maynard] Keynes , by people like [
Joseph Alois] Schumpeter ,
but really ignored because they're extremely uncomfortable.
The rationalization for inequality in the institution of private property, in the thinking
of eighteenth century philosophers, was that property had to be shared unequally and income had
to be unequal because this inequality provided incentives which would constitute a constant
assurance of the drive to the expansion of production. That was the rationalization, but in the
20th century, according to the economic historians and according to people like Keynes,
countries like the United States and Great Britain began to end, began to transform the
historical situation within which these institutions were conceived. How? By developing such a
capacity to produce that gradually more and more numbers were lifted out of anything which
could be historically or comparatively called poverty so that scarcity, which dominates the
reasoning of economists, was really beginning to end in many respects. And Joseph Schumpeter
was able to say, for instance, in 1928, that if economic growth continued in the United States
for another 50 years we would see in 1978 the end of anything that could reasonably be called
poverty.
Now that didn't quite happen. That didn't quite happen because of the enormous influence of
inequality in the distribution of this productive abundance. But what it did transform was the
lives of many, many people, and it transformed everyday life and the historical condition. Look
between 1870 and 1970 at how the number of hours that the average American works falls. In the
period between 1945 and 1970, per capita production trebled, just in that period, and we
already had a huge industrial base at that time, so I would argue [agree], with Galbraith, who
-- because he was right was vilified and ignored by the economist profession and studiously
made little of by the mass media -- that indeed America began to be transformed with the
success of its enormous industrial revolution by the end of the period after 1865, when really
heavy industrialization began to take place. And indeed I would argue that the reason for the
Great Depression was that the United States had lost the ability to continue to absorb
everything that it could produce in an adequate way, given the institutions of the time.
So what happened then was that within this framework, which is the same framework conceived
by the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. To further the purposes of property and to insure
against what Madison called "the leveling attacks of democracy," we have industrialization
enhance the expansion of an enormous power, which is the power that controls the machinery and
the resources of that productive system. That is to say large corporations. The largest 500
corporations in the United States today, plus the largest 500 banks and the largest 50
financial corporations control more resources than the Soviet planners ever dreamed of
controlling. The control of those resources, which is made invisible by the clever workings of
economists, inheres in the ability to make investment decisions. Investment decisions are the
key decisions in any economic system. The power to make those decisions is the power to
continuously transform and to determine the terms of everyday life among human beings in any
society. That power is not only invisible in our system of thought, carefully hidden by the
descendants of the 18th century philosophers, but it is also totally unaccountable.
Now maybe you could say, and we did say this between 1945 and 1975:
"OK this is a contradiction of democracy. This is the inheritance from the Philadelphia
Convention, the Constitution in its ratification and the dominance of this one-sixth of the
male adult population in 1789, but this system is so productive that we can alleviate the
resulting social and political tensions by raising the standard of living of ordinary
folks."
And that was the whole philosophy of the sophisticated American leadership in the first
generation after the Second World War. That was the philosophy of the Rockefellers when they
talked about the new enlightened capitalism of 20th century. Capitalism could deliver the goods
and hence people would be content, despite the fact that the realities of power born at the end
of the 18th century, and essentially enhanced by the enormous accumulation of power represented
by industrialization and the growth of large corporations and their concentrated power in the
economy. We could live with that because the United States economy was so productive.
Now, that's our history, and the tremendous tension of our situation today as contrasted
with the post-war period because one thing is very clear today: that for 20 years in the United
States this system has not been working. There has been a systematic retreat from full
employment, high wages, advancing standards of living, security in one's job, and the advance
of the welfare state. We have systematically been retreating from those things so that we have
higher and higher official and real unemployment, which of course is about double the official
unemployment -- and the statisticians work very hard to hide the realities of
life.
Sean Gervasi
Between 1977 and 1992, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 70% of American
families have seen their after-tax income fall. 70%! In the lower ranges of the income
distribution those falls are quite sharp. Purchasing power falls by twenty 20.8% for the
poorest fifth, by something like 12% for the next fifth, by something like 11% for the third
fifth, and by smaller amounts for those in the middle of the income distribution system. So I
would say that that represents, and people are increasingly becoming aware of it, a collapse of
the American standard of living. And this collapse of the American standard of living is
related to a gradual economic decline which is causing the post-war system, as we have known it
in the United States between 1945 and 1970, to begin to disintegrate. And I think this is the
reality of what is happening so that today even according to Wall Street forecasters like the
Levies, attached to Bard
College up here in the county, we are facing what they call a contained depression, which
may be worse than the kind of depression we saw in the 1930s because the stabilizing role of
the government makes it possible not to avoid some of the awful horrors that occurred in
the depression, but to diminish them to a degree which makes them almost invisible.
So we have a very tense situation. I ask you to reflect on that when we confront the
enormous economic difficulties from which there follow all kinds of social problems in our
society today which we face. These are connected to, and, if you like, made possible by the
arrangements conceived by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton . If this crisis which we have
been living in for 20 years, and have become more acutely aware of in the last 10, is
intractable, it is, above all, intractable because of this invisible concentrated power which
exists today after industrial growth -- the rise of the large corporations in the framework
conceived by Madison, Hamilton and the other Federalists.
So if you want to argue today that we need to reconsider this framework, you run into very
fundamental problems. You run into the problem that the Constitution is treated like an icon,
that people are unaware that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is not the law of
the United States, that people are unaware of the fact that the Bill of Rights, which is
supposed to compensate for some of the failings of our constitutional system, has been
systematically shredded by the two most recent administrations. Witness William Kunstler and
his remarkable talks on what has happened to the Bill of Rights in the last ten years.
Part 2 The Crisis in the Soviet Union
Now, let's get to the Soviet Union, keeping in mind always that it is against this
background of crisis and the intractability of crisis, and it's rooting in the historical
origins of the Constitution that we are asked, that we are invited -- without anybody saying
that that's the background -- that we are invited to ponder the proposition that there is no
alternative to the kind of capitalism that we have, and that this capitalism is the
quintessence of democracy.
Now let us look at that proposition against a second set of data, if you like, which is
supposed to prove the case that there was socialism in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union
then, along with its Eastern European partners, collapsed in chaos owing to the essential
unworkability of this kind of a system. Let's look at that.
When the Reagan administration came into office we all became aware rather quickly that
something new was happening. We should have known that something new was happening because, in
fact, the arrival of the Reagan administration in power had been preceded by a very careful
build-up which was, in part, visible in the American polity, and that was the emergence of the
development and the elaboration of the power of a group which we now call the new right --
people who 20 years ago, 28 years ago in 1964, after Goldwater lost the Republican National
Convention. Rockefeller took command of the party that had been relegated to what every major
political commentator at the time called the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. These were
the people who, particularly in California, were coming out of the walls in the late 1970s,
creating foundations, buying chairs of economics at universities. Look at it: the Coors ,
the
Mises , with all of their contacts. These were the people who were building a new group,
and the purpose of this group was to put a stop to the kind of systematic democratic
entrenchment which they thought had been going on in the 1960s and the 1970s.
In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were three movements: (1) the movement for workers'
rights, for unionization, the expansion of unionization, particularly among city employees and
for raising wages, and the tremendous industrial disruption that attended the 1960s and the
early 1970s in the industrial sector, (2) the civil rights movement, which preceded that,
beginning in the late 1950s, and (3) the movement against the war in Vietnam, the war in
Vietnam being one of the ways in which this society managed to utilize, in a profitable
fashion, its enormous productive capacity without giving it to ordinary folks, without giving
its fruits to ordinary folks.
The new right was determined to do something quite new. One of the new things that it did,
and Reagan really was not its spokesman because that implies a degree of activity which I think
he's incapable of. You can always program a spokesman. I don't think he had the wheels to do
that.
Reagan launched, as you know, a massive, serious, intense, ugly confrontation with the
Soviet Union, ideologically. At the same time we became aware that there was a significant
drive on to re-arm the United States, to throw enormous resources -- ultimately it was in
excess of 1.7 trillion dollars during the 1980s -- to throw enormous resources into the
military sector, to throw enormous resources into shifting the technology of the military
sector to war in space, SDI [Space Defense Initiative], etc. All of those things were on the
agenda, but many of us at the time puzzled about this. I remember asking myself, "What is it
with these folks? Do these fellows really want a world war? Can they not see that this can be
the outcome?"
And I remember those discussions, and I remember when many of you and I on June 12, 1982
were at the demonstration of 750,000 to 1 million people in the center of New York City, which
was an expression of the alarm that people felt at this enormous aggressive policy which was
coming out of the Reagan administration, which threatened to shred US-Soviet relations.
But in fact, retrospectively, we can see that there was something else behind it, that it
was not just irrational madness. There was a bit of that, but there was a rationality to what
was being done, and in fact, to understand that, it's important to see that it is connected to
every single major line of innovative policy that the Reagan administration developed. It was
extremely well thought-out, extremely shrewd. And [it involved] the military buildup and the
aggressive rhetoric towards the Soviet Union, the deliberate effort to create difficulties in
the relationships between the Soviet Union and the European powers. You remember that in 1982
the United States tried to force the European powers not to accept natural gas from the Soviet
Union, to deny shipments of technology to the Soviet Union which would make it possible for the
Soviet Union to exploit that natural gas, to earn foreign exchange, etc. It was all part of a
very complex strategy, but it was a very clear strategy.
Let me say, though, that many of us, at least I at the time, missed that. We didn't quite
comprehend what was going on, but we had in the back our mind flickers that something was
wrong. There were people who were saying or hinting clearly at what was happening, and shrewd
people, intelligent people who did begin to grasp what was happening.
Let me quote from one or two. Writing in 1982, Joe Fromm , who was then the editor of the
United States' US News and World Report , said,
"There was something behind," I'm quoting him, "the shift to a harder line in foreign
policy." The US, in fact, seemed to be "waging limited economic warfare against Russia to
force the Soviets to reform their political system." That suggests that's a nice journalist,
a reasonably liberal journalist at US News and World Report , but Joe then quoted a
State Department official saying (actually, a National Security Council official), "The
Soviet Union is in deep, deep economic and financial trouble. By squeezing wherever we can,
our purpose is to induce the Soviets to reform their system. I think we will see results over
the next several years." That's in 1982.
Robert Scheer wrote a book in 1982 called With Enough Shovels: Reagan and Bush and
Nuclear War . I think I've got the title almost right. This is a very interesting book in
which Scheer saw that there was something behind this enormously aggressive foreign policy,
foreign and military policy, that the Reagan administration was deploying. And he saw that the
United States was not simply playing nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union, as he put it, but
that it was embarked on a policy designed to create such pressure for the Soviet Union as to
force changes within the Soviet Union.
Now of course it had always been the case that the Cold War consisted of moves designed to
affect the behavior of others. The Cold War, from the point of view of the West, had always
aimed at modifying, as the State Department cookie pushers liked to put it in their delicate
prose, the behavior of our antagonist. But this, I think you will see, went beyond that
because, in fact, the Reagan administration embarked on a policy of many dimensions which
included pressure around the world on countries with close ties to the Soviet Union.
Insurgencies were initiated in Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia against Vietnam, Nicaragua, and,
quite a lot, Afghanistan.
I don't want to get into too many complicated discussions of Afghanistan, but I think
anybody who reflects upon the United States' response to the Soviet entry into Afghanistan in
1979 must realize that the United States did not want the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan,
and in fact the purpose of these insurgencies around the world, which as you know, had expended
billions of dollars, was to pin the Soviet Union down, and to inflict economic costs upon the
Soviet Union. The purpose of the remilitarization in the West was to force the Soviet Union, at
the risk of exposing itself to the pressure of escalation, to meet our resource commitments, to
defend itself, or to place itself in a position to resist our pressure.
The purpose of escalating the technology of nuclear warfare, again, was to impose costs upon
the Soviet Union. [This was ] the purpose of every principled measure, such as withholding
advanced technology from the Soviet Union, foreign assistance programs aimed not at assisting
countries on the basis of their needs, but on assisting countries on the basis of the
contribution they would make to putting pressure on the Soviet Union. All of these things were
part of a systematic strategy designed to create havoc in the Soviet Union.
Now I'll say a little bit more about what the purpose of that was, but first let me point
out that this is a systematic strategy consisting of a number of pieces, and that it did pose
enormous economic and other costs upon the Soviet Union.
But who is Gervasi [the speaker] to say that this is so, beyond quoting Joseph Fromm? Well,
let me tell you a little bit about an interesting experience I had. I had lunch one day with a
friend who was passing through the United States, who had been in jail in South Africa for
eight years, and had just got out. He had been engaged in planning one of the principal
sabotage operations against the South African nuclear installations, and he was very happy to
be out of jail. We sat at lunch and he said to me -- we talked about many things, mostly about
Africa which he and I had worked on together -- and he said to me,
"What's going on in the Soviet Union?" I said to him, "Well, you know, I really can't
figure this out. I can't figure out what's going on." He said, "It seems to me that the
Soviet Union is being destabilized." "My goodness," I say to myself quietly.
The thought had never passed my mind, but when my friend, Christie, said this I thought I
should look into this, and I did.
The first thing I found was I spent a little bit of time on a computer and some things came
up, and I said that looks very interesting. Within a very short time I had discovered reams of
material being generated at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s by organizations like
the RAND Corporation. You know what the RAND Corporation is. It's an Air Force/CIA contracting
agency in Southern California, very large, very powerful, very influential in the so-called
intellectual defense community, the military industrial complex, and in Washington. People go
back and forth from the CIA, from the DIA to the State Department to the RAND Corporation. And
what were the chaps at the RAND Corporation doing? Well, they were producing very interesting
studies with titles like Economic Factors Affecting Soviet Foreign and Defense Policy :
A Summary Outline , The Costs of the Soviet Empire , Sitting on Bayonets: the
Soviet Defense Burden and Moscow's Economic Dilemma: The Burden of Soviet Defense ,
Exploiting Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire: Economic Relations with the USSR .
Anyway, I started reading the stuff. First of all, I started collecting it and I started
reading this stuff, and I found out something very interesting: that these fellows at the end
of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were clearly fashioning a plan in which we began to
see the pieces of in the emerging parts of foreign and military policy, foreign and military
and economic policy under the Reagan administration. And the basic reasoning of this plan --
I'll give it to you -- is as follows: the Soviet Union was in a dual crisis. They knew what was
going on in Soviet Union. Economic growth in the Soviet Union had begun to slow down. It had
been very rapid, by the way, in the period from 1950 to the early 1970s. Between 1960 and 1984
per capita income and per capita production in the Soviet Union trebled, so it wasn't slow.
That was a 4 or 5% rate of growth, very rapid considering that we're growing at about 1.5
which, is about, by the way, equivalent to the rate of growth on average during the decade of
the 1930s in the United States.
Now, what I found out was that they also understood there was a leadership crisis in the
Soviet Union. The old line of principal Soviet leaders born in the early stages of Soviet
redevelopment after the Revolution, formed in the Second World War -- that leadership was dying
out, as we all knew. And in fact Mikhail Gorbachev , selected by Andrei Gromyko , was the first
representative of a new generation of Soviet leaders, but in the late 70s and early 80s, people
were dying. The major figures Andropov, Chernenko and Brezhnev, were dying, and there was a
very great confusion about succession. So the country was in a kind of crisis. The CIA calls it
a dual crisis, a leadership crisis, not knowing to which new people of a new generation the
leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union should pass, and at the same time
a beginning of faltering of economic growth, which was serious because since the Soviet Union
had to always, like any country, choose between investing, competing in the arms race, and
raising the standard of living of its population. The fact that economic growth fell off made
that more difficult.
Now the next step in the reasoning of the RAND Corporation, gentlemen and ladies from the
RAND Corporation, was that the United States and its allies could take various actions which
would force the Soviet Union to increase its defense spending and its military assistance to
allies and friends. They could take measures to deny the Soviet Union credits, which they did,
and to deny it technology. They could also take measures which would reduce the overall volume
of resources available to the Soviet Union and hold back the growth of productivity, which
would exacerbate the problem, or force them to shift resources from consumers to investment.
And [they knew] that all of these effects would (to quote them) "aggravate the difficulties
confronting the Soviet leadership in a stagnant economy. So, a combination of these measures to
impose costs on the Soviet Union could be expected to lead to falling investment and/or living
standards, and such measures consequently might generate pressures within the Soviet Union for
withdrawing from the world stage, and for political reform."
So the purpose of this operation, which I will try to define more clearly in a moment, was
to impose, in a variety of ways, enormous costs on the Soviet Union, or to reduce the resources
available to them in such a way as to exacerbate their economic difficulties. Let me quote from
Abraham Becker , one of the shrewder Rand analysts:
Thus the Reagan administration seized Soviet economic troubles as an opportunity to
complicate further their resource allocation difficulties dilemma, in the hope that
additional pressures would result in a reallocation of resources away from defense, or would
push the economy in the directions of economic and political reform.
The purpose of this new aggressive multi-dimensional strategy was to force reform upon the
Soviet Union. What that reform was to be is a later chapter. Now, it's one thing to say that
these plans exist, and I'll talk about other plans. For instance, I managed to pull together a
collection of documents from the National Endowment for Democracy, which as you know, is
supposed to be a quasi-government institution. It's not a quasi-government institution. It's
funded by Congress. It's a government institution funded by Congress, which sees it to be its
business to "promote democracy outside the United States" in the rest of the world, where by
"democracy" one means essentially, and when you come down to it it's clear now in the Soviet
Union, "capitalism" and "liberal democracy," if you like [the latter term].
Now, it's one thing of course to talk about all this planning, to try on your own to reason
that all of these things fit together, but in fact we began to get official indications and
documentation, as early as the spring of 1982, that the government had signed on to this
strategy, that this was not the wild thinking of a few eager folks in a few think tanks, that
it was policy and that it was policy which the American public knew very little of, did not
understand the purposes and consequences of, but would nonetheless be required to pay for to
the tune of several trillion dollars, which did indeed help to create the situation in which we
presently find ourselves at home, locked in the Philadelphia Convention.
In the spring of 1982 I had spoken to two of the participants in this little meeting. A
senior National Security Council official charged with responsibility for Soviet affairs called
a number of influential Washington correspondents and asked them to come to the National
Security Council for a briefing. Two of them told me that they left this briefing extremely
shaken. They didn't want to say too much about it, but they gave me to understand that they
thought that this was an extremely aggressive, dangerous, and highly risky strategy which the
administration was describing and stating that it was about to embark upon.
Helen Thomas of UPI was one of the people who was in that meeting, and she described the
results of the briefing -- this briefing on the Soviet Union -- in the following manner:
A senior White House official said Reagan has approved an eight-page National Security
document that undertakes a campaign aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and the
shrinkage of the Soviet empire. He affirmed that it could be called a full-court press
against the Soviet Union.[vi]
A little later, just a few days later, in fact, further evidence, this time quoting official
documentation, not hearsay from a briefer at the National Security Council, but quoting
official documentation: Richard Halloran, the defense correspondent of The New York
Times published an article in that paper on May the 30th of 1982, just a few days really
after Helen Thomas sent out her UPI dispatch. Halloran quoted from the fiscal years 1984-1988
Defense Guidance, of which The Times stated that it had a copy.[vii] The Secretary's
Guidance Document recommended what Halloran called "a major escalation in the nuclear arms
race." Apart from that it indicated that a number of other measures were being taken "to impose
costs on the Soviet Union." Note the language is the language of the RAND planners. Some of the
same people probably wrote the document. I quote from Halloran's direct quote from the National
Guidance document of the Secretary of Defense:
"As a peacetime complement to military strategy, the Guidance Document asserts that the
United States and its allies should, in effect, declare economic and technical war on the
Soviet Union."
This is interesting. "And so I think," it went on. They wrote,
"to put as much pressure as possible on the Soviet economy already burdened with military
expenditure, they should develop weapons that are difficult for the Soviets to counter,
impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition, and
obsolesce," (Nice English. I've put sic in my article) "precious Soviet
investments."
So I think it's safe to say, and a number of people prove it to us a little later on, that
this policy was instituted. Let me just race ahead to one of the more recent proofs. David
Ignatius , who is a correspondent at The Washington Post, published a very remarkable
article about "spyless coups" not long ago, in October, if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps it was
September. Ignatius is a correspondent with very close ties to the intelligence community, to
be very polite about it. I quote from his article: "Preparing the ground " This is immediately
after the Yeltsin double event of August 1991 in which Mr. Gorbachev was seemingly threatened
by a coup and in which Mr. Yeltsin did not seem to take power but did. He described the event
in this way:
Preparing the ground for last month's triumph was a network of overt operatives who,
during the last ten years, have quietly been changing the rules of international politics.
They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private, providing money and moral
support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist
rule.[viii]
Could he have written that in The Washington Post in 1982? It's difficult, I would
have thought. It might not have passed muster. Some people might have noticed, but in 1991,
evidently, it was all right to say that this is what we were doing.[ix]
If you look very carefully you can find many traces by officials stating that the United
States had embarked upon a strategy which, retrospectively, it is very clear, was nothing more
and nothing less than a strategy to destabilize the Soviet Union. Mr. Casey's magnificent and
expansive imagination had carried covert operations beyond the narrow confines of Third World
countries and aimed them at the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. If you go back and look at the
history of these events in this perspective, reading some of the documents, you'll see things
very differently
Judd Clark [name indistinct, spelling uncertain], for instance, speaking at a private
seminar at Georgetown University, again around 1982, said,
"We must force our principle adversary, the Soviet Union, to bear the brunt of its
economic shortcomings."
Well, that's slightly veiled language that means the same sort of thing that everybody else
was saying. It wasn't, though, until 1985, that the redoubtable and incomparable Jeane
Kirkpatrick appeared on the stage with the full text of the play in hand, and she gave a
speech, not surprisingly in front of the Heritage Foundation, at a conference room on Capitol
Hill in which she said, "The Reagan doctrine, as I understand it, is about our relations with
the Soviet Union," and she then described every principal element of the strategy which Helen
Thomas in 1982 called, repeating the NSC briefer's statement, "a full-court press against the
Soviet Union."
If you read her speech to the Heritage Foundation, which everybody should read because it
was 1985, she was saying that the United States is bent upon a strategy aimed at overthrowing
the Soviet Union through internal and external pressures. She principally described the
external pressure.
I want to say a little bit about the debate over the internal pressure. Again, in 1982,
there was a nasty little debate between some members of Congress and the then-Secretary of
State General Alexander Haig . Mr. Haig was very anxious that the United States should embark
upon the program which Ronald Reagan was going to describe before the British Parliament in
June 1982, at just about the time most of us were going to be in the streets of New York to
protest some of the things that he was doing. And Hague said in the debate over the creation of
the National Endowment for Democracy, which the Congress had insisted should not spill over
into efforts to meddle in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, Mr. Haig said,
"Just as the Soviet Union gives active support to Marxist-Leninist forces in the West and
the [Global] South " [ironic commentary:] (because it owns Newsweek , for instance and
it manipulates the Columbia Broadcasting Company such enormous power the Soviet Union has in
the West) " we must give vigorous support to democratic forces wherever they are located,
including countries which are now communist. We should not hesitate to promote our own
values, knowing that the freedom and dignity of man are the ideals that motivate the quest
for social justice. A free press, free trade unions, free political parties, freedom to
travel, and freedom to create are the ingredients of the democratic revolution of the future,
not the status quo of a failed past."
The founder of the Central Intelligence Agency said that propaganda is the first arrow of
battle. A statement by Alexander Haig in 1982 to the Congress signals what the United States
would attempt to do with the National Endowment for Democracy, that it would try to create and
participate in the creation of [a false narrative of ] a failed past in the Soviet Union. And,
in fact, as you know, all that went ahead.
Now, let's look at that for a second. I know that it's very difficult to believe this. I ask
you to look at the second of the articles which I read, or to search for what I've written. You
can read it and search for some of the documentation easily available. You will find that the
mission statement of the National Endowment for Democracy, which functions as a kind of
consortium bringing many of the pressures of the US government to bear inside the Soviet
Union.
Destabilization requires external pressure and a manipulation of the internal situation to
move political developments in the direction you desire. That's what targeting a country for
destabilization involves. We deprive Cuba of sugar, of medicines etc. and that creates internal
pressure, and utilizing the internal pressure, you insert yourself, create groups, diffuse
ideas which are inconsistent with those prevailing and suitable to power, and you begin to work
on that discontent. If the discontent deepens and spreads, you get better and better odds, and
because the Soviet Union was already in a kind of crisis, which, as Abraham Becker said,
"the United States then systematically sought to intensify and exacerbate."
The National Endowment for Democracy and literally dozens and dozens of pseudo-private
foundations, which I'll talk about in a second, went into the Soviet Union under the new
umbrella of glasnost, created academic presses, created newspapers, created radio stations, and
began to mobilize and to work upon the natural dissent and discontent that existed in the
Soviet Union, not only because of the historical past but also because of the difficulties of
the present as exacerbated by the United States and its Western partners.
If you look at how much money I'll just give you an idea of some of the projects that were
involved, and this is just one agency. You have to recognize that if this was going on in the
National Endowment for Democracy that there were many, many other channels of finance and
influence into the Soviet Union that were working on this.
For instance, in 1984 the NED gave $50,000 to a book exhibit in the Soviet Union: America
through American Eyes. At the book fair in 1985 (I mean I'm just selecting [a few]):
$70,000 via the Free Trade Union Institute, which is part of the National Endowment, to
Soviet Labor Review for research in publications on Soviet trade union and worker
rights.
In 1986, $84,000 to Freedom House to expand the operations of two Russian language journals
published in the US and distributed in the higher levels of the Soviet bureaucracy and
intelligentsia, already an arresting description. Imagine the Soviet Union publishing two
English-language journals in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and having them distributed and
eagerly read in the highest levels of the United States bureaucracy and intelligentsia. I don't
think that would have stuck very well in the United States.
In 1987, Freedom House, for the Athenaeum Press, rushed $55,000 for a Russian-language
publication house in Paris to publish unofficial research conducted in the USSR by established
scholars writing under pseudonyms. Now what does that mean? If you get down to 1989, we're
talking already in the $200,000 category.
For instance, the Center for Democracy, which is related to the National Endowment for
Democracy, began to create a center for assistance to independent and nationalist groups,
including the Crimean Tatar movement for human and national rights. In other words, they began
to finance ethnic and nationalist separatism, began to finance separate trade unions, began to
finance their own academics etc., except this is open, but it's very large-scale, very
large-scale.
I've done a little calculation and I can tell you that very large amounts of money were
being spent, probably on the order of, by all the Western allies, minimum, inside the Soviet
Union in the period from the mid to the late 1980s, one hundred million dollars a year -- a
hundred million dollars a year to finance organizations which might begin like WESPAC but would
then grow, develop, have outreach, which would become extraordinary with that kind of funding,
and did finally change things.
If you look at perestroika in the Soviet Union, [we know it started when] Mr. Gorbachev
became the Soviet leader. This is the background to the two stages in which we must understand
perestroika. In the first stage it was clear that the Soviet leadership was desperate to find a
way to renew socialism, that Mr. Gorbachev was bent upon the reformation of the notion of
socialism, and that he had widespread support inside the Soviet Union.
There were genuine economic improvements which took place between 1986 and, sort of, let's
say, the end of 1988, in the Soviet Union, as a result of those efforts, but the principal
question we have to ask ourselves, since today we confront a fragmented, or, if you like,
disassembled Soviet Union, the supremacy of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and Mr. Yeltsin --
who represents an extremely right-wing constituency at the present moment -- and the supremacy
of capitalism. And a capitalist society is now being created in the Soviet Union, ending Mr.
Gorbachev's experiment the crucial question to ask ourselves is a very simple one: how is it
that between 1985 and 1990 a movement which began as an attempt to transform and renew
socialism in the Soviet Union was supplanted by a right-wing movement aiming at the creation of
a capitalist society in the Soviet Union? That is the key question. That is the key question
because that's what's happened, and it's strange.
That's why many of us were puzzled about the contradictory evidence coming out of the
Khrushchev [ sic ? Brezhnev?] era. It was very difficult to understand. At first, it
seemed very positive, and then from the end of 1988, the fall of 1988, it became increasingly
clear that things were going to pieces, that Mr. Gorbachev was either not able to control the
forces which he had unleashed or that indeed he was bent upon creating, as I heard on the
French radio in 1988 for the first time stated very clearly -- it arrested my attention: the
purpose, said Mr. [name indistinct], on the radio in his not-bad French, was to create a
regulated market economy. That was the purpose of perestroika, not when it began, but somehow
something had happened.
In fact there's a lot of very interesting information out there now on the whole process.
There was clearly a large dissatisfied set of strata in the Soviet intelligentsia. What has
happened in the Soviet Union is more complex than the collapse through its own internal
contradictions of the system of socialism in the Soviet Union. I really don't want to talk very
much about whether the Soviet Union was a socialist society. There are people who say it was
and people who say it wasn't. It's a long discussion between Trotsky and Stalin etc., but for
my part I would say this: that the Soviet Union began as a genuine attempt to establish
socialism. There were always in the Soviet Union people genuinely seeking to further socialism,
and people who didn't give a damn. On balance, the thing we have to ask ourselves is whether
the existence of the Soviet Union, as an apparently perceived socialist society, was a positive
thing in the world equation at this particular time of history. I, on balance, having spent
years in the United Nations, seeing that under the attacks of the Western countries, which in
many cases were very ugly, most of the Third World countries which emerged in the late 1950s
and 60s and early 70s were really only barely saved by the few sources of support which they
got in the socialist world. And when the Soviet Union went down, they went down too; [for
example] Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua.
So in many respects I would have thought that the Soviet Union, for all its defects, stood
as a positive development in history, with all of the horrors that took place. The United
States has had its horrors. The question is this: did the Soviet Union collapse because
socialism is unworkable and central planning doesn't work? No, it didn't. There was a crisis in
the Soviet Union. I would argue that in the absence of the kind of pressure [that was applied],
it's very difficult to weigh the balance. How important were the internal forces? How important
were the difficulties experienced internally, and how important was the external pressure and
the externally intervening force? How important that balance was is very difficult to get. We
have to read through all a lot of intelligence to understand that, to begin to get a grasp of
things, but that's our duty as people who are living history, or who seek to understand
history. We have to try to do that, and my basic conclusion still at this moment is this: the
Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out, extremely
costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling through
great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it was. It
would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that Western
intervention made a crucial difference in this situation. That's a judgment.
Conclusion
All right. Now, there is a question irrespective of that: what does it mean that the Soviet
Union now has disappeared as a result of the kind of process that I'm talking about, a
combination of internal difficulties and external pressure and intervention? Does it mean that
socialism doesn't work? Does it mean that [there is no alternative to] the kind of capitalism
that we live in today, which I think increasingly of as a return to irrational and savage 19th
century capitalism? If you walk through the Bronx and Brooklyn and Harlem, how can you not
conclude that we are living in an irrational and savage capitalism in which the leveling
attacks of democracy have been dealt with, in which the possibility of remedying that situation
by the constitutional means which exist in the normal political channels of our government are
very small, that electoral changes, in other words, are not going to be very significant, until
there's a mass mobilization of American people to make something happen.
If this is so, then the fact that what has happened in the Soviet Union has happened as it
happened has no bearing whatsoever on our problems, and we should not be confused or pushed
into consternation by it. Why? Primarily, for a very simple reason: The Soviet Union was
conceived at a time when, in Marxist terms, it was not ready. The Soviet Union did not have the
material base of abundance which would make it possible to create a society at once egalitarian
and democratic because the struggle to create that base would require a degree of repression
and authoritarianism, particularly heightened by external intervention and attack, which
inevitably would distort the nature of socialism.
I sympathize with Isaac [name indistinct], but I think it's too simple when he says
socialism in a backward country is backwards socialism. But the critical fact for us is this:
the Soviet Union was a society conceived as a socialist society prior to the creation of the
economic base which would permit the creation of a socialist society with ease. We live in a
society whose capacity to produce, whose potential abundance is so great that the inability to
make use of it is literally tearing this society apart.
We live in a society which is ready, and when I say that, I want to go back to the terms of
the discussion on the constitutional conventions. Well, why can't we have economic democracy?
What does economic democracy mean? Economic democracy inevitably would mean a number of these
things: the accountability of the enormous concentrated power which exists in our society today
to public democratic institutions. The planned rational use of resources at the public level,
with democratic participation in the same manner that that planned rational use is conceived
within the framework of the corporations, where the exercise of those decisions is not
accountable. So it seems to me that in our day, when our society is riven by its
contradictions, unable to use its abundance, unable to use its productive capacity in a
rational, humane and democratic manner, that what is on the agenda today is the democratization
of economic power, the rendering accountable of the enormous economic potential and power that
exists in our society to make this a better and decent and democratic world.
Voilà.
End of lecture
Question Period
Well, dear friends, first of all, we have to have this serious debate because the real terms
of the debate are rendered invisible by the absurd rhetoric and the absurd way in which we
speak about ourselves, and by the mass media whose power and determination is to keep the real
terms of the debate invisible. The real terms of the debate are: why is this society
collapsing? Why does this economic machine not work? Who is responsible? If the people who are
responsible are not going to do something about it, let them get the hell out.
Moderator : I know there have got to be lots of questions. We'll allot a certain amount of
time. We'll try to recognize everyone.
Question : You've analyzed this quite well, but what does one do to change [the
situation]?
Well, I think part of the problem I don't mean to be repetitious but I think that people are
clearly immobilized and confused at the moment. I think one of the reasons that people are
immobilized and confused is that the proper debate is not out there. It's not possible for
people to express what they know from their experience to be true, to assert its truth. The
public debate rejects our experience and understanding because the public debate is designed to
contain us, to make us accept and even to believe in the superiority of this situation. I think
people know what needs to be done out there. In a sense the quintessential problem confronting
our country is the enormous concentrated power to shape people's lives, to define discourse, as
[name indistinct] pointed out, which is accountable to no one. The democratization of that
power means, I think, certainly radical changes in the structure of our society, but ones for
which in many respects people are ready and which indeed are supported by most of the values
that this society has lived by historically and attests to.
It seems to me it's really quite simple. We don't have democracy in the sense in which we
normally understand ourselves to have democracy in which people often speak of us as having. We
don't have that. Why do we not have it? Because of this eternal and now much more intensive,
much more intense tension that has existed from the beginning between property and democracy,
between popular majorities as the Federalists called them, disdainingly, and the rights of
property. This now has become an enormous incubus on American society. We have enormous
concentrated power for which nobody is accountable, and this is not acceptable. Roger and Me [the documentary
film] is a reflection of a sensitivity that says, "We've got to talk about this, Roger. You're
responsible for this." So I really think by not knowing these things, not changing the
discourse of our lives, and the discourse in the public arena, coming to agreements amongst one
another by hard work, by hard discussion, how can we know it's true?
And by the way, I don't think this can be done in the absence of action. That is to say, in
a haltingly naive phase of my recent existence, I tried to convince some people in the Congress
that we were headed into a really horrible situation, and they didn't want to know. They
didn't. They don't want to believe what is uncomfortable for them to believe, so my decision
was that you have to go into the trenches, that you have to work on projects that are going to
materialize these ideas, that you have to work against plant closings, that you have to work
for measures that alleviate the social burdens that exist in a city like New York, that you
have to work for things while articulating these ideas because it seems to me it's only in the
combination of action and debate of ideas that people will begin to understand the relevance
and the necessity of a new discussion. You can't have in that sense -- I cede your point -- you
can't have a drawing-room discussion which will prevail.
Certainly the people in the National Endowment for Democracy believe that. They don't just
sit back and spend millions of dollars on printing books and making radio tapes and television
shows. No. They created new political institutions. They then created new political parties,
financing people like Arkady Murashev, the Inter-Regional Group in the Soviet Parliament, until
recently. It doesn't exist anymore. The Inter-Regional Group was the group of pseudo-democrats,
pro-capitalists, speaking, in many respects for the interests represented in the agglomeration
of black market operations in the Soviet Union. Arkady Murashev was systematically cosseted,
financed and trained by an organization in Washington very closely tied to certain agencies
whose names we don't want to pronounce in the present circumstances. Murashev was a liaison man
between Washington and Yeltsin. The National Endowment for Democracy gave $40,000 just for the
faxes, and the printing machines and the telephones in the Initiatives Foundation, which was
the organization that the Inter-Regional Group used to put out its messages, get itself
organized, make contacts, etc. The United States was financing that operation. Arkady Murashev
is now the chief of police of the city of Moscow.
This is heavy stuff. I mean, really, it's incredibly dramatic, but we mustn't go on in this
vein because there are questions to be answered.
Question : Does every country have to go through this period of savage capitalism to become
socialist?
No. I don't believe that. No.
Question: Bush seemed to like Gorbachev. Was Gorbachev foolish? Was he taken for a ride?
These are the great mysteries. There are, as you know, there are a different views. There
are different theories about that. One of them is that Gorbachev was a mole, that Gorbachev was
a deep-cover or Western intelligence agent. I believe that's exaggerated. I believe that's off
the wall, but I do believe that there's an element here that's important to understand.
There was in the Soviet Union, as a result of the very success of the industrialization of
the Soviet Union, an enormous alienated set of strata amongst the educated population because
the Soviet elite absorbed people at a very small rate. It didn't reach out to large numbers of
people. They were educating enormous numbers of people, professional scientific workers,
managers, and these people were mostly urban people. They were the fruit, in many respects, of
industrialization. At the same time, being urban people, they found themselves trapped in the
most difficult conditions in the Soviet Union because in its industrialization the Soviet Union
really ignored a lot of problems. Theyfound themselves, in many respects, in a similar
situation as the United States, where the decay of urban areas, the lack of equipment, the lack
of infrastructure, the lack of adequate facilities for health or education etc. became a real
problem. They didn't have the resources to industrialize, to raise the standard of living in
the really poor republics of the Soviet Union, and to deal with the urban problem, as we call
it in the United States.
So these people were imagine all educated people earning this education and looking upon
themselves as deserving of the advantages and prerogatives of their Western counterparts,
living in the equivalent of New York City, but earning the wages of a skilled worker. They
didn't like it. They felt shut out. They were angry, and it's those people that the neoliberals
were recruiting, not just the American neoliberals but their own neoliberals. There were
neoliberals in the Soviet Union. There were reactionary people in the Soviet Union this [name
indistinct] operation out in Siberia, the so-called sociological think tank. There are people
who, I don't know why Perhaps when you become very isolated from the world and separated from
reality you conjure up the most amazing dreams in your mind. I think Marx called it idealism.
In any case, these people were very much Western idealists and they came, frankly, into Moscow
and Leningrad fervent believers in the need to embrace Western institutions because of their
frustration, because of their understanding of their own past. Whether it was distorted or not,
it's not for me to say. It's because of the way they viewed and felt about their past, because
of their own personal frustration, because of the problems which were very real that they
experienced by the Soviet leadership, by the Soviet economy and society. They were alienated,
and that's where there was recruitment. When economic growth slowed down it made it much worse,
and it spread the basis of recruitment very effectively.
There is a collection of essays which I think is quite remarkable and valuable, which gives
you some background about the incredible contradictions in the Soviet Union, and how the Soviet
Union, in fact, more than a decade and even two decades ago, was in fact being prepared for
what is happening. It was ripening for some big bull shaking the tree, which is eventually what
happened. That's the collection that The Monthly Review has published recently, After
the Fall, something like that. After the Fall of the Soviet Union is really a very
valuable collection of essays on the Soviet Union, or whatever it is after communism. Very
useful stuff.
Question : Could you talk about Third World countries?
That's a really hard question. I've worked in Third World countries which were socialist
countries and which were under attack. I worked in Mozambique in the beginning of the 1980s
when the South African-Western-CIA operations were really beginning to [take a toll], and
people were dying by the tens of thousands because the roads had been cut, and the supplies had
been cut, and the health stations blown up, and I think that it was very hard for them to
survive that. Socialism proved very frail in Mozambique, even though the leaders of the
revolution had been born in armed struggle, formed by armed struggle, were dedicated to armed
struggle, but the society just couldn't withstand that kind of pressure.
In some ways I think that's true of the Soviet Union. There was a war in the shadows waged
against the Soviet Union on a massive scale, and what these events prove is the Soviet Union
was insufficiently strong to stand up to those pressures, and I think this is all the more true
in the Third World. I don't know, but I don't want to say that I know the answer, whether they
should try to make that jump or not. I think that will depend on what happens in the Western
world. I don't see any reason why the jump couldn't be made if the West, Western Europe and the
United States, in particular North America saw [supported] significant transformation of the
present system of power. Then it's not a problem, but with this massive opposition coming from
the West, it's very difficult to survive.
Question (apparently edited from video recording): __________________
These same people today, and we're talking about within a few months, within the end of the
year there being not 50,000 but between six and eight million unemployed people in Russia, 130
million people, labor force of 65 or 70 million, and I saw this same thing happening in East
Germany.
I was very briefly in Humboldt University in 1989 or 1990, I can't remember which now. The
whole situation was in upheaval, and I saw many intellectuals genuinely enraged by the
arrogance of the Honecker regime, and at the same time, unfortunately, completely unaware of
what would happen if that regime went down, taking everything, "really existing socialism,"
with it. And my question would be, OK, it's a question. You know the old version of this
question used to be what about Stalin, but it's a little different now.
My problem is this: let's look at it in human terms, OK? Just forget ideology. What has
happened as a result of the materialization of the dreams of the so-called reformers and
democrats in the Soviet Union? What has happened is what has happened in Poland, and worse:
that the standard of living of ordinary people is going to collapse, that old people will be
destitute, that children will be without health care, that the transportation system is
collapsing, that there will be no food distribution by spring, that people will starve, that
there is continuous ethnic conflict. Now, the Soviet system of prices and of raw material
supplies were such that enormous quantities that the supply system worked in a way which led to
the waste of vast quantities of raw materials and semi-finished products. I mean vast
quantities.
So the idea was to go in to work at the enterprise level to create incentives to create
better accounting, a system of prices which would reflect the real value of these raw materials
and not the fact that they could be replaced anytime you wanted because all you have to do is
put an order in. It didn't matter what you did with them. It [the reform] was focused on the
enterprise, on profit incentives, and this loosening of the tight bonds on the enterprise,
really did lead to a recrudescence of output. For instance, between 1986 and 88 there was a 17%
increase in housing production in the Soviet Union. There was a 30% increase in overall
production. The production, the economy, accelerated in the period 1986-88. In those three
years the economy accelerated, but as I said, there were two stages of perestroika. There was a
stage of perestroika where the effects were quite beneficial, where it was clear that
perestroika and glasnost were aiming to energize and develop andfree and move forward the
Soviet Union.
As a friend of mine said, the only way to ensure the social development of the Soviet Union
is to undertake these reforms, but there was another stage, a second stage beginning in late
1988 to, obviously, the end of 1991, where the forces that were unleashed utilized the reform
program to destroy socialism, clearly to destroy socialism, and Mr. Gorbachev was either
helpless before that or a willing apprentice of that process. I could not pretend to pronounce
which of those was the case. It's very difficult to say.
On the other hand, I really don't know how anybody in his right mind could have conceived of
the notion that the way forward for the Soviet Union -- and this was the quintessential
statement of perestroika by the principle Soviet leaders in the mid-1980s -- the way for the
Soviet Union was to integrate the Soviet Union into the world economy. I mean to an economist
with any degree of sophistication and critical approach, that is sheer unadulterated madness.
It's like saying that the North American free trade agreement will lead to real economic
development in Mexico. It's absurd. I mean we know what those processes are. How can a much
weaker, less industrialized Soviet Union hope to stand up against the economic forces arrayed
against it and capable of penetrating it, once it declares its intention to integrate itself
into the world economy? When I heard that, I said, "It's all over, boys. These people don't
know that they're doing," and indeed, listening to Soviet economists as I did when I was still
teaching in Paris, and meeting with some of these people, until 1989, I got the impression of
two things: they had not the least actual understanding of what was going on in the West, and
that their theoretical conceptions were taken out of a handbook by Voltaire making fun of the
French aristocracy.
Transcript produced by Youtube "auto-caption" speech recognition software, corrected and
edited by blog author, Dennis Riches.
Notes
[i] Davis Guggenheim (Director), Al Gore (Writer), "An Inconvenient Truth," Paramount
Classics , 2006.
[ii] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), 267-268. "What is
really needed is proper planning of available resources globally, plus a drive, through public
investment, to develop new technologies that could work and, of course, a shift out of fossil
fuels into renewables. Also, it is not just a problem of carbon and other gas emissions, but of
cleaning up the environment, which is already damaged. All these tasks require public control
and ownership of the energy and transport industries and public investment in the environment
for the public good."
The reference appears to be to this article. The dates 1984-1988 may appear to be an error
because the report referred to was written in 1982. However, the Defense Guidelines were
focused on plans for the future, fiscal years of 1984-1988.
[ix] As we know from the perspective of 2017, the normalization of such interventions
continued shamelessly, going from a bad habit to a deranged addiction. The political
establishment in America now resorts to economic warfare, violence and military intervention as
the solutions for every problem in international relations.
All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.
Perestroika put the final nails in the USSR's economy One of the first main policies
Gorbachev adopted was Perestroika – reform of the economy. Hoarding and reciprocal
favours (blat) had been a means of survival in the Soviet Union, thieving to 'moonlight' was
also common and this cost the regime a lot. The 'command-administrative' system had become
obsolete in the Post-Industrial era and was curtailing economic development 1. To solve this,
Gorbachev wanted to give enterprise managers control over contracts and introduce aspects of
the market economy, to make it managers' responsibility to gain contracts and to make sure the
enterprise makes a profit. However, in practice the way the enterprises operated remained
unchanged except in terms – ministries rephrased their commands as contracts 2. Private
enterprise was also permitted, which seemed to contradict Gorbachev's claim to be committed to
Marxist-Leninist thought which was vehemently opposed to capitalism which Marxist's argue
exploit the proleteriat – so to actually create a class of capitalists who (according to
Marxist doctrine) would exploit the workers who were supposed to be living in socialist –
i.e. 'classless society' seemed contradictory to the very ideological concept the regime's
power was based upon. A small amount of private enterprise emerged, but the profiteering was
very much resented by the general population – goods and services were sold for four or
five times their subsidized price due to shortages. Another aspect of Perestroika was entry
into the market economy – many of the social benefits given by the enterprises had to be
done away with, as they could not make a profit and afford to maintain the benefits, resulting
in a stagnant economy occuring simultaneously with a collapsing social welfare system.
Gorbachev's reforms did not work and only succeeded in hastening the economic collapse that was
inevitable.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Glasnost facilitated Opposition to Concentrate against the Regime Allowing freedom of
thought from the 'mono-ideological controls' that existed for decades and allowing pluralist
thought and leadership meant a weakening of power for the Communist Party – it had to
convert into a proper parliamentary party to survive. Furthermore, in a regime based on
oppression and propaganda, when these are removed and freedom of speech and freedom of the
media are introduced, nasty elements about the system in the past are going to be revealed, and
when there is 70 years of repression being reported all at once, it is inevitable there will be
extreme hostility toward those responsible – the Party 1, this especially fuelled the
anger of the nationalities who had been oppressed and triggered a nationalist movement.
The population were dissatisfied with the dire state of affairs and could voice their
discontent openly with glasnost, which led to Gorbachev becoming very unpopular by 1991, in
which year the economy had contracted by 18% 2, people were also very concerned over the
incompetence of the command-administrative system and irresponsibility of the leadership with
regards to the 1986 Chernobyl power station disaster 3.
In a state committed to one ideology, the removal of mono-ideological controls, and the
ability of other ideological persuasions to come to power meant the Party had lost its RIGHT to
govern the people unless the people themselves WANTED the Party to rule. Thus, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had to win the support of the people in order to govern
effectively. However, in a society that was becoming increasingly liberal and 'bourgeois' (the
USSR was largely middle class, private property was protected and capitalism was legalised),
the people had to believe in socialist ideology – which would have been almost impossible
to achieve.
Gorbachev's reforms themselves undermined some of the principle features of socialist rule
in the USSR, e.g. atheism, mono-ideological control, one-party state, economic monopoly and the
suspendability of law. Gorbachev's ideology itself – his focus on 'all-human values'
instead of the class struggle, the rule of law, international peace and proper parliamentary
representation have more resonance with John Stuart Mill than Karl Marx 4 – Gorbachev was
subconsciously moving the USSR in this ideological direction.
With democratization and pluralist thought permitted, Gorbachev found himself operating
within an increasingly wide political spectrum – with the reformist 'democrats' on one
side and the conservative Communist Party members on the other. There was a constant power
struggle between the two and Gorbachev dealt with this by constantly playing one side against
the other and compromising. One of Gorbachev's critics at the time said this was like trying to
marry a hare to a hedgehog. The two sides were very much irreconcilable and instead of trying
to defeat one side, Gorbachev sat on the fence and as a result his policies were constantly
inconsistent – you cannot mix radical reforms with conservatism 5. The dangers of this
were apparent when Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister at the time, resigned because he warned a
dictatorship was approaching, Gorbachev ignored this threat and dismissed this claim with
overconfidence 6.
1 Kagarlitsky, B. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: neo-liberal autocracy, London: Pluto
2002
2 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
3 Haynes, M., Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000, London: Bookmarks 2002
4 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
5 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991
6 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991 No because...
Regional Nationalism and Independence Movements These original flaws in the system were
largely responsible for its own downfall – in particular the nationalities issue –
the decision to maintain the Empire without granting real power to the nationalities whilst
simultaneously repressing them left most of the nationalities feeling bitter when glasnost
revealed the truth about how they had been treated in the past and democratisation gave them
the power to chose representatives who would really represent people's interests (the
nationalist movement) whilst at the same time being given by Gorbachev an appetite for power
– a fatal combination.
The wealthier regions wanted a separation from the USSR because of the feeling they were
being milked from the centre and many other regions wanted to become independent because they
did not want to be part of an economic disaster area which became apparent when the Donbass
miners who had no commitment to nationalism thought their future would be safer if the Ukraine
wasn't part of the USSR 1.
The nationalist movement emerged when freedom of speech, media and association along with
democratisation and the loss of fear of repression allowed people to voice pride in their
nation and resentment at past repressions as well as the ongoing special treatment of Russians
in the Regions, who had access to better housing and other special privileges the locals did
not.
Certain Republics felt nationalism more strongly than others, most notably the Baltic States
who felt a strong cultural attachment to the West and felt they were being unfairly occupied.
Gorbachev's mistake here was to downplay the importance of nationalism and not treat the Baltic
States as a special case 2. After all, most of the population of the USSR wished to preserve
the Union – 76% voted to preserve the Union in March 1991 (except the Baltic States,
Moldova, Georgia and Armenia who did not conduct the referendum) 3. After the failed coup, most
states declared their independence, even if they did so with reluctance, as there was a general
feeling there was no alternative. Gorbachev tried to persuade the Republics not to become fully
independent. However, in early December, the Ukraine held a referendum where the population
voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, even after Gorbachev stated "there can be no
Union without Ukraine", on 8th December, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Bielorussian leader
and declared a formal end to the USSR and the establishment of the Confederation of Independent
States which they invited the other states to join.
There was nothing left Gorbachev could do, democratisation had brought about the means for
independence and Gorbachev didn't feel he could argue with people's wishes carried out through
democratic means and, on 25th December he resigned with regret.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996
3 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 Yeltsin Factor
Boris Yeltsin emerged as the true hero and strong leader for the fearlessness to condemn the
coup – in a press conference afterwards Yeltsin ordered Gorbachev around undermining his
position, then used his institutional powers derived from democratization to appoint Egor
Gaidar, an economist dedicated to laissez-faire economics, as his Finance Minister and
suspension of the CPSU pending an investigation into the coup. Gorbachev half heartedly argued
against this but it was no use – he was seen as a weaker leader along with discontent
over his policies, whilst Yeltsin's radicalism was keeping pace with developments and his
popularity at an all-time high, Gorbachev's position was also much less weaker without the
Communist Party. Also, the Soviet Union really could not exist without the Communist Party
arguably as they had political and economic monopoly on society and the Communist Party went
from controlling these aspects of society to ceasing to exist, the Soviet Union could not
function and the economy spiralled out of control. Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... August 1991 Coup
Counter Productive, Bringing About What It Sought To Prevent - The End of the Soviet Union
By August 1991 Gorbachev's popularity was at an all-time low both in the Party and outside it.
Despite being advised by some of his staff to sign the Treaty agreement granting the republics
real autonomy before going on holiday and some suspicious circumstances he should have been
more questioning about, he planned on signing the agreement when he returned. This was a big
mistake and allowed the conservatives to stage a coup. The Emergency Committee made no
reference whatsoever to Marxism-Leninism or the class struggle in their speech, meaning it was
a coup in the hope of returning the Soviet Union to 'normal' i.e. an Empire controlled from
Moscow and putting the final nails in the coffin of socialism in the USSR 1.
The failed coup triggered the very thing it sought to prevent – the break-up of the
Soviet Union 2.
1 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... The System Needed to
Change in Order to Survive in the Longer Term; That Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms Failed Showed
that the USSR Could Not be Saved By the Gorbachev era, all hopes of fulfilling the original
Marxist-Leninist dream were gone and most did not feel passionately about communism, even
within the Party. There was a general acknowledgement that the USSR could not continue in the
same way as before – Andropov, Gorbachev's predecessor also realised this and set about
changing society through repressive measures such as harsh labour discipline enforced by
cutting payments from workers for work deemed poor quality and restrictions on the sale of
alcohol and prohibition of alcohol on official occasions was felt overly repressive and for
many – Gorbachev was seen as a positive, energetic leader who would overcome the USSR's
problems in a less repressive manner. With economic stagnation and an economy dependent on the
exportation of natural resources to survive 1, an unsuccessful war (Afghanistan) and an ageing
Party Membership to combat, Gorbachev was the candidate for those who wanted change or at least
realised change could no longer be postponed 2.
Autocracies survive due to repressing their people to the extent that they are not given the
freedoms required to change their government, rather than because the people want them to stay
in power. Mikhail Gorbachev's conscience and sense of responsibility for his population
dictated that the system could no longer be propped up like this, and that the people needed
and deserved the freedoms and basic human rights they had been denied for decades. That the
system could not encorporate such freedoms meant that the system morally should not be allowed
to perpetuate itself, and thus the Soviet Union fell apart because it was unrepresentative and
did not support the population's human rights means the fall of the USSR should be applauded,
not mourned for its' population.
1 Volkogonov, D.A. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: political leaders from Lenin to
Gorbachev, edited and translated by M. Shukman, London: HarperCollins 1998
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... War with Afghanistan
Drained USSR of Patriotic Morale The war in Afghanistan was a key contributing factor to
the breakup of the USSR. Reuveny and Prakash argue that the Soviet-Afghan war contributed to
undermining the Soviet Union in many ways. First, it discredited the Red Army, and impacted
negatively upon the image of the Red Army as a strong, almost invincible force, which gave
nationalist movements in the Republics hope that they might succeed in attaining independence
after all. Second, it impacted upon leadership perception on the usefulness of utilising the
military to keep the union intact and as a force for foreign intervention. Third, it created
new forms of political participation, which had begun to impact upon media reporting even
before glasnost, and began the first calls for glasnost, as it created a number of war
veterans, who went on to form organisations which weakened the total authority of the CPSU
1.
1 Reuveny, Rafael, and Prakash, Aseem, 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet
Union', Review of International Studies (1999), 25:693-708 Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... It was dead from the
time Stalin took control Gorbachev finished it off, but Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev etc.
really killed it. Lenin had nothing to do with that, he was a socialist-marxist, not a
communist. You obviously don't know the difference. Learn it before you blindly yell your
opinion into the dark of the internet.
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
MOSCOW --
Yegor K. Ligachev, once the second-most-powerful man in the Kremlin, on Wednesday called his former
boss and comrade, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a coward and a traitor.
"I met many Communists who spent
decades in labor camps in the permafrost zone but retained their faith in the party," the erstwhile
Politburo hard-liner said. "I fail to understand its general secretary who spent three days in the
best health resort the country has by the warm sea, then called for its dissolution."
Ligachev, as straight-talking and opinionated as ever, met with journalists to present his book
"The Gorbachev Riddle," a personal chronicle of the
perestroika
years he helped to
shape before the Soviet president and party leader gave him the boot in August, 1990.
The book presentation, attended by a standing-room-only audience in the Moscow House of
Journalists, served as a forum for Ligachev, 71, to reiterate his views and credo.
Advertisement
"When life proved me wrong, I did change my perceptions," he said with quiet dignity, "but I never
changed my principles. Unlike Gorbachev, I still adhere to socialism, and I still think this is the
future for my country." The white-haired native of Siberia said his only desire is to reunite the
nation, introduce peace and stability and build a "new, refurbished Soviet Union."
A foe of both Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Ligachev contended that his country
is in danger of becoming a "raw materials supplier and semi-colony" for the capitalist world as the
Russian leadership presses on with its economic reforms.
"The ban on the Communist Party, an organization uniting about 20 million members, cannot but
diminish the chances for a peaceful resolution of the country's current political, economic and social
crisis," Ligachev said, referring to a ban that Yeltsin ordered last Nov. 6.
Few questions during the presentation ceremony concerned Ligachev's 303-page book itself; instead,
many people sought out his view of recent political developments.
The most persistent question put to Ligachev was why none of the former leaders of the Communist Party
had volunteered to defend it at hearings on its record ordered for July by the Constitutional Court of
Russia.
Asserting that it is Gorbachev who is legally obligated to take on this task, Ligachev said
that the party "had been betrayed by its general secretary" and that it is now up to "ordinary
Communists" to defend the party's 73-year record in leading the Soviet Union.
Ligachev, who became a voting, or full, member of the ruling party Politburo in 1985, the same year
Gorbachev came to power, remains the only publicly active figure from the defunct body who voices
support for his old principles.
Others, such as former Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, are now in prison for their roles in last
August's unsuccessful attempt at overthrowing Gorbachev when he was on vacation at a Crimean beach
resort.
"... In 1979 at one of my public speeches ("How to kill an elephant with a needle"), I was asked what in my opinion was the most vulnerable point in the Soviet system. I replied: the one that is considered the most reliable, namely, the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, within it - the Central Committee, and within the latter - the General Secretary. ..."
"... The reader should not think that I gave that idea to Cold War strategists. They realized that without me. One of the employees of the Intelligence Service told me that soon they (i.e. forces of the West) would put their man on "the soviet throne". ..."
"... What distinguishes this Cold War operation is that the method of "killing an elephant with a needle" was applied against a less powerful, yet mighty opponent, to obviate the possibility of a "hot war" becoming dangerous to the point where the advantages of the West could disappear, as happened in the war of Germany versus the Soviet Union in 1941-1945. ..."
"... The method in question made it possible to avoid risk and losses, save time and win by proxy. The method invented by the weak to fight stronger opponents was adopted by the most powerful forces on the planet in their war for domination over the entire human race. ..."
More than anyone else, he was responsible for handing the US and UK their greatest strategic victory ever
Alexander Zinoviev
Tue,
|
1300 words
8,718
31
MORE:
History
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
RI
continues
with
a series of articles about the life and works of the brilliant postwar Russian philosopher, author, and
dissident, Alexander Zinoviev.
This time, his famous essay on how the West destroyed the USSR is introduced by his widow Olga, chairwoman
of the Zinoviev Club at Rossiya Sevodnya, a major Russian news agency.
How
different US-Russia relations were back then...
Zinoviev often said that judging from
Gorbachev's behavior, one cannot exclude the possibility that he was working for the West, but that at the end of
the day, it didn't really matter, because what he did served the West's interests exactly.
lllustrations are by Zinoviev himself, provided to
RI
by his family.
Translated from
Russian
especially
for
RI
by Sergei Malygin
Introduction
Before you, dear readers, you have one of the
seven chapters
of Zinoviev's famous essay 'How to Kill an Elephant With a Needle', written in 2005, a year
before the author's death.
The material for it derived from recollections of the numerous meetings Alexander Zinoviev had with
representatives of the West's political elite who were responsible for the formation of policy with respect to the
USSR.
1016196444.jpg
Olga Zinovieva - an active voice in
contemporary Russia
The idea underlying little episodes, including historical examples, is as elementary and limpid as spring
water: how to work out the weak spot of the enemy, adversary, scoundrel or opponent, irrespective of their
number and armaments, both literally and metaphorically.
With graphic clarity, as if it were a lesson, he provides a whole series of examples, beginning with his
own example involving a compass but then using classical examples from history, such as the episode with Francisco
Pizarro, the conquistador conqueror of Mexico, who demonstrated extraordinary quick-wittedness in his detection of
the adversary's weak spot (the Indians).
Astonished by the attack of a handful of Pizarro's warriors on their leader, whom they regarded as a god
and who in their conception was invulnerable and untouchable, the Indians capitulated without a fight. "Pizarro",
wrote Alexander Zinoviev, "had divined the enemy army's weak spot, its Achilles heel".
In this essay he writes about how the Soviet Union's weak spot turned out to be the top echelons of the
leadership.
Zinoviev was often called a dissident, but he never thought of himself as such. He was a critic of the
Soviet system, but he was not its enemy.
In his later years he often repeated that, if he had known what a dreadful fate awaited the USSR, he would
not have written a single critical book or article about it.
Olga Zinovieva
How to kill an elephant with a needle
I was exiled to the West in 1978, when the thirty-year course of the Cold War hit a radical turning point.
Cold War leaders have studied Soviet society since the beginning. The new science of Sovietology has been
developed employing thousands of experts and involving hundreds of research centers.
Within it, a separate branch of Kremlinology has appeared. It pedantically studied the structure of the
Soviet State, the party apparatus, the central party apparatus, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, the Politburo and employees of the government apparatus individually.
But for a long time (perhaps until the end of the 1970s) the main focus was on the ideological and
psychological manipulation of the general population, the creation of pro-Western masses of Soviet citizens who
in actuality would play the role of the West's "fifth column" and (intentionally or unintentionally) working on
the ideological and moral disintegration of the Soviet population (not to mention other functions). Thus the
dissident movement was created.
In short, the main work was carried out through the destruction of Soviet society "from below". Important
achievements had been made that became factors in the future counterrevolution. But they were not significant
enough to bring the Soviet society to its collapse.
By the end of the 1970s, the Western Cold War leaders understood that. They realized that the government
system formed the basis of Soviet communism and the party apparatus was at its core. Having thoroughly studied
the party apparatus, the nature of relations between its members, their psychology and qualifications,
selection methods and its other characteristics, Cold War leaders concluded that Soviet society could be
destroyed only from the top, by destroying its system of government.
To destroy the latter it was necessary and sufficient to destroy the party apparatus, starting from its top
level - the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. So they shifted their main efforts in
that direction.
They found the most vulnerable place in the Soviet social structure. It was not difficult for me to guess
this shift, because I had an opportunity to observe and study that hidden part of the Cold War.
In 1979 at one of my public speeches ("How to kill an elephant with a needle"), I was asked what in my
opinion was the most vulnerable point in the Soviet system. I replied: the one that is considered the most
reliable, namely, the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, within it - the Central Committee,
and within the latter - the General Secretary.
To Homeric laughter in the audience, I said that "if you put your man in that position he will ruin the
party apparatus, thus starting a chain reaction resulting in the breakdown of the entire government system and
administration. The consequence will be the breakdown of the entire society". I referred to the precedent of
Pizarro.
The reader should not think that I gave that idea to Cold War strategists. They realized that without me.
One of the employees of the Intelligence Service told me that soon they (i.e. forces of the West) would put
their man on "the soviet throne".
At that time I did not believe that was possible. I spoke hypothetically of the General Secretary as the
West's "needle". But Western strategists already considered that to be a realistic proposition. They developed
a plan for winning the war: take the supreme power in the Soviet Union under their control by promoting "their"
man to the position of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, force him to destroy the CPSU apparatus, implement an overhaul ("perestroika") that would start a chain
reaction and consequent breakdown of the entire Soviet society.
Such a plan was realistic then because the crisis at the top level of Soviet power was already evident, due
to the senescence of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Soon "their" man in the role of the Western "needle" appeared (if he was not "prepared" in advance).
Admittedly, the plan worked well.
What distinguishes this Cold War operation is that the method of "killing an elephant with a needle" was
applied against a less powerful, yet mighty opponent, to obviate the possibility of a "hot war" becoming
dangerous to the point where the advantages of the West could disappear, as happened in the war of Germany
versus the Soviet Union in 1941-1945.
The method in question made it possible to avoid risk and losses, save time and win by proxy. The method
invented by the weak to fight stronger opponents was adopted by the most powerful forces on the planet in their
war for domination over the entire human race.
You put it pretty well. I also think that Gorby wasn't a conscious traitor, but he
was not capable to handle the necessary tasks for the reform of the USSR. He botched
it badly.
Yeltsin, on the other hand, was exactly that: a traitor. And he proved
it time and again.
Did not notice that about Pizarro, Kortez conquered Mexico.
Gorby was not fit and did not have what it takes to be Central Secretary and
he had no idea about how power is used. In times of restructuring and reforms
power cannot be diffused and undermined which is what he did, but must be
concentrated. Making quite a few heads roll would cause the rest to fall in
line including Yeltsin, who was a typical opportunist who smelt weakness and
rot at the top and used it.
Note that after Lenin death and until, Stalin by brutal measures concentrated
power in his hands, there was a lot of talk but little deeds. Just like in US
Congress. Same happened under Gorby, everybody started talking, then everybody
started smearing face with feces and glorifying the West until they undermined
any chance for positive change. What should have been done is to make heads
indeed roll at the top especially in Central Asia and Caucasus republics where
corruption was running amok and local intelligencia born by USSR own efforts
started thinking too much of themselves. Then when everybody would see there
is the Boss in Kremlin, things could have been started to move .
In China Deng had to deal with Hua Guo Feng and others before he started
reforms after concentrating power in own hands.
Gorby, well, was not cut for the role. Every few months new ideas, busy body
and not very straight talker. He was too soft and lacked abilities to be
leader of such a country and had none in his surrounding to shore his
deficiencies up.
He did , but me think not enough. also, it is not exactly the way
it used to be. I think Putin knew what he was doing. Unlike Gorby
who had all of the power in his hands and could do things we are
talking about, Putin had to maneuver. His position was not
unassailable when he came to power and much later. He had to be
more of a fox. He is also not a cruel man, like Stalin was.
It wouldn't be impossible, even today there are some questionable characters in very
high Kremlin positions, and if any of them manage come to power they will undermine
Russia's interests as has happened in the not so distant past.
I agree that in the
case of Gorby he was more of a fool than a Western agent. The Westerners knew how to
charm, flatter and entertain him and he was only too willing to please them and lap
up their manipulation and false promises.
It would be impossible. They do not and did not understand how things work in
Russia and they almost always are wrong. Gorby stupidity was all the required,
Yeltsin was a dark horse and Coup leaders should have studied more of Lenin
how to make coups.
With Gorby no cunning was necessary. The guy was plain sucker and not fit for
the office. Looks like he got picked for 2 qualities. Youth and good health
and having no enemies.
In those years we had new General secretary every
year.
I am so sad that the great Soviet Union for which so many many millions
of brave and honest people gave everything they had and their life in
the end got ripped apart due to this corrupted idiot. Furthermore I am
surprised beyond any belief that no one from KGB or Soviet Army arranged
for this fool to get smoked when they saw what was about to commence.
Today it is still the biggest mystery to me. I am aware that USSR had
some problems but those were truly nothing compared to what Russia and
all the other post Soviet countries faced after USSR got destroyed by
that cock sucker. 300 000 000 people more or less got their future
crippled and robbed because of 1 ( one ) western puppy. I just still
today cannot believe that happened. Looks like of course he had some KGB
staff on his payroll but in the end I just cannot believe that no one
took him to Siberia and burried him over there on time.
What is even
more sad is that today this idiot is prancing freely across Russia even
after almost everyone today sees that because of him they got Yeltsin
and his mobsters that stole their future.
I do admire Russian people and respect them for everything they wnt
through their past but some things are just not logical for a 12 year
old child and definitely not for a nation that gave the most chess
masters and champions to the world.
I would definitely like your comment on this if you are a citizen of
ex USSR.
lets look at it a different way ... Who was Gorbachev not Working FOR !
-
Gorbachev Was not Working For the USSR, Gorbachev Was not working for the People of the
USSR ...
-
now it is easier to see who Gorbachev the Traitor was Working For / and Where Gorbachev
Loyalties Were !
Mihail Sergeyevitch is a Russian
patriot, just as good as many more millions of Russians are! But Mihail Sergeyevitch
fallen for the pretence of honesty, so skilfully played by the west, as he presupposed the
existence of GENTLEMEN being in power in the west! ...and he wasn't the only one of the
Russian politicians, ...Dimitry Anatolyevitch fallen for the same, ...when the agreed for
a no-fly zone to be established over Libya!
There are NO gentlemen in western politics! ZIPPO, ZILCH, NADA! There are O N L Y
BASTARDS, one worse then the next!
i think gorbachev can in a sense be called traitorious to the RUSSIAN nation --
whether it was under the USSR or not...
but precisely because he allowed himself
to be ''open'' in ways that the west needed for the leadership to be open -- at the
exact time when russia at the core of the USSR NEEDED someone to REFUSE to be
''open'' in exactly the way the USA wanted -- in order to get rid of the
'perception' of a 'failing, geriatric ussr" - and thus , be ''welcomed" by the
''world" which to gorbachev WAS the west...
to the nearly complete ignoring of THE MAJORITY of other nations (such as we see
PUTIN achieve differently) -
he became the instrument of what was to follow -- yeltsin and the collapse of not
just the USSR -- but RUSSIA'S governance itself
which further opened russia to the pillaging through the oligarchic collaborators
with their western masters...
i think GORBACHEV LOVES RUSSIA -- i really do -- i think he is as russia in his
soul and heart as can be...
but he was simply
WRONG in his putting FAITH and confidence, just as BORIS correctly argues,
in having GENTLEMEN AS COUNTERPARTS from the west. -- reagan the ACTOR?
excuse me -- THAT IS ALL that gorbacheV should HAVE KEPT IN MIND. to know that
the USA was and IS NOT A ''partner"
as the russians, including putin -- like to say out of POLITENESS.
he should have realized that the WEST ARE NOT -- nd never have been 'THE LEAGUE
OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN"
but EXTRAORDINARILY DECEITFUL plunderers and pillagers.
AND it has been like that since the beginning of the USA - TODAY -- and WILL
continue to be so.
it is in its DNA
just as TRUE compassion -- faith, ethics, morality, a sense of TRUE justice and
brotherhood of all humanity
IS IN THE DNA Of the RUSSIAN SOUL.
in other words -- the MISTAKE of gorbachev -- and yeltsin -- who were RIVALS --
was to believe or WISH to believe THAT THE AMERICANS and west --
were and are EQUALS AS PEOPLE GUIDED BY ETHICS ABOVE politics, economics,
personal glory, even nationality --
tht the west -- reagan etc -- were actually MEN OF HONOR.
THAT WAS HIS -- and ANY russian leaderships; GREATEST mistake.
perhaps gorbachev did not HAVE to 'work for the CIA" -- AND THE author is
probably correct -- he didn'/t HAVE to - DIRECTLY \\\
it was enough that gorbachev suffered from ''infatuation" with the west....
and so -- whatever HIS intentions or beliefs were -- his ACTS -- in themselves
BECAME acts of treason to his great country and people.
for what he did was -- to try to present THEM -- IN HIS ''glasnost and perestroika"
some of the 'freedom of the west" -- that the russian people REALLY did NOT need
-- but could have a freedom of THEIR very own
INDEPENDENT of ''copying or emulating" the west...
because IN RUSSIA AND AMONG the russian people
was ALL THE STRENGTH of their own freedom and choice and prosperity they WOULD
EVER NEED!
Hearing on U.S. Security Strategy Post-9/11
Testimony before House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
November 6, 2007
(
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/...
Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage:
Well, indeed. I think we probably didn't get off to the
right foot in the Cold War. But, you know, we did apply smart power.
And let me give you an example -- I was being facetious about the
Chou En-lai French Revolution comment. But one of the advisers to
Gorbachev was a fellow by the name of Yakovlev -- he's the fellow who
came up with the term perestroika.
He actually, back in the bad days of the Cold War, when we were
tightly constraining the number of Soviet citizens who might come here,
he actually studied at Columbia. And he studied under a professor who
taught him about pluralism.
And Yakovlev went back to the then-Soviet Union with an idea that pluralism could work.
And 20 years later, he was the adviser. So it took a while to realize that investment,
but we realized that investment.
I called this out as a real possibility 2 years ago! I actually think that Gorbachev was
just a naive fool and the real CIA agent was his top adviser, Yakovlev. Here is what I
wrote back then:
". . . after extensive research by the Prole Center research team, it
has come to light that Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev's chief advisor on glasnost
and perestroika, was very likely a CIA penetration agent – an agent of influence. He could
have been either a witting or unwitting asset of U.S. intelligence."
This information was included as part of a brief book review I did. Here is the link to
the full article:
I still cannot believe how many naive people live today in Russia. There are STILL plenty
of people who believe that gorbachev was just a "clumsy" person in charge of the "task too
big to handle".
I would like to remind you that even after 2 "sudden" deaths of Soviet
leaders ( Andropov and Chernenko ) before this traitor USSR was just in a period of
economic stagnation and certainly not a deep recession. Several independent prominent
western economists have also collaborated that.
What happened is just so obvious to me that it really cannot get any simpler.
Gorbachev was a very weak minded person who even wasnt a true believer in Soviet
principles and even less so even less capable manager and organizer. He was a bureaucrat
whos wife was terminally ill and who was just a simpleton who allowed himself to be
seduced by the western propaganda and few full stores even though he obviously knew
nothing of the background principles of how world economy functioned even then.
Apparently he was way out of his league when meeting with Reagan who was a smart brave
and a cunning man I do have to admit that.
Gorbachev did what he only knew he could do. He betrayed the 70 years or hard work of
Soviet people and building of different world because he thought that world will admire
this moron and traitor if he arranges the collapse of USSR and the "end of the Cold War".
Of course there is another side of this coin.
What the actually did was "below the table" arrangement with the US that he would be
able to send his wife to a treatment abroad if he made the USSR disappear and that he
would be obviously well compensated for this evil deed. Even today he is being funded by
the western government through his "charity funds" Green Cross and Gorbachev foundation.
This guy made the dissolution of USSR on purpose make no mistake about it. It was
organized to make it seem as it happened "accidentally" and as a part of "democratic
process" so less question would be asked. Apparently even that idiotic strategy worked
which seems rather incredible for a country that provided so many smart people and was a
leading chess nation for decades. Even Albania would be skeptical about it.
Of course there is a silver lining to this. He could not do this all by himself. He had
powerful friends in KGB and army who helped him in his deeds. Why? Because they were
greedy people who lost faith in CP. With the help of these people Gorbachev introduced
extremely vile version of capitalism to the 300 000 000 people while he and his "comrades"
extracted currency reserves from the sabotaged USSR and hid them in western banks and off
shore companies.
To corroborate my point I will point out few facts:
1. only when gorbachev came to power Chernobyl catastrophe happened
2. he is the person who sent top Soviet military commanders AND THEIR WHOLE FAMILIES to
move from East Germany to the PLAINS of Ukraine and live like dogs for months until their
poor quality appartements were finished while being given nothing in exchange from Helmut
Kohl but a "Danke schon". No sane 6 year old would do that and certainly not a reasonable
and intelligent but honest Soviet leader.
3. He was the person who forced the Energia rocket with Polyus payload to be rushed beyond
all reason and that is what caused its demised and failure to put first ever weapon system
into orbit.
4. He allowed for the Berlin wall to fall like a brick overnight and did nothing to stop
that
5. He DIRECTLY NEGLECTED results of referendum of Soviet people in 1991. who with 72% of
votes wanted to preserve USSR
6. He arranged for NATO not to move eastward ORALLY WITHOUT ANY KIND OF
AGREEMENT!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??! WHO DOES THIS!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?
BUAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA
7. He himself made the USSR formally and willingly the thing of past in the end of 1991.
No one sane can believe that USSR dissolved itself in the time when there was no war
had a stable economy and strong army. This guy did it with the help of corrupt highly
positioned KGB and military personnel and of course CIA who helped them to transfer 50 000
000 000 US dollars ( 1991. value ) out of USSR for their own benefit.
To conclude: Gorbachev is a person of poor intellect, no love for Soviet or Russian
principles or state, but also a very sane traitor of USSR and Russia as well and also a
member of masonic clan who sold it for his personal interest. Just because he was playing
dumb doesnt mean he is not the biggest criminal in Soviet history. Make no mistake about
it. Even the dumbest person in Russia cannot believe that all this factors fell in place
"like chips". The probability for that is exactly 0 ( zero ).
Oh come on, this is not news. This was pretty evident. Initially he was not cooperating
with CIA. But CIA offered him something he couldn't resists. Nobel peace price, enormous
wealth, safe passage to US etc. Health care etc.
Wasn't Gorbachev from Russia's frontier lands (sometimes called Ukraine)? Not only that,
but from a place which joined the Nazis in their atrocities? I've also heard he took big
US money to step down. Bad source on that one though.
I disagree with this. Gorbachev had the right intentions. He just didn't bank on the
treachery of the wests big biz and various vested interests. Both Gorby and Reagan were
both honorable in their intentions and they did achieve much. To me it was Yeltsin who did
the utmost damage to Russia making it look like a 3rd world anarchic country as he allowed
Oligarchs to strip the countries assets.
It's difficult for me to believe that Gorbachev was simply a naive fool. Anyone
educated in Marxist theory know about the predatory nature of
capitalism/imperialism. Anyone, particularly a Soviet politician, who'd been
observing the behavior of the US after WW2 should have known that the Yanks are
masters of treachery.
This same words could be written by Gorbachov ' if he had known what a dreadful fate
awaited the USSR, he would not have written a single critical book or article about it." ,
I think Alexander Zinoviev also worked and even work for the CIA after his dead publishing
his books.
To me, Gorbachev is no traitor. He is a Russian patriot who honestly wanted to improve
Soviet Communism and adapt it to his time. Was he naïve? Yes, very much so. After all, he
started the stones rolling and should have known what could happen if other people got
their hands on them. He probably knew that if one takes one single stone from the
monolithic structure of communism the whole structure would collapse. So he just tried to
embellish some of the corner stones of communism without pulling them entirely out from
its structure, and called this 'perestroika' and 'glasnost'. Other people in his
government, oblivious of the danger of completely pulling corner stones from its
structure, didn't think embellishing stones in-situ was enough, and pulled them completely
from the structure, with the intend to put them back once the dust that had settled on
them over time had been thoroughly scratched off, with a wire brush. But by doing so the
corner stones changed their form and didn't fit anymore into the places they had been
taken from, communism. Thus, the Primal Sin was committed, and Soviet Communism collapsed.
And so did Roman Catholicism in Europe for similar reasons.
"... Ivan Nikitchuk, a Communist party deputy, said recent events and the Ukraine crisis in particular have led five MPs, including two from the ruling United Russia party, to ask the prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, to examine Gorbachev, 83. ..."
"... "The consequences of that destruction can be felt today in the conflicts that we have seen," said Nikitchuk. ..."
A group of Russian MPs have formally requested prosecutors to investigate former Soviet
leader Mikhail
Gorbachev for treason over the breakup of the Soviet Union, a lawmaker said on
Thursday.
Ivan Nikitchuk, a Communist party deputy, said recent events and the Ukraine crisis in particular have led five
MPs, including two from the ruling United Russia party, to ask the prosecutor general, Yury
Chaika, to examine Gorbachev, 83.
"We asked to prosecute him and those who helped him destroy the Soviet Union for treason of
national interests," said Nikitchuk, adding that Soviet citizens in 1991 were against the
country's breakup.
Seeking to create a more open and prosperous Soviet Union through glasnost and perestroika,
Gorbachev ended up unleashing forces that swept away the country he had sought to preserve and
himself from power.
"The consequences of that destruction can be felt today in the conflicts that we have seen,"
said Nikitchuk.
He added that this included not only Ukraine but other former Soviet countries over the past
two decades.
In February, a popular pro-Western uprising in Ukraine ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor
Yanukovych, who has since taken refuge in Russia .
The Kremlin responded by sending troops to Ukraine's Russian-speaking peninsula of Crimea
and annexing it as part of Russia last month.
"What is happening in Ukraine can happen in Russia, too," said Nikitchuk. "This pushed us to
write to the prosecutor general, so that professional lawyers rather than historians can
investigate the events of 1991."
He added that lawmakers were also concerned about internal enemies stirring unrest.
"The fifth column in our country has been formed and works in the open, funded by foreign
money," he said.
In a landmark speech marking Russia's takeover of Crimea, President Vladimir Putin called Russians
disagreeing with his policies, such as his decision to occupy Crimea, a fifth column.
There have been previous attempts by the Communist party to have Gorbachev prosecuted but
these have led nowhere.
Nikitchuk said he hoped that the current political climate makes for a more favourable
moment and that prosecutors would launch the investigation this time.
Unlike the previous cases, the current request is backed by lawmakers from the ruling party,
United Russia.
Gorbachev said the lawmakers' initiative was "poorly thought out and groundless from a
historical point of view".
"Such calls only show that some lawmakers want publicity," he told the Interfax news agency.
A spokeswoman at the prosecutor's office declined to comment.
The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist in December 1991 after Russia, Belarus and
Ukraine signed the Belavezha accords dissolving the USSR. Gorbachev resigned two weeks
later.
The Soviet Union did not disappear because of a great flood or a major earthquake. Somebody
was at the helm making decisions and setting a political course. Politicians should be
responsible for their actions. But do politicians alone bear responsibility?
In fact, Gorbachev's problem is inseparably linked with the unstated problem of the low
self-esteem and rationalization of the millions of people who lived through the drama of 1991.
Some justify Gorbachev's actions in an attempt to justify their own complicity in events. For
the same reasons, others try to shift blame from themselves by holding Gorbachev solely
responsible. "He ruined everything," they say. "We are not to blame."
Unfortunately, the Soviet people bear responsibility for what happened to their country.
That does not lift responsibility from any one individual, even if that person was part of the
leadership -- those whom we naturally call on the carpet first for anything that happens. We
the people are to blame for not mounting any resistance to that course of action, or at least
for not fighting it hard enough.
In truth, the only people with the moral right to criticize Gorbachev today are the ones who
had the courage in the 1980s and 1990s to point out how destructive his policies were, to go
against the flow, and to condemn the path followed not only by Gorbachev, but also by his main
political rival, former President Boris Yeltsin.
Gorbachev's rule contrasts favorably with the leaders who came both before and after him,
and he is not remembered for having committed any particularly egregious wrongdoings. According
to that thinking, Gorbachev did not "destroy" the Soviet Union, he "only" betrayed the country
he led.
Gorbachev took office with a pledge to serve and defend the state. He cannot be blamed for
the fact that a catastrophe that had been brewing for two decades erupted during his reign. But
as the captain, he was obligated to "go down with the ship" and share the same political fate
as the country he governed. The problem is not that Gorbachev could have prevented the collapse
and didn't -- he couldn't have under any circumstances -- but that when the troubles came, he
snuck away from the battlefield and went home to have dinner.
The people might sometimes excuse or even justify the deeds of malefactors, but it never
forgives a traitor.
Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization
Studies.
But by his death in 1997, Deng's decision appeared vindicated, as world opinion had turned
decisively in his favor. Deng had seen enough of Russia's tumultuous politics to know where he
stood: sacrifice political liberalization for stability's sake, because the alternative was
chaos and collapse. Chinese analysts of Soviet politics continue to fault Gorbachev for
abandoning central planning too rapidly and in a disorganized fashion. Rather than liberalizing
politics, they argue, Gorbachev should have focused on the economy.
Today, top Chinese leaders cite the Soviet Union as an example of why China's Communist
Party must keep its fist clenched on power, even as it casts off the last remaining vestiges of
the Maoist economy. Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Deng as China's leader, argued in 1990 that
the Soviet Union's main problem was that Gorbachev was a traitor like Leon Trotsky, the Soviet
revolutionary who was found guilty of betraying Marxism-Leninism by then-leader Joseph
Stalin.
That was an ironic charge coming from the official who first formally welcomed China's
business classes into the supposedly communist ruling party. Yet in December 2012, Chinese
President Xi Jinping echoed this analysis. "Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?" he
asked
a group of Communist Party members. "Their ideals and convictions wavered," he explained.
"Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the
Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone." Yet it is Deng's logic that has come to
dominate most interpretations of the Soviet Union's collapse. "My father,"
reported Deng's youngest son, "thinks Gorbachev is an idiot."
In Russia, many agree. Russians regularly rate Gorbachev as one of their worst leaders of
the 20th century. A 2013 poll
found that only 22 percent of Russians perceive Gorbachev positively or slightly
positively, while 66 percent have a negative impression. By contrast, Leonid Brezhnev, who
presided over two decades of stagnation, is viewed positively by 56 percent of Russians. Even
Stalin, who managed a murderous reign of terror, gets positive marks from half of Russians. It
is not surprising, then, that Deng's reputation in Russia has risen. Many Russians see China as
a model of what their country should have done during the 1980s and 1990s. Liberal politics
cause chaos and economic distress, many Russians have concluded, and only a strong hand can
deliver economic growth.
... ... ...
... Deng managed to compromise with other elites, letting them retain their authority in
exchange for their support in pursuing economic reforms that allowed China to grow. But in the
Soviet Union, economic reform meant destroying the power base of the special interest groups,
leaving a potential military coup lurking in the background and hanging over Gorbachev's head.
That was a threat Deng never faced.
The reason why Gorbachev lost out is not because the Soviet economy was unreformable.
China's example proved that the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy was
possible. Rather, the Soviet Union collapsed because vast political power was entrusted to
groups that had every reason to sabotage the efforts to resolve the country's decades-long
financial dilemmas.
In the end, the political clout of these interest groups proved far greater than Gorbachev
anticipated. In his quest to reform his country and steer it away from calamity, Gorbachev
brought about the very process that would eventually lead to the Soviet Union's collapse.
Perestroika put the final nails in the USSR's economy One of the first main policies
Gorbachev adopted was Perestroika – reform of the economy. Hoarding and reciprocal
favours (blat) had been a means of survival in the Soviet Union, thieving to 'moonlight' was
also common and this cost the regime a lot. The 'command-administrative' system had become
obsolete in the Post-Industrial era and was curtailing economic development 1. To solve this,
Gorbachev wanted to give enterprise managers control over contracts and introduce aspects of
the market economy, to make it managers' responsibility to gain contracts and to make sure the
enterprise makes a profit. However, in practice the way the enterprises operated remained
unchanged except in terms – ministries rephrased their commands as contracts 2. Private
enterprise was also permitted, which seemed to contradict Gorbachev's claim to be committed to
Marxist-Leninist thought which was vehemently opposed to capitalism which Marxist's argue
exploit the proleteriat – so to actually create a class of capitalists who (according to
Marxist doctrine) would exploit the workers who were supposed to be living in socialist –
i.e. 'classless society' seemed contradictory to the very ideological concept the regime's
power was based upon. A small amount of private enterprise emerged, but the profiteering was
very much resented by the general population – goods and services were sold for four or
five times their subsidized price due to shortages. Another aspect of Perestroika was entry
into the market economy – many of the social benefits given by the enterprises had to be
done away with, as they could not make a profit and afford to maintain the benefits, resulting
in a stagnant economy occuring simultaneously with a collapsing social welfare system.
Gorbachev's reforms did not work and only succeeded in hastening the economic collapse that was
inevitable.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Glasnost facilitated Opposition to Concentrate against the Regime Allowing freedom of
thought from the 'mono-ideological controls' that existed for decades and allowing pluralist
thought and leadership meant a weakening of power for the Communist Party – it had to
convert into a proper parliamentary party to survive. Furthermore, in a regime based on
oppression and propaganda, when these are removed and freedom of speech and freedom of the
media are introduced, nasty elements about the system in the past are going to be revealed, and
when there is 70 years of repression being reported all at once, it is inevitable there will be
extreme hostility toward those responsible – the Party 1, this especially fuelled the
anger of the nationalities who had been oppressed and triggered a nationalist movement.
The population were dissatisfied with the dire state of affairs and could voice their
discontent openly with glasnost, which led to Gorbachev becoming very unpopular by 1991, in
which year the economy had contracted by 18% 2, people were also very concerned over the
incompetence of the command-administrative system and irresponsibility of the leadership with
regards to the 1986 Chernobyl power station disaster 3.
In a state committed to one ideology, the removal of mono-ideological controls, and the
ability of other ideological persuasions to come to power meant the Party had lost its RIGHT to
govern the people unless the people themselves WANTED the Party to rule. Thus, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had to win the support of the people in order to govern
effectively. However, in a society that was becoming increasingly liberal and 'bourgeois' (the
USSR was largely middle class, private property was protected and capitalism was legalised),
the people had to believe in socialist ideology – which would have been almost impossible
to achieve.
Gorbachev's reforms themselves undermined some of the principle features of socialist rule
in the USSR, e.g. atheism, mono-ideological control, one-party state, economic monopoly and the
suspendability of law. Gorbachev's ideology itself – his focus on 'all-human values'
instead of the class struggle, the rule of law, international peace and proper parliamentary
representation have more resonance with John Stuart Mill than Karl Marx 4 – Gorbachev was
subconsciously moving the USSR in this ideological direction.
With democratization and pluralist thought permitted, Gorbachev found himself operating
within an increasingly wide political spectrum – with the reformist 'democrats' on one
side and the conservative Communist Party members on the other. There was a constant power
struggle between the two and Gorbachev dealt with this by constantly playing one side against
the other and compromising. One of Gorbachev's critics at the time said this was like trying to
marry a hare to a hedgehog. The two sides were very much irreconcilable and instead of trying
to defeat one side, Gorbachev sat on the fence and as a result his policies were constantly
inconsistent – you cannot mix radical reforms with conservatism 5. The dangers of this
were apparent when Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister at the time, resigned because he warned a
dictatorship was approaching, Gorbachev ignored this threat and dismissed this claim with
overconfidence 6.
1 Kagarlitsky, B. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: neo-liberal autocracy, London: Pluto
2002
2 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
3 Haynes, M., Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000, London: Bookmarks 2002
4 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
5 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991
6 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991 No because...
Regional Nationalism and Independence Movements These original flaws in the system were
largely responsible for its own downfall – in particular the nationalities issue –
the decision to maintain the Empire without granting real power to the nationalities whilst
simultaneously repressing them left most of the nationalities feeling bitter when glasnost
revealed the truth about how they had been treated in the past and democratisation gave them
the power to chose representatives who would really represent people's interests (the
nationalist movement) whilst at the same time being given by Gorbachev an appetite for power
– a fatal combination.
The wealthier regions wanted a separation from the USSR because of the feeling they were
being milked from the centre and many other regions wanted to become independent because they
did not want to be part of an economic disaster area which became apparent when the Donbass
miners who had no commitment to nationalism thought their future would be safer if the Ukraine
wasn't part of the USSR 1.
The nationalist movement emerged when freedom of speech, media and association along with
democratisation and the loss of fear of repression allowed people to voice pride in their
nation and resentment at past repressions as well as the ongoing special treatment of Russians
in the Regions, who had access to better housing and other special privileges the locals did
not.
Certain Republics felt nationalism more strongly than others, most notably the Baltic States
who felt a strong cultural attachment to the West and felt they were being unfairly occupied.
Gorbachev's mistake here was to downplay the importance of nationalism and not treat the Baltic
States as a special case 2. After all, most of the population of the USSR wished to preserve
the Union – 76% voted to preserve the Union in March 1991 (except the Baltic States,
Moldova, Georgia and Armenia who did not conduct the referendum) 3. After the failed coup, most
states declared their independence, even if they did so with reluctance, as there was a general
feeling there was no alternative. Gorbachev tried to persuade the Republics not to become fully
independent. However, in early December, the Ukraine held a referendum where the population
voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, even after Gorbachev stated "there can be no
Union without Ukraine", on 8th December, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Bielorussian leader
and declared a formal end to the USSR and the establishment of the Confederation of Independent
States which they invited the other states to join.
There was nothing left Gorbachev could do, democratisation had brought about the means for
independence and Gorbachev didn't feel he could argue with people's wishes carried out through
democratic means and, on 25th December he resigned with regret.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996
3 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 Yeltsin Factor
Boris Yeltsin emerged as the true hero and strong leader for the fearlessness to condemn the
coup – in a press conference afterwards Yeltsin ordered Gorbachev around undermining his
position, then used his institutional powers derived from democratization to appoint Egor
Gaidar, an economist dedicated to laissez-faire economics, as his Finance Minister and
suspension of the CPSU pending an investigation into the coup. Gorbachev half heartedly argued
against this but it was no use – he was seen as a weaker leader along with discontent
over his policies, whilst Yeltsin's radicalism was keeping pace with developments and his
popularity at an all-time high, Gorbachev's position was also much less weaker without the
Communist Party. Also, the Soviet Union really could not exist without the Communist Party
arguably as they had political and economic monopoly on society and the Communist Party went
from controlling these aspects of society to ceasing to exist, the Soviet Union could not
function and the economy spiralled out of control. Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... August 1991 Coup
Counter Productive, Bringing About What It Sought To Prevent - The End of the Soviet Union
By August 1991 Gorbachev's popularity was at an all-time low both in the Party and outside it.
Despite being advised by some of his staff to sign the Treaty agreement granting the republics
real autonomy before going on holiday and some suspicious circumstances he should have been
more questioning about, he planned on signing the agreement when he returned. This was a big
mistake and allowed the conservatives to stage a coup. The Emergency Committee made no
reference whatsoever to Marxism-Leninism or the class struggle in their speech, meaning it was
a coup in the hope of returning the Soviet Union to 'normal' i.e. an Empire controlled from
Moscow and putting the final nails in the coffin of socialism in the USSR 1.
The failed coup triggered the very thing it sought to prevent – the break-up of the
Soviet Union 2.
1 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... The System Needed to
Change in Order to Survive in the Longer Term; That Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms Failed Showed
that the USSR Could Not be Saved By the Gorbachev era, all hopes of fulfilling the original
Marxist-Leninist dream were gone and most did not feel passionately about communism, even
within the Party. There was a general acknowledgement that the USSR could not continue in the
same way as before – Andropov, Gorbachev's predecessor also realised this and set about
changing society through repressive measures such as harsh labour discipline enforced by
cutting payments from workers for work deemed poor quality and restrictions on the sale of
alcohol and prohibition of alcohol on official occasions was felt overly repressive and for
many – Gorbachev was seen as a positive, energetic leader who would overcome the USSR's
problems in a less repressive manner. With economic stagnation and an economy dependent on the
exportation of natural resources to survive 1, an unsuccessful war (Afghanistan) and an ageing
Party Membership to combat, Gorbachev was the candidate for those who wanted change or at least
realised change could no longer be postponed 2.
Autocracies survive due to repressing their people to the extent that they are not given the
freedoms required to change their government, rather than because the people want them to stay
in power. Mikhail Gorbachev's conscience and sense of responsibility for his population
dictated that the system could no longer be propped up like this, and that the people needed
and deserved the freedoms and basic human rights they had been denied for decades. That the
system could not encorporate such freedoms meant that the system morally should not be allowed
to perpetuate itself, and thus the Soviet Union fell apart because it was unrepresentative and
did not support the population's human rights means the fall of the USSR should be applauded,
not mourned for its' population.
1 Volkogonov, D.A. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: political leaders from Lenin to
Gorbachev, edited and translated by M. Shukman, London: HarperCollins 1998
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... War with Afghanistan
Drained USSR of Patriotic Morale The war in Afghanistan was a key contributing factor to
the breakup of the USSR. Reuveny and Prakash argue that the Soviet-Afghan war contributed to
undermining the Soviet Union in many ways. First, it discredited the Red Army, and impacted
negatively upon the image of the Red Army as a strong, almost invincible force, which gave
nationalist movements in the Republics hope that they might succeed in attaining independence
after all. Second, it impacted upon leadership perception on the usefulness of utilising the
military to keep the union intact and as a force for foreign intervention. Third, it created
new forms of political participation, which had begun to impact upon media reporting even
before glasnost, and began the first calls for glasnost, as it created a number of war
veterans, who went on to form organisations which weakened the total authority of the CPSU
1.
1 Reuveny, Rafael, and Prakash, Aseem, 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet
Union', Review of International Studies (1999), 25:693-708 Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... It was dead from the
time Stalin took control Gorbachev finished it off, but Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev etc.
really killed it. Lenin had nothing to do with that, he was a socialist-marxist, not a
communist. You obviously don't know the difference. Learn it before you blindly yell your
opinion into the dark of the internet.
Joe Venetos ,
history, European Union and politics, int'l relations
Answered Aug 22 2017 · Author has 485 answers and 325k answer views
Neither.
The USSR as it was was not sustainable, and the writing was all over the wall.
The reason it wasn't sustainable, however, is widely misunderstood.
The Soviet Union could have switched to a market or hybrid economy and still remained a
unified state. However, it was made up of 15 very different essentially nation-states from
Estonia to Uzbekistan, and separatist movements were tearing the Union apart.
Unlike other multi-national European empires that met their day earlier in the 20th century,
such as the British, French, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires, the Russian
Empi...
The USSR as it was was not sustainable, and the writing was all over the wall.
The reason it wasn't sustainable, however, is widely misunderstood.
The Soviet Union could have switched to a market or hybrid economy and still remained a
unified state. However, it was made up of 15 very different essentially nation-states from
Estonia to Uzbekistan, and separatist movements were tearing the Union apart.
Unlike other multi-national European empires that met their day earlier in the 20th century,
such as the British, French, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires, the Russian
Empire never had the chance to disband; the can was simply kicked down the road by the
Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet era. Restrictions on free speech and press, followed by a
gradual economic downturn that began in the 1970s, brewed anti-Union and separatist sentiments
among sizeable sections of society. It's important to note, however, that not everyone wanted
the disband the USSR, and not everyone in the Russian republic wanted to keep it together (the
Central Asian states were the most reluctant to secede). There was, actually, a referendum on
whether or not to keep the Union together, and a slight majority voted in favor (something
Gorbachev points out to this day), but the vote was also boycotted by quite a few people,
especially in the Baltic republics. So, we know that the citizens had mixed feelings and the
reasons for the USSR's end were far more complex than just "communism failed".
By the summer of 1991, there was nothing Gorbachev could do. The hardliners saw him as
incompetent to save the Union, but too many citizens and military personnel had defected to the
politicians of the constituent republics (rather than the Union's leadership), including Russia
itself, that were increasingly pursuing their independence since the first multiparty elections
across the Union in 1989. By December 1991, Union-level political bodies agreed to
disband. So, Gorbachev had no choice but to admit that the USSR no longer existed.
Gorbachev could have ruled with an iron fist, and he could have done so from the 1985
without ever implementing glasnost and perestroika, but that could have been a disaster.
We don't really know, actually, but in my opinion, an oligarchy -which is what the USSR
was in its later years, not an authoritarian state like it was under Stalin- still needs
some level of public consent to continue governing, like China (which is also a diverse
society, but far more homogenous than the USSR was). If you have all this economic and
separatist malaise brewing, it's not going to work out.
In the long run, Russia is much better off. They now have a state where ethnic
Russians make up 80% of the population (a good balance), from what was, I think 50% in the
USSR.
While some Russians regret that the USSR ended, others don't care or were ready to call
themselves "Russian" rather than "Soviet". It's no different to French public opinion turning
against the Algerian war in the 1960s and supporting Algerian independence, or British public
opinion starting to support the independence of India yet some people from those countries, may
look back fondly. Also, Russia went through a tough economic period in the 1990s, which
strengthened Soviet nostalgia, understandably, thinking back to a time when the state
guaranteed everyone with housing and a job. While some sentiments still exist today in
the Russian Federation that may appear pro-Soviet, it's important to point out that that
doesn't necessarily mean these folks would like to recreate the Soviet Union as it
was . Many just simply miss the heaftier influence the USSR had, versus what they perceive
to be weakness or disrespect for Russia today. The communist party today gets few votes in
Russian elections; and many Russians now were not adults prior to 1991, and thus don't quite
remember the era too well; many others may be old enough to remember the economic downturn of
the 80s, and not the economic good times of the 60s.
One final point, regarding Gorbachev being a "stooge of the West": that gives far too
much credit to America under Reagan for taking down the USSR. The "West" had nothing to do with
it. In the longer run, as we may be seeing slowly unravel since the Bush Jr administration,
America pretty much screwed itself with the massive military spending that started in the 80s
and continues upward, with supporting the mujahedeen to lure the USSR into Afghanistan in 1979
(a war that lasted until 1989), with opposing any secular regime in the Middle East
friendly to Moscow in the 70s and 80s, and so on we all know how these events started playing
out for the US much later, from 9/11 to the current Trump mess.
That's the same bottomfeeder and tax fraud Browder, who most probably killed Magnitsky. and who abruptly changed his
citizenship from the USA to British after his adventures in Russia. What a Chutzpah on the part of a person involved in
fleecing Russia after dissolution of the USSR, the activity supported by MI6 and CIA.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
If, for example, Russia decides to cur Kiev from Southern regions and split the country into two, the USA can do nothing to
help Ukraine. If the USA are engaged in the conflict in Ukraine they will need to fight the Russian army with conventional weapons
in their own backyard and on conditions that Russian impose including the risk of escalation into a nuclear war. They are
not prepared for such a development.
Notable quotes:
"... The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies were willing to engage in. ..."
"... After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S. leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals. ..."
In the Department of Defense authored summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United
States for 2018, Secretary James Mattis quite succinctly sets out the challenges and goals of
the U.S. military in the immediate future. Importantly, he acknowledges that the U.S. had
become far too focused on counter-insurgency over the past two decades, but he seems to miss
the causation of this mission in the first place. U.S. foreign policy, and its reliance on
military intervention to solve all perceived problems, regime change and imperialist
adventurism, resulted in the need to occupy nations, or destroy them. This leads to the growth
of insurgencies, and the strengthening of long simmering religious radicalism and anti-western
sentiment in the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. military willfully threw itself
headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the
immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were
not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for
guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies
were willing to engage in.
They obviously had not reflected upon the Soviet experience in
Afghanistan, nor the nature of their new enemies. As casualties mounted due to roadside IEDs,
snipers, and suicide bombers hidden amongst civilians, the U.S. military and the defense
industry were forced to find ways to protect soldiers and make vehicle less vulnerable to these
types of attacks. This resulted in vehicles of every description being armored and new IED
resistant vehicles being designed and fielded in large numbers. This in turn, equated to a vast
amount of time, effort and money. It also focused both the U.S. military services and the
defense industry away from fighting conventional wars against peer adversaries.
After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S.
leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria
immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the
CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals.
They
funded and armed these groups, provided clandestine training, and facilitated the logistical
movement of fighters and weapons into a sovereign nation to cause its disintegration. In these
two examples they decided not to occupy these countries, but to destroy all semblance of
ordered society and replace it with brutally violent chaos. The U.S. political and military
leadership seems to have learned that their past adventurism resulted in costly occupations,
yet instead of refraining from using the military option as a tool to alter geopolitical
realities they did not like, they merely opted to abandon the responsibility of occupation and
reconstruction all together.
... ... ...
Atrophy and Exhaustion
The U.S. military has been engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan for over
seventeen years. The disastrous invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and
counterinsurgency operations in a host of nations including, but not limited to Yemen, Somalia,
Niger and Nigeria, have all taken a toll on the U.S. military. Not only has a great deal of
military hardware been destroyed, but a great deal of equipment has been worn out and
essentially must be retired from service. More importantly, the constant deployments have
undermined the personnel needs of all services, with thousands of men having been killed or
physically and psychologically maimed for life. Tens of thousands of the most skilled
commissioned and non-commissioned officers have left the services, many of them having served
multiple combat deployments.
The fact that 62% of U.S. Navy's F-18s are not mission capable is not an anomaly. In 2017,
approximately 72% of all U.S. Air Force aircraft were not flight worthy. Many of the airframes
are quite old, yet well within their engineered service life, but most are in need of
maintenance. Both the Navy and Air Force claim that there is not enough money in their
respective budgets to procure the needed spare parts to keep these aircraft flying. One would
wonder that if this is the case, why tens of billions of dollars are being poured into new
aircraft when existing fleets are being left in disrepair. The decisions being made in the
upper echelon of the DOD are quite perplexing for the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen
struggling to keep weapons and vehicles ready for action.
The U.S. Army finds itself looking for buyers of surplus MRAPs, vehicles of little utility
in a major conventional war with a peer adversary, while at the same time lacking spare parts
and munitions for armored vehicles and artillery systems. While the Army has made some progress
in procuring the first of the 49,099 JLTVs it wants, it is far behind in all other armored
vehicle procurement and development programs. BAE has delivered the first batch of 29 AMPVs to
the U.S. Army for extensive testing before the decision can be made to start low rate initial
production (LRIP). Once the LRIP begins, it is estimated that BAE will be able to produce
approximately 262 units annually, unless the company's main manufacturing facility in
Pennsylvania is expanded. The initial contract is worth $1.6 billion USD. The Army wants at
least 3,000 AMPVs of six different main variants to replace the thousands of M113 armored
vehicles still in service. The M113 first saw service in 1962 and a replacement for the
venerable vehicle has been required for decades.
Defense Secretary James Mattis made it crystal clear in his National Defense Strategy that
the U.S. must rebuild its conventional warfare capabilities. The U.S. Army's proposed 2019
budget lays bare the new priorities of a service facing a major transition in priorities.
Procurement of tracked combat vehicles, as well as artillery rounds, rockets and missiles
account for much of this latest budget request. Procurement is up by 18.4% over the previous
year, with procurement of weapons and tracked vehicles up 84% over the previous year. Although
upgrading of the M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer to the M109A7 level is down by 56%
compared to 2018, procurement of 155mm artillery rounds is up a whopping 800%.
The percentage of total procurement directed toward weapons and tracked combat vehicles in
the 2019 proposed budget denotes that the U.S. Army recognizes its weakness in conventional
warfighting capability.
This chart clearly shows the desire on the part of the U.S. Army to upgrade and rearm
conventional capabilities. 155mm artillery rounds and Army Tactical Missile System upgrades to
the M207 MLRS are at the top of the list, followed by MBT upgrades and acquisition of new AMPV
vehicles.
As the U.S. Army attempts to rebuild its aged and depleted armored brigade combat teams and
conventional and rocket artillery, the U.S. Navy and Air Force are facing their own challenges.
The Navy finds itself in a position that is far from enviable, but was very easy to predict.
Having dumped $38 billion USD into two failed new classes of warships and a further $13 billion
into a new aircraft carrier that will likely not become operational until 2022, the service is
currently in the process of realigning its priorities. The service is struggling to procure the
new Virginia Class SSN and Columbia Class SSBNs that are required to ensure the
viability of the nation's nuclear deterrent triad well into the foreseeable future. These
defensive weapons programs, which are integral to U.S. national security, could have benefitted
greatly from the $50 billion wasted on the LCS, DDG-1000 and Gerald R. Ford programs.
Russia and China have spent the same time wasted by the U.S. Navy on updating and modernizing
their own submarine forces, chiefly their ballistic missile submarines.
Institutional
Corruption
If one had to identify the main reason behind the utter failure of the U.S. political
establishment and military leadership, both civilian and in uniform, to identify and prioritize
weapons programs and procurement that was truly in line with the national defense needs of the
country, it would be the institutional corruption of the U.S. military industrial complex. This
is not a fault of one party, but is the inevitable outcome of a thoroughly corrupted system
that both generates and wastes great wealth at the expense of the many for the benefit of the
few.
Massive defense budgets do not lead to powerful military forces nor sound national defense
strategy. The United States is the most glaring example of how a nation's treasure can be
wasted, its citizens robbed for generations, and its political processes undermined by an
industry bent on maximizing profitability by encouraging and exacerbating conflict. At this
point it is questionable that the United States' could remain economically viable without war,
so much of its GDP is connected in some way to the pursuit of conflict.
There is no doubt that the War Department was renamed the Department of Defense in an
Orwellian sleight of hand in 1947, just a few years after end of World War II. The military
industrial complex grew into a monolith during the war, and the only way to justify the
expansion of the complex, was by finding a new enemy to justify the new reality of a massive
standing military, something that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids. This unlawful state
of affairs has persisted and expanded into a rotten, bloated edifice of waste. Wasted effort,
wasted wealth and the wasted lives of millions of people spanning every corner of the planet.
Tens of thousands of brave men and women in uniform, and millions of civilians of so many
nations, have been tossed into the blades of this immoral meat grinder for generations.
President Donald Trump was very proud to announce the largest U.S. military budget in the
nation's history last year. The United States spent (or more accurately, borrowed from
generations yet to come) no less than $874.4 billion USD. The declared base budget for 2017 was
$523.2 billion USD, yet there are also the Overseas Contingency Operations and Support budgets
that have to be considered in determining the total cost. The total DOD annual costs have
doubled from 2003 to the present. Yet, what has the DOD really accomplished with so much money
and effort? Very little of benefit to the U.S. tax payer for sure, and paradoxically the
exorbitant waste of the past fifteen years have left every branch of the U.S. military
weaker.
The U.S. Congress has the duty and responsibility of reigning in the military adventurism of
the executive branch. They have the sole authority to declare war, but more importantly, the
sole authority to approve the budget requests of the military. It is laughable to think that
the U.S. Congress will do anything to reign in military spending. The Congress and the Senate
are as equally guilty as the Executive in promoting and benefitting from the military
industrial complex. Envisioned as a bulwark against executive power, the U.S. Congress has
become an integral component of that complex. No Senator or Representative would dare to go
against the industry that employs so many constituents within their state, or pass up on the
benefits afforded them through the legalized insider-trading exclusive to them, or the
lucrative jobs that await them in the defense industry and the many think tanks that promote
continued prosecution of war.
Possible Reforms
It would be quite simple for the U.S. Department of Defense to rectify the current endemic
problems that have rendered it weaker and less prepared for a major conventional conflict with
a peer adversary. The greater challenge is transforming the relationship between the federal
and state governments back to the constitutionally intended one, and to dissolve the powers of
the now allied executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. This
would undermine the ability of the military industrial complex to coerce the nation into
working against the interests of the states and the citizenry. The military industrial complex
and the Deep State that serves it can only exist when power is greatly concentrated in a
federal system.
... ... ...
Conclusion
The United States stands at a crossroads in many respects, and the nation's military equally
so. All empires experience a period of over-expansion, military, economic and political
over-reach and imbalance. The United States has followed in the wake of the many imperialist
endeavors before it, with apparently little lessons having been learned. Imperialism is the
inevitable result of power devoid of wisdom and humility. A nation borne out of a revolution
against empire and absolutism has itself devolved into a much more dangerous and immoral avatar
of its former oppressor. This must change.
While Defense Secretary Mattis clearly acknowledged the need to transform the U.S. military
and realign it in a direction more focused on fighting and winning a conventional conflict with
the near peer adversaries he identified as Russia and China, one can only hope that he realizes
how the U.S. military that he served in for decades, got to the deplorable state that it now
finds itself in. The greatest enemy that the U.S. military has fought for the past seventy
years is undoubtedly the military industrial complex that it is an integral component of. The
Soviet Union, North Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and
Syria were never as much of a threat to the U.S. Armed Services as the corrupt military
industrial complex and the Deep State that serves as its guardian.
The United States military is in the weakest state of material strength and readiness since
the conclusion of the Cold War. The conventional ground forces of the Army have been
transformed into a force bent on occupation and counterinsurgency. Its heavy armored formations
are in a state of disrepair and material inferiority vis-a-vis its most capable theoretical
adversaries. The cornerstone of American power projection and intimidation, the aircraft
carrier strike groups, are a sad shadow of their former self. The carrier air wing, the entire
reason that an aircraft carrier exists in the first place, has devolved into a tool of
increasingly limited utility, with an ever diminishing reach.
The corrupt military industrial system that permeates every facet of American economic,
political and even cultural life has sucked the very lifeblood from the nation, eroded its
morality, bankrupt its economic future, and stolen a generation of its most patriotic and
selfless sons and daughters. While James Mattis acknowledges the challenges facing the national
security of the United States, he clearly misattributes the blame and misidentifies the very
real adversary. Russia and China are not existential threats to the continued welfare of the
American state. James Mattis need only look in the mirror to see the real threat, for he has
come to represent the cabal of special interests that enslaves the nation and constitution he
has pledged to serve, and holds the remainder of the world equally hostage.
There is very little chance that the reforms mentioned in this analysis will be adopted, or
that the United States will move in a direction that brings it back to its inception as a
constitutional republic. The interests of the military industrial complex in promoting
conflict, and maximizing financial profit will continue to steer the United States military,
and the nation as a whole, on an unsustainable and self-destructive path. There is little doubt
that if the Deep State pushes the nation to war against Russia or China, and likely an alliance
of the two, that the United States military has ever been in a weaker position. Such a conflict
would be of no benefit to any of the nations concerned, yet many potential flash points exist
that could lead to a conflict, including the South China Sea, Syria or Ukraine. As the United
States plays catch-up after decades of military adventurism, China and Russia have spent that
same time patiently and judiciously gathering their strength. The scenario of a one-sided
victory in favor of the United States is pure fantasy, existing only in the daydreams of the
emperor who wears no clothes.
Can we view MIC as analog of cancer cells what want to multiply no matter what?
Notable quotes:
"... So what exactly is the U.S. grand strategy with regard to Russia? ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"... Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO's quick march to Russia's ancient frontiers, is alive and well. ..."
"... "Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy?" ..."
Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be
transferred there in coming months. Russia's navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base
in minutes.
Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine's naval rights inside
a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American?
Poland this week invited the U.S. to establish a major base on its soil, for which the Poles
will pay $2 billion, to be called "Fort Trump."
Trump seemed to like the idea, and the name.
Yet the Bush II decision to install a missile defense system in Poland brought a Kremlin
counter-move: the installation of nuclear-capable Iskander cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, the
former German territory on Poland's northern border annexed by Stalin at the end of World War
II.
In the Balkans, over Russian protests, the U.S. is moving to bring Macedonia into NATO. But
before Macedonia can join, half of its voters have to come out on September 30 to approve a
change in the nation's name to North Macedonia. This is to mollify Greece, which claims the
birthplace of Alexander the Great as it own. Where are we going with all this?
With U.S. warships making regular visits into the Eastern Baltic and Black Sea, the
possibility of a new base in Poland, and growing lethal aid to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian
rebels in the Donbass and the Russian navy on the Sea of Azov, are we not crowding the Russians
a bit?
And are we confident the Russians will always back down?
When Georgia, believing it could kick Russian peacekeepers out and re-annex its seceded
province of South Ossetia, attacked in August 2008, the Russian army came crashing in and ran
the Georgians out in 48 hours.
George W. Bush wisely decided not to issue an ultimatum or send troops. He ignored the hawks
in his own party who had helped goad him into the great debacle of his presidency: Iraq.
So what exactly is the U.S. grand strategy with regard to Russia?
What might be called the McCain wing of the Republican Party has sought to bring Ukraine and
Georgia into NATO, which would make the containment of Russia America's policy in
perpetuity.
Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy? What are the
prospects of Russia yielding always to U.S. demands? And are we not today stretched awfully
thin?
Our share of the global economy is much shrunk from Reagan's time. Our deficit is
approaching $1 trillion. Our debt is surging toward 100 percent of GDP. Entitlements are
consuming our national wealth.
We are committed to containing the two other greatest powers, Russia and China. We are tied
down militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, with the War Party beating the drums
for another larger war with Iran. And we are sanctioning adversaries and allies for not
following our leadership of the West and the world.
In looking at America's global commitments, greatly expanded since our Cold War victory, one
word comes to mind: unsustainable.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more
about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators website at www.creators.com.
Largely right. However "entitlements" are not consuming wealth. Crony capitalism and unbridled
militarism are. 800 billion per year of military spending , which is unaccountable, unaudited
and is in addition to black budgets is a major problem. In addition, it seems crimes by the
financial sector -- even when local governments are defrauded, are never punished in a way that
acts as a deters future crimes. Nobody ever goes to jail.
Tackling these internal enemies instead of trying to cook up new enemies and crises would
definitely help.
Have to remind Pat that South Ossetia was a very rebellious part of an independent Georgia only
from 1918-1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia#South_Ossetia_as_a_part_of_the_Soviet_Union
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 a CIS peacekeeping force had conrrol over South
Ossetia till August 2008.
April 2008 US promised Georgia NATO membership. Georgia was part of the willing coalition in
Iraq and US armed and trained Georgia attacked South Ossetia in August 2008 shortly after
Rice's visit in July 2008.
So the whole claim of Georgia to South Ossetia is bogus anyway.
One problem with America's fealty to Israel is that it prioritizes countering Russia over
China. Left to her own devices, America would probably try to play one country off the other to
prevent them from joining forces. However, Russia is far more active than China in the Middle
East and is therefore of much greater concern to the Israelis. Once again, the "No Daylight"
policy with Israel costs the US dearly.
Odd statement. Entitlements can't consume anything. Though they do change what is consumed.
By transferring wealth from one person to another, different choices about consumption will be
made. Like more healthcare and less video games.
Military spending on the other hand is a pure consumption of wealth. Tanks and bombs add
zero value to our wealth and put vital raw materials to use to no good effect.
"Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy?"
Yes. Which is why Trump was voted in as President.
Perhaps the hesitancy of Putin's response to provocations is that it is almost impossible to
gauge what a counter response might be. If Trump is in control, he is known to be
unpredictable. It seems that Trump is not, however, in control. If true, then a counter
response is even more unpredictable and it is not even clear exactly who to deal with, let
alone what their motives might be.
We won the first Cold War but failed to completely disarm Russia and turn them into West
Germany. We became infuriated that they did not become remain completely submissive to us and
started a second Cold War using the full arsenal of the first Cold War tactics. This includes
information war demonization, isolation, to be followed by an arms race. We will either succeed
this time or die trying, either figuratively or literally. God's not on our side this time.
Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO's quick march to Russia's
ancient frontiers, is alive and well.
Because the Cold War was never about "Bolshevism" in the first place, d'uh! As for the
"Russian nationalism" – what's wrong with that? Why only the US can be nationalist
("unique", "indispensible", "shining beacon of Freedom", etc.), while other countries are
shamed for that? If you don't have the nationalism, then you have it's opposite –
"internationalism". What kind of internationalism can the US offer to other countries besides
becoming American patriots within their respective countries?
"Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a
policy?"
That presumes that the American people are in charge of anything when it comes to the
governance. Rather naive notion all things considered.
"... In contrast, the transatlantic alliance should advance American and European security. Absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, thereby pushing the alliance up to the Russian Federation's border, proved to be a foolish move because it violated assurances made to Russian leaders. Despite being former KGB, Vladimir Putin never appeared to be ideologically antagonistic toward America. However, when he perceived Washington's behavior as threatening -- including dismembering Serbia, backing revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, and promising to include both nations in NATO -- it encouraged him to respond violently. ..."
"... Admitting new members is never costless. Aid will be necessary to improve their militaries. Moreover, newer members sometimes become the most demanding, like the Baltics and Poland, which insist that they are entitled to American bases and garrisons. ..."
"... Continuing expansion also reinforces the message that NATO is hostile toward Russia. That's the only country allies are joining to oppose, after all. Obviously, there are plenty of other reasons Moscow should distrust the United States, but reinforcing negative perceptions for no benefit at all is bad policy. ..."
America Doesn't Need Another Weakling NATO Ally Macedonia is the latest nation invited into the alliance, but how does
that enhance America's (or Europe's) security?•
July 19,
2018
Utenriksdept /
cc At last week's NATO summit, President Donald
Trump denounced the allies for taking advantage of American taxpayers. Then he approved their latest subsidies. He even agreed to
invite a military weakling, Macedonia, to join NATO, which will add yet another nation to our military dole.
When George Washington warned Americans against forming a "passionate attachment" to other countries, he might have been thinking
of the Balkans. Indeed, a couple decades later, John Quincy Adams criticized proposals to aid Greece against the Ottoman Empire,
which then ruled that region. America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," he intoned.
On into the 20th century, the Balkans were in turmoil. Germany's "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, warned that "the great
European War would come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans." That's exactly what happened in 1914.
It took decades and two world wars for the Balkans to stabilize. But after the Cold War ended, Yugoslavia, which had emerged from
Europe's previous convulsions, broke apart. One of the smaller pieces was Macedonia.
The battles among the Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians were bloody and brutal. In contrast, Macedonia provided comic relief.
The small, mountainous, landlocked nation of two million people won its independence without a fight in 1991, though Athens launched
a verbal and economic war against Skopje over the latter's use of the name "Macedonia."
Perhaps modern Greeks feared that a resurrected Alexander the Great would lead the newly freed Macedonian hordes south and conquer
Greece. Skopje entered the United Nations under the provisional name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. In June, after
only 27 years, the two governments agreed that Macedonia/FYROM would be called the Republic of North Macedonia -- though the decision
must still be ratified by the Macedonian people in a referendum.
More serious was the insurgency launched by ethnic Albanians who made up about a quarter of the nation's population. The battle
two decades ago over Kosovo inflamed ethnic relations in Macedonia, eventually resulting in a short-lived insurgency. Although the
fighters disarmed, Skopje's politics remained nationalist and difficult. Last year, a more liberal administration took over, but
the country's democratic institutions remain fragile.
Indeed, Freedom House only rates the nation "partly free." The group cites voter intimidation, political patronage networks, violent
protests, and problems with judicial impartiality and due process. Particularly serious were the threats against press freedom, which
led to a rating of "not free" in that area. While NATO's newer members tend to score lower than "Old Europe," as Donald Rumsfeld
once referred to the original allies, Macedonia is a step further down. Only Turkey, an incipient dictatorship, is worse: it almost
certainly would not be considered for membership today.
None of this mattered last week, however. After suffering Trump's many slings and arrows, alliance members approved an invitation
for Skopje to join NATO. Macedonian lawmaker Artan Grubi called it "our dream coming true. We have been in the waiting hall for too
long."
That's because Macedonia had hoped for an invite back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, but was blocked by Athens over the name
dispute, and has wanted to join ever since. Macedonia's Defense Minister Radmila Sekerinska said, "With NATO membership, Macedonia
becomes part of the most powerful alliance. That enhances both our security and economic prosperity." Money and status are expected
to follow.
But how would this benefit the United States and other NATO members? James Ker-Lindsay at the London School of Economics made
the astonishing claim that "opening the way for the country to join NATO would be a big win for the organization at a crucial time
when concerns over Russian influence in the Western Balkans are growing in many capitals." As Skopje goes, so goes Europe? Not likely.
If Washington and Moscow are engaged in a new "great game," it is not a battle for Macedonia.
In fact, Macedonia is a security irrelevancy, destined to require American aid to create the pretense that its military is fit
for the transatlantic alliance. Skopje spent just $112 million on its armed forces last year, ahead of only one NATO member, Montenegro.
That was barely 1 percent of its GDP, putting Macedonia near the back of the NATO pack.
With an 8,000-man military, one is tempted to ask, why bother? But then one could similarly pose that query to several other NATO
members. Skopje's military is roughly the same size as Albania's, slightly bigger than Slovenia's, and about four times the size
of Montenegro's. None will be of much use in a conflict with the only conceivable threat, Russia.
So why bring Macedonia into NATO?
Some American policymakers see alliance membership as a means to socialize nations like Macedonia, helping them move towards democracy.
However, the European Union, which sets standards governing a range of domestic policies, has always been better suited to this task,
and EU membership imposes no security obligations on Washington. With the name controversy tentatively resolved, Skopje could begin
the EU accession process -- if the Europeans are willing. That is properly their -- not Washington's -- responsibility.
In contrast, the transatlantic alliance should advance American and European security. Absorbing former members of the Warsaw
Pact and Soviet Union, thereby pushing the alliance up to the Russian Federation's border, proved to be a foolish move because it
violated assurances made to Russian leaders. Despite being former KGB, Vladimir Putin never appeared to be ideologically antagonistic
toward America. However, when he perceived Washington's behavior as threatening -- including dismembering Serbia, backing revolutions
in Georgia and Ukraine, and promising to include both nations in NATO -- it encouraged him to respond violently.
The Balkans are peripheral even to Europe and matter little to America's defense. The states and peoples there tend to be more
disruptive and less democratic than their neighbors, reflecting the region's unstable history. (North) Macedonia's 8,000 troops aren't
likely to be reborn as the Spartan 300 and hold off invading Russians. So why should America threaten war on Skopje's behalf?
Admitting new members is never costless. Aid will be necessary to improve their militaries. Moreover, newer members sometimes
become the most demanding, like the Baltics and Poland, which insist that they are entitled to American bases and garrisons.
Expansion also complicates alliance decision-making. No doubt, Washington wishes its European allies would do what they're told:
spend more, shut up, and deploy where America wants them. That doesn't work out very well in practice, alas, as Trump has discovered
in Europe (though nations with smaller militaries are more likely to acquiesce than nations with bigger ones). An organization of
30 members, which NATO will become if Macedonia is added, is a more complex and less agile creature than one of 16, the number that
existed before NATO raced east.
Continuing expansion also reinforces the message that NATO is hostile toward Russia. That's the only country allies are joining
to oppose, after all. Obviously, there are plenty of other reasons Moscow should distrust the United States, but reinforcing negative
perceptions for no benefit at all is bad policy.
Finally, expanding the alliance is nonsensical in light of the president's criticisms of the Europeans. Hiking U.S. military spending,
increasing manpower and materiel deployments in Europe, and adding new members all contradict his demand that the allies do more
and signal that the president is not serious in his demands. That leaves the Europeans with little incentive to act, especially since
most of their peoples perceive few if any security threats.
Yet again President Trump has been exposed as a thoughtless blowhard. His rabid supporters have likely enjoyed his confrontational
rhetoric, but he has done nothing to turn it into policy. The Europeans need only wait for his attacks to ebb and then they can proceed
much the same as before. The status quo will continue to reign, impervious to change.
Montenegro always resembled the Duchy of Grand Fenwick from the delightful novel The Mouse that Roared . Macedonia is
the Duchy of North Grand Fenwick, a slightly larger neighboring state with similar features but additional problems. Neither is remotely
relevant to American security. America doesn't need yet another security black hole as an alliance partner.
But, according to the CNN (the original source), Germany will still not disbuse anywhere
near the 2-3% minimum required for each member.
At this point, many people here must've been asking: why doesn't the other NATO members
rise their contributions, since, as capitalist nations, it could provide them a consumerist
black hole (infinite demand) a la Keynes? After all, what works for the USA should work for
them, right?
"The Franco-German political-economic duopoly that has held Europe together during the
postwar period is fracturing, with Europe being pulled in different directions by the
gravitational forces of these two incompatible economic models that are likely incapable of
sustaining a singular economic union, let alone underwriting a geriatric military alliance
that has lost its purpose and meaning. NATO is on life-support, and Europe is being asked to
foot the bill to keep breathing life into an increasingly moribund alliance whose brain death
is readily recognized, but rarely acknowledged."
Interesting heads-up in there; NATO Exercise Defender 2020 will be the third-largest
military exercise in Europe since the Cold War; 37,000 troops from 15 nations, including
20,000 of the American troops some American politicians maintain are welcomed throughout the
world. However, the article points out the military muscle which will be on show
" pales in comparison with the scope of the U.S. commitment then when compared to now.
In 1983, more than 250,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Germany, compared to approximately
35,000 now. The 20,000 troops the U.S. is flying in next year represents the maximum number
the U.S. can deploy on short notice; the 19,000 flown in in 1983 were part of a larger force
of over 350,000 earmarked for deployment should the need have arisen."
WARNING! ABOVE-LINKED ARTICLE BY KREMLIN-CONTROLLED RT!
Having sponsored the 2011 'humanitarian' regime-change in Libya and reducing the North
African country to chaos and civil war, the US is now protesting the alleged presence of
Russian troops there as "incredibly destabilizing."
That was the claim on Tuesday by David Schenker, the assistant secretary for near
eastern affairs at the State Department. He told reporters that Russian regulars were being
sent to Libya "in significant numbers" to support the Libya National Army (LNA) and said that
"raises the specter of large-scale casualties among the civilian population."
Schenker's concern for the lives and well-being of Libyan civilians is especially
touching, given that the US was one of the driving forces behind the regime-change operation
in 2011 targeting the government of Col. Moammar Gaddafi. Few can forget then-Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton cackling ghoulishly when she was informed of Gaddafi's brutal murder at
the hands of US-backed 'moderate' rebels.
It has been estimated that some 25,000 Libyans were killed just between March and
October 2011, and who knows how many more since, as the country went from one of the most
prosperous in Africa to a chaotic wasteland dominated by warlords. Islamic State (IS,
formerly ISIS) was drawn to the chaos, and reporters even found open-air slave markets at one
point.
Even when the "humanitarian" fallout reached out to claim the lives of four Americans
at the consulate in Benghazi in 2012, Washington shrugged. Their murders were blamed on a
YouTube video and Clinton famously sneered at Congress, "what difference, at this point, does
it make?"
Now, however, as General Khalifa Haftar – who lived in the US for 20-plus years,
mind you – and his LNA seem poised to reunite the country and brush aside the US-backed
"national unity government" that clings on to the capital and not much more, Washington is
suddenly concerned for Libyan lives? Please!
"From all the SMR projects, Rosatom is arguably out in front. Unlike the other projects,
the Russian flagship RITM-200 small modular reactor design of 50 MW capacity is already tried
and tested is it is the reactor used to power Russia's Arctic icebreakers that go into
operation next year. So far six RITM-200 reactors are being installed on the icebreakers
Arktika, Sibir and Ural. Two more nuclear powered icebreakers have already been
commissioned.
The two smaller KLT-40 reactors (35 MW) also went into the Akademik Lomonosov floating
nuclear power station that was towed to its permanent Chukotka location in August to start
commercial operations next year. The logic of a floating version of an SMR is the same as the
land-based version: to serve remote locations and allow for their industrialisation. Most of
Russia's northern coast is home to a cornucopia of natural resources but are at the same time
thousands of kilometres away from any sort of infrastructure."
Russia earns more from the export of nuclear technology than from the export of arms.
Carthago delenda est The US hopes to attain this technology 2026
The Magnitsky Case
How true is the story on which US sanctions against Russia are based?
Exclusive for subscribers
Bill Browder turned the Americans against Putin with his statements about the death of a
whistleblower. However, his story is full of contradictions.
I'm almost tempted to open the month's trial Spiegel subscription on offer at the
walled-off article, but why read a "revelation" about something that all true Kremlin Stooges
the world over have known for years? -- and, I daresay, there are also more than a few who
are really in-the-know about the Magnitsky Case in the USA and in that state where
piece-of-shit Browder is now a citizen.
America eagerly embraced Browder's fabrications and rubbish because his tale fit the image
the United States is fond of cultivating of Russia, land of savagery and state repression
– but also for a more practical reason; it wanted legislation on the books which would
allow it to continue discriminating against Russia after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was
relaxed, as it legally had to be with Russia's accession to the WTO. All members must be
granted Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR) status by all other members, and America
wanted an instrument which would allow it to let Russia know things had not changed. So the
Magnitsky Act was safely in place before Jackson-Vanik restrictions were lifted.
Poking holes in Browder's story, gratifying as it is, will not make any practical
difference. As we are all aware, America will steamroller ahead as if nothing had happened,
and continue broadcasting its untruths as if it had never been contradicted, and its allies
will follow suit. The real glimmer of light is Germany's increasingly restless relationship
with the United States, and its implications for the completion of Nord Stream II. Once
that's done and dusted, either Russia or Germany can tell the USA to go fuck itself. It will
take years for the fact that Uncle Sam routinely lies in order to support manipulative
actions in its own interests to percolate through to the general public, because it mostly
listens to whoever yells the loudest. But once that pipeline is through and Russia's energy
connection to Europe exclusive of Ukraine is secure, it's just a matter of time before Uncle
Sam loses his grip on the whole region.
Browder and the Magnitsky Narrative: the end of a disinformation campaign?
24. November 2019
Der Spiegel has broken the anti-Russian story of the whistleblower's murder. The lie
construct has been known for some time: the scandal is that the media and politicians have
spread it unquestioned
Just over 10 years after the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison, a large
news media organization has dared to write a critical article about this anti-Russian myth.
Browder, a shrewd businessman who made his money with tricks and tax evasion in the 1990s, is
another kind of Relotius [Claas-Hendrik Relotius: a former German journalist. He resigned
from Der Spiegel in 2018 after having admitted to numerous instances of journalistic fraud --
ME.] , who has also demonstrated his stance by moving from the USA to Britain for tax
avoidance. Persistent and eloquent, former hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who has allegedly
turned himself into a selfless human rights activist, has portrayed his employee Magnitsky as
a death-defying whistleblower and a fighter against the corrupt system of Vladimir Putin
.
The media and politicians believe in everything that fits in with their ideologies and
interests. But that's not Bidder's theme: if it were, he would have had to critically
question the role of Der Spiegel in this case as well
I any case, Bidder has not really been brave anyway. The European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) had already made a decision about the Magnitsky Case: in September 2019, the court
granted damages to Magnitsky's family because of the conditions of his detention and his
sentencing after his death, but it did not call his death murder, nor did the court speak of
torture and it rejected key points in Browder's story .
Even then the media could have listened, but it didn't: it preferred to follow
Browder's misrepresentation, which stated, "The ECHR decision also completely destroys the
lies and propaganda about Sergei Magnitsky that the Russian government and its paid smear
campaigners in the West have been trying to spread for many years?
The article goes on to say that Bidder presents his article as a revelation of the truth,
and backs up this claim by publishing congratulatory Tweets from admiring subscribers to Der
Spiegel But the article criticising the great revelation in Der Spiegel says nothing new has
been published: what has been "revealed" by Bidder of Der Spiegel was already well known. The
article discusses Nekrasov's revelations and the blocking of the film he made exposing
Browder, stressing that Nekrasov is in no way a Putin fan.
The article critical of the Der Spiegel article says that Bidder's "revelations" also
reveal the ways of fake news story tellers, of how gullible audiences are manipulated, of how
anti-Russian prejudices are vigorously stoked by politicians, governments, Nato and NGOs. The
critical article also points out that the Council of Europe had looked at the case and
blindly accepted the Browder team interpretation of events in the Magnitsky Case, without
doing any independent research itself.
The above-linked article by Florian Rötzer ends thus:
Bill Browder, who otherwise reacts quickly, has not yet commented on the Der Spiegel
article. The strange thing is that Deutsche Welle [ German World Service -- not
Bundestag controlled, aber natürlich! ] has a report in Russian on the
Spiegel article by Bidder, but not in German or English. Bidder does not question this fact
either.
Have the German powers-that-be given the green-light, then, that Browder be exposed so as
to totally undermine the USA reason for imposing sanctions against the Evil Regime, including
its attempts to stop NS-2, whereby the Evil Orcs wish to control the EU energy market,
thereby enslaving the free and democratic satellite Western European satrap states of Uncle
Sam?
When did Kyiv's control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security
of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from
Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and
Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the
Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking
the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic
nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on
Germany. Would Justin Trudeau's Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin's Russia -- for
Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who
took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations
even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the
American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if
the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.
NATO was formed to protect Europe from the 'enemy' - Russia. But Russia hasn't shown or
proven its threat to Europe for decades - despite the manufactured scaremongering used to
keep the MIC funded. But now, the Chinese can (have) take(n) over that particular role so the
MIC funding is 'safe' and Russia should be taken in as a potential partner and valuable
marketplace for European countries to access.
A ground-based conflict with Russia is a ludicrous prospect - it would turn nuclear in
days - so any form of 'army' to protect those borders is nonsensical. It's not like the
sand-bandit countries where there is no real opposition (to spending) and conflicts can be
manufactured and engineered as a retail source of income.
Funny drawing, Vlad kisses Angela. In real life, Vlad is a big villain, but not a pervert.
How much schnapps needs to be drunk for Merkel to like? 1 liter or 2? This is a joke.
The USSR ceased to exist in 1991, the Russians withdrew their troops from Europe in 1995.
NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the invasion of the USSR - the invasion did not
happen, the USSR traded with Europe. Russia, this country with a normal capitalist economy
and 4 world religions on its territory that coexist peacefully. Russia trades with Europe and
does not attack. NATO is not intended to protect Europe from the Muslim tsunami, and there is
no united European army (not because Europe cannot, but because Europe does not want because
of love for the American "freebie", which is actually cheese in a mousetrap). So why do need
NATO - to suck money and resources from European countries? A good question.
Anyone with even an elementary understanding of geopolitics knows NATO is yet another arm
of US power, and a market for the US MIC.
We Europeans, with the notable exception of the always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history Poles,
do NOT want or need NATO. We are not threatened other than by the consequences of Zionist US
foreign policy.
Russia is our natural ally and reliable trading partner, as is Iran, as is China.
When did Kyiv's control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security
of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from
Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and
Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the
Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking
the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic
nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on
Germany. Would Justin Trudeau's Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin's Russia -- for
Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who
took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations
even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the
American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if
the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.
NATO was formed to protect Europe from the 'enemy' - Russia. But Russia hasn't shown or
proven its threat to Europe for decades - despite the manufactured scaremongering used to
keep the MIC funded. But now, the Chinese can (have) take(n) over that particular role so the
MIC funding is 'safe' and Russia should be taken in as a potential partner and valuable
marketplace for European countries to access.
A ground-based conflict with Russia is a ludicrous prospect - it would turn nuclear in
days - so any form of 'army' to protect those borders is nonsensical. It's not like the
sand-bandit countries where there is no real opposition (to spending) and conflicts can be
manufactured and engineered as a retail source of income.
Funny drawing, Vlad kisses Angela. In real life, Vlad is a big villain, but not a pervert.
How much schnapps needs to be drunk for Merkel to like? 1 liter or 2? This is a joke.
The USSR ceased to exist in 1991, the Russians withdrew their troops from Europe in 1995.
NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the invasion of the USSR - the invasion did not
happen, the USSR traded with Europe. Russia, this country with a normal capitalist economy
and 4 world religions on its territory that coexist peacefully. Russia trades with Europe and
does not attack. NATO is not intended to protect Europe from the Muslim tsunami, and there is
no united European army (not because Europe cannot, but because Europe does not want because
of love for the American "freebie", which is actually cheese in a mousetrap). So why do need
NATO - to suck money and resources from European countries? A good question.
Anyone with even an elementary understanding of geopolitics knows NATO is yet another arm
of US power, and a market for the US MIC.
We Europeans, with the notable exception of the always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history Poles,
do NOT want or need NATO. We are not threatened other than by the consequences of Zionist US
foreign policy.
Russia is our natural ally and reliable trading partner, as is Iran, as is China.
Putin foe says Fusion GPS was agent for Russia while
helping Clinton in 2016 by Jerry Dunleavy | November 26,
2019 07:14 PM
Print
this article T he company that conducted anti-Trump research for Hillary Clinton's 2016
campaign also worked for the Russian government, producing material that was used by Moscow to
pressure the United States, according to a longtime foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
Browder, 55, championed the
Magnitsky Act, which was named for his tax lawyer, corruption
whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009 after his
investigation for Browder's business uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian tax
fraud implicating Russian officials.
Putin, who despises the law, retaliated by banning American adoptions of Russian
children.
"The work that [Fusion GPS co-founder] Glenn Simpson did involved trying to change the
narrative of how Sergei Magnitsky was killed," said Browder. "He and the Russians paying him
wanted people in Washington to believe that Sergei Magnitsky died of natural causes instead of
being killed. Glenn Simpson claimed that Sergei Magnitsky wasn't a whistleblower and that he
was criminal. He also claimed that all of my testimonies to have Magnitsky sanctions imposed
were untrue."
Browder said he believes Fusion GPS's work violated the Foreign
Agents Registration Act . He sent a
complaint to the Department of Justice in 2016, and then-Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Chuck Grassley
urged the department to look into it in 2017.
"We did receive a response from the Justice Department, essentially stating that it can
neither confirm nor deny the existence of a specific FARA investigation," Grassley's office
told the Washington Examiner .
The DOJ declined the Washington Examiner 's request for comment, and a lawyer for
Fusion GPS didn't respond, though the company has previously said
"it was not required to register under FARA and it did not spread false information about
William Browder or Sergei Magnitsky."
Browder pointed out that Fusion GPS and Simpson began working for Russian lawyer Natalia
Veselnitskaya, who would later make headlines for
her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower , in 2014 and provided her with
anti-Magnitsky research for years. Veselnitskaya, a former Russian prosecutor, maintained
Russian government ties, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, including lobbying
against 2016's expanded Magnitsky Act.
The DOJ alleged that Russia-owned real estate company Prevezon Holdings laundered fraudulent
money, and the
company later settled with the DOJ for $5.9 million in what the department
called "a $230 million Russian tax refund fraud scheme involving corrupt Russian
officials."
Veselnitskaya hired law firm BakerHostetler to help Prevezon in court, and the firm hired
Fusion GPS, which Simpson
confirmed in an interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017.
"Browder was always eager to testify before Congress or appear on TV, but he did not want to
answer questions from BakerHostetler lawyers about his role as a whistleblower in the Prevezon
case. So the lawyers asked Fusion to figure out how they could get Browder's testimony. What
ensued was a legal game of cat and mouse in which Fusion developed information that would help
BakerHostetler subpoena Browder multiple times, forcing him to testify about his business
activities in Russia and earning Fusion his everlasting enmity. The U.S. government had staked
its case against Prevezon on the credibility of Browder. Yet he was reluctant to explain under
oath where he had obtained his evidence. It was an odd position for a human rights crusader to
take," Simpson and Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch wrote in their new book, Crime in
Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump .
"I participated in two all-day depositions, but the case was settled before it went to
court," said Browder. "Otherwise, I would've been on the witness stand."
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act documents released in 2018 show the DOJ and the FBI
made extensive use of Steele's dossier in 2016. Fusion GPS was
hired by Clinton's campaign and the DNC through the Perkins Coie law firm. Fusion GPS then
hired Steele, who allegedly reached out to Russian sources to put together his dossier.
Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook said they
received briefings from Perkins Coie about Fusion GPS's findings during the campaign.
Browder contended Fusion GPS created a dossier against him, too, by using "false
information."
"Since the Russians were working so closely with Simpson on the anti-Magnitsky, anti-Bill
Browder dossier, it would seem unlikely to me that the Russians wouldn't know that there was
another dossier being created," Browder said.
Mueller's report on Russian election
interference detailed the June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and various Russians, including Veselnitskaya.
The meeting was pitched to Trump's campaign as an opportunity to get damaging information on
Clinton, but Veselnitskaya pulled a bait-and-switch and turned it into a presentation on
Russia's desire to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Veselnitskaya presented a
short dossier echoing nearly identical Kremlin talking points that were passed
to a Republican congressman by the Russia prosecutor general's office in April 2016,
criticizing the Magnitsky Act and criticizing Browder as a "fugitive criminal" who was engaged
in a massive fraudulent financial scheme in support of Democrats. In his Senate testimony,
Simpson admitted to researching many of the allegations that appeared in Veselnitskaya's
talking points. When Donald Trump Jr. asked Veselnitskaya for proof, she did not provide any,
according to Mueller's report. Russian American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer
Rinat Akhmetshin and the Russians then complained about U.S. sanctions and mentioned Russian
adoption, and the Trump associates considered it a waste of time.
Browder believes that presentation was from Fusion GPS research, though Simpson denies any
foreknowledge of the Trump Tower meeting despite seeing Veselnitskaya the day before, the day
of, and the day after.
Simpson "was a person who was coordinating an advocacy campaign for Natalia Veselnitskaya,
and the Trump Tower meeting seemed to be part of that advocacy campaign," said Browder. "It
seems a little odd that he would know about everything else but not that one meeting."
Veselnitskaya attended the meeting with fellow Russian anti-Magnitsky Act advocates,
including Akhmetshin. Simpson told the
Senate that BakerHostetler instructed Fusion GPS to pass anti-Browder research to
Akhmetshin, who lobbied Congress against the Magnitsky Act. Akhmetshin, who is in Browder's
FARA complaint, criticized Browder in congressional
testimony in 2017 and filed a lawsuit against him
in 2018.
In January, the DOJ unsealed an
indictment against Veselnitskaya, now out of reach in Russia, alleging she'd obstructed
justice during the Prevezon case through secret collaboration with Russia.
Fusion GPS's co-founders said in their book that Prevezon's court case was separate from its
anti-Magnitsky Act activities.
"In early 2016, Prevezon -- apart from the court case -- had launched a lobbying campaign
against the Global Magnitsky Act, working with Akhmetshin, in a backhanded effort to discredit
Browder in the halls of Congress," they wrote.
The firm never registered under FARA, they said, because it was not lobbying.
"Fusion had no say in the matter if Prevezon decided to take evidence from a court case and
repurpose it. But all this would come back to haunt Fusion," they wrote.
At the 19th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi (31 October 2019)
reiterated the imperative of "Upholding the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC."
Why does Xi insist on this point as #1 item on the party's agenda of items?
Let's make a comparison. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a "dictator" and of
using the party as a sort of church for the worship of his own "personality cult." This was
nonsense of course and Mao said so formally in 1963, but it was music to the ears of the
capitalist powers, in the lead the US .
Kruscev then decided to liberalize the "Stalinist party"--which was more music to the
ears of the capitalist "Free West." He said, since the class struggle in in the USSR was
over, there were no class enemies, and everyone could join the party. Opportunist did;
corrupt greedy people did, until at last in 1989 it was top heavy with members of the
shadow economy--managers of factories, mines, industries of all sorts who had over 3
decades accumulated undeclared private wealth from leeching from the the public wealth. The
party had become a club of "entrepreneurs" (thieves) whose best bet for investments of
their ill-gotten accumulation of wealth was the restoration of capitalism.
There was much more damage to the party than I can synthesize in a post, but this small
bit will do. The party was infiltrated by opportunists of the worst greed. And its
integrity, authority, ability to plan the economy according to scientific Marxist Lenininst
wisdom and principles died.
Now the US and the Cia had long ago figured that if the integrity of party could be
disintegrated the USSR would collapse. And so it did.
The CPC has no intention of China collapsing and falling once again into the avid hands
of Western imperialism, which wages capitalist.imperialist class war on China. So, China
would never dream of declaring the class struggle over for China.
Its constitution states that China will remain a class society for a long time. Not only
because it depends for the creation of wealth on a loyal national, anti-imperialist
bourgeoisie but also because China is threatened by imperialism, which is also a class war
Khrushchev ignored, calling for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism, since both USSR
and the imperialists supposedly shared the goal of peace under the nuclear cloud.
The man was a scoundrel and destroyed the power of the Communist Party, paving the way
to the restoration of capitalism.
This is the difference between the Soviet Union post-1956 and China. Mao was not
cleansed out of the party and consigned to the lower depths of Hell like Stalin. Whatever
his mistakes, he was treated as a comrade not an enemy, his contribution acknowledged, his
deficits also--unlike Stalin. Furthermore, his revolutionary contribution to the founding
and survival of the People's Republic of China was enshrined in the party's memory. His
picture is on the currency. He is loved and respected. The party was not stressed, purged,
or divided by making Mao an issue of allegiance.
Finally, by recognizing the contribution of the loyal bourgeoisie to a self-sufficient,
independent China, the CPC acknowledges that China is still a class society. No second
economy, operating in the shadow for China. The private sector exists and is regulated (and
lately bought up gradually by the state). No chance for a clutch of opportunists to
accumulate more combined wealth than the state's and so able to take over the state and
exact regime change.
This is why Xi specifically demands and requires a strong, centralized, integral, and
uncorrupt Communist party. The party is the insurance for the persistence of the path to
socialism and eventually communism for China. No party, no sovereign, imperialism-free
China
And in this determination of making the CPC the pillar of China's social and economic
progress for all the people, Xi is acting as a Leninist. The party is for the people and
the people for the party. They are one. Without a revolutionary party and a revolutionary
theory (in China "scientific and Marxist) the revolution would die. A it did in the Soviet
Union, starting with the Kruscev gambit.
This for the West is "authoritarianism," though the West is ruled by a clutch of
authoritarian economic elites who make all the decisions in their own interests. But they
call tit "democracy." At least in China, if anything, it's an "authoritarianism" for and by
the people--a bit closer to democracy, I should argue.
Andrew Bacevich
describes how the U.S. learned all the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the end of the Cold War:
You won't hear it from any of the candidates vying to succeed Trump, but we are still
haunted by our false conception of the Cold War. On the stump, politicians get away with
reciting comforting clichés about the imperative of American global leadership. Yet
the time for believing such malarkey is long gone.
An essential first step toward recoupling national security policy and reason is to see
the Cold War for what it was: not a "long, twilight struggle" ending in victory, but a vast
and costly tragedy that inflicted needless suffering, brought humankind absurdly close to
extinction, and from which U.S. policymakers have drawn all the wrong lessons.
The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall offers an occasion not for celebration but
for somber and long overdue reflection.
One of the wrong lessons that U.S. policymakers drew from the events of 1989-1991 was that
the U.S. was chiefly responsible for ending and "winning" the Cold War, which inevitably
overestimated our government's capabilities and effectiveness in affecting the political
fortunes of other parts of the world. The far more critical and important role of the peoples
of central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself in overthrowing the system that had
oppressed them was pushed into the background as much as possible. The U.S. took credit for
their success and policymakers frequently attributed the outcome to the policies of the late
Cold War rather than to the deficiencies and failings of the other system. After waging
stalemated and failed wars in the name of anticommunism, U.S. policymakers wanted to be able to
claim that they had "won" something, and so they declared victory for something that they
hadn't caused.
The period that followed the dissolution of the USSR was one of triumphalism, expansion, and
overreach. The U.S. not only congratulated itself for achieving something that was accomplished
by others, but it also assumed that it could achieve similar results in other parts of the
world. If NATO had been a great success as a defensive alliance, the "thinking" went, why
shouldn't it continue and expand to include many more countries? If the U.S. was supposedly
able to bring down the Soviet Union, why shouldn't it do the same to authoritarian regimes
elsewhere? Absent the check on ambition and hubris that a superpower rival provided, the U.S.
was free to run amok and do whatever it liked without regard for the consequences. That
triumphalism sowed the seeds for many of the more significant post-Cold War failures that we
have witnessed since then. Even today, that same overconfidence encourages U.S. policymakers to
flirt with the idea of engaging in another Cold War-style rivalry with a more formidable state
in China.
George Kennan presciently warned
against the triumphalism that he saw around him as early as 1992. At that time, he was
responding directly to the claims from Republicans that Reagan and his policies had "won" the
Cold War:
The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the
course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side
of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
Kennan went on to say that the militarization of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was
a boon to Soviet hard-liners and in that way helped prolong it:
The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line
circles over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the
Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate
military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the
tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the
braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold
war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union
at the end of the 1980's.
Whenever hawks talk about "winning" the Cold War, they invariably mean that it was the
militarized policies they favored that carried the day, but Kennan reminded us that this was
not so. In fact, a militarized foreign policy perpetuated the struggle by providing Soviet
hard-liners with a plausible foreign threat that they could use to justify their own policies
and to clamp down on internal dissent. We have seen the same thing repeated several times in
the last thirty years on a smaller scale with other governments. The most aggressive and
confrontational policies unwittingly aid authoritarian regimes by giving them an external enemy
that they can use to deflect attention from their own failings and as a pretext for the
consolidation of power at home.
Kennan was already telling us shortly after the Cold War ended that no one had "won" it:
Nobody -- no country, no party, no person -- "won" the cold war. It was a long and costly
political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions
and strength of the other party [bold mine-DL]. It greatly overstrained the economic
resources of both countries, leaving both, by the end of the 1980's, confronted with heavy
financial, social and, in the case of the Russians, political problems that neither had
anticipated and for which neither was fully prepared.
We can all be grateful that the Cold War ended, but we shouldn't delude ourselves with talk
of victory. Not only is it inaccurate, but it encourages the worst kinds of overreach and
arrogance that has led to several serious foreign policy failures in the decades that have
followed. Kennan warned us almost thirty years ago not to go down this path of triumphalism,
and as so often happened Americans ignored Kennan's wisdom.
Kennan concluded with the same idea that Bacevich stated at the end of his op-ed:
That the conflict should now be formally ended is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also
for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a
fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and
particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal
credit.
American policymakers are not known for sober re-examination and acknowledgment of error,
but these are exactly the things that are needed if we are to stop making the same blunders and
learning the wrong lessons from the past. Kennan and Bacevich's advice is just as timely and
important today as it was twenty-seven years ago. Perhaps this time we should pay attention and
listen to it.
Lavrov "I wouldn't want to drag myself into a discussion about the medical side of this
issue.. If Macron had felt that the diagnosis he made [of NATO] was so evident – he had
all the right to state it. He knows NATO better than me, since he represents a nation which
is a member of the alliance."
"... Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange. ..."
"... Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government. ..."
"... In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town. ..."
"... Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up. ..."
"... Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications? ..."
"... What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future. ..."
"... because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky ..."
"... who is going to foot these barristers' bills? ..."
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange
and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense. Editor
A US government lawyer in the Assange extradition case just wrote a London Times oped
promoting the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Ben Brandon is one of five lawyers in a London network whose spokes link to convicted tax
fraudster William Browder, the U.S. government, and to both sides of the extradition case against whistleblower publisher Julian
Assange.
Here is how the British legal system works. Lawyers are either solicitors who work with clients or barristers who go to court
in cases assigned by the solicitors. To share costs, barristers operate in chambers , which provide office space, including
conference rooms and dining halls, clerks who receive and assign cases from solicitors, and other support staff. London has 210 chambers.
There are not "partners" sharing profits, but members operate fraternally with each other.
Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British
legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK
support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange.
The law firm and chambers involved in the Browder-Assange stories are Mishcon de Reya, Matrix Chambers and Doughty Street Chambers.
Ben Brandon of Mishcon de Reya and Alex
Bailin of Matrix Chambers co-authored an opinion
article
in The Times of London October 24, 2019 in which they repeated William Browder's fabrications about the death of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky.
The article aimed to promote the Magnitsky Act which builds a political wall against Russia. It is based on the fake claim that
Magnitsky, the accountant who handled Browder's tax evasion in Russia, was really a lawyer who exposed a government scam.
Except that is not true, there is no evidence for it, and the lies are documented
here . But the Act has prevented the Russians from collecting about $100 million Browder owes in back taxes and illicit stock
buys.
Brandon's and Bailin's connections are notable. Law firms, at least in the U.S., tend to stake out their commitments. Lawyers
who represent unions do not represent companies fighting unions. It appears to be different in Britain, where legal chambers have
members on either side of some cases.
Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime
Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which
has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government.
Nevzlin's suit was for $50 billion against Russia for money allegedly lost by the nationalization of Yukos Oil. Yukos was obtained
by Khodorkovsky in the mid-90s in one of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin's rigged auctions. Khodorkovsky's bank Menatep ran
the auction.
He paid $309 million for a controlling 78 percent of the state company. Months later, Yukos traded on the Russian stock exchange
at a market capitalization of $6 billion. Not surprising, after Yeltsin departed, the state wanted the stolen assets back.
To add insult to injury, Khodorkovsky laundered profits from Yukos through
transfer-pricing
and other scams.
Transfer pricing is when you sell products to a shell company at a fake low price, and the shell sells them on the world market
at the real price, giving you the rake-off. It cheats tax authorities and minority shareholders.
See how
Khodorkovsky and Browder did this with Russian company Avisma, which Khodorkovsky also got through a rigged auction.
The Times oped co-author, Brandon of Mishcon de Reya, has a startling connection. The day after an extradition request
targeting Julian Assange was
signed by the UK home secretary , Brandon representing the U.S. government, formally opened the extradition case.
Now look at another Assange link. Mark Summers , who is
representing Julian Assange is, along with Bailin,
a member of Matrix Chambers.
But while he is Assange's lawyer, Summers is acting for Assange's persecutor, the U.S. government, in a major extradition
case involving executives of Credit
Suisse in 2013 making fake loans and getting kickbacks from Mozambique government officials.
Does Assange, or those who care about his interests, know he is part of chambers working for the U.S. government?
And where do you put this factoid? Alex Bailin is representing Andrew Pearse, one of the Credit Suisse bankers that the U.S. government,
represented by Summers, is seeking to extradite!
But there's chambers where two members are each supporting both Browder and Assange.
Geoffrey Robertson is founder of Doughty Street Chambers. He is also a longtime Browder / Magnitsky story promoter. He has pitched
implementation of a Magnitsky Act in Australia and has served Browder in UK court.
In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who
claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money
in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town.
Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He
died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found
that untrue. Robertson
accused local
police of a cover-up.
He is a legal advisor to Assange and is regularly
interviewed by international media about the case.
Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers also has a Browder connection. She is acting for Paul Radu a journalist and official
of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is being
sued by an Azerbaijan MP. OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.
Browder admits in a deposition
that OCCRP prepared documents he would give to the U.S. Justice Department to accuse the son of a Russian railway official of
getting $1.9 million of $230 million defrauded from the Russian Treasury. The case was settled when the U.S. couldn't prove the charge,
and the target declined to spend more millions of dollars in his defense. OCCRP got the first Magnitsky Human Rights
award , set up for Browder's partners and acolytes.
Robinson is also the longest-serving member of Assange's legal team. She
acted for Assange in the Swedish extradition proceedings and in relation to Ecuador's request to the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights Advisory Opinion proceedings on the right to asylum.
Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could
those lawyers be so ignorant about the
facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications?
It raises questions about how they are handling the Assange defense.
The individuals cited were asked to respond to points made about them, but none did.
The Telegraph reports on a 2015 private dinner in the home of Doughty Street 's Geoffrey Robertson at which the
Magnitsky myth and sanctions against Russia are pitched to then-Labour-Party-leader Ed Miliband, and Doughty Street lawyer Amal
Clooney and co.:
Today we find aforementioned Browder/Magnitsky touts Alex Bailin, QC (Matrix lawyer and "legal writer for The Guardian, The
Times and The Lawyer – co-writer of the bogus FT Magnitsky column with Ben Brandon), and Geoffrey Robertson, QC (Doughty
Street's eminence grise), both on the Advisory Board of Amal Clooney's " TrialWatch " (part of the Clooney " Foundation
for Justice "): TrialWatch® Advisory Board
universal
The tentacles of the deep state (no longer secret now) are clamping on our life so tightly that one would honestly wish that one
of those extraterrestrial rocks would smash into this planet causing total annhilation –just in order to get rid of these psychopathic
mongrels ruling over us.
I am not sure, though, fantasy could solve problems!
mark
We have a corrupt and politicised "justice" system used for the purposes of intimidation and political persecution. Some people
still believe in fairy stories like the Rule of Law and an independent judiciary.
What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian
regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future.
Jen
Unfortunately what we don't get in Lucy Komisar's article, perhaps because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain
that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal
representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Who recommended Mishcon de Reya and
other barristers to Assange and Wikileaks, and who is going to foot these barristers' bills? Are there no other barristers
specialising in human rights cases in Britain who can take on Assange's case or was the case awarded to certain chambers in some
kind of bidding arrangement or some other competitive arrangement?
BTW it's not unusual for law firms in Britain and Australia to have clients whose interests may be opposed, ie a law firm can
represent both a company and a trade union whose members may be employed by that company. What usually happens is that different
teams of lawyers work for the two sides and the work of one team is separated from the other team by internal firewalls. The firewalls
include physical separations: the teams may even work on different floors so as not to share copiers or other office equipment
and lawyers in opposing teams may be discouraged from socialising with each other during lunch and coffee breaks. Sounds bizarre
but this does happen.
R Heybroek
With respect, you can't judge British law by US standards. Barristers are briefed by solicitors, not individual clients, and associate
primarily in areas of competence, e.g. criminal, corporate or tax law. In their specialization, they generally follow the 'cab
rank' principle and accept briefs from prosecution or defence as they arise. It's a strength of the system, not a problem.
Whatever I may think of some of the barristers in Matrix or Doughty, it would be foolish to assume that everyone in a chambers
shares the same political views or attitudes. They do not. They argue like cats and dogs, usually with considerable professional
respect.
I see nothing dubious about the range of experience of Assange's legal team. If his solicitor thinks a barrister has a conflict
of interest, he will withdraw the brief. I'd suggest you direct your enquiries to the instructing solicitor.
Julian Assange was a dead man walking from the time he was taken (totally illegally) from the Ecuadorian embassy. Just about all
the Wikileaks team are now totally corrupted; and as this article points out, most of Assange's legal team are also corrupted.
The alleged mental deterioration of Assange, combined with harsh (and totally unnecessary) prison conditions, might account for
some of this.
An important subsidiary question becomes, why aren't any of his high profile champions asking these questions? John Pilger? Craig
Murray? They all bang on about stuff like 'torture' but never point out that his lawyers totally fail to address this pretty darn
crucial issue. Craig Murray says 'Julian has great lawyers'. Really? If we step back and think for a minute, does it honestly
look that way?
They can't even get him out of solitary or into a lower security prison. Shit, they can't even get his mail delivered adequately
or uphold his right to get regular legal visitation! And yet no one, not even his parents, are complaining about these failures!
And who is running Wikileaks these days? Do we have any way of being sure they aren't just a co-opted shell?
Betrayed planet
To be fair Pilger is one of the few real supporters of Julian along with a handful of musicians. His lone voice is not enough.
I saw a clip of Pilger crying after the recent spectacle of a so called hearing. The presiding judge, The Honorary Upyourbottom
should have been in the dock for perjury, fraud, lying before a court and crimes against humanity.
LawStudent
I'm a 2nd year law student and I can confirm that questions about the conduct of Assange's defence are legion in my school. MNynpeople
talking about the inexplicable lapses. Just s fee usdyes often discussed: Why didn't the defense take up the judge's offer of
bail application? To say 'well they would lose' is counter to the basics of jurisprudence.
Why is there no complaint being lodged about his detention in a maximum security facility when he's on remand – not serving
a sentence – pending an extradition hearing? Why don't his lawyers lodge an appeal to the ECHR based on the testimony of the UN
observers? Why are his lawyers keeping such low media profiles?
It's generally agreed something is very 'off' about this.
L Took
I think his lawyers stated that they were never offered a bail application, even though the judge claimed they had refused one.
But I'm not sure; I had heard previous to this event that the lawyers would not ask because if they lost (the appeal?) Assange
could be further punished for the loss. Is this accurate?
MaryD
It may be relevant that one of Assange's barristers also represents the corporate psyop Extinction Rebellion!
nottheonly1
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions. The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder,
Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense.
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises only one question: What the?
I know it's not comedy, because people get seriously hurt and killed as a result of the transformation of a more or less democratic
government into a well organized criminal organization. Who better to run the courts, than the mob? Mob 'Law' enforcement included.
So, organized crime owns everything. The big club. The biggest profits are made with stuff that was bought to blow up something.
Or somebody. One could ask: 'With links like these, who needs enemies?' Anybody interfering into, or compromising the Mob execution
of the owners' plan, will be taken care of. Laws are written to owners' demands and are quickly as needed in show trials.
The eloquence in describing what is happening right now – and in all other show trials – is comforting.
As it is more like 'a gang of lawyers in revolving door roles in organized crime by Browder and US regime et al versus Julian
Assange, providing Defense for Julian Assange in his case against the same people and the same regime.
I forgot where, but I have heard of such things before.
The World will have to understand that, without the immediate release of Julian Assange, no more rule of law exists on Earth.
And to whomever has not connected the Assange affair with 'pre-emptive incarceration', might for a little longer enjoy playing
outdoor chess on the deck of a sinking cruise ship.
Oh, and yes, the qualifier "six ways to/from Sunday" should also be mentioned as an exemplary business practice by the Mob
regime. Actually, the Mob merged with the regime, with the regime belonging to the owners' club.
Northern
Good to see another article on this, seen several people raising concerns about these associations in independent media over the
last few months, though it's no doubt one of those things that will never be 'officially' addressed. Many people with more knowledge
than I have questioned the wisdom of certain decisions his legal team have made (or not, as the case may be) in recent proceedings.
Craig Murray's account of Julian's recent court appearance reads like something you'd expect from a country with 'the people's
democratic republic' in the name.
On a tangentially related note, anybody reading this who has the impetus to write to Julian in support;
The 'writetoJulian' website which appears at to the top of Google's search results for those who google how to go about such
a thing, is either accidentally or deliberately (one can probably guess which) mis-advising its readers of the requirements. The
website advises several times NOT to include Julian's prisoner number on any correspondence sent to him, but I know from direct
knowledge of communicating with the incarcerated that without the prisoner number your correspondence will be destroyed and neither
you nor the receiver will be notified. I hate to think how many well meaning messages of support for Julian have been 'legally'
destroyed without him seeing them as a result of this.
Northern
Ah, in a limited sliver of good news; The aforementioned website seem to have cottoned on to their mistake after several people
bringing it to their attention. They now advise you should include his number on all correspondence.
Mr Julian Assange
Prisoner #: A9379AY
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB
UK
Betrayed planet
I have long suspected that Julian is not getting proper legal council. That his lawyers have not yet been able to get a proper
hearing whilst he is left to rot in a maximum security prison is suspect in the extreme. The obvious Nazi style behaviour of the
unlawful and fascist U.K. government and its lick spittle judiciary are apparent to all with absolutely no fight back from the
excuse of a media nor indeed 99.9 percent of its compliant increasingly dumbed down and wilfully ignorant population.
What is obvious now to anyone with half an eye open is that the U.K. is now a rogue state where law and justice are meaningless,
where bribery and corruption are common place. That Julian Assange is slowly dying in front of the whole world, will die without
some kind of major intervention is a stain on every single aware English resident. Mind you with a population seemingly set to
vote back in the same filthy vermin that have turned the country into the complete shithole it has become, it's hardly surprising.
Does anybody know if Gareth Pierce is still involved in his case?
nottheonly1
For quite some time now, an odd possibility offers itself – theoretically. Julian Assange is not the messenger. He is the message.
As a messenger, he is somewhat ineffective. He has not been able to convince people that the need for an uprising against lawlessness
exists. That any form of government cannot work when the judiciary is corrupt and that there is no justice in a society ruled
over by a regime.
As a message however, he is in the eyes of masses of people. Probably a majority of humans on Earth know who Julian Assange
is. How many know who he is, where he came from and what it was exactly he did, before he published videos showing how well the
'Support our Troops' deserve was used up in the way it was intended, can only be a guess. Or a dedicated team of statisticians
to hold polls in every country.
So, the published material, that was also leaked by a whistle blower, was proof of how deserving those soldiers were
of our support – showing them killing innocent human beings and 'our Troops' having the greatest times of their lives doing it.
The message is simply: Look, if we can do this to Assange, what do you think we will do to you from Monday to Sunday – if you
get any ideas?
No matter where you are. No matter who you are.
The only antidote to this insanity is the Truth and it be given its day(s) in court. 'Justice Mondays'.
I wonder if Alexander Perepilichnyy's death happened any which way – if indeed he was even a real person – there's only two photos
of him as far as I can tell and the feeling of reality about his is not strong – as the Japan Times says, "What we know of Perepilichnyy
is slight." Could he have just conveniently been invented and disappeared somehow? The story of him spending his last night with
his 22 year-old mistress (the good old 22) in Paris, complaining about his dinner, vomiting and then having his wife the next
day in London prepare his favourite food, sorrel soup, for lunch then going out jogging somehow doesn't ring true and we see a
typical anomaly of faked stories, different versions:
The Guardian: "was found outside his Surrey home"
The Atlantic: "He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting"
Japan Times: "Then, 50 meters from his home, he staggered into the road and died."
Wikipedia: "[he] was found dead on the road by a neighbour" with a reference to a BBC story makes no mention of neighbour
BBC story: "[he] has been found dead near his home in Weybridge. had collapsed on a road early on the evening"
Collapsed on a road? Wouldn't you give the name of the road in a suburban area?
Rhys Jaggar
Same story in UK sports reporting corrupt industries raking in cash for unprincipled wordsmithery
DiggerUK
The defence team around Julian seems to be unfathomable at many levels. My main concern has been over the unproved allegations
of chemical torture made during his incarceration in Bellmarsh Prison. Why has his defence team not asked for an independent medical
assessment? Why have concerns not been raised with prison visitors who are allowed to investigate independently?
https://www.imb.org.uk/independent-monitoring-boards/
Craig Murray who saw Julian on his last court appearance wrote of his condition .
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/
is it as a result of drugs used during interrogations, or is it down to mental trauma after what he has been through.
Either way, his defense team and close friends need to up their game.
This article is not the first time that concerns have been raised in a worrying manner about the defence team around Julian
_
Rhys Jaggar
It is a standard Uk tactic to have someone try to beat you up then publicly say what a friend of yours they are. Happened to me
four times: I called the lot of them out on it, something which gets them on their faux high horses very quickly
Harry Stotle
Amazing isn't it, the way the legal system goes into hyperdrive pursuing those who expose war crimes while nonchantly turning
a blind eye to those who commit them (no matter how high the body count). Harder to find a more glaring example of the way hypocrisy
defines the elite's relationship with things like morality, fairness or decency, not least because no western politician has ever
been held to account for the havoc they have unleashed (in any court prosecuting war crimes).
Ellen DeGeneres hi-fiving with George Bush. British MPs pretending a courageous whistle blower is not being tortured to death
just a few miles from parliament.
Needless to say the MSM has fully sided with the criminals: first denigrating Julian Assange, then mocking his plight – this
gave way to lies, and now silence.
Put simply can anyone expect justice in Britain if their actions conflict with the ethos of the gangsters who control Britain's
economic, media and military interests?
Rhys Jaggar
We are actually approaching apartheid South Africa in that regard, namely contempt for legal due process. Not quite had the Met
coppers beating Assange over the head like SA cops did to Steve Biko, but we are slowly getting there
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
"... As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with. And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of the population eventually fall on their own sword. ..."
"... And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with Iran and Islamic state jihadists.) ..."
"... So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role. ..."
"... It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed. ..."
"... So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite). ..."
"... The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how much money to bribe top officials. ..."
"... As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR. ..."
"... The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't care less about regular citizens and their sufferings. ..."
"... BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say. ..."
"... BTW few republics in former USSR space managed to achieve the standard of living equal to the best years of the USSR (early 80th I think) See https://web.williams.edu/Economics/brainerd/papers/ussr_july08.pdf ..."
"... Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe. ..."
"... Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is corruptible and can eventually change sides. ..."
"... But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie" state. ..."
This is a very complex issue. And I do not pretend that I am right, but I think Brad is way too superficial to be taken seriously.
IMHO it was neoliberalism that won the cold war. That means that the key neoliberal "scholars" like Friedman and Hayek and
other intellectual prostitutes of financial oligarchy who helped to restore their power. Certain democratic politicians like Carter
also were the major figures. Carter actually started neoliberalization of the USA, continued by Reagan,
Former Trotskyites starting from Burnham which later became known as neoconservatives also deserve to be mentioned.
It is also questionable that the USA explicitly won the cold war. Paradoxically the other victim of the global neoliberal revolution
was the USA, the lower 90% of the USA population to be exact.
So there was no winners other the financial oligarchy (the transnational class.)
As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with.
And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of
the population eventually fall on their own sword.
And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level
of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with
Iran and Islamic state jihadists.)
The degeneration started with the death of the last charismatic leader (Stalin) and the passing of the generation which remembers
that actual warts of capitalism and could relate them to the "Soviet socialism" solutions.
So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to
produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the
theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role.
With bolshevism as the official religion, which can't be questioned, the society was way too rigid and suppressed "entrepreneurial
initiative" (which leads to enrichment of particular individuals, but also to the benefits to the society as whole), to the extent
that was counterproductive. The level of dogmatism in this area was probably as close to the medieval position of Roman Catholic
Church as we can get; in this sense it was only national that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became a pope John Paul II -- he was very
well prepared indeed ;-).
It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level
of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created
the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed.
So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects
the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite).
The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how
much money to bribe top officials.
As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And
the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of
Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and
by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive
efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR.
Explosion of far right nationalist sentiments without "Countervailing ideology" as Bolshevism was not taken seriously anymore
was the key factor that led to the dissolution of the USSR.
Essentially national movements allied with Germany that were defeated during WWII became the winners.
The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal
West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't
care less about regular citizens and their sufferings.
And the backlash created conditions for Putin coming to power.
BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably
by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of
Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say.
The majority of the xUSSR space countries have now dismal standard of living and slided into Latin American level of inequality
and corruption (not without help of the USA).
Several have civil wars in the period since getting independence, which further depressed the standard living. Most deindustrialize.
Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse
of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe.
Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion
to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is
corruptible and can eventually change sides.
But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism
is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie"
state.
So in the worst case it is the USA which might follow the path of the USSR and eventually disintegrate under the pressure of
internal nationalist sentiments. Such a victor...
Even now there are some visible difference between former Confederacy states and other states on the issues such as immigration
and federal redistributive programs.
The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a
fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments
and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the
judgement in the mainstream media at all.
The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered
corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned
on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his
former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for
Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the
Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible
for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.
However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against
Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find
that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in
conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was
credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And
most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy
and action by the authorities "years" before he started to make counter-accusations of
corruption against officials investigating his case.
This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:
Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released
an extraordinary report titled "The Opportunity Costs of Socialism." The report begins with the
statement: "Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, socialism is making a
comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared
socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate."
The very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of popular support for
socialism, particularly among the nation's youth, testifies to vast changes taking place in the
political consciousness of the working class and the terror this is striking within the ruling
elite. America is, after all, a country where anti-communism was for the greater part of a
century a state-sponsored secular religion. No ruling class has so ruthlessly sought to exclude
socialist politics from political discourse as the American ruling class.
The 70-page document is itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism
by identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded state
ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of the banks, and, with
the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices, increasingly attacked the living
standards of the working class.
It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as "Medicare for all,"
raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton
Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of "economic freedom," i.e., the
unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business
regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy's
self-enrichment.
The report's arguments and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of
Donald Trump, who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them
of seeking to turn America into another "socialist" Venezuela.
What has prompted this effort to blackguard socialism?
A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular
disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by
the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would
participate in a "large-scale uprising." Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, "Banks and
money rule the world."
Last November, a poll conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the
ages of 21 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist
country.
In August of this year, a Gallup poll found that for the first time since the organization
began tracking the figure, fewer than half of Americans aged 18–29 had a positive view of
capitalism, while more than half had a positive view of socialism. The percentage of young
people viewing capitalism positively fell from 68 percent in 2010 to 45 percent this year, a
23-percentage point drop in just eight years.
This surge in interest in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in
the US and internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this
year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly terrified by the
teachers' walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by
rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the
pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global
crisis of capitalism , which finds its most acute social and political expression in the
center of world capitalism -- the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the key
to the fight for genuine socialism.
Masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by
decades of uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process has
accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The Obama years saw the
greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, the escalation of the wars
begun under Bush and their spread to Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass
surveillance, attacks on immigrants and other police state measures.
This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and
backwardness of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much
as the average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest
Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a radical
alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its program eight
years ago, " The Breakdown of Capitalism and the
Fight for Socialism in the United States ":
The change in objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their
minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a
fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic
forms of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections has
revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump's fascistic attacks on
immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down unarmed men, women and
children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment establishing birthright
citizenship.
That this has evoked no serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that
the entire ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats are
spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing and socialist
opposition.
The second response is to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the working
class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has
been largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two DSA members,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, are likely to win seats in
the House of Representatives as candidates of the Democratic Party.
The closer they come to taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their
supposed socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing the
recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if she opposed the US
wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for the abolition of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The working class and youth are increasingly looking for a socialist alternative, but their
understanding of socialism and its history is limited. Here the role of the revolutionary
party, the Socialist Equality Party, is critical. It alone seeks to arm the emerging mass
movement of the working class with a genuine revolutionary, socialist and internationalist
program.
The SEP fights to mobilize and unite the working class in the US and internationally in
opposition to the entire ruling elite and all of its bribed politicians and parties. As our
program explains:
But socialism will be achieved only through the establishment of workers' power. This will
be a difficult struggle Socialism is not a gift to be given to the working class. It must be
fought for and won by the working class itself.
The task facing workers and youth looking for the way to fight against war, inequality,
poverty and repression is to join and build the Socialist Equality Party to lead the coming
mass struggles of the working class.
"... The last three decades have seen the United States engaged in continuous and ever-expanding warfare under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The drive to conquer and subjugate the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia is a consensus policy of the American ruling class. The results have included over a million dead in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more across Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. ..."
"... Meanwhile the Pentagon released a seemingly lunatic "joint doctrine" that goes well beyond Dr. Strangelove. It states: "nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of nuclear weapons will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and develop situations that call for commanders to win." ..."
"... There is a worried sense within ruling circles that three decades of war have only created a series of debacles, and that US imperialism is confronting what is termed, in military and foreign policy circles, as "strategic competition" from Russia and China. At the same time, ever-sharper conflicts are emerging between Washington and its erstwhile NATO partners, in particular Germany, against which the US fought in two world wars. ..."
"... Zakaria pays special tribute to the individual who popularized the concept of the "unipolar moment," the extreme right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote an article with that title, also in Foreign Affairs , in 1991. He promoted an unvarnished perspective of the unilateral use of US military aggression to assert the dominance of American capitalism around the globe. ..."
"... He further insisted that if US imperialism proved unable to maintain its unipolar moment it would be "not for foreign but for domestic reasons. ... stagnant productivity, declining work habits, rising demand for welfare state entitlements and new taste for ecological luxuries." He charged that while "defense spending declined, domestic entitlements nearly doubled." And, above all, he blamed "America's insatiable desire for yet higher standards of living without paying any of the cost." [3] ..."
"... For America's ruling elite, long at each other's throats, the path should be clearer now to reforming a working consensus about the US's world role. Some of the policy-making world's most divisive issues now look settled. Force is a legitimate tool of policy; it works. For the elites themselves, the message is America can lead, stop whining, think more boldly. Starting now. [5] ..."
"... We understood this editorial, by the mouthpiece of US finance capital, as an accurate reflection of the pathological triumphalism prevailing within the American bourgeoisie. ..."
"... A third of the population is functionally illiterate. Not even the mass media can avoid reporting on a daily basis some of the more spectacular 'horror stories' of lives destroyed by the impact of the social crisis: homeless people freezing in cardboard boxes, cancer victims being denied treatment because they have no medical insurance and unemployed workers and their families committing suicide ..."
"... This position dovetailed neatly with that of German imperialism, which was backing Croatian and Slovenian independence as part of a post-reunification reassertion of its power in Europe. German imperialism was returning to the scenes of its crimes in 1914 and 1941, unilaterally defying the United States, the United Nations and the European Commission. ..."
"... This was patently the case in Yugoslavia, where the first impulse to break up the existing federation came from Slovenia and Croatia, the wealthiest regions of the country, where local ruling elites calculated that they could fare better by breaking with the poorer republics and establishing their own independent ties to European governments, banks and corporations. ..."
"... In conclusion: the so-called "Unipolar Moment" of 1990 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the launching of the Gulf War, marked the collapse of the post-World War II equilibrium, established on the basis of the hegemony of American capitalism and the collaboration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. It signaled the beginning of a new period of uninterrupted war, the growth of inter-imperialist rivalries ..."
This lecture was delivered by Bill Van Auken, senior writer for the World Socialist Web Site , at the Socialist Equality
Party (US) Summer School on July 25, 2019.
It is now nearly three decades since the deliberate liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the
launching of the First Persian Gulf War, which began in January 1991. This war, which involved the deployment of over half a million
US troops -- more than twice the number sent into the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- clearly marked a turning point in the development
of US and world imperialism.
It likewise marked a turning point for the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Objective developments,
in particular the disintegration of Stalinism, intersected with the protracted struggle of the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism,
culminating in the 1985 split and the consolidation of control by the orthodox Trotskyists, for the first time since the founding
of the International Committee in 1953. This signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between the Fourth International and
the working class.
Grasping that change, the ICFI sought to shoulder the immense political responsibility of leading the international working class,
which found concrete expression in the convening of the extraordinarily important "World Conference of Workers against War and Colonialism"
held in Berlin in November 1991, to which we will return.
The sharp turn by US imperialism toward unilateralism and militarism, consummated in the Gulf War of 1991, was bound up with the
protracted crisis of American capitalism and the relative decline of its domination of the global economy. With the demise of the
USSR, US imperialism concluded that it could now offset the challenge that American corporations faced from rivals in Europe and
Japan, which had been growing since the 1970s, through the relatively untrammeled use of the US armed forces.
Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the "Highway of Death", the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated
fom Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. [Credit: U.S. Air Force]
In the case of the Persian Gulf, the US military could be used to secure unchallenged American supremacy in the world's most important
oil-producing region, which would put Washington in a position to blackmail its oil-import-dependent European and Asian imperialist
rivals with the threat of cutting off their energy supplies. As President George H.W. Bush would declare, in the run-up to the Gulf
war, an attack on Iraq would give the US "persuasiveness that will lead to more harmonious trading relationships."
This was not a development that took us by surprise. In its 1988 Perspectives Resolution, the ICFI warned:
Despite the loss of its economic hegemony, the United States remains, militarily, the most powerful imperialist country, and
reserves to itself the role of global policeman. But the conditions which prevailed in 1945 at the beginning of the so-called
American Century have been drastically transformed. The loss of the economic preponderance which once made its word "law" among
the major capitalist nations compels the United States to place ever-greater reliance on the brute force of its military strength.
[1]
The resolution went on to declare that a prophecy made by Trotsky was about to be vindicated, quoting his War and the Fourth
International from 1934. "The world is divided? It must be re-divided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.'
The United States must organize the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
This was confirmed in barely two years.
There is an obvious continuity between these events of nearly 30 years ago and the present global political situation. The struggle
to assert US hegemony over the Persian Gulf threatens to ignite a new and even more terrible war against Iran, a country with three
times the population and four times the landmass of Iraq. The outbreak of a military confrontation is only a matter of time.
The last three decades have seen the United States engaged in continuous and ever-expanding warfare under both Democratic
and Republican administrations. The drive to conquer and subjugate the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia is a consensus policy
of the American ruling class. The results have included over a million dead in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more across Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria and Yemen.
More and more these various conflicts threaten to metastasize into a Third World War. Preparations for a nuclear confrontation
with Russia and China were chillingly described recently by the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the military's
No. 1 priority. Meanwhile the Pentagon released a seemingly lunatic "joint doctrine" that goes well beyond Dr. Strangelove. It
states: "nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the
use of nuclear weapons will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and develop situations that call for commanders to win."
There is a worried sense within ruling circles that three decades of war have only created a series of debacles, and that
US imperialism is confronting what is termed, in military and foreign policy circles, as "strategic competition" from Russia and
China. At the same time, ever-sharper conflicts are emerging between Washington and its erstwhile NATO partners, in particular Germany,
against which the US fought in two world wars.
The contradiction between the interdependent character of the global economy and the capitalist nation-state system is leading
inexorably to a new world war.
Under these conditions, there have been several recent commentaries by US foreign policy analysts bemoaning the end of the "unipolar
moment" proclaimed nearly 30 years ago, and looking back upon it with a certain nostalgia.
Among them is a piece published in Foreign Affairs by CNN's multi-millionaire pseudo-intellectual charlatan Fareed Zakaria,
titled "The Self-Destruction of American Power." He writes:
Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible
than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone
for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm legitimized by international law. [2]
The American way, world order, norms and international law: this is how these layers fondly recall a mass slaughter.
Zakaria pays special tribute to the individual who popularized the concept of the "unipolar moment," the extreme right-wing
columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote an article with that title, also in Foreign Affairs , in 1991. He promoted an unvarnished
perspective of the unilateral use of US military aggression to assert the dominance of American capitalism around the globe.
Our best hope for safety in such times is in American strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the
rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them," he wrote.
He went on to present the pretext for the next major US war: "There is no alternative to confronting, deterring and, if necessary,
disarming states that brandish and use weapons of mass destruction. And there is no one to do that but the United States."
He further insisted that if US imperialism proved unable to maintain its unipolar moment it would be "not for foreign but for
domestic reasons. ... stagnant productivity, declining work habits, rising demand for welfare state entitlements and new taste for
ecological luxuries." He charged that while "defense spending declined, domestic entitlements nearly doubled." And, above all, he
blamed "America's insatiable desire for yet higher standards of living without paying any of the cost." [3]
This, after a decade of unrelenting attacks on working class living standards in the wake of the breaking of the 1981 PATCO strike.
The message was clear: imperialist war abroad had to be accompanied by an intensification of social counterrevolution and class war
in the US itself.
Bush himself, in the run-up to the Gulf War, proclaimed that the unleashing of US military power, against a relatively defenseless
oppressed country, would inaugurate a "New World Order."
The content of this "new world order" was never explained. The only thing that was clear was that the old world order had broken
down and what was to replace it, in the first instance, was an eruption of US military violence.
The catastrophic breakdown of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union -- celebrated by facile bourgeois
intellectuals as the "end of history" and the "triumph of capitalism" -- had removed a key prop of the old post-World War II order.
Moreover, the very same forces of globalization of capitalist production and technological development that had fatally undermined
the autarchic Stalinist economies were driving the entire world capitalist order into profound crisis.
... ... ...
It justified this threat on the basis of the "overwhelming dependence of Western nations on vital oil supplies from the Middle
East." Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, introduced the "Reagan corollary," vowing that the US would defend these vital oil interests
against internal threats to stability as well.
The US government deliberately manufactured the pretext for its military intervention in the Persian Gulf. Tensions between Iraq
and Kuwait had been growing since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, in which Washington had provided significant aid to the Iraqi regime
of Saddam Hussein. Kuwait's lowering of oil prices and its demand for debt payments had further undermined an Iraqi economy that
had been battered by the war, while Baghdad claimed that Kuwait was carrying out slant drilling into Iraq's Rumaila oil field, on
the border between the two countries.
The US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, used a meeting on July 25, 1990 -- just weeks before Bush was to announce his "line
in the sand" and launch the drive to war -- to assure Saddam Hussein of US friendship and sympathy, while telling him that Washington
had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
The trap having been laid, Saddam Hussein, driven by desperation over the mounting economic and social crisis in Iraq, quickly
walked into it.
Like every US imperialist war waged in the name of liberation and democracy, the Gulf War was based on deception and lies.
The attempt was made to equate Saddam Hussein, whom Washington had only recently courted as an ally, with Adolf Hitler. This demonization
would become a standard feature of every succeeding US war. It had, in fact, been used in what amounted to a dress rehearsal for
the Gulf War, less than two years earlier. In preparing the invasion of Panama, the US State Department compared the involvement
in the drug trade of Manuel Noriega -- a longtime CIA asset -- with Hitler's invasion of Poland.
A massive propaganda campaign was waged to sway US public opinion toward support for the Gulf war. This infamously included the
testimony given by a 15-year-old girl to Congress, in which she tearfully recounted seeing armed Iraqi troops invading a hospital
to steal incubators, throwing babies onto the floor to die. Only later was it revealed that the story was a complete fabrication.
The girl had not been in Kuwait before, during or after the Iraqi invasion. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington
and a member of the royal family, sent to read a script written by a major US PR firm.
Finally, Bush justified military intervention by claiming an imminent threat posed by Iraq's massing of 120,000 troops on Saudi
Arabia's border. Satellite images subsequently revealed that there was nothing on the Kuwait-Saudi border but desert sand.
A critically important part of the report to the Special Congress of the Workers League in 1990 was the clarification of our attitude
toward Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Initial responses within the International Committee had included its condemnation as
an "act of aggression" by the British section, in an initial article published in its newspaper. On the other hand, there was a suggestion
from within the Australian section, that we support the annexation of Kuwait as a "small step" in advancing "the unfulfilled national
and democratic tasks of the Arab revolution."
The report made clear that we had no reason to condemn Iraqi aggression. Given the economic warfare waged by Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia against Iraq in the run-up to the invasion, our concern was not who fired the first shot. Moreover, to take such a position
would be to support the territorial integrity of Kuwait, a Sheikdom created by British imperialism, carved out of the southern Iraqi
province of Basra, as a means of better dominating the Arabian Peninsula. The same is the case with virtually all the borders drawn
by imperialist powers in the Middle East.
At the same time, in response to the suggestion from a member of the Australian section that we support Kuwait's annexation, it
affirmed:
To attribute any progressive role to Hussein's invasion would lead the ICFI in a false direction and undermine the theoretical
and political gains that have been made since 1985, in our collective struggle against the WRP's betrayal of the program of world
socialist revolution.
Of course, this refers to the struggle waged against the Workers Revolutionary Party's abandonment of the Theory of Permanent
Revolution, particularly in relation to its opportunist relations with various Arab regimes, systematically subordinating the independent
struggle of the working class to the supposedly anti-imperialist stance of one or another bourgeois nationalist leader.
... ... ...
The US launched the Gulf War on January 16, 1991. Operation Desert Storm, as it was dubbed, consisted mainly of one of the most
intensive air bombardments in military history. Eighty-eight thousand tons of munitions were dropped on Iraq in the course of just
42 days. This is roughly equivalent to one-fourth of the total bomb tonnage dropped on Germany during the entire Second World War.
The Iraqi casualty totals were estimated at 135,000. Much of Iraq's conscript army was wiped out, with soldiers incinerated from
the air or buried alive in their trenches. Hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, of course, died as a result of the systematic destruction
of the country's infrastructure.
On the so-called Highway of Death, the US launched wave after wave of bombings against a defenseless, miles-long column of vehicles,
carrying Iraqi troops as well as civilians withdrawing from Kuwait on the orders of the Hussein government, which announced that
it was complying with a UN Resolution demanding the withdrawal.
As we stated in response to this war crime:
The US war against Iraq is among the most terrible crimes of the twentieth century, a slaughter that future generations will
look back on with shame. It has demonstrated that the ruling class of so-called democratic America is just as capable of mass
murder as the Nazis. [4]
The Wall Street Journal responded to the Gulf War with an editorial that stated:
For America's ruling elite, long at each other's throats, the path should be clearer now to reforming a working consensus about
the US's world role. Some of the policy-making world's most divisive issues now look settled. Force is a legitimate tool of policy;
it works. For the elites themselves, the message is America can lead, stop whining, think more boldly. Starting now. [5]
We understood this editorial, by the mouthpiece of US finance capital, as an accurate reflection of the pathological triumphalism
prevailing within the American bourgeoisie.
The 11th Plenum of the International Committee was held on March 5, 1991, less than a week after the end of the Gulf War. Its
opening report stated:
The American bourgeoisie is serving notice that American imperialism will seek through force to overcome problems arising from
the protracted economic decline of the US. For all the problems of American capitalism -- the decay of its industrial base, the
loss of its overseas markets, the massive trade deficits and budget deficits, the collapse of its banking system, the gangrenous
growth of social ills -- the bourgeoisie believes it has found an answer: Force!
The report quotes the extremely relevant passage from Anti-Dühring , written 113 years earlier, in which Engels delivered
a Marxist response to Dühring's claim that force was the decisive element in history:
...its own productive forces have grown beyond its control and, as if necessitated by a law of nature, are driving the whole
of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution. And if the bourgeoisie now make their appeal to force in order to save the collapsing
"economic situation" from the final crash, this only shows that they are laboring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the
delusion that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation"; this only shows that they imagine, just
as Herr Dühring does, that by making use of "the primary," "the direct political force," they can remodel those "facts of the
second order," the economic situation and its inevitable development; and that therefore the economic consequences of the steam-engine
and the modern machinery driven by it, of world trade and the banking and credit developments of the present day, can be blown
out of existence by them with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles. [6]
Substitute computerization for the steam engine and smart bombs and cruise missiles for Krupp guns and Mausers and this statement
stands as a fitting refutation of the triumphalist rantings of the US ruling class in the wake of the Gulf War.
... ... ...
Moreover, in the context of the Gulf War, the call for revolutionary defeatism from the standpoint of fighting the US military
to the last Iraqi was senseless and reactionary. The military balance of forces was such that -- outside of the revolutionary mobilization
of the masses of the Middle East and the working class in the US and beyond -- the military victory of the US was virtually assured.
More fundamentally, it betrayed a complete disdain for and hostility to the fight against war based upon the struggle of the working
class. It was entirely bound up with the Pabloite perspective that one or another form of "armed struggle," waged by non-proletarian
forces, was the substitute for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class internationally, and particularly in the advanced
capitalist countries.
The most decisive response of the ICFI to the Gulf War, US imperialism's "unipolar moment" and the march toward the restoration
of capitalism and dissolution of the USSR, was the calling of the Berlin Conference against imperialist war and colonialism.
... ... ...
The war ushered in a period of capitalist disequilibrium that would last for three decades, dominated by capitalist crisis and
overshadowed by the successful October 1917 Revolution in Russia, calling into question the very survival of the capitalist order.
The absence, however, of revolutionary parties -- particularly in Europe -- on a par with the Bolsheviks in Russia, allowed the
bourgeoisie to defeat a series of revolutionary struggles. But they were unable to create a new equilibrium to replace what was shattered
by 1914.
The rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, led by Stalin, and the terrible degeneration of the Communist International as
it was subordinated to the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country" and Moscow's maneuvers with imperialism, led to a series
of catastrophic defeats, above all in Germany. The coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, without a shot being fired, exposed the
counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism, leading Trotsky to found the Fourth International.
The document establishes that the ability of the bourgeoisie to achieve a new equilibrium in the aftermath of World War II, which
they could not do following World War I, was based not merely on the rise of US imperialism as a hegemonic power, but also the indispensable
role of Stalinism. It opposed and sabotaged the revolutionary struggles of the working class in the aftermath of the war, particularly
in Italy, France and Greece. In Eastern Europe, its establishment of so-called buffer states served not only to suppress the working
class and any genuine struggle for socialism, but also to pacify a fractious region that had been a source of European instability
since the dawn of the 20th century.
The equilibrium established at the end of World War II, however, as the document makes clear, was mined with its own contradictions.
Its revival of world trade and rebuilding of capitalism in Europe and Japan led to the gradual decline of US hegemony, leading to
mounting US deficits which, by 1985, had transformed America into a debtor nation.
Turning to the crisis in the United States, the manifesto sketches out a portrait that seems altogether contemporary:
Not a single significant piece of social legislation has passed through Congress in more than two decades [now we can say
five decades ]. Massive budget cuts have destroyed what remains of the old social programs. The crime statistics are merely
the most obvious symptoms of the malignant state of social relations. Amidst rapidly growing unemployment and, for those who still
have jobs, declining wages, the state of education, housing and medical care is nothing less than catastrophic.
A third of the population is functionally illiterate. Not even the mass media can avoid reporting on a daily basis some of
the more spectacular 'horror stories' of lives destroyed by the impact of the social crisis: homeless people freezing in cardboard
boxes, cancer victims being denied treatment because they have no medical insurance and unemployed workers and their families
committing suicide. [10]
... ... ...
The manifesto warned that these conflicts were being manipulated and exploited by the imperialist powers, while capitalism sought
to divert popular indignation over social inequality into the blind alley of national and ethnic conflict.
The ability of reactionary petty-bourgeois demagogues to agitate for communal violence it said, "is to be attributed not to the
intellectual and moral power of nationalism, but to the political vacuum left by the prostration of the traditional organizations
of the working class, which offer no way out of the crisis of the capitalist system."
Between the calling of the conference on May 1, 1991 and its convening on November 16, events moved very rapidly, with Croatia
and Slovenia both declaring their independence on June 25 of that year. Macedonia followed suit soon after, and the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
began its fragmentation into warring ethnic cantons. Armed clashes had broken out, particularly around the coastal city of Dubrovnik.
US Army combat engineer vehicle demolishes a Bosnian Serb bunker near Dubrave, January 1996
The promotion of virulent ethno-chauvinism and national separatism was led by former bureaucrats of Yugoslavia's ruling League
of Communists. They sought, on the one hand, to divide and suppress the Yugoslav working class, which had carried out a wave of mass
strikes against the austerity measures imposed by the IMF as part of capitalist restoration. On the other, they were driven to carve
out ethnic states in order to forge their own independent relations with imperialism as a new ruling class of comprador capitalists.
In his report to the conference, comrade North pointed to the attitude adopted by the Pabloite leader Ernest Mandel, who advocated
unconditional support for the self-determination of Croatia, regardless of the character of the regime. Mandel moreover issued a
call for direct imperialist intervention, denouncing Serbian chauvinism, while turning a blind eye to Croatian chauvinism.
This position dovetailed neatly with that of German imperialism, which was backing Croatian and Slovenian independence as part
of a post-reunification reassertion of its power in Europe. German imperialism was returning to the scenes of its crimes in 1914
and 1941, unilaterally defying the United States, the United Nations and the European Commission.
The Berlin conference adopted a resolution titled "On the Defense of the Working Class in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union"
which stated the following:
Everywhere rival capitalist cliques are stirring up nationalism and chauvinism, in order to incite the workers against each
other and to preempt an uprising against the old and new oppressors. The bloodbath in Yugoslavia is a result of these policies.
This war has nothing to do with the right of nations to self-determination. Serbian and Croatian nationalists are merely fighting
to secure for themselves a larger portion of the exploitation of the working class. [19]
The history of Yugoslavia, its rise and fall, could be the subject for an entire school, as could the national question and the
slogan of "self-determination." Clearly that cannot be accomplished in this lecture.
... ... ...
Not only the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, but more fundamentally, the development of capitalist
globalization, gave rise to a new type of nationalist movement, seeking the dismemberment of existing states -- including those that
emerged out of the previous national struggles against colonialism -- to further the interests of rival bourgeois factions in establishing
the most advantageous relations to imperialism and transnational capital.
This was patently the case in Yugoslavia, where the first impulse to break up the existing federation came from Slovenia and Croatia,
the wealthiest regions of the country, where local ruling elites calculated that they could fare better by breaking with the poorer
republics and establishing their own independent ties to European governments, banks and corporations.
Similar considerations have motivated a whole series of national separatist movements, including in Europe, in the cases of the
right-wing Northern League in Italy and Catalan nationalism in Spain.
... ... ...
In conclusion: the so-called "Unipolar Moment" of 1990 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the launching of
the Gulf War, marked the collapse of the post-World War II equilibrium, established on the basis of the hegemony of American capitalism
and the collaboration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. It signaled the beginning of a new period of uninterrupted war, the growth
of inter-imperialist rivalries, and inevitably, a global rise in the class struggle and socialist revolution.
... .. ...
Footnotes:
[1] The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Perspectives Resolution of the International Committee
of the Fourth International , (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p. 66.
[2] Fareed Zakaria, "The Self-Destruction of American Power," Foreign Affairs , Vol. 98, No. 4, (July/August 2019)
[3] Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs , Vol. 70, No. 1, (1990/1991), pp. 23–33
[4] The Bulletin , March 1, 1991, "Bush is Guilty of Mass Murder"
[5] Cited in Desert Slaughter, The Imperialist War Against Iraq , (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), p. 232.
[6] Karl Marx Frederick Engels, Collected Works , Vol. 25, p. 153.
[7] The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, The Transitional Program , (New York: Labor
Publications, 1981), p. 20.
[8] Workers League Internal Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 15, p. 31.
[9] Workers League Internal Bulletin , Vol. 5, No. 1, p. 2.
[10] Oppose Imperialist War & Colonialism, Manifesto of the International Committee of the Fourth International , (Detroit:
Labor Publications, 1991), p. 12.
[11] Ibid., p. 24.
[12] The Fourth International , Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall-Winter 1992, p. 11.
[13] Ibid., p. 7.
[14] Ibid., p. 9.
[15] Ibid., p. 10
[16] Ibid., p. 14
[17] Ibid., p. 13.
[18] Oppose Imperialist War & Colonialism , p. 16.
[19] The Fourth International , Vol. 19, No. 1, p. 38.
[20] On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats , Iskra, No. 33, Feb. 1, 1903, Lenin, Collected Works , Vol.
6, pp. 326–329.
"... As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become
lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime. ..."
"... By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order. ..."
"... Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist, but
he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and
relaxation of international tensions. ..."
"... The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater
the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than
hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's.... ..."
"... In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral aspects
of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity. ..."
Note to Self: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War *
Harry Dexter White... George Kennan... George Marshall... Arthur Vandenberg... Paul Hoffman... Dean Acheson... Harry S Truman...
Dwight D. Eisenhower... Gerald Ford... George Shultz
The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.
By George F. Kennan
The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership "won the cold war" is intrinsically
silly.
The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political
upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and
become lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime.
These thoughts found a place in my so-called X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, from which the policy of containment is
widely seen to have originated. This perception was even more clearly expressed in a letter from Moscow written in 1952, when
I was Ambassador there, to H. Freeman Matthews, a senior State Department official, excerpts from which also have been widely
published. There were some of us to whom it was clear, even at that early date, that the regime as we had known it would not last
for all time. We could not know when or how it would be changed; we knew only that change was inevitable and impending.
By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order.
Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist,
but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization
and relaxation of international tensions.
The downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960, more than anything else, put an end to this hope. The episode humiliated Khrushchev
and discredited his relatively moderate policies. It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on
a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.
The U-2 episode was the clearest example of that primacy of military over political policy that soon was to become an outstanding
feature of American cold war policy. The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles
over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the
greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to
delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's....
In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral
aspects of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity.
Early in my time in the service, when I had time to think being at a remote station I decided the west had the marked economic
advantage, particularly as the green revolution permitted some higher level of nutrition security.
Later on I recall discussions where the collapse of the Soviet Union was assured but would take in to the 21st century to occur.
The big question then was "would a nuclear exchange occur in the way of a peaceful collapse".....
The presence of the A Bomb in some ways prevented war in other encouraged intrigue and small scrapes in to each other's spheres.
There was a bit of the Divine in the world getting through the Cold War.
The Berlin wall came down as hoped but 25 years earlier than I expected.
KENNAN Was a lucky guy. He hit the right notes at the right time and then as he got second thoughts and better vision. Like yugoslaving
peoples China in 1949
He was side tracked and then sent out to ivy pastures
Nonsense. The moment to engage was 1953 -54 and yes a goo regime blocked it
But it was Truman that crossed the parallel in 1950 and tried to liberate north Korea
It was Kennedy that preferred brinksmanship to real engagement. Brush wars and regime change to accommodation. Missile racing
to sensible unilateralism
Yes LBJ was an ignorant oaf on foreign policy. But it was Nixon that finally used PRC as Yugo twenty years too late of course
The cold war was invented by democrats and exploited by republicans for domestic shindiggery. Tragicomedy cinescope scaled
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now, American historians were mistaken at the
end of the 1980s. There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was
about. If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet
ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking
policy steps to carry on the Cold War.
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
Many voice conflicting judgments, but an impartial look back on history produces the unequivocal conclusion: yes,
mistakes and shortcomings were many, but without perestroika the world would have never been what it is today
MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. Thirty years after the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on a policy of
reforms that would go down in history under a name sounding very oddly to a foreign ear - perestroika - Russians are
discussing those events of their country's recent history again. Many voice conflicting judgements, but an impartial
look back on history produces the unequivocal conclusion: yes, mistakes and shortcomings were many, but without
perestroika the world would have never been what it is today.
On April 23, 1985 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party gathered for its historic full-scale meeting to
set course towards what was described as fundamental reorganization and acceleration of the Soviet Union's economic
development after a long period of what was condemned as stagnation. The new course, originally expected to overhaul
and invigorate the Soviet system, ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The gist of what happened
then was simple: at the very top a decision was a made the people are free to express their thought in public and for
that they will neither risk losing their life or go to jail or even go jobless," says the founder of the Yabloko
party, Grigory Yavlinsky. "There emerged the freedom of speech. The feeling of fear vanished. Full stop. All other
processes that followed were nothing but consequences. The previous political system was built on falsehoods. The
advent of truth caused a lethal effect on that system, and it fell apart."
"Perestroika's worst problem was there was no strategic planning. The reform plan and its end goal were very
unclear all along," Sergey Filatov, the former chief of staff of Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin told TASS.
"Without a plan the policy was doomed to fail."
And still, Filatov said, perestroika caused a tremendous impact: it triggered reforms and showed the people that
changes were possible even under the old system.
"Perestroika was an intricate process," says Aleksei Makarkin, the first deputy president of the Political
Technologies Centre. "It was first a belated attempt to reform the economy, then the ensuing chaos, and ultimately an
attempt to defuse popular anger with political reform. The process eventually broke bounds. It all ended with the
collapse of the country. Gorbachev merely tried to make that process controllable more or less," Makarkin told TASS.
Gorbachev was forced to launch economic reforms, because the main engine that kept the Soviet economy going was
the export of oil. When oil prices slumped, something had to be done right away," Makarkin recalled. "His
predecessors had drawn up no strategic plans. Nobody dared touch the system. Later, when some steps began to be taken
at last, it turned out that no one had the slightest idea of how to go about that business. Conflicting decisions
followed in quick succession. First, an attempt was made to speed up economic development and diversify the economy
at a time when oil prices plummeted. In 1987 the attempt failed. Other remedies began to be tried. Some traces of a
free market economy began to develop, such as cooperatives in the services and public catering. Some components of a
controlled market economy cropped up."
The rapprochement with the West under Gorbachev was started with a far-reaching aim, Makarkin believes. In that
situation the Soviet economy was no longer capable of carrying the burden of the Cold War and the arms race. "Without
that no rapprochement might have ever happened. Also, there was the war in Afghanistan that had to be curtailed."
"In general, the Gorbachev era in home and foreign policies was that of haste, inconsistency, belated decisions
and forced moves. In the meantime, the people's living standards slumped and protest sentiment soared. Attempts to
woo the general public reached nowhere. In 1987-1988 social discontent soared and Boris Yeltsin emerged as its
embodiment."
"Hoping to ease tensions in society political reforms were declared only to cause centrifugal processes," Makarkin
recalls. "As a result, the Soviet republics began to drift ever farther apart - some before the August 1991 coup, and
others after. A counter-attempt to create something like a federation or confederation drew strong objections from
the hard-line conservatives, which led to the country's utter collapse.
But perestroika should not be painted only in dark colours, Makarkin said.
"One should remember that Gorbachev gave the people freedom - first, economic, and then political. For instance,
the freedom to travel out of the country and back: something everybody takes for granted. It was under Gorbachev that
the Church regained full legitimacy. Lastly, the freedom of speech, which has long become a fact of life."
"Also, Gorbachev largely takes the credit for avoiding a large-scale civil war and chaos and total chaos in a vast
country, however tragic the unrest in Tbilisi, Vilnius and Nagorno-Karabakh of those days may still look these days.
He decided against the extreme scenario implying the use of force, which many interpreted as a sign of weakness. It
should be remembered: those who dared use force merely accelerated the country's collapse."
The policy of perestroika proclaimed in the Soviet Union in 1985 has caused more harm than good, say 55% of
Russians, as follows from a Levada poll held in March. In contrast to this, ten years ago 70% said perestroika was a
bad choice.
"... There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was about. ..."
"... If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking policy steps to carry on the Cold War. ..."
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now,
American historians were mistaken at the end of the 1980s.
There had been no winning of the
Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was about.
If the
Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the
Soviet Union and Soviet ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or
with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking policy steps to carry on the Cold
War.
"... No, America lost the Cold War. We may be richer than when it started, but a larger portion of our incomes go to the government . Even worse, the United States now leads the world in imprisonment –not just by rate but in absolute terms as well, with 1 out of every 150 Americans behind bars. This is largely a consequence of the War on Drugs, which is a war the American government wages upon its own citizens. In the years of the Cold War and since, we have become substantially less free. ..."
As everyone should know by now but probably does not, this is the twentieth anniversary of
the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first breach in that wall set off a chain reaction that would
eventually topple Communist governments and liberate people across half of Europe. It would
also end the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Block, substantially diminishing the
possibility for nuclear annihilation. However, when people say that the West–or more
particularly, America–won the Cold War, I'm not exactly sure what they mean.
Of course, America still exists as a country while the Soviet Union does not, but in a war
that is supposedly about ideas and ideals, victory must me something more than outlasting your
opponent.
I think the more appropriate way to look at the matter is to ask: who has benefited the most
from the end of the Cold War? Clearly, it is the peoples of East Germany, Poland, Estonia, etc.
that have gained the most. They are far richer than they were twenty years ago, and more
importantly they are able to speak and think as they please without fear of imprisonment,
torture, and possibly death at the hands of their governments. Even Russia, which is still far
from free, is a much freer place than it was under the Soviets. Dissident journalists do still
turn up missing, but to be known as a dissident journalist in the Soviet Union was almost an
impossibility. The post-Communist states all have a long way to go to complete freedom, but
with few exceptions , they are all now much
closer to that ideal than they were twenty years ago.
But can we say that the people of the United States also won the Cold War? Sadly, I
do not believe so. After World War II, the United States' standing army likely would have
shrunk back to the small peacetime numbers that existed for most of our history if it weren't
for the Cold War. Instead, the U.S. military spread across the world, allegedly to keep the
country free from the horrors of Communism. Ironically, keeping the people of America free
required enslaving a large percentage of her young men through the country's first peacetime
draft. And of course, soldiers must be housed, equipped, fed, and paid, which required a higher
level of taxation than Americans were used to in peacetime. Twenty years ago, the United States
could have reversed this course and reaped the peace dividend, but instead the government
pressed ahead and extended American influence into the former Soviet Block–taking on new
powers and responsibilities along the way.
No, America lost the Cold War. We may be richer than when it started, but a larger portion
of our incomes go to the government .
Even worse, the United States now leads the world in imprisonment
–not just by rate but in absolute terms as well, with 1 out of every 150 Americans behind
bars. This is largely a consequence of the War on Drugs, which is a war the American government
wages upon its own citizens. In the years of the Cold War and since, we have become
substantially less free.
One right that is still largely intact is the Freedom of Religion, but most versions of
American Christianity today bear little resemblance to the teachings found in the Gospels. In
this country today, people tend to worship the American Jesus , more known for killing
"hajis" than offering salvation. Christianity has become a state religion in this country as it
was for the Roman Emperor Constantine, and it is put to the same use of justifying military
power. Perhaps even worse than using the Prince of Peace for war, the president (provided he is
of the right party, of course) is now viewed by most as an avatar of God on Earth if not God
himself. Many American Christians have rendered everything unto Caesar and have nothing left
for God.
The world is a far freer place than it was twenty years ago, but America is not. Kierkegaard
once wrote "What slave in chains is as unfree as a tyrant!" As the tyrant of the world,
America is enslaved to all. Truly, America has gained the world, but lost her soul.
And yet we had plenty of (perhaps more) morality laws before the War on
Drugs
Perhaps the problem is that the government does not defend its borders (well, that and the
intelligence agencies have long funded some operations with drug money look at
Afghanistan!)?
Not everything illegal has a special allure, it really depends on enforcement of the
law.
And, John, a lot of Eastern Europe is NOT better off than it was 20 years ago, particularly
now that their speculative bubbles have burst. The signs are shinier, there are more decent
restaurants, but many other economic, social, and moral declines. And East Europeans have
gained freedom in many ways, but lost it in others.
People forget that many of the anti-Communist movements like the New Forum activists in the
DDR or Solidarnosc in Poland claimed they were pro-socialist (just for a more democratic,
participatory regime). The original point was not joining NATO and mass privatisation, but
rather civil liberties, and, sometimes, true conservative principles (pro-church, rediscovering
a spiritual mission of their people). But church attendance has increased slightly while
(corporal, at least) immorality has increased significantly! What gain is that? Much of the
national infrastructure was stolen by oligarchs who took the money to Switzerland, much others
were sold to foreigners.
Basically, (most of) East Europe has been absorbed into the control of the international
financial elite (or NWO or whatever you prefer to term it).
There are some very secular, more generous welfare states with considerably more civil
liberties. Of course they have their own problems, but that is not the source of our War of
Terror, War on Drugs, USA Patriot Act, etc. Paleoconservatives are too often naifs in
suggesting, essentially, that some lead us on the road to Hell with good intentions. It is
actually direct corruption in our govt that is the source of all our greatest national
catastrophes.
I found a figure for Cuba. The 2005 official statistics put it at about 490 per 100K, so
about 70% the US rate – still high, but no cigar. Oh I see a more recent (2008?) rate of
531, but still keeping pace with the US at about 70% its rate. That is a British univeristy
study – they estimate the Sudanese rate about 1/20 the US rate (so they had a civil war,
but they aren't totalitarian, what did you think?). Zimbabwe is given as about 1/5 the US rate.
The link, if it works to post it here-
Thomas, were you referring to England and the continental welfare
states with their anti free speech laws, confiscatory taxation and intrusive regulation of
every stage of life? Welfare states must be coercive in order to function. That's why
conservatives off all types abhor them.
The percentage of population in incarceration can be a deceptive statistic. States lie about
these things for a start. Totalitarian states like Cuba and China have the option of simply
killing offenders and of course many people just flee state control.
The US has a large degree of incarceration due to the popularity of "Get tough on drug
offender" legislation. We have a large criminal underclass in this country and after decades of
revolving door justice, the public just got fed up. It may not be humane, but it works. That's
democracy for you.
By the way, there is no system more involved in the criminal justice system than our welfare
bureaucracy. Most criminals are born into to welfare, graduate to truancy and addiction and
then crime, all under the watchful eye of social workers, guidance counselors, school
psychologists, court appointed counselors and probation officers, etc. etc. But this shouldn't
take any of the luster off welfare states, right?
Actually, China records their executions, they do not just shoot
criminals on sight. Neither does Cuba. And neither of those countries would qualify as the top
10 or 20 draconian, authoritarian states (i.e., where citizens shake in fear of the police) at
the moment.
England is widely known to be the most surveillance over its population, but it also has the
weakest welfare state in Western Europe!!!! Scandinavia has much more freedom in general and
much stronger welfare. Your attempt to make some sort of correlation is ridiculous. None of
these countries has a PATRIOT ACT, where you can be deemed an enemy and held indefinitely.
Britain has tried several times to enact something similar, but the Lords always block it. It
would be absurd in Germany even.
The United States is simply no longer a beacon of civil liberties even compared with true
welfare states. Sorry.
And if you are worried about the existence of a criminal underclass, you can probably blame
the extreme inequalities of wealth, the co-existence of hyper-First World and quasi-Third World
elements. All of Latin America has the same, though their welfare states are rarely very
advanced. I think you would find the same trend in Africa.
Mind you, I don't want to be like Sweden. I would prefer America to return to the 50s (not
entirely, but overall it would be an improvement). In the 50s there was a more even
redistribution of wealth and less nanny statism because there was more direct dirigisme. The
State was more involved in industrial planning and regulated trade and financial institutions.
Individuals paid less tax because corporations paid more. If the economy is planned such that
productive employment is a priority, then you can maintain a stable working class. If you take
that away, like the US and UK have done, then you get a permanent underclass with no prospects
of a stable life.
The problem with the 1950's is that they inevitably evolve into the
1960's. And soon we're where we are now. That's the way of welfare states, they introduce such
dependency, indolence and corruption that they just grow. But hey they always have their
defenders. As for the lack of a Patriot Act in Europe, you must be kidding. The least you could
do is read the British press. British subjects can be criminally charged for suggesting that
heterosexual couples make better adoptive parents than homosexuals. The French police do as
they please, and always have. The British do have preventative detention.
Nobody said that the Chinese and or Cubans shot people out of hand. But they do shoot people
rather than feed them for long periods, as we do. You can believe their statistics if you want
to.
Our underclass remains a dangerous nuisance despite public education, taxpayer supported
charity care, a multitude of Federal and State programs and affirmative action. Of course we
are importing more every day, adding to the income disparity you speak of. Perhaps we should
deport people to level out the disparity a bit. What do you think?
I like your idea of our no longer being a beacon. It's attracting the wrong sort.
Yes, of course we should deport people. Illegal immigration is not the
source of the US socioeconomic problems, but it compounds them by a serious factor.
Being a former resident of Houston, where parts of the city (probably the most red-voting
major city in the US) were literally crawling with illegals who undercut everyone else's wages
(that's why they are here), I can attest a bit to the corrupting effect this has on everyone
involved.
"... Westad faults Truman for being unwilling or unable to extend Franklin Roosevelt's friendly policy toward the USSR. ..."
"... "The Soviet assistance program for China was not only the biggest Moscow ever undertook outside its own borders," Westad writes. "It was also, in relative terms, the biggest such program undertaken by any country anywhere, including the US Marshall Plan for Europe." Within a decade following this generosity, they almost fought a nuclear war. ..."
"... WESTAD ALSO wrote a book on the fall of détente, for which he distinctly blames Americans. "Nixon and Kissinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept," he writes. "Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever." This is where Gaddis's immersion in American documents might have been helpful. Most Americans, at least on the anti-détente side, were worried not that the Soviet Union was at parity with the United States, but that it had actually exceeded America's capabilities. However wrongheaded and overly alarmist that perspective was, its importance in explaining American behavior should not be overlooked. ..."
"... Westad will have none of it. "Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine," he writes. "On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. . . . The turn toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed unimaginable." Pages later, he adds, ..."
"... Eisenhower lacked the imagination and political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin's death. This is a provocative portrayal of Eisenhower, a welcome antidote to the revisionism that can approach hagiography. But it is undercut by Westad's slight documentation. ..."
"... Cold War triumphalism has had pernicious effects on American foreign policy. A straight line can be drawn from the idea that Ronald Reagan's military buildup and assertive rhetoric ended the Cold War to the fantasy that the United States could rebuild the Middle East. The prominence of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration was due largely to the widespread belief that they had been right in seeing the transformative potential of American power during the Cold War. Though Donald Trump was able, in the Republican primaries in 2016, to counter delusions of American omnipotence with delusions of American seclusion, the messianic streak still runs strong in the Republican Party and in segments of the Democratic Party. Its absence in current political debates should be seen as temporary. When it inevitably arises again, trouble will ensue. "We all lost the cold war," Gorbachev once said. The difficulty arises when one party thinks it won. ..."
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History
(New York: Basic Books, 2017), 720 pp., $35.00.
IN 2005
, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis released his book,
The Cold War: A New History
. Glowing
reviews of the book followed in the
New York Times
and
Foreign Affairs
. Among the few dissenters was Tony Judt, a
New York University historian who died in 2010. Judt had opposed the Iraq War, when so many other intellectuals -- including
Gaddis -- joined in the delusions that George W. Bush could, should and would democratize the Middle East. By 2005, those fantasies
were discredited by events in Mesopotamia (though Gaddis was unchastened, arguing in the American Interest
as late as 2008
that the senior goal of American foreign policy should be "ending tyranny").
In the
New York Review of Books
, Judt argued that "John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of America's cold war: as
seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers." However brilliant his
works had been during the Cold War, Gaddis became an American triumphalist once the Berlin Wall collapsed. He had comparatively
little understanding of the Soviet experience and, most egregiously, didn't seem to care much about the enormous damage both
superpowers inflicted on what was then called the Third World. The result, Judt argued, was that the Cold War was "a story still to
be told."
With Odd Arne Westad's new book, the story is now told. Westad is the coauthor of several books on the Cold War, as well as
coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War
. He also wrote
The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times
, which won the Bancroft Prize. As its title indicates,
The Global Cold War
suggested that the Cold War was very much a globe-spanning conflict, migrating into areas far beyond the borders of the two
superpowers.
His new book integrates that focus on the developing world with a more traditional emphasis on the great powers. It is aimed at a
general rather than a scholarly audience, with far fewer footnotes or archival research than his previous works (more on that
later).
The Cold War: A World History
is told chronologically, but unlike most books on the subject, it begins with the
right period.
THE FIRST
well-regarded book on the war written from a post–Berlin Wall perspective was Martin Walker's
Cold
War,
published in 1994. Like so many others to come, it began with the dissension in the Allied ranks in the closing years of
World War II. By beginning with an earlier period, Westad advances beyond that approach. He is able to devote some attention to the
ideological sources of the struggle, which began with Lenin's interpretation of communism, prioritizing global revolution and
antagonism toward the noncommunist world. "The Cold War was born from the global transformations of the late nineteenth century and
was buried as a result of tremendously rapid changes a hundred years later," he writes. Those changes include decolonization, the
ascension of the United States to world power and the gradual decline of scientific socialism, as well as the two world wars. "The
Great War jumpstarted the destinies of the two future Cold War Superpowers. It made the United States the global embodiment of
capitalism and it made Russia a Soviet Union, a permanent challenge to the capitalist world." Westad also makes the
thought-provoking claim, rather unusual in a book on the Cold War, that
it is therefore quite possible that the Cold War will be reduced in significance by future historians, who from their vantage
point will attach more significance to the origins of Asian economic power, or the beginning of space exploration, or the
eradication of smallpox.
Westad proceeds from there through all the stops along the way to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Separate chapters
examine India, China, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as summaries of Richard Nixon's diplomacy and the reigns of
Kennedy, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. That he manages to do all this in largely sequential fashion is doubly impressive.
The Cold War
evinces a lifetime of research and thought on the subject. Compelling ideas and valuable insights appear
frequently, such as: "In spite of their attractiveness on a global scale, neither the Soviet nor the US system was ever fully
replicated elsewhere." Or the explanation for communism's appeal in Vietnam: "One reason, ironically, was the integration of
Vietnamese elites into French culture and education, from whence the post-1914 generation took over the radicalization that was
prevalent among French youth, too." Or: "In Asia as in Europe, US policy in the early Cold War was more oriented toward the
expansion of capitalism as such than toward a unique preservation of US national economic advantage or the interests of specific US
companies."
Westad's assessment is that some sort of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable once the common
foe of Nazi Germany was extinguished. "Leaders of the two countries had seen each other as adversaries ever since the Russian
Revolution of 1917, and in some cases even before that," he writes. Illustrative of his measured approach throughout the book,
Westad assigns blame for the conflict to both parties, though not so much that he is unable to make moral distinctions. Stalin's
determination to establish control in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, contributed greatly to the breakdown of good relations
with Britain and the United States. But, he writes, "it was containment that made postwar conflict into a Cold War." The United
States was unwilling to grant the Soviets a traditional sphere of influence, let alone see them as a comparable power deserving of
commensurate respect. Seen from 2017, it might seem absurd that so many Europeans, even in England, looked upon the Soviet Union
with admiration and gratitude. But, however much Americans like to forget it, it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the
German military machine," in Winston Churchill's colorful phrase.
Westad faults Truman for being unwilling or unable to extend Franklin Roosevelt's friendly policy toward the USSR. Stalin might
have hunkered down and developed foreign-policy paranoia regardless of Truman's behavior, he concedes. "But the intensity of the
conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had
been made by the stronger power to entice Moscow toward forms of cooperation." This is somewhat unfair to Truman. The day he was
sworn in as president after Roosevelt's death, Truman said in a statement he intended "to carry on as he believed the President
would have done." There is little reason to doubt his sincerity. In From Roosevelt to Truman
, University of Notre Dame
professor Wilson Miscamble credibly argued that Truman began his presidency with open-mindedness toward the Soviets but was
convinced by events that cooperation was impossible. He wasn't alone.
ASIA, MEANWHILE
, experienced rapid decolonization. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were resolutely
opposed to traditional European imperialism, however much they acted as imperialist powers in their own regions. Combined with the
destitution of the former colonial powers, this meant that Asian nations were freer to pursue their own destinies. Of course, in
Japan and Korea, those destinies were determined by their occupiers, who molded these societies in their own images. It is a sign of
Westad's attentiveness to facts that, without ever succumbing to anything resembling American chauvinism, he can write something as
direct as: "The Korean War came from Stalin's change of mind. If he had not given the go-ahead to Kim, there would have been no
war."
Westad betrays no romanticism toward the Soviet Union or its communist admirers -- that might seem like a low bar, but there are
still scholars like Bruce Cumings who look fondly on the Marxist regimes -- but the book makes the clear-eyed observation,
Only by industrializing fast could a country become socialist and modern. The policy had an obvious appeal: in countries on
the European periphery, where there was a profound sense of having fallen behind, and in countries outside of Europe, such as China,
Korea, and Vietnam, rapid industrialization seemed indeed to be the way forward.
Westad might have added that the Soviet Communist Party's untouchable command of power was similarly appealing to political
leaders and intellectuals worldwide.
Immediately prior to
The Cold War
, Westad's latest book was a study of China's foreign policy since 1750. His mastery of
the subject is evident in a chapter called "China's Scourge." It is valuable not only for a discussion of how the Chinese Communist
Party managed to win the civil war against the Nationalists, but also for a succinct reminder of why and how swiftly relations
dissolved between the CCP and the Soviets. "The Soviet assistance program for China was not only the biggest Moscow ever undertook
outside its own borders," Westad writes. "It was also, in relative terms, the biggest such program undertaken by any country
anywhere, including the US Marshall Plan for Europe." Within a decade following this generosity, they almost fought a nuclear war.
Similarly incisive here is a chapter on India. Often neglected in general histories of the Cold War, India was for a while the
leader of the Non-Aligned nations. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was progressive, but intent on keeping his newly independent
country truly independent. This, of course, infuriated the Americans, for whom any friendliness with the USSR was interpreted as
hostility to them. And yet, when India's moral purity conflicted with its conflict with China, nationalism prevailed, leading to a
brief war. "In spite of its many efforts, even a country as a significant as India was never able to fully break away from the
global conflict molding its policies," Westad concludes.
WESTAD ALSO
wrote a book on the fall of détente, for which he distinctly blames Americans. "Nixon and Kissinger
had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept," he
writes. "Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in
the 1970s or ever." This is where Gaddis's immersion in American documents might have been helpful. Most Americans, at least on the
anti-détente side, were worried not that the Soviet Union was at parity with the United States, but that it had actually exceeded
America's capabilities. However wrongheaded and overly alarmist that perspective was, its importance in explaining American behavior
should not be overlooked.
Indeed, Westad's decision to reduce the research shown to the readers in this book makes some of his unorthodox judgments
difficult to credit. Most conspicuously, Westad assesses Dwight Eisenhower harshly, but without offering enough support for his
claims. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the evaluation of Ike was decidedly mixed. He was too complacent, it was said, too moderate and
timid. He favored a strategic posture built around nuclear weapons that led to an arms race. He failed to confront Joe McCarthy and
McCarthyism. He initiated the first of many ill-considered CIA interventions in foreign countries, in Guatemala and Iran. And he
added a religious dimension to the Cold War, which elevated the conflict beyond the already-dangerous levels that existed when he
took power in 1953.
That perception gave way in the 1980s to a consideration that Eisenhower was not complacent, but subtle. The opening of archives
in the 1970s convinced many that his was, as the political scientist Fred Greenstein put it in his 1982 book of the same name, "the
hidden-hand presidency." The popular historian Stephen Ambrose did much to further this view, first in 1981's
Ike's Spies:
Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
, and then in a biography, released in two volumes in 1983 and 1984. (Writing in the
New Republic
in 2006, the journalist John Judis observed that Ambrose's books "changed many a liberal's view of the general,"
counting himself among them.)
The revisionist view of Eisenhower has now become orthodoxy. He routinely numbers among historians' rankings of the top ten
presidents. Far from sharing the contemporary perception of him as popular but ineffectual -- "It's just like Eisenhower. The worse I
do, the more popular I get," JFK said after the Bay of Pigs disaster -- we like Ike as much as the people who wore his campaign
buttons. Celebrity architect Frank Gehry designed an Eisenhower memorial that Congress has funded to the tune of $100 million, to
sit across from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, on Washington's Independence Avenue.
Most scholars lean toward the view that Ike was a first-rate Cold War strategist. He balanced the budget thrice, halting the
unsustainable economic and military buildup that resulted from the Korean War. He set diplomatic precedents by meeting with Soviet
leaders and organizing purposeful summits. And he outflanked domestic hysteria, establishing a bipartisan commitment to a strategy
of containment. Predominant is the view expressed by Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman in their book, Waging Peace: How
Eisenhower Shaped a Cold War Strategy
:
Later events . . . have enhanced appreciation of his prudent and sober judgment. In a turbulent and dangerous stage of
East-West relations, with an untested and erratic Soviet leadership and a changing strategic environment, Eisenhower managed a
succession of crises and set a course that preserved both security and peace.
Westad will have none of it. "Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up
institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine," he writes. "On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. . . . The turn
toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed
unimaginable." Pages later, he adds,
If the president was not a Cold War hysteric, neither was he someone who could conceive of a world without the confrontation
with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower lacked the imagination and political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin's death. This is a provocative portrayal of Eisenhower, a welcome antidote to the revisionism that can approach hagiography. But it is
undercut by Westad's slight documentation.
Cold War triumphalism has had pernicious effects on American foreign policy. A straight line can be drawn from the idea that
Ronald Reagan's military buildup and assertive rhetoric ended the Cold War to the fantasy that the United States could rebuild the
Middle East. The prominence of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration was due largely to the widespread belief that
they had been right in seeing the transformative potential of American power during the Cold War. Though Donald Trump was able, in
the Republican primaries in 2016, to counter delusions of American omnipotence with delusions of American seclusion, the messianic
streak still runs strong in the Republican Party and in segments of the Democratic Party. Its absence in current political debates
should be seen as temporary. When it inevitably arises again, trouble will ensue. "We all lost the cold war," Gorbachev once said.
The difficulty arises when one party thinks it won.
Jordan Michael Smith is the author of the Kindle single
Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the
Post-Presidency
.
Harry Dexter White: Treasury Assistant Secretary* who was the major force behind the
Bretton Woods Conference and the institutional reconstruction of the post-World War II world
economy. He accepted enough of John Maynard Keynes's proposals to lay the groundwork for the
greatest generation of economic growth the world has ever seen. It was the extraordinary
prosperity set in motion by the Bretton Woods' System and institutions--the "Thirty Glorious
Years"--that demonstrated that political democracy and the mixed economy could deliver and
distribute economic prosperity.
George Kennan: Author of the "containment" strategy that won the Cold War.
Argued--correctly--that World War III could be avoided if the Western Alliance made clear its
determination to "contain" the Soviet Union and World Communism, and that the internal
contradictions of the Soviet Union would lead it to evolve into something much less dangerous
than Stalin's tyranny.
George Marshall: Architect of victory in World War II. Post-World War II Secretary of
State who proposed the Marshall Plan, another key step in the economic and institutional
reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II.
Arthur Vandenberg: Leading Republican Senator from Michigan who made foreign policy truly
bipartisan for a few years. Without Vandenberg, it is doubtful that Truman, Marshall,
Acheson, and company would have been able to muster enough Congressional support to do their
work.
Paul Hoffman: Chief Marshall Plan administrator. The man who did the most to turn the
Marshall Plan from a good idea to an effective aid program.
Dean Acheson: Principal architect of the post-World War II Western Alliance. That
Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and the United States reached broad consensus on how to
wage Cold War is more due to Dean Acheson's diplomatic skill than to any single other
person.
Harry S Truman: The President who decided that the U.S. had to remain engaged
overseas--had to fight the Cold War--and that the proper way to fight the Cold War was to
adopt Kennan's proposed policy of containment. His strategic choices were, by and large, very
good ones.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: As first commander-in-chief of NATO, played an indispensable role
in turning the alliance into a reality. His performance as President was less satisfactory:
too many empty words about "rolling back" the Iron Curtain, too much of a willingness to try
to skimp on the defense budget by adopting "massive retaliation" as a policy, too much trust
in the erratic John Foster Dulles.
Gerald Ford: In the end, the thing that played the biggest role in the rise of the
dissident movement behind the Iron Curtain was Gerald Ford's convincing the Soviet Union to
sign the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet Union thought that it had gained worldwide recognition
of Stalin's land grabs. But what it had actually done was to commit itself and its allies to
at least pretending to observe norms of civil and political liberties. And as the Communist
Parties of the East Bloc forgot that in the last analysis they were tyrants seated on thrones
of skulls, this Helsinki commitment emboldened their opponents and their governments'
failures to observe it undermined their own morale.
George Shultz: Convinced Ronald Reagan--correctly--that Mikhail Gorbachev's "perestroika"
and "glasnost" were serious attempts at reform and liberalization, and needed to be taken
seriously. Without Shultz, it is unlikely that Gorbachev would have met with any sort of
encouragement from the United States--and unlikely that Gorbachev would have been able to
remain in power long enough to make his attempts at reform irreversible.
*Also, almost surely
an "Agent of Influence" and perhaps an out-and-out spy for Stalin's Russia. If so, never did
any intelligence service receive worse service from an agent than Stalin's Russia did from
Harry Dexter White....
I'm reading "The
Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World
Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press))" by Benn Steil and
wanted to share this quote with you.
"As regards the economics White advocated, they were hardly Marxist. They were by this time
what would be described as thoroughly Keynesian. He insisted that government should take an
active role in supporting economic activity; certainly more so than was orthodox before the
Great Depression, but he never pushed for broad government control of the means of production.
His writings on international monetary affairs express a concern with the need to fashion a
system that "reduces the necessity of restrictions on private enterprise."As for White's
domestic politics, these were mainstream New Deal progressive, and there is no evidence that he
admired communism as a political ideology."
ReplyFebruary 15, 2019 at 12:49
jorgensen said...
Vannevar Bush pushed for government support of science after the Second
World War and should get some credit for America's scientific dominance through the Cold War.
ReplyFebruary 16, 2019 at 15:38
andres said... The above list is old hat, so to speak. I would add the following two
lists:
Russians Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War (for both sides):
1. Georgi Zhukov (Was an unbelievable s.o.b. during WWII, but did the right thing having the
Red Army side with Khruschev and Malenkov against Beria). 2. Nikita Khruschev (secret speech, ousting of Stalin's old cronies and final unwillingness to
go to war over Cuba outweigh Hungary and U-2 incident, imo). 3. Aleksandr Solshenitsyn (self-explanatory). 4. Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago is a better read than The Gulag Archipelago). 5. Roy Medvedev (Let History Judge). 6. Vasili Arkhipov (Don't Push the Button I). 7. Andrei Sakharov (self-explanatory). 8. Stanislav Petrov (Don't Push the Button II). 9. Mikhail Gorbachev (glasnost plus withdrawal from Afghanistan). 10. Boris Yeltsin (lousy president, but energetic opposition to August 1991 coup was
vital).
Americans Who Tried Their Best to Make the U.S. Lose the Cold War.
1. Douglas MacArthur. 2. John Foster Dulles. 3. Allen Dulles. 4. Barry Goldwater. 5. Robert McNamara/McGeorge Bundy/Maxwell Taylor/W.W. Rostow (joint award for Vietnam) 6. William Westmoreland (made it even worse). 7. Richard Nixon (carpet bomber in chief, plus undermined 1968 Vietnam peace talks). 8. Henry Kissinger (took over from JF Dulles as military coup enabler in chief, and nearly
pushed India to Russia's side after giving a blank check to Pakistan). 9. Ronald Reagan (was clearly pointed toward WWIII before Schultz and GHW Bush brought him
around).
(There are lots more, but I've tried to limit the list to those who were either in the
executive branch or came close (Goldwater). LBJ could also be included, but it is still being
argued whether he led his cabinet or his cabinet led him into Vietnam).
ReplyFebruary 16, 2019 at 22:52
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w:User:Coolcaesar /
United States Department of
JusticeUS 22:39 05.09.2019
(updated 23:51 05.09.2019) Get short URL
9 7 62 The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that Alexander Yuryevich Korshunov,
director for business development at Russia's United Engine Corporation, has been charged with
conspiring to steal trade secrets. The charge carries a potential prison sentence of 10 years.
Korshunov, 57, was arrested in Naples, Italy on August 30 alongisde 59-year-old Maurizio Paolo
Bianchi, on suspicion of industrial espionage. The court filing unsealed Thursday
in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio charges that the two "conspired and
attempted ... to steal and convey the confidential and proprietary information constituting
trade secrets of the Ohio-based Company A."
Bianchi was once the former director of Avio Aero, an Italian subsidiary of GE Aviation and
one of the world's largest aircraft engine suppliers. However, after he left that job to work
at Italian aerospace firm Aernova, he allegedly established a relationship with Korshunov, who
then worked at the Russian-state-owned UEC. According to the filing, Aernova had a contract at
the time with a UEC subsidiary named Aviadvigatel, a firm that specializes in engines for
commercial aircraft.
"It is alleged that between 2013 and 2018, Bianchi – on behalf of Korshunov –
hired current or former employees of GE Aviation's Italian subsidiary to do consulting work
related to jet engine accessory gearboxes for Bianchi and Korshunov," the DOJ
press release announcing the charges states. "The employees' statements of work typically
stated that the 'the holders of patent and intellectual property obtained as a result of the
work are the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.'"
"Throughout the consulting, employees allegedly used trade secrets owned by GE Aviation to
create the technical report. The effort focused on accessory gearboxes made by Avio Aero, which
are external engine components that provide power to systems such as hydraulic pumps,
generators and fuel pumps," the DOJ statement continues.
Following Korshunov's arrest Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it "a really
bad practice."
"In this case we're dealing with attempts at dishonest competition," he told reporters at
the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, noting the contract between the two firms is "a
normal global practice. It's open commercial work with European partners."
Following the Justice Department's announcement, the Russian Embassy in the US issued a
Thursday statement calling on the State Department to immediately recall its extradition
request for Korshunov.
""Certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have 'conspired' with key unknown
figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet
securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet
Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence. These securities,
originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of
September 11th
through the BoNY. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street
Journalas being experienced in the BoNY was tip of a three day operation, when these
securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.
The current conflict between the West and Russia, which has pushed Russia into the waiting
arms of China began due to the arrogance and short sightedness of the West.
At the tail end of the Cold War, West Germany and East Germany wanted to reunite. The then
Soviet Union (now Russia) would need to give its permission before this happened in accordance
with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. On February 9, 1990
then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested to the Soviet leaders that in return for
allowing West Germany and East Germany to reunite after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and
allowing a reunited Germany to remain in NATO, that NATO would not move 1 inch eastward towards
the then border of the Soviet Union.
While no written guarantee was provided to the Russian leaders, less than a week later,
Premier Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow reunification talks to begin between West Germany and
East Germany. Then, less than 1 month later in March of 1990, the U.S.
began planning to organize Eastern Europe into a sphere of U.S. influence and expanding
NATO to the very borders of the Soviet Union.
Despite the promises made by the West, in 1999 NATO agreed to the admission of Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. This was done despite vehement protests by the
Russian government which accused the West of reneging on the agreement reached by the Soviet
Union with Western Europe and the United States. The admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic was followed by the admission of several Eastern European countries in 2004. These
nations are Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Since then,
NATO in 2019 has threatened to expand its presence to the southern border of Russia by
officially recognizing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, North Macedonia and Ukraine as aspiring
members of NATO. This is a direct threat to the national security of Russia by placing, what
Russia feels, are hostile forces reminiscent of the German invasion of southern Russia in
1942.
"Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." – Winston
Churchill
This famous quote by Sir Winston Churchill is puzzling, as he was a serious student of
history. A close look at the history surrounding the relations between Russia and the world
would easily explain the suspicion that Russia has of the outside world.
Probably the most decisive moment in the forming of Russian distrust of foreigners has its
roots in the occupation of Russia by the Mongol Horde from 1240 A.D. to 1480 A.D.
Before the rise of Moscow as the principal city of the Rus, Kyiv, now the capital of
Ukraine, was the center of Russian civilization. In 1240 A.D., the Mongol Army under the
nominal command of Batu Khan sacked Kyiv and opened the door to the Mongol conquest of Russia
and the invasion of Europe. From 1240 A.D. to 1480 A.D., the Golden Horde ruled Russia. It was
during this time that the city of Moscow surrounded by a fortress, called a Kremlin on the
banks of the Moscow river became the enforcers of the Mongol Horde, and from 1328 the Horde's
tax collection surrogates.
In November 1989 East German students sit atop the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in
front of border guards. The destruction of the once-hated wall signaled the end of a divided
Germany.
The Tver rebellion in 1327 allowed Moscow to gain ascendancy over its rival cities in Russia
by supporting the Mongol's by putting down the Tver rebellion in 1328. As a result of Moscow's
support, the ruler of the Golden Horde granted the Russian cities of Novogorod and Kostroma as
duchies to Moscow, and later Tver itself after the leader of the rebellion was captured and
turned over to the Mongols; there he was quartered alive along with his son. The Mongols then
commissioned the Prince of Moscow to collect the yearly tribute that the Horde had imposed on
the subjugated cities, towns and villages of Russia.
This allowed Moscow to become the most powerful and principal city of Russia. Moscow was
able to increase its power over Russia by bringing under its controls those cities and areas
that were not able to meet their tax burden and adding them to the over lordship of Moscow.
This increased the power of Moscow so much that in 1480 A.D., at the Battle of the Ugra River,
The Duchy of Moscow under Ivan the Third was able to refuse payment of the required tribute to
the Golden Horde, and forced the Mongols to retreat. This battle marks the end of the rule of
Russia by the Golden Horde. The grandson of Ivan the III would at the age of 3 become the
Prince of Moscow, and upon reaching his majority he was crowned "Tsar of all the Russia's."
This was the first Tsar of Russia and the last competent ruler of the Rurikid line. Ivan the
4th was known as Ivan the Formidable and as Ivan the Fearsome in Russia. In the West, he is
known as "Ivan the Terrible."
In the last 200 years, Europe has invaded Russia 4 times.
There is a constant fear in Europe that Russia will invade Europe, and place Europe under
the domination of Moscow. Yet, if one reads the history of political relations between Russia
and Europe for the last 200 years, it is Russia that has had to fear Europe and with good
reason. Beginning with the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 to the Nazi invasion of 1941,
Russia has had to fight for her polity and her life many times. The most serious invasion of
these four invasions of Russia took place during the summer campaign in Southern Russia of
1942, lasting to the spring of 1943, which culminated in the Battle of Stalingrad.
So, unless there has been some serious change in the dynamics between Russia and the West,
Europe, with a population of 508 million and a GDP of
$18.8
trillion , has nothing to really fear conventionally from a Russia that has a population of
144.5 million people and a
GDP of
$1.578 trillion .
The Euromaidan movement and West's support for the Ukrainian revolution.
Euromaidan protestors. (Ivan Bandura)
The Euromaidan's Movement began as a result of the delay by the government of Viktor
Yanukovych of the association agreement with the European Union. The EU was offering Ukraine
$838 million in loans in return for major changes to Ukraine's laws and regulations. Russia was
offering $15 billion in loans and no demand for changes to its laws and regulations.
With Russia then being Ukraine's biggest trading partner, President Yanukovych at the last
minute decided to take Russia's offer and to remain outside the European Union. Europe, along
with the United States, launched a publicity campaign calling on the people of Ukraine to force
the government of Ukraine to change its position, and to sign the association agreement with
the EU.
In December of 2013, Senator's John McCain and Chris Murphy addressed Ukrainian crowds
urging them to continue to resist the government's decision to remain in the economic and
political orbit of Russia. On February 4th, 2014 Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland
and the American Ambassador to Ukraine in a leaked phone call discussed plans to help form an
interim government after the legitimate Ukrainian government had been dissolved.
In November of 2013, the EU Enlargement Commissioner, Štefan Füle, declared that
he was happy to see that democracy had reached a point where young people could demonstrate
peacefully and legally. On the same day, members of the European Parliament responsible for the
Eastern Partnership policy, Elmar Brok and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, warned Ukraine not to use
force against the protestors or there "would be consequences."
Shortly thereafter on February 22, 2014, the legitimate Ukrainian government was overthrown,
and the elected president of Ukraine had to flee for his life. It was after the overthrow of
the elected government of Ukraine that Russia annexed the Crimea.
The Crimea in Russian History
The Crimea has been a part of Russia since 1783 when Catherine the Great defeated the
Ottoman Empire, absorbed the Crimea and then built the cities of Sevastopol which became the
center of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and later on Simferopol which became the center of the
Tauride province. From 1921 to 1945, Crimea was the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist
Republic until 1945 when it became an Oblast of the Russian SSR.
Later, in 1954, in a move that was done to help Nikita Khrushchev in his attempt to solidify
Russian control over Ukraine, the Crimea was transferred from the Russian SSR Oblast to UkrSSR.
Khrushchev was then struggling with Soviet Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov for control of the
Russian Communist Party and saw an opportunity to woo the support of the Ukrainian Communist
Party boss, Oleksiy Kyrychenko. It was not until 1955 that Khrushchev was able to fully
consolidate his control over the Communist Party and the rule of the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from Russia,
and since the Crimea had been part of the Ukrainian Oblast, the Crimea became part of the new
nation of Ukraine.
Why the Crimea is important to Russia's national security and why a political solution is
necessary to end the Ukrainian crisis.
After the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and the establishment of a government hostile to
Russia, Vladimir Putin reacted to what he believed was an existential threat to the national
polity of Russia. A careful examination of recent history bears him out and explains why Russia
will not willingly allow the Crimea to fall under the political control of any other power.
The Crimea is the last natural militarily defensible obstacle to any invasion of southern
Russia. Before the German Army could begin its summer campaign in southern Russia in 1942, the
port city of Sevastopol in the Crimea had to be reduced in a long and costly siege. It is for
this reason that the summer campaign in southern Russia code-named " Blue ," was without the 11th Army when Blue was
kicked off on June 28, 1942.
The 11th Army was the Army that had been fighting in the siege of Sevastopol and had been
mauled so badly during the siege that 11th Army was prevented from participating in the 1942
summer campaign as had been planned for in Blue. This seriously weakened the 6th Army to where,
when it was locked in street to street fighting at Stalingrad later in the year, the 6th Army
did not have the 11th Army's strength and was unable to dislodge the Russian defenders from the
city.
Once past Crimea, there is no natural defense for Russian military forces until the Don
River to impede any invading force. From the Crimea to the Don there is only a flat plain that
is excellently suited for mechanized warfare. With NATO being so strategically aggressive, it
would be the height of military folly for Russia to allow the Crimea to be in the hands of any
foreign power.
With the West's actions being so strategically threatening to Russia since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, and the expansion of NATO to the political frontiers of Russia, Russia has
countered this by becoming closer economically and militarily closer to China, which is a more
long-range threat to Russia than the West is.
In order to repair the damage done to the relations between the West and Russia, a political
settlement is necessary to remove Russia from the embrace of China, settle the tensions between
the West and Russia, and bring Russia, finally, into the economic and political life of the
West.
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It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government
under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor,
Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the
same filmdom community outraged about Russia's supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003,
Spinning Boris , which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia.
The highly unpopular alcoholic politician benefited from a near universal media bias as virtually all the federation's news outlets
came under the control of the 'oligarchs' (in America known simply as billionaires) which his economic policies of mass privatization
of state industry enriched overnight.
Yeltsin initially polled at less than 10% and was far behind Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov until he became the recipient
of billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thanks to his corrupt campaign manager, Anatoly Chubais, now one of the most
hated men in all of Russia. After the purging of votes and rampant ballot-box stuffing, Yeltsin successfully closed the gap between
his opponent thanks to the overt U.S. meddling.
Spinning Boris was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who previously helmed an installment in the James Bond series, Tomorrow
Never Dies . The 1997 entry in the franchise is one of thousands of Hollywood films and network television shows exposed by journalists
Matthew Alford and Tom Secker as having been influenced or directly assisted by the Pentagon and CIA in their must-read book National
Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Based on evidence from documents revealed in Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) requests, their investigation divulges the previously unknown extent to which the national security complex
has gone in exerting control over content in the film industry. While it has always been known that the military held sway over movies
that required usage of its facilities and equipment to be produced, the level of impact on such films in the pre-production and editing
stages, as well as the control over non-military themed flicks one wouldn't suspect to be under supervision by Washington and Langley,
is exhaustively uncovered.
As expected, Hollywood and the military-industrial complex's intimate relationship during the Cold War is featured prominently
in Alford and Secker's investigative work. It is unclear whether HBO or Netflix sought US military assistance or were directly involved
with the national security state in their respective productions, but these are just two recent examples of many where the correlated
increase in geopolitical tensions with Moscow is reflected. The upcoming sequel to DC's Wonder Woman set to be released next
year , Wonder Woman 1984, featuring the female superhero " coming into conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War
in the 1980s ", is yet another. Reprising her role is Israeli actress and IDF veteran is Gal Gadot as the title character, ironically
starring in a blockbuster that will demonize the Eurasian state which saved her ethnicity from extinction. Given the Pentagon's involvement
in the debacle surounding 2014's The Interview which provoked very real tensions with North Korea, it is likely they are at
least closely examining any entertainment with content regarding Russia, if not directly pre-approving it for review.
Ultimately, the Western panic about its imperial decline is not limited to assigning blame to Moscow. Sinophobia has manifested
as well in recent films such as the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival where the extra-terrestrials who reach Earth seem more interested
in communicating with Beijing as the global superpower than the U.S. However, while the West forebodes the return of Russia and China
to greater standing, you can be certain its real fear lies elsewhere. The fact that Chernobyl and Stranger Things are
as preoccupied with portraying socialism in a bad light as they are in rendering Moscow nefarious shows the real underlying trepidation
of the ruling elite that concerns the resurgence of class consciousness. The West must learn its lesson that its state of perpetual
war has caused its own downfall or it could attempt a last line of defense that would inevitably conscript all of humanity to its
death as the ruling class nearly did to the world in 1914 and 1939.
It has now come to the stage where NATO cannot fight a ground war against Russia, China,
or even Iran. Since firstly, there would be huge opposition to such another crackpot piece of
military adventurism, in both the US and more so in its vassals. The Korean, Vietnam
(Indo-China), and Iraq wars ended the era of massive ground conflicts in which hundreds of
thousands of ground troops were involved.
More importantly was the draft, which met with massive opposition in the US itself.
Secondly there was the enormous cost of such a dubious venture. The cost of these wars led to
a run on the dollar as other states were cashing in their surplus dollars for gold, all of
which resulted to Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971. Empires, as
the US is learning, are expensive little items, and as the British also found out during
their long retreat, beginning with India.
NATO, like the EU bureaucracy, is little more than a job creation scheme for the otherwise
unemployable. It must be difficult to dream up a scheme in which these otherwise redundant
individuals can be employed in doing useful. But NATO like the EU is a bureaucracy, and
bureaucracies by their nature strive to exist and expand with no particular goals or
objectives to realise. It is just a matter or going through the motions: the means, the
routine becomes and end in itself. As Joseph Alois Schumpeter observed: " That in Egypt a
class of professional soldiers formed during the war against the Hyksos, persisted, even when
those were over, along with its warlike instincts and interests this military grouping
created by wars that required it, now created the wars in required."
Bittersweet
Who will plan economies: Financial managers (Trump and Wall St), or democratic governments
(Bernie)?
Bonnie Faulkner: If there were pressures to create a New International Economic Order in
the 1970s, what was this new order looking to achieve?
Michael Hudson: Other countries wanted to do for their economies what the United States
has long done for its own economy: to use their governments' deficit spending to build up
their infrastructure, raise living standards, create housing and promote progressive taxation
that would prevent a rentier class, a landlord and financial class from taking over economic
management.
In the financial field, they wanted governments to create their own money, to promote
their own development, just like the United States does. The role of neoliberalism was the
opposite: it was to promote the financial and real estate sector and monopolies to take
economic management away from government.
So the real question from the 1980s on was about who would be the basic planning center of
society. Would it be the financial sector – the banks and bondholders, whose interest
is really the One Percent that own most of the banks' bonds and stocks?
Or, is it going to be governments trying to subsidize the economy to help the 99 Percent
grow and prosper? That was the social democratic view opposed by Thatcherism and
Reaganism.
I didn't know that. I always thought it stand for 'Venom of America'. Or worse.
Robbobbobin
'It might help, Glasshopper, if you identify your sources on "the longstanding and increasing
oppression of Uigurs in Xinjiang".'
Erm:
Have you travelled all over the region as i have? Do you have friends who've married
into the community?
Patient "anecdotal" evidence bad, identifiable textbook assertion definitive? Ever thought
of becoming a medic?
DunGroanin
The highwater mark for the centuries long Anglo Imperialism is constantly reached across the
globe. Indian subcontinent, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia in the east. Afghanistan and
across back to the ME now the desperate bottom of the barrel petty caesars of the declining
Empire are now splashing around in the Med' – Boltons latest missive by twitter:
"All hands on deck in the campaign to stop Iran from funding terror, destabilizing the
globe, and breaking international sanctions. The illicit oil heading to Turkey on the Adrian
Darya 1 must not be allowed off-loaded in port or at sea."
!!!!!!!!!!!
How the fuck can anyone take the failing Empire at all seriously when one of its highly
placed unelected arseholes starts telling the World about what not to do with ONE fully laden
oil tanker, thoisands of miles from his homeland?? Who the fuck do they think they are
telling never mind talking to? And we are supposed to salute and say yes sir, will do,
whatever you say, massa.
Fuck 'em.
nottheonly1
Bolton is a mentally ill subject whose sense for reality is so much compromised,that he lives
in a fantasy world like anybody who believes to be Napoleon, or worse. He is constantly
projecting his own criminal activities onto others.
Part of his mental illness is that he is incapable to realize that nobody is taking him
serious anymore – but people that are mentally worse off then him. He and his fan base
belong into closed mental healthcare, where they can wear their Napoleon hats and hide their
hands under their jackets.
Father Beyond
My diagnosis of the life-condition of John Bolton is that he displays all the classic
attributes of the psychopath.
He tries to present a charming facade, behind which lies a
complete lack of empathy with human life, which to these warmongering delinquents, remains a
commodity to be disposed of in the satisfaction of their lusts and cravings for money, power,
influence and status, at the base of which lies a perversion of the dignity and worth of all
life, human or otherwise, which struggles to survive in the face of extinction on this
planet, which is the property of no-one yet the property of all.. He is a high priest of
Neo-liberalism and he expounds the "Monroe Doctrine" – which is but one of the
heretical doctrines of Imperialism. The criticisms being directed towards Andre Vitchek here
(and elsewhere) are unfounded and give the impression that these superior beings who mock him
from above, have never read any of his books, let alone given any serious consideration to
the issues he raises. I don't agree with all of his views, but it appears he displays more
courage and integrity than those who like to take cheap shots at him, seeking refuge in the
knowledge that few will even bother to challenge them. Just remember one thing – you
are as bad as the person you condemn. Looking into the mirror of your life-condition, you
will see the "clown", the 'muppet", the "idiot", the "racist" and the 'virtue signaller".
Call the next patient in please. . . . . .
Martin Usher
There are plenty more Boltons where he comes from. Most are a bit more subtle in their
approach but they still share the same goals.
I m
In all honesty and in reply to 'Father Beyond' i'm convinced these people are simply crazed
from watching too many superhero movies.
George
Another issue is what this means for the home populations of the Western nations. As the
Western ruling class finds it harder and harder to intimidate the countries it has been
bleeding, it will find its own formerly luxuriant position in danger and will start to demand
more and more from its lower classes. And since the threat of a worker's revolution (posed
very concretely by Russia and China in the first half of the 20th century) no longer applies,
the welfare state (formed as a concession to keep the proles in line) will become
increasingly decimated. Our ruling class no longer even has to pretend to care. In short, the
UK and US publics will start to become more and more like the foreign native populations
targeted by the West.
So it seems that the 'workers revolutions' were not 100% grassroots up risings, just as
today's "Colour Revolutions" often arise out of the hidden hand of various change agents and
NGO's whose cover is as providing humanitarian support etc.
The Welfare State may have been as you say a concession, but there could conceivably be
other reasons too maybe?
George
I think the Western governments, having had decades of practice and observation, know full
well not only to control the opposition and not only to lead it but to create it too. In a
way, all this is just an extension of capitalist consumerism. The idea is to find out what
everyone wants and then manufacture the image of it, but not the reality.
According to the Adam Curtis documentary, "Century of the Self", Edward Bernays, father of
the modern PR industry, was asked by cigarette manufacturers how to get women to smoke (in
those days it was considered a male activity and the cig industry figured it was missing out
on a huge potential market demographic). Bernays did a bit of research and found out that
what women wanted was to be more independent "like men". So Bernays staged a publicity stunt
whereby a number of young attractive women were to gather and light "torches of freedom"
– this info being delivered with maximum publicity throughout the media. So the day
comes, the women appear and light cigarettes and smoke them. You hear that and think, "Oh
come on now!" But it apparently worked. (Actually I don't think it was a simple case of
fooling the public but of signalling via the press that it was no longer "unseemly" for women
to smoke.) the point being that women wanted freedom, were delivered a "substitute" which
turned out to be little cancer sticks. That's the way capitalism works. And that's also the
way the propaganda system works too.
You could call this "the genius of capitalism". Capitalism says, "Whatever you want, we
can give! You want beauty? Here it is! You want ugliness? Have it! You want violence? Here!
You want rebellion? Here again! You want the overthrow of the capitalist system? No problem!"
Of course it doesn't intend the actual delivery of any of these. It simply drudges up more
commodities.
Thus we can expect the creation of any number of phoney oppositions. Now it may be
paranoia but I think that Dave McGowan's "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon" about the
deliberate manufacture of trendy rebellious pop music has got a lot of credibility. There's a
book called "A Century of Spin" all about the PR industry and how it works through
organisations that sound like worker's groups or concerned citizen groups but they are just
corporate hack entities. If these were easy enough to create in the pre-internet days, just
think how much easier it is to do now.
mark
Our ruling elite has run out of places to loot.
Unfortunately those pesky Russkies/ Chinks/ Eye-ranians won't play ball any more.
So they have to cannibalise their own societies, eat their own tail and loot their own
countries instead.
Wilmers31
For a one-son family no reason is good enough for war.
Since 'the pill' people adapt their family size to their financial or other means. This
results in one-son families at a significant percentage. Russia is quite an example. Due to
their housing restrictions they had (have) small families. When I heard in 1982 how
distraught Soviet mothers were who had to bury welded zinc coffins (coming from Afghanistan)
I knew the Soviet Union was on borrowed time – and then they threw the whole system
out.
"But it is too cowardly, too spoiled to risk the lives of its soldiers." No, mothers do
not like to see their one son used for war, war that serves the big corporations and not the
people who are told it is their fight.
The main problem was the the USA elite after the dissolution of the USSR was hell-bent on world dominance. And Clinton
was in the vanguard of this trend.
Clinton has pretty destructive, toxic legacy, is not he? He and his administration
essentially acted as a short sited and greedy gangster and he sowed the teeth of dragon into US-Russia relations.
Clinton tried to exploit Russian weakness during this period to the fullest extent possible,. This is the policy similar to
policy of GB toward Germany after WWI. In short Clinton was a typical imperialist from the very beginning and like all subsequent
Presidents valued international treaties and obligation only when they benefited the USA. The stance that illegal bombing of
Serbia only confirmed. At this point by Nuremberg standards he and all top official ion his administration and first of all
Madeline not so bright Albright became war criminals. The fact they they were not prosecuted is just a historical aberration
stemming from the dominant USA position at this time.
Essentially Clinton transformed NATO into aggressive alliance which is an expansion of the USA military.
Notable quotes:
"... As President Bill Clinton repeatedly remarked, the two key questions about enlargement were when and how ..."
Newly available sources show how the 1993–95 debate over the best means of expanding
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unfolded inside the Clinton administration. This
evidence comes from documents recently declassified by the Clinton Presidential Library, the
Defense Department, and the State Department because of appeals by the author.
As President Bill Clinton repeatedly remarked, the two key questions about enlargement
were when and how . The sources make apparent that, during a critical decision making
period twenty-five years ago, supporters of a relatively swift conferral of full membership to
a narrow range of countries outmaneuvered proponents of a slower, phased conferral of limited
membership to a wide range of states.
Pleas from Central and Eastern European leaders, missteps by Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, and victory by the pro-expansion Republican Party in the 1994 U.S. congressional
election all helped advocates of full-membership enlargement to win.
The documents also reveal the surprising impact of Ukrainian politics on this debate and the
complex roles played by both Strobe Talbott, a U.S. ambassador and later deputy secretary of
state, and Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister.
Finally, the sources suggest ways in which the debate's outcome remains significant for
transatlantic and U.S.-Russian relations today.
... ... ...
In other words, the Bush administration performed the first “ratcheting down” of options, a process not without its costs. It
raised the question, controversial to this day, of whether the Bush administration promised Moscow that, in exchange for
tolerating the extension of NATO across a united Germany, the alliance would not seek further expansion eastward. Opinions on
this topic range from absolutely not to absolutely yes.15
... ... ...
Without advance warning, Yeltsin decided to vent his frustrations publicly at the Budapest summit with Clinton in attendance.
The Russian president accused the United States, in the interest of NATO expansion, of risking a “‘cold peace’” to follow the
Cold War.108
On the flight back from Budapest to Washington, Talbott recalled that the president “was furious at his foreign-policy team for
dragging him across the Atlantic to serve as a punching bag for Yeltsin.”
... ... ...
The shift in U.S. thinking unsurprisingly contributed to more tensions with Moscow, as evidenced by Talbott's subsequent
negotiations. Kozyrev tried to convince Talbott that a better idea would be to transform NATO into “a collective security
organization rather than a vehicle for containment” by amending the North Atlantic Treaty.122
Talbott rejected the idea, saying “no way are we going to entertain the possibility of redefining NATO in any way that
compromises its basic mission.”123
Put bluntly, “We're not in the business of having to ‘compensate’ Russia or buy it off. Russia is not doing us a favor by
allowing NATO to expand.”124
...Finally, interacting with the other five factors was President Clinton's increasing sympathy to the appeals of
CEE leaders, which inclined him toward those aides pushing for full Article 5 expansion, and his personal optimism that Russia
would eventually tolerate enlargement.
...In Perry's view, arms control—most notably, START II, which would have eliminated two-thirds of the U.S. and Russian
arsenals, but never went into effect—ended up being “‘a casualty of NATO expansion’” and of fighting between the Kremlin and the
Duma.139
START III suffered a similar fate, not even progressing to a signing. Looking back in 2015, Perry concluded: “The downsides of
early NATO membership for Eastern European nations were even worse than I had feared.”140
.... Viewed from twenty-five years on, with U.S.-Russian confrontation on the rise, democracy crumbling in Hungary
and Poland, and U.S. tanks returning to Europe, there is room for doubt. Given that the window of opportunity for changes is now
firmly shut, however, NATO must make the best of the status quo; for the foreseeable future, confrontation with Russia is once
again the order of the day.
I'm sure that had Michael Hudson accepted a position with the CIA, he would not have been
the first or the last person with Marxist, Trotskyist or even more extreme (for want of a
better description) socialist connections to have worked for the agency.
One just wonders (but I have read no-one raising this question) why Epstein stopped being useful, why was his "business" dismantled.
All further steps, "suicide" comprised, are standard operation.
The scandal is about the Mega Group [Bonfman and Wexner and the assorted group of other Israel-firsters with the ties to
Mossad], Maxwells [the old embezzler and his daughter the pimp, both tied to Mossad] and Mossad: "The Spy Story at the Heart
of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal."
The end: blackmail the "elite" clients on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.
Thanks for posting this most interesting and edifying story about Israeli decade-long, standard practice, of using sex trafficking
to blackmail and control politicians.
Although Shulamit Cohen's story is highly embellished by official historiography, she herself started working as a prostitute.
The Syrian military she trapped was Adib Al Shishkali, who went on to become Syria's president.
The young girl she used to bait her "clients" was a 14-year Armenian youngster called Lucy Kobelian.
One of Mossad' main modes of operation is prostitution. Not surprising. The Jewish tribe is
exceptional in having as its heroines a set of prostituting women -- Esther, Judith, Dalila.
No wonder that the orthodox Jews treat women like filth. All within the national tradition.
In 1967, Shulamit Cohen, Rachel Raffoul and two of the Jewish prostitutes were released
in a secret prisoner exchange after the Six Day War: they were exchanged against three
officers of the Syrian air force (the official version states that they were exchanged for
"over 500 prisoners").
Today Shula is a national hero of Israel and her story has been whitewashed and made
"apt for public consumption". She lives in the neighborhood of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish
fundamentalists, the Haredim, who are probably ignorant of her past.
And if a man and a woman are drowning in a river, first they'll save the man, "who is
obligated to perform more commandments," whereas a woman's "wisdom is only in the spindle."
In fact, "words of Torah should be burned rather than being given to women."
A man must say three blessings every day during morning prayers: He thanks God "that He
didn't make me a gentile, that He didn't make me a woman, that He didn't make me an
ignoramus."
"... “It would be contrary to our interests to give Moscow the impression,” Nixon wrote, “that we are prepared to help only as long as Russia remains on its knees. Russia is a great country that deserves to be treated with appropriate respect.” ..."
"... Nixon was either lying or was outright delusional. The collective West can not operate in terms of friendship. The only motive behind any western foreign policy has always been to gain absolute power with no limits or borders. It happens that Russia is viewed as the only nation that can stop that western culture of domination and offer a multi polar world order, respected national sovereignty and mutual trust. Therefore the animosity towards Russia is inevitable, no matter what, as long as Russia exists. Any other view is a sort of wishful thinking. ..."
"... The constantly escalated lie of America about Russia's aggression is needed to knock out 2% of the military budget from satellites for the purchase of actually American weapons, to support the American military industrial complex. ..."
"... Russia enjoys escalation dominance in its own sphere, all the way up to the use of nukes in defense. America cannot possibly justify using that same kind of escalation, which means America will be the first to blink and then withdraw. ..."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly sided with opposition groups in Russia and expressed sympathy with mass anti-government
demonstrations whose organizers made no secret of their objective to remove Putin from power. In March 2011, Vice President Joe Biden
told Russian opposition leaders that it would be "bad for the country and for himself" if Putin attempted to run for president the
following year, according to the later murdered Putin critic Boris Nemtsov. I have spoken with people who were present at Biden's
meeting with the Russian opposition, and there was no question in their mind that Biden fully intended to pressure Putin not to run
again. Biden and Clinton were not acting out of turn; the Obama administration put its money where its mouth was, giving millions
of dollars to political opposition groups in Russia. Today, leading Democrats are demanding that Russia refrain from intervening
in the 2020 elections, but what implications do such demands have for America's own willingness to take sides in Russian political
disputes?
... ... ..
Last but not least, we must be willing to be clear that we are not beholden to shaping American policy exclusively to align with
the whims of our allies. Relationships between former iron curtain states are remarkably complex and fraught with centuries of painful
history, making them prone to conflict with one another. It is precisely these parochial European conflicts which George Washington
strongly advised against being involved in, stating in his farewell address that America should be wary of entangling, "our peace
and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice."
WASHINGTON ALSO spoke about those, "ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens," who become so enamored with the causes of their
favorite countries that they not only lose perspective of American interests, but are even prepared to accuse those who disagree
with them of a lack of patriotism and, in modern times, of being a Putin lackey. One does not need to be a supporter of President
Trump to understand that these pseudo-patriots do not serve American interests or American values well. In April 2019, 73 percent
of the Ukrainian people rejected President Petro Poroshenko, who ran on a nationalist, anti-Russian platform. While few American
and European experts were willing to acknowledge that the Poroshenko government was corrupt, inept, and, according to Ukrainian media,
willing to use money to influence the American political process, they were suddenly willing to make such pronouncements as soon
as the election results were solidified. America cannot allow the designation of an "ally" to make any states immune from disagreement
or criticism. When the stakes are as high as nuclear war, America cannot afford to conduct foreign policy based on the whims of its
domestic constituencies or the sentiments of those very "deluded" citizens about whom Washington warned.
Great American presidents of the past knew how to be loyal allies, but to do it in a calibrated and deliberative fashion. President
Dwight D. Eisenhower fully understood the importance of the transatlantic alliance, having fought to preserve it in World War II,
yet in 1956 he refused to support Britain and France during the Suez Crisis when doing so went against America’s national interest.
Similarly, despite being a genuine friend to Israel, Ronald Reagan was willing to condemn it for going overboard in Lebanon in 1982.
But today, to suggest that America is not obliged to support with blood and treasure the actions of our allies and friends is considered
morally unacceptable. That is why whenever Baltic states, Georgia and Ukraine have any disagreement with Russia, America automatically
denounces Russia as the aggressor, regardless of the historical background, geopolitical context, and even, as in the case of Russia’s
war with Georgia in 2008, who attacked whose troops first.
America and Russia appear unlikely to resolve their hostilities any time soon. America has a long tradition of standing tall and
being prepared to be ruthless in the defense of its interests, but also in being careful not to unnecessarily entangle itself in
the conflicts of others. If the United States starts treating Putin’s Russia like it is Hitler’s Germany, moves from supporting Ukrainian
and Georgian sovereignty to encouraging these states to conduct hostile policies towards Moscow, and strengthens NATO’s military
position in the Baltics, Russia may feel confronted by an existential threat.
Dimitri K. Simes, publisher and CEO of the National Interest, is president of the Center for the National Interest.
“It would be contrary to our interests to give Moscow the impression,” Nixon wrote, “that we are prepared to help only
as long as Russia remains on its knees. Russia is a great country that deserves to be treated with appropriate respect.”
Nixon was either lying or was outright delusional. The collective West can not operate in terms of friendship. The only
motive behind any western foreign policy has always been to gain absolute power with no limits or borders. It happens that Russia
is viewed as the only nation that can stop that western culture of domination and offer a multi polar world order, respected national
sovereignty and mutual trust. Therefore the animosity towards Russia is inevitable, no matter what, as long as Russia exists.
Any other view is a sort of wishful thinking.
To save us all from the nuclear catastrophe it is important to remember what Putin once said:
""We are not interested in the world without Russia" (c)
The constantly escalated lie of America about Russia's aggression is needed to knock out 2% of the military budget from
satellites for the purchase of actually American weapons, to support the American military industrial complex. This lie began
with the already proven European aggression of Georgia against South Ossetia. And the RETURN of the Crimea during the anarchy
arranged by America coup in Ukraine. America uses Goebbels propaganda.
Part of the problem is that the establishment Republicans got heady beginning in the early 1990s, thinking that America is
omnipotent and can always get its way in the world. Nowhere was this sentiment stronger than the business elite. This arrogance
continues in our foreign policy with those like John Bolton who figure that firepower is always the answer. The good news is that
this sentiment peaked during the George W. Bush years, when Iraq taught the lesson that solutions are often not quick-and-easy.
I think the proper title of the article should be "Russia continue to be delusional about Ukraine"
Dimitri's is the perfect example of how Russian propaganda wants to cast events in the Ukraine: " In April 2019, 73 percent
of the Ukrainian people rejected President Petro Poroshenko, who ran on a nationalist, anti-Russian platform "
While it is obvious Ukrainians showed Poroshenko the location of the exit door, the main reason was not his so-called anti-Russian
nationalistic platform, but corruption and inability to accelerate necessary reforms.
If the resentment against so called nationalism and anti-Russian policies were material, then the pro-Russian block will have
significantly more votes than it managed to gain.
Dmitri here follows Russian dogma and equates pro Ukrainian to anti Russian. Any move in Ukraine to advance Ukrainian language,
history and culture - in a sense a sort of affirmative action policy - equates to anti Russian nationalism.
And this delusion needed to be fixed in order for Russia to be able to start moving back towards normalcy in relationship with
its neighbors.
Volo, you don't know how public perception works - if you pour dirt on somebody who has wide respect and sound reputation -
it backfires. By badmouthing Dimitri Simes you basically show how foolish you are. You may not feel like it in your little make-believe
Ukranian banderite world - but this is how it is in reality.
Besides, Volo, we both know you're Poroshenko supporter and you supported him because of his nationalistic anti-Russian stance.
So why pretend he's out because he's inefficient manager? Also, there is a so-called Fallacy of a Single Cause, which you seem
to follow. Obviously, there were many reasons for Poroshenko's fall, yet chief among them being ultra-nationalism and administrative
ineptitude
Yeap, educate yourself on the list of
logical fallacies . As I've said, I'm glad I'm a good influence on you
"And this delusion needed to be fixed in order for Russia to be able to start moving back towards normalcy in relationship
with its neighbors."
You can't have normalcy when Ukraine is still ruled on the streets by armed facist ultra-nationalist scumbags. Once these criminals
are disarmed and jailed awaiting trial then normalcy will have a chance.
Seriously?! You really not see the reality... you swallow everything Putin told you... take time and learn a bit about history,
stop to be the little good soldier and became a human!
Yes, seriously. The armed nationalists are a damngerous force in Ukraine and the elected politicans are quite rightly scared
of these radicals. People die in Ukraine if they speak out openly against the Nationalist militants, ask Oles Buzina... oh wait,
we can't cuz they killed him.
Speaking out against the Ukro nationalists in 2019 is like speaking out against the Russian mafia in the 90s and 00s. It's
a great way to get yourself killed.
"Russia’s grievances, real or imagined, are not justifications for the United States abandoning the pursuit of its own
interest and allowing Russian domination of Eurasia.
But the United States has no legitimate interests in the former Soviet Union. For the US to think otherwise is to be power
drunk and blinded by imperial greed.
It scares to me see that so many of my ignorant countrymen in America seem to have a sense of manifest destiny regarding the
former Soviet land mass. This myopic America policy is going to lead to disaster for the US. That's because Russia enjoys
escalation dominance in its own sphere, all the way up to the use of nukes in defense. America cannot possibly justify using that
same kind of escalation, which means America will be the first to blink and then withdraw.
It is amusing how Banderites always blame others for their own failures and utter irrelevance. You violently siezed Ukraine
and proceeded to make a slaughterhouse and a basket-case out of her, but its always someone elses fault... what a good little
empty-headed stormtrooper for Empire you are....
The author likes to write about US "defense of its interests" but what about when those "interests" are in direct opposition
to the real interests of the nations and peoples in those distant lands? Why should the self-declared and often selfish desires
of the US elites be used as justification for political, financial or outright military aggression? Are we really going to accept
law-of-the-jungle in global relations where the strong & wealthy get to attack the weak & impoverished simply because doing so
is ostensibly in their "interests"? A burglar ransacks your house while you're out and kills your dog in the process cuz its in
his "interest', but that doesn't make it OK.
Somewhere we need to accept that morality and ethics should be the primary guide as to how we interact with others. Unfortunately
the US elites have long since abandoned any such constraints or considerations as they aren't really compatible with building
a global hegemony and crushing all resistance to their rule.
"Putin is not blindly militaristic, but always considers the consequences of his actions, even if he has not always managed
to anticipate them correctly (as was the case with Russian interference in U.S. elections)."
"Russia’s interference in the American political process was serious and real"
Gimmee a break.... Russian "interference".... The author feels the need to insert this debunked shibboleth into his article?
Surely there isn't a free-thinking individual alive who still belives this hogwash?
Yeah, he did. Biden bragged about it. Stop this "Russia's paranoia" nonsense, you keep on clinging to it until it's proven
to be truth in some memoir of an ex-cia chief or US offical. Just like with NATO not expanding that was portrayed as a myth until
it appeared they really promised it to Gorbachev.
America and its European allies supported the ousting of Yanukovych in 2014
It was a lot more than simple "support". The U.S., led by State Department Nitwit Vulgarian Victoria Nuland and her barrel
of CIA monkeys directly organized and enabled the Maidan coup debacle. All the U.S. had to do was wait for the next presidential
election in Ukraine. But no, the Global Cop Gorilla had to stick its fat greasy thumb into someone else's soup yet again.
And the Russians knew that following the ham-fisted coup the U.S. would direct its new puppet President in Ukraine to eject
them from their historic naval base in Sevastopol that Russia had occupied for more than 200 years. Ironically, no U.S. facilitated
coup, no annexation of Crimea.
The Global Cop Gorilla wrecks everything that it touches. The one perverse benefit of the Trump presidency is that U.S. foreign
policy pathology is now so visible to the rest of the planet
"At the next revolution, the present rulers would either give up power peacefully or follow the fate of Chaushesqu or Qaddafi."
You mean Russians want NATO to bomb Moscow so that Russian people could get the honor of being sold on the slave markets like
Libyan people are today?
https://www.reuters.com/art...
Qaddafi is indeed a cautionary tale, just not the one you think it is.
Yet again, lying by omission . Their 'Defense Correspondent' Jonathan Marcus notes
briefly that W. Bush pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and that Russia announce pulling
out of it in 2007 but does not explain why, i.e. the combination of the following:
a) expanding these 'defensive' ABM sites to the lo-land of Po-land & also Romania
b) the universal Mk.41 launchers can also fire nuclear capable Tomahawk cruise missiles at
Russia from much closer ranges = less reaction time = reduced deterrence effect =
increases the chance of nuclear first strike against Russia, and thus
c) denied/refused Russia any means to verify the non-use of nukes for the launchers just
saying 'Trust us!' which is complete bs considering all the previous promises made and
not kept.
None of the linked articles therein mention Russia's objections. But then Marcus is
only a 'Defence correspondent' (such small details clearly aren't important in the grand
scheme of things) and he can always get a future job at NATO as a Spokesman like previous BBC
journos Oana Lungescu & Mark Laity. In a fight between Jonathan Marcus & Mark Urban,
who do you think would replace Oana? Or someone else? They all do sterling government
service
Oooh, looky here! The BBC inches itself up the line which if crossed would constitute
journalism . Why don't they just jump on in? It's safe as long as your patrons –
Da Gov – and the intelligence services don't go after you (Hello 'Guardian'!):
In an earlier statement, Russia's foreign ministry said the US decision to withdraw was
"a grave mistake".
It also accused America of violating the treaty by deploying MK-41 launchers in Europe,
capable of firing intermediate-range cruise missiles
####
So the plus is, above they actually link to the Russian Foreign Ministry statement, but no
further. The big minus is that they wrote far, far more about Russia's 'violations'.
That t-Rump thinks Russia, let alone China is excited about joining a new deal,
hahahahahahahah!
We also discover that go to and favorite 'defense expert' (MGU Candidate of Sciences
Biology degree!) for the Pork Pie News Networks Pavel Felgenhauer is not dead!
In view of the anniversaries of bomb tests 2 and 3 (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) let's remember that
Groves said the bomb was to control Russia (said in March of 1944), not Japan.
And let's read fun stuff> (url is broken-up) http://blog. nuclearsecrecy.com/ 2017/04/10/president-bomb-iii/
Title> The President and the Bomb, Part III
The Plan to control Russia has evidently failed...
Oh yes, there's Coster-Mullin and his gadget... (look him up)
NATO expansion is the kind of immoral enterprise that justifies nearly any response from
Russia.
While David Warsh keys on Russia vis a vis the North Atlantic front of the US post WW II
world order it should not be considered in vacuum.
There is the Caspian Sea front of the US post WW II world order that is absorbing immense
US treasure and further moral decline (Libya, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen....) which
fortunate for US post WW II world order Putin has been rather restrained.
There is also China and OBOR entering in the Caspian Sea front with high moral purpose and
economic weapons not bombs and special operators!
David Warsh has been on my weekly read list since I tacked my low quarters to a tree in
the backyard in the Boston area.
"... Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA? ..."
"... The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers prediction come true in slow motion. ..."
"... Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that. ..."
"... I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up when he did, the way he did was very strange. ..."
"... If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all the lies? ..."
"... Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part. ..."
"... JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's government. ..."
"... In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others. ..."
"... Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats. ..."
"... If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break the Law if they ignored this? ..."
"... Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information that is being gathered ..."
"... The problem is that Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have "dirt"on Hillary. ..."
"... Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier. ..."
"... Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this, and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast. ..."
"... We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense. ..."
"... Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc? ..."
"... We do know that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt. ..."
"... Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what is in the report, if he actually answers questions ..."
"... The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop, that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is likely to become his downfall when he testifies. ..."
"... Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine. ..."
"... Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of "Special Counsel". ..."
"... At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it, Trump Tweets and all. ..."
"... He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison, and his boss is lionized as a hero. ..."
"... Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose ..."
"... I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the "players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!). ..."
"... Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means" rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert. ..."
She was also working with Fusion GPS and had nothing?
Trump Dossier Firm Also Supplied Info Used in Meeting of Russians, Trump Team
"The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in
June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the
infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter."
Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become
operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA?
The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE
SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers
prediction come true in slow motion.
One thing about CIA being the most powerful entity in the U.S. when they screw up they
have no place to hide. except behind the skirt of Lady Justice!
Mr. Mueller are you back there also?
robert e williamson jr , July 5, 2019 at 13:53
I would wonder just how many files Mueller has gotten from ICIJ. Maybe we all need to call
bull shit on this entire affair.
Everyone says follow the money but no one seems to be able to do so here. Why not. ICIJ
sure as hell seems able to get info.
I'll state it again, I wonder just how much data Mueller got from ICIJ since CIA didn't
have it?
Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because
he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that.
I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up
when he did, the way he did was very strange. Whether what he claims to be true seems not to
have mattered to congress. Look at what the fools have done. Magnitski Act for what.
So did Bill, the DEEP STATE and CIA all get caught doing what they have always done in
third world countries for the last 70 years ?
If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so
badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all
the lies?
It appears someone has gotten to DOJ. AGAIN!
I have some very bad news for many here. If what I witnessed here in the last couple of
years here is the only way for those who contribute and those who comment here to expose evil
doers we all are thoroughly screwed.
The county is running out of time. If Mueller has received data from ICIJ maybe we all
should be after someone to get the information about what files he got.
Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years
and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder
do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part.
Just what do you suppose that carnage would look like.
Think about what the rest of the planet is thinking about the U.S. singing happy birthday
to it's self at such a chaotic time.
Isn't that something to be expected from 2 and 3 year old children?
JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared
telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's
government.
We have the Trump mafia running the repugniklans and the Israeli mafia running the
dimocraps, and the DEEP STATE hoarding the proceeds.
"Off with their heads ", the Queen Shouted. She must have been familiar with the heads of
hedge funds!
In the 1990s I received an NNA – National Newspaper Award (Canada's top prize for
print journalism) for a series of newspaper articles first exposing the presence of Russian
mafia money laundering behind North American public and private co.s – and shut down
the YBM Magnex fraud – which led to Semion Mogilevitch being placed on the FBI's "Most
Wanted" list. The late Robert I. Friedman's "Red Mafiya" book (2000) included info from this
case – and he broke the word in the US via a 1998 feature in "The Village Voice".
I retired from active investigation of white collar / organized crime at the turn of the
century – and just last year became aware that the con-man Bill Browder, who, in the
1990s, was being mentored by another international scammer, Edmond Safra, is today falsely
portrayed as an "anti-corruption crusader". This geopolitical smoke-and-mirrors act is
maintained through the support of state actors and a western "legacy" media that is failed in
so many ways.
Fortunately, the inter-twined myths are all coming undone. To do my part, I've launched a
website "J'Accuse News" @ https://jaccuse.news
There is more than enough independent information – corporate, court, police+
records, employee interviews etc. – accessible on the public record for anyone that
chooses to know the truth of the "Magnitsky" campaign to do so.
In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines
in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his
connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others.
"In his own words, Sergey Magnitsky was neither Bill Browder's lawyer nor a whistleblower.
It is in his witness statements." Rose concludes: "I salute the fight against human rights
abuses and personally was active in this fight in the former Soviet Union. But I fear that,
by relying on untruths, Browder's campaign could undermine this fight rather than support
it."
Fittingly, in Denmark, the land which gave the world Hans Christian Andersen, author of
"The Emperor's New Clothes", the Browder/Magnitsky con is unraveling and the naked truth is
revealed:
Editorial columns penned by Flemming Rose published by"Berlingske":
Danish investigative authors Birgitte Derykilde and Lars Abild have just announced their
book, which promises to reveal "The Emperor's New Clothes" of geopolitics, will be published
August12, 2019 (with a focus on the elements within that country eg. Danske Bank). The book's
title, "Troldmanden", translates fully into English as "The Wizard (master of trolls) –
the story about Danske Bank, money laundering and the man who deceived/fooled the world":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOl9S0_jMEk
###
Zhu , July 5, 2019 at 05:22
Remeber the Historians' Rule, folks: Stupidity always trumps conspiracy.
John McCarthy , July 5, 2019 at 00:09
From your article:
" Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats.
The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. "
If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are
they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break
the Law if they ignored this?
Abby , July 4, 2019 at 21:06
One thing about this Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr is that she originally couldn't
get into the country because she had problems with her passport. The Obama state department
had to fix it for her. And after the meeting she met with Simpson from Fusion GPS for
dinner.
Almost every person who ended up having contact with someone to make it look like they
were colluding with Russians was setup by the FBI or were members or connected to the
Clinton's foundation.
Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama
administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information
that is being gathered, but I doubt that he will let Obama be snared in it. Mueller took the
country on the biggest snipe hunt in history. Lots of people are thinking that they got lots
of snipes.
False. That is the disinformation spread by Fox News, John Solomon and Sara Carter, most
likely originating with Browder. Yes, she did meet Simpson on July 8, because he was hired by
US law firm Baker-Hostetler, who she hired to conduct the defence for her client Denis
Katsyv, in the Prevezon case.
In 2013, Browder had secretly passed US Attorney Preet Bharara a bundle of documents,
accusing Katsyv, wrongly as it turned out, of using proceeds of the alleged "Russian Tax
Fraud", central to his Magnitsky story. Browder was working with the State Dept's Jonathan
Winer, now his his personal lawyer, to have his Magnitsky story enshrined in US Case Law,
effectively giving the State the ability to confiscate any Russian property in the US by
linking it to the so called tax fraud.
The problems began for Browder, when his was discovered, and BH hired Simpson to check out
his story. Simpson recounts in his Senate Testimony, that they tracked Browder to Aspen,
Colorado, twice he evaded the subpoena, and again in New York, after he told the Judge Greisa
he would be overseas, he ran away from the server, after coming out of NBC studios plugging
his fictional book "Red Notice"
The Judge ordered Browder to appear on 15 April 2015, for a Deposition under oath. The
reason why he ran became clear, he couldn't substantiate any of the evidence he provided,
mostly complied by his staff, and he couldn't substantiate his Magnitsky Story either.
So what did he do? What he always does, attempt to shut down proceedings, on a thin
pretext, and his appeal was, guess what, in New York on morning of 9 June.
The meeting between NV and Simpson was about Browder's appeal, both have sworn to that
effect and there is zero evidence they setup the Trump Tower meeting. The also went to a full
defence team dinner a few days after, all above board.
However Browder always accuses others of his crimes, there is good evidence that Browder
was working with the State Dept's Robert Otto and Jonathan Winer, from Otto's leaked emails,
showing a menacing photograph of Veselnitskaya's Moscow home, the same day, she was granted a
work visa by the State Dept, 6 June 2016, three days before Browder's appeal. Same day,
Goldstone had Don Jr and Emin Agalarov agree on 9 June for Trump Tower. The problem is that
Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr
could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have
"dirt"on Hillary.
Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most
likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving
Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely
Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier.
Haruspex , July 6, 2019 at 00:27
And the Phoenix tarmac meeting was about grandchildren and golf between two people who
never chatted socially. And you are trying to claim, the architect of the Steele dossier, had
nothing to do with Veselnitskaya meeting the Trump team? That it's coincidental? And it's
coincidental that Mike Isikoff runs into Jim Baker and warns him about the Steele dossier?
And it's coincidental that some unconnected oil industry specialist in London all of a
suddenly becomes the most courted man in Europe once it's determined he is associated with
Trump's campaign? And it's coincidental that Nellie Ohr gets a ham radio license the month
after Adm Rogers tossed her off all US intel data sites? And it's coincidental that Nellie is
married to the DoJ conduit between Steele and the FBI? Too many coincidences and in law
enforcement, they teach you there is no such thing as coincidences.
Garrett Connelly , July 4, 2019 at 20:03
Seemingly normal congressional representatives became obsessed with sanctions and passing
the Magnitsky Act.
Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2019 at 19:20
Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up
the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this,
and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast.
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 16:54
The excellent film by Andrei Nekrasov has been unavailable for at least a year. It shows
too clearly the falsity of the Browder charges, but somehow Browder is supported by those in
high places, since it is impossible to find the film anywhere. (I saw it twice online last
year before the complete blackout).
How many people here find the Skripal story in the UK to be as false? We have Theresa
May's word for all the relevant "facts" and that is all.
Experience tells us that US government/intel statements need to be backed up by perfect
evidence or they should be considered propaganda. With regards to Russia, the 5 Eyes have
told us nothing but lies for the last 5 years.
Stan W. , July 4, 2019 at 12:10
The Browder hoax would make a good sequel to the 1966 movie "The Russians Are Coming! The
Russians Are Coming!"
jsinton , July 4, 2019 at 10:15
We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense.
Brian James , July 4, 2019 at 10:14
This will reveal their ultimate goal!
Jul 1, 2019 Democrat Calls On Tech Giants To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris
Debate
Elizabeth Warren Calls On Big Tech To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris Debate.
You are right that censorship was one of the goals of Russia Gate. Because of it we got
Hamilton 68 that said they were able to tell us what tweets came from Russian trolls or
bots.
The Integrity Initiative is another company created during this time and they have stuck
around and then there's NewsGuard who is putting its buttons on Microsoft web browsers.
Facebook, Twitter and Google all changed their algorithms and alternative websites were so
downgraded that some lost up to 90% of their readership. This all came into being after
someone leaked the DNC computers and podesta emails and gave them to Wikileaks. Hillary's
campaign said that if they blamed it on Russia then no one would focus on their content. It
worked. The DNC rigging the primary is considered CT on many leftists sites.
Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:44
Thanks for another great article that gives us a glimpse behind the curtain. It would be
great if the truth regarding Browder were to make it into the mainstream, but I have my
doubts about that being possible. People like Mueller and the MSM lackeys are protectors of
the powerful. What Robert Parry called the "mighty Wurlitzer" keeps the truth drowned out
except for our small "sound proof free speech zone" here at CN and similar sites.
For people who wish to take a look at the "evil Rooskies" from a more realistic angle, I
highly recommend Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" I am just finishing it and it is a good
read.
Amazing how long the fraud has been going on, hiding in plain sight, Mueller a clear
player for the corrupt Deep State! We who read Consortium News have been informed about
Browder's fraudulent claims for the entire 2+ years of this ongoing chicanery. The swamp muck
is deep and thick, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is embedded in it. The confluence of swamp
creatures is odd, many don't even interact but they do in strange ways, all by lying. Thanks
for this article, hope for an end to the lies although the US truth decay is pretty far
advanced, maybe a sign it is collapsing ?!
Michael Collins , July 4, 2019 at 00:48
I think the Magnitsky Act is profoundly arrogant and not in our national interest.
I believe that Russia's intervention in Syria was essential and positive.
I'm not convinced that the Dutch report on MH17 has any persuasive power. This site had
the first insider source info that the missile was launched by the Ukrainians.
Having said that, I must say that this article is pure propaganda.
"Collusion" is a pure Republican propaganda term straight from Trump and his acolyte Barr.
The term is the straw man that forms the basis of the author's argument. The Mueller Report
outlines numerous contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign. Were they just chatting
about the weather or were the Russians trying to apply influence.
Whether or not Mueller could prove a conspiracy to commit a crime doe not take away from
the clear meddling by the Russians. In terms of outcome, Trump's performance in Helsinki is
the best argument for Russians influence. He was Putin's bot.
T,J , July 4, 2019 at 02:48
Michael, you got it right in your first three sentences but then, alas, you allowed your
imagination to run wild. The truth is that the Russians had little or no effect on the result
of the 2016 elections. The Democrats, alone, were responsible through their own incompetence
for the election result and even with their poor choice of candidate they could still have
won. The Mueller thing is just a distraction. By not admitting this, to themselves, they have
probably forfeited the 2020 election.
Mark Kelly , July 4, 2019 at 09:48
Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with
foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc?
It would be rather
difficult for a campaign not to have documented contacts with foreign nationals, and the
Trump contacts like Sessions running into Kislack at receptions seem innocuous. We do know
that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an
opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information
on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred
million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events
seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt.
Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what
is in the report, if he actually answers questions . ( Huddles with counsel "Cannot answer,
its classified .") Then wait for IG and Barr investigations .
Mr.Parry immediately smelled a great big rat using historical Russiaphobia
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:11
"Trump's performance in Helsinki is the best argument for Russians influence. He was
Putin's bot."
So the dropping of the INF Treaty and the continued massive arms build-up in the ex-Soviet
satellites is simply cover for Evil Vlad's real plans of world domination?
Same with Bolton's failed coup in Venezuela and our arming and training of Ukraine's fascist
Azov Battalion?
Michael,
Did you know Putin provided us our primary Afghan supply line and introduced us to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, all-the-while warning us of the real dangers of creating a
quagmire?
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 17:00
Pathetic conclusion. Pres.Putin, with all the faults cast upon him from the West, cannot
be considered to be stupid. All the "interference", which he denies (and unlike Trump he is
NOT a liar) would be uncharacteristic and counterproductive, like the alleged
novichok/perfume poisoning in the UK of someone already punished and exchanged, by alleged
"GRU operatives" botching the job.
bjd , July 3, 2019 at 21:08
What an excellent article!
The author provides another view –from a whole other angle yet again– showing
how the Mueller Report is more a work of uninspired wordsmithery and linguistic trickery
(with one or two –sometimes not even that carefully– hidden objectives), than an
unambiguous work of judicious scrutiny.
The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop,
that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude
tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is
likely to become his downfall when he testifies.
Most readers of Consortium News from around the Earth understand the immensity of the
Browder-Magnitsky scandal, and so then they are certainly hugely appreciative of Lucy
Komisar's years-long reporting on the scandal, plus thankful to Consortium News for
exhibiting the moral courage to publish Ms. Komisar's truly bombshell, Earth-shaking article.
Those people around the world yet unaware of this profound and historically important
situation will now, undoubtedly, become fully aware – and soon.
Every candidate from every political party in America running for the office of President
of the United States in 2020 will find it impossible to avoid this just-revealed
800,000,000-pound elephant standing in/on the living room known as planet Earth, as well as
find it impossible to respond in any manner but in 100% alignment with the truth. There are
nothing but positive consequences coming from this truly historic development – most
especially, the forthcoming global paradigm shift featuring exponentially greater
effectiveness of international law in deterrence of major criminality. It is a moving and
humbling experience to witness. Thank you sincerely.
Jerry L.! that was a tremendous piece of editorial writing! . I have been on the trail of
this " MAGNITZKY Sting thing Josef Mifsud is the key man of not so much mystery any more ! I
have been on this William Browder Grifter of the Hoover Institute _Stanford John Perkins .
Book " Confessions of a Economic Hitman " is eye opening . look into Edmond Safra his bizarre
demise or death in 1999' in the middle of Monaco Principality Párkinson had ravaged
Mr. SAFRA a third generation manifestation of Lebanon and Jewish Global financial markets
Financiers Of renowned Edmond Safra was from family heritage of movers and shakers of Global
financial markets and currency manipulators from the Middle Ages! Rick – Él
Cuban cowboy ( 702.767.0072)) hope all is well
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 19:12
This article, which I thank Consortium News for publishing, and its author, Lucy Komisar
for researching and writing, is very important for a number of reasons.
Those who know the history of what happened to Russia and the Russian people when U$
"experts", vulture capitalists and B-School grads, descended on Russia for a sportive
slaughter of its economy, all the better to create an oligarchic class and impoverish the
many while providing many of those "experts" lucrative, even obscenely lucrative rewards,
among them William Browder.
Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov
know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a
front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a
favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine.
That so very much has been done to suppress any public or widespread showing of the film
speaks, eloquently and succinctly, to the motivations, if not expressly exposing the reasons,
for the suppression.
Clearly, when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, in 2012, few of those who voted for that
law had seen the film or else they made no serious efforts to ascertain the actual facts.
Perhaps, they did not care to know the facts or, worse, do not care, at all, what the facts
actually were.
One hopes that among the questions posed to Robert Mueller will be several seeking clarity
about something he, rather obviously, got very wrong, about the infamous "meeting" at Trump
Tower.
Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very
many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any
genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is
hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual
evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of
"Special Counsel".
His special guest appearance before Congress may well not be a reprise of a Cameo Role,
but an opportunity to win the Lifetime Oscar for Pusillanimous Leading Man.
The Democrats who have arranged this awards ceremony, thinking they are about to unearth
manifold riches, may well find that they have bitten off far more crow than they can possibly
chew.
Russiagate may yet become a dead albatross piece of neck ware for those banking on its
bonanza.
The "Ineffective Opposition" may soon confirm its utter uselessness, even as Robert
Mueller may find the very real need to embark on a costly "brand" restoration.
At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious
respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it,
Trump Tweets and all.
Seriously?
Once again, my appreciation for this timely and important article, which ties together a
plethora of peculiarities particularly perceptively well.
Nick , July 4, 2019 at 00:47
Mueller's lack of curiosity is something people in Boston are well aware of. He was the US
Attorney here when his FBI was covering up for Whitey Bulger, the murderous drug kingpin.
It's crazy, because now, to these same people in Boston, he's the saint who's gonna bring
down Trump. The fact that he got away in the late 90s when his FBI agents all came up filthy
with gifts from this gangster, and was subsequently able to work his way into an FBI
directorship, shows that this dude is a skillful liar, and more one of omission than
commission.
He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your
boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to
ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it
came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police
put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison,
and his boss is lionized as a hero.
Seer , July 4, 2019 at 11:35
I too watched the film: subtle reminder- people ought to be sure to pay for it!
Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is
so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose.
Seems that the Deep State HAS to
be involved in here somewhere: I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring
Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the
"players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!).
Jerry Markatos , July 3, 2019 at 18:59
After watching the important film by Andrei Nekrasov, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the
Scenes," I was embarrassed for the New Yorker and their running a puff piece with swindler
Browder anointing himself as a brave human rights hero standing up to the Russians. I hope
I'm not the only one who wrote the New Yorker editor urging a visit to Consortiumnews and an
evening with Nekrasov's docudrama. Robert Parry in a brief series of questions to people who
knew Sergei Magnitsky and an investigative reporter's nose for fraud, swiftly offered key
truths about the Magnitsky affair to readers of this site. If anyone else sees a possibility
of a mainstream magazine having an appetite either for detailing a fascinating and
consequential fraud or a willingness to eat crow, have at it!
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:48
The New Yorker and the lion's share of our MSM and late night talk shows (Colbert,
foremost) became collateral damage to Coronated-Hill's Clown-Car Fiasco.
Hill successfully projected her loss into the victimization of nearly half of the Nation.
Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means"
rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert.
Robert Parry was clearly spot on about Browder and his fraud.
But the fraudster will not just go away, why should he, if he has been so successful in
his deception and fraud. Now we see that he is "leading" a charge against money laundering in
some of the European banks. If nothing else, the fraudster "continues:"
Mr Johnson,
This would tie in to your (correct imo) observations of apparent untruths in the Mueller
Dossier, and with Mr Habakkuk's comment above.
Re: The Trump Tower meeting and Russian attorney Veselnitskaya - journalist Lucy Komisar
interviewed Veselnitskaya twice Nov 2018 iirc, and has found another apparent untruth.
Komisar does not believe William Browder of Magnitsky Act fame, and Komisar's article backs
up that claim, relating that to the Trump Tower meeting and the Mueller Dossier.
FTA - "the (Mueller) report on this topic is deceptive...the report itself lies about the
issue the meeting addressed."
"It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton...That was a ploy by Robert
Goldstone...(Goldstone) got the lawyer (Veselnitskaya) the meeting for her to lobby a
potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act..."
"Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats."
You and Mr Habakkuk should be aware Jeff Carlson (Epoch Times) is a "Q" follower (Trust The
Plan), fwiw.
Aaron Mate, although a flaming Socialist Progressive, is top notch. imo
Thank you for your continuing research on this.
Thanks again to the Colonel for allowing the intrusion.
Regards.
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring
its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics
requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV"
badge?
Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.
Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western
world?
Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse
them..Hmmm?
Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of
politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he
spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in
Iraq?
How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?
"... Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive -- that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. ..."
"... In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth) which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for everything they did in the name of the Revolution. ..."
"... They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged, brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the Revolution). ..."
"... So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. ..."
To this day, Maher's response still leaves me dumbfounded: "I would say that's a secular
religion." Before Douthat could ask what the hell a secular religion is, Maher changed the
subject. The meaning of Maher's nonsensical statement was clear: everything Maher doesn't
like is religion.
Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive --
that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. Sure, they didn't use God or angels or
miracles in their rhetoric, but that's just surface trappings.
In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They
had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth)
which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for
everything they did in the name of the Revolution.
They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to
join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his
death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged,
brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the
Revolution).
So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. No, they
didn't include personified invisible spirits in their ideology. But if it looks like a duck,
walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ....
"... Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as 'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be the new Stalin. He also made international statements that made the US-USSR relations much worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence with the West and pressed on for more World Revolution. ..."
"... It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising. ..."
Abrams is giving the West too much credit for the Sino-Soviet rift of the late 5os and 60s.
That was NOT the doing of the CIA or Western Europe. It was 90% the fault of Mao who tried
to shove Khrushchev aside as the head of world communism. Because Stalin had treated Mao
badly, Khrushchev wanted to make amends and treated Mao with respect. But Mao turned out to
be a total a-hole. There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate friendly gestures and
those who seek kindness as 'weakness'.
It's like Hitler saw Chamberlain's offer as weakness and pushed ahead. Being kind is nice,
but one should never be kind to psychopaths, and Khrushchev was nice to the wrong person.
Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as 'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be
the new Stalin. He also made international statements that made the US-USSR relations much
worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence with the West and pressed on for more
World Revolution.
He also ignored Soviet advice not to attempt radical economic policies (that were soon to
bring China to economic ruin -- at least Stalin's collectivization led to rise of industry;
in contrast, Mao managed to destroy both agriculture and heavy industry).
When Stalin was alive, he didn't treat Mao with any respect, and Mao disliked Stalin but
still respected him because Mao understood Power. With Stalin gone, Khrushchev showed Mao
some respect, but Mao felt no respect for Khrushchev who was regarded as a weakling and
sucker.
It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's
impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his
mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could
lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising.
Anyway, Putin and Xi, perhaps having grown up in less turbulent times, are more stable and
mature in character and temperament than Mao and Khrushchev. They don't see the Russo-China
relations as a zero sum game of ego but a way for which both sides can come to the table
halfway, which is all one can hope for.
This is just think tank swamp vapor. No real analysis, no real recommendation on adaption of the USA to the collapse of global neoliberal
system (aka the USA empire)
At the heart of the alignment between China and Russia is their shared interest in undermining U.S. influence globally. The two
countries are united in their mutual displeasure with the United States and the U.S.-dominated international order that they feel
disadvantages them. But while Russia and China may have initially banded together in discontent, their repeated engagement on areas
of mutual interest is fostering a deeper and enduring partnership.
It is clear that China will pose the greatest challenge to U.S. interests for the foreseeable future, but Beijing's increasing
collaboration with Moscow will amplify that challenge.
... ... ...
Washington must come to terms with this China-Russia alignment and work to address and manage it. To contain the depth of alignment,
Washington must look for opportunities to strain the seams in the Russia-China relationship. Russia and China may be drawing closer,
but their interests -- and especially their approaches -- are not identical. Russia and China compete in the Middle East, for example,
for military sales and nuclear energy deals. And their very different approaches to Europe could be a source of strain. In communicating
with Beijing, Washington should underscore how Russian interference in these countries could generate instability that threatens
China's growing economic interests.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is focused on combating China's unfair economic practices, a worthy undertaking. But any trade
war "victory" will be incomplete if Washington does not address Beijing's challenge, in collaboration with Moscow, to the very fabric
of the rules-based order that underpins continued U.S. global leadership and prosperity. Washington will be ineffective if it seeks
to go it alone. Pushing back against the illiberal influence of an aligned Russia and China will require the collective heft of Allies
and partners. The time is ripe to tackle this issue with America's European Allies. Europe has grown more attuned to -- and concerned
about -- the threat that China poses and shares the U.S. imperative to compete with Russia and China.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a senior fellow and director of the Center for New American Security's Transatlantic Security Center.
Contents of the article correlate extremely poorly with the title... I don't see even a semblance of a "containment plan" other
than a vague outline that US should ask EU countries something as of yet unspecified...
With regard to ongoing US threats directed against Iran:
Whereas a "bloody nose" missile attack directed against specific targets in Iran cannot be
ruled out, a conventional war theatre including ground war operations directed against Iran is
almost an impossibility without the support of Turkey and Pakistan, both of which are "sleeping
with the enemy".
Turkey is a NATO heavyweight which is allied with Iran and Russia. Pakistan is allied with
China and Iran. Both Turkey and Pakistan have borders with Iran.
The Pentagon's policy of "encirclement" of Iran formulated in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War
is defunct. Iran has good relations with neighbouring countries including Turkey, Iraq and
Pakistan. All three countries have refused to collaborate with Washington.
Needless to say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also in crisis. America can no no
longer rely on its staunchest allies.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
America's largest military facility in the Middle East the Al-Udeid military base in Qatar
is now situated in a country which is (unofficially) a partner and de facto ally of Iran. Qatar
has switched sides. It has broken its relations with Saudi Arabia. While retaining good
bilateral relations with the US, Qatar is nonetheless aligned with Iran (and Turkey).
Moreover, since 2016, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is in jeopardy. The Sultanate of
Oman which together with Iran guards the Strait of Hormuz entry into the Persian Gulf is also
unofficially aligned with Iran.
US Central Command (USCENTCOM) in Enemy Territory
Moreover, while the US air force has relocated part of its capabilities to Saudi Arabia, the
Al-Udeid military base in Qatar still "officially" hosts the Middle East "forward headquarters"
of US Central Command (USCENTCOM) in a country which is de facto aligned with an enemy of the
United States of America.
The United States welcomed Qatar's generous offer to expand critical facilities at bases
used by US forces in the country and to align operating procedures at these bases with Nato
standards, thereby increasing the operational capability of US and coalition forces based in
Qatar.
Ironically, the US and Qatar signed an Memorandum of Understanding "enabling deeper
co-ordination on potential expansion at Al Udeid Air Base."
Not withstanding the rhetoric underlying official US-Qatar ties, The Atlantic Council, a
think tank, which has close ties to both the Pentagon and NATO confirms that Qatar is now a
firm ally of both Turkey and Iran:
Put simply, for Qatar to maintain its independence, Doha will have essentially no choice
but to maintain its strong partnership with Turkey, which has been an important ally from the
perspective of military support and food security, as well as Iran. The odds are good that
Iranian-Qatari ties will continue to strengthen even if Tehran and Doha agree to disagree on
certain issues On June 15, President Hassan Rouhani emphasized
that improving relations with Qatar is a high priority for Iranian policymakers. Rouhani
told the
Qatari emir that "stability and security of regional countries are intertwined" and Qatar's
head of state, in turn, stressed
that Doha seeks a stronger partnership with the Islamic Republic. (Atlantic Council, June
2019)
The structure of alliances is in jeopardy. The US cannot reasonably wage a full-fledged
conventional theatre war on Iran without the support of its longstanding allies which are now
sleeping with the enemy.
This of course does not exclude other forms of warfare, including
targeted missile attacks which could lead to escalation,
economic warfare and sanctions,
cyber warfare,
political destabilization and regime change,
the selective use of advanced weapons systems (e.g. electromagnetic warfare,
environmental modification techniques (ENMOD), climatic warfare, the use of biological and
chemical weapons)
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 22, 2019
***
A major and far-reaching shift in military alliances is unfolding.
While Turkey is still "officially" a member of NATO, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
has been developing "friendly relations" with two of America's staunchest enemies, namely Iran
and Russia. (see image right).
US-Turkey military cooperation (including US air force bases in Turkey) dates back to the
Cold War. Today Turkey is sleeping with the enemy. And Trump has ("rhetorically") declared war
on Turkey.
We are ready for war, says President Erdogan.
"The secret to successful states is their readiness for war. We are ready with everything
we have," (Erdogan's statement on August 12, 2018 meeting with ambassadors in Ankara)
Erdogan also accuses the US of waging a "financial warfare" against Turkey. Turkish banks are under attack. In turn, a banking crisis is unfolding in the European Union
largely hitting EU banks which hold substantial portions of Turkey's debt.
According to Turkey's president:
"It is everyone's observation that the developments in foreign currency exchange have no
financial basis and they are an attack on our country On the one hand you are a strategic
ally and the other you shoot (the country) in the foot. Is something like this acceptable?" (
Ahvalnews
)
While the media has its eyes riveted on the collapse of the Turkish Lira (which so far in
2018 has lost approximately 40 percent of its value in relation to the US dollar), NATO is in a
state of disarray, with one of its member states "at war" with another member state, namely the
United States of America.
Turkey by a long shot has the largest conventional forces (after the US) within NATO
outpacing France, Britain and Germany, (not to mention its tactical B61 nuclear weapons
capabilities).
#NATOExit
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7ib4syl7rno
Broadly speaking, the US-Turkey rift and its implications for the Atlantic Alliance are
either ignored or trivialized by the media. The entire structure of military alliances is
defunct. NATO is in a shambles.
Turkey is to acquire Russia's state of the art S-400 air defense system. Why?
Does this mean that Turkey which is a NATO member state will withdraw from the integrated
US-NATO-Israel air defense system? Such a decision is tantamount to NATOExit.
"On July 26, the US Congress decided to ban the shipment of F-35 aircraft to Turkey unless
Ankara refused to purchase S-400 anti-aircraft systems from Russia." (Pravda)
The US-Turkey-Israel "Triple Alliance" is Also Defunct
In 1993, Israel and Turkey signed a Memorandum of Understanding leading to the
creation of (Israeli-Turkish) "joint committees" to handle so-called regional threats. Under
the terms of the Memorandum, Turkey and Israel agreed "to cooperate in gathering intelligence
on Syria, Iran, and Iraq and to meet regularly to share assessments pertaining to terrorism and
these countries' military capabilities."
Image on the right: Sharon and Erdogan in 2004
The triple alliance was also coupled with a 2005 NATO-Israeli military cooperation agreement
which included "many areas of common interest, such as the fight against terrorism and joint
military exercises." These military cooperation ties with NATO were viewed by the Israeli
military as a means to "enhance Israel's deterrence capability regarding potential enemies
threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria."
The "triple alliance" linking the US, Israel and Turkey was coordinated by the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff. It was an integrated and coordinated military command structure pertaining to
the broader Middle East. It was based on close bilateral US military ties respectively with
Israel and Turkey, coupled with a strong bilateral military relationship between Tel Aviv and
Ankara. In this regard, Israel and Turkey have been close partners with the US in planned
aerial attacks on Iran since 2005. (
See Michel Chossudovsky, May 2005 )
Needless to say, that triple alliance is defunct. With Turkey siding with Iran and Russia,
it would be "suicide" for US-Israel to even consider waging aerial attacks on Iran.
Moreover, the NATO-Israel 2005 military cooperation agreement which relied heavily on the
role of Turkey is dysfunctional.
What this means is that US-Israeli threats directed against Iran are no longer supported by
Turkey which has entered into an alliance of convenience with Iran.
The broader Realignment of Military alliances
The shift in military alliances is not limited to Turkey. Following the rift between Qatar
and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is in disarray with Qatar siding with Iran
and Turkey against Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Qatar is of utmost strategic significance because
it shares with Iran the world's largest maritime gas fields in the Persian Gulf. (see map
below)
The Al-Udeid military base near Doha is America's largest military base in the Middle East.
In turn, Turkey has now established its own military facility in Qatar.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
A profound shift in geopolitical alliances is also occurring in South Asia with the
instatement in 2017 of both India and Pakistan as full members of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO). Inevitably, this historic shift constitutes a blow against Washington,
which has defense and trade agreements with both Pakistan and India. "While India remains
firmly aligned with Washington, America's political stranglehold on Pakistan (through military
and intelligence agreements) has been weakened as a result of Pakistan's trade and investment
deals with China." (
Michel Chossudovsky , August 1, 2017)
In other words, this enlargement of the SCO weakens America's hegemonic ambitions in both
South Asia and the broader Eurasian region. It has a bearing on energy pipeline routes,
transport corridors, borders and mutual security and maritime rights.
Pakistan is the gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, where US influence has been
weakened to the benefit of China, Iran and Turkey. China is involved in major investments in
mining, not to mention the development of transport routes which seek the integration of
Afghanistan into Western China.
Where does Turkey fit in? Turkey is increasingly part of the Eurasian project dominated by
China and Russia. In 2017-18, Erdogan had several meetings with both president Xi-Jingping and
Vladimir Putin. Erdogan has been contemplating becoming a member of the SCO since 2016 but
sofar nothing concrete has emerged.
The Antiwar Movement: #NATOExit People's Movement
Of crucial significance, the crisis within NATO constitutes a historic opportunity to
develop a #NATOExit people's movement across Europe and North America , a people's movement
pressuring governments to withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance, a movement to eventually
dismantle and abolish the military and political apparatus of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.
The Centre of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post Global
Research articles on community internet sites as long the source and copyright are acknowledged
together with a hyperlink to the original Global Research article. For publication of Global
Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact:
[email protected]
If we consider economics to be an objective science, its rules should also have universal
significance and use, despite differences in societal order. However, socialists of the materialist
camp are committed to the idea that common ownership of the means of production would change the
way economic laws unfold under socialism.
Basically, they reject the notion of the
universality and objectivity of economic rules by suggesting that the laws would change along with
a change to the social formation.
Thus,
communists adhered to the Marxian idea that socialism would rectify a "surplus
value" law, end the "exploitation" of workers, and efficiently regulate the production,
distribution, and consumption aspects of the economy.
They sought to eliminate the market
regulatory mechanism and replace it with directives of the central planning authority. Bolsheviks
enthusiastically got down to business: they eradicated private property, collectivized everything
and everyone, and implemented an official planned economy.
Did it effectively turn off market relations as they thought it would?
No. In contrast to the common perception, socialism has been unable to kill the market economy.
The market went underground and turned into a black market. Black markets existed in capitalist
countries as well, but they worked underground because they dealt in illegal commodities and
services. The black market under socialism served the same purpose, but the list of commodities and
services included mostly items of everyday and innocent consumption that people under capitalism
could easily purchase in stores. Virtually all groups of personal consumption products found their
way to the black market at some time and in some places. Everything from jar lids to toilet paper
was subject to black-market relations.
Despite the proclaimed planned economy, people were engaged in market relations on all levels
and trusted more the price of the goods and services that were established by the market and not
dictated by the government. The official exchange rate of the ruble to the dollar was 0.66 to 1 in
1980. But nobody except party nomenclature was able to enjoy such a favorable exchange rate. At the
same time, the black market offered 4 rubles for 1 American dollar.
There was no production of jeans in the Soviet Union, but like all their peers abroad,
Soviet youth wore jeans.
The price was 180–250 rubles for a pair depending on the brand,
which was almost twice as much as the monthly wage of an entry-level engineer. A visiting nurse
charged 1 ruble for one injection if a patient lived below the fifth floor. The price reached 1.5
rubles for patients who lived on the fifth floor and up. A plumber happily repaired a faucet for
just a bottle of vodka.
Two Prices for Everything
Therefore, in the Soviet Union, any significant goods had two price tags: one real and
another virtual.
The state set the first price through some obscure methods; the usual
mechanism of supply and demand established the second price on the market. If you were lucky, after
several hours of standing in a queue, you could purchase goods at the state price. However, due to
the chronic lack of everything for everyone, the same product could be bought on the black market
at a much higher price. The virtual price became real on the black market and reflected the actual
value of the goods for the buyer. The presence of two price tags is a confirmation of the thesis of
Ludwig von Mises regarding the impossibility of economic calculations under socialism. At the same
time, this is proof of the immortality and immutability of the economic laws of the free market,
even under a totalitarian regime.
Therefore, two economic systems and two sets of prices
co-exist under socialism.
People were forced to use the services of the black market,
even under the penalty of
severe punishment, including up to the death penalty.
Almost the entire society was
engaged in various corruption schemes to support a certain standard of living. There was a
paradoxical situation when the shelves of the supermarkets were empty, but refrigerators at home
were more or less full. The black market was filled with smuggled goods from abroad, as well as
commodities produced in underground workshops. But more often, everyday products were specifically
kept from retail to create a shortage and sell them on the black market at a speculative price.
Socialism had undermined the normal flows of production, distribution, and consumption by ignoring
the objective laws of economics. Nevertheless, an underground market and the intrinsic
entrepreneurial spirit of the people helped them survive the socialist madness.
Regardless of the proclaimed successes of the Soviet economy reported by Communist party
leaders, the socialist economy was unable to compete with its capitalist counterparts.
Communists decided to create a system that somehow mimicked the work that a free market had
successfully and automatically performed for centuries. Thus, they introduced socialist competition
that was supposed to replace free market competition. Surely enough, it was an inadequate and
unfortunate replacement.
The rewards for winners in the capitalist competition were far
higher than for the winners under socialism.
For example, the capitalist winner enjoyed a
significant increase in well-being.
Moreover, the principal winner of the free market competition was society as a whole. This is a
natural feature of a free market economy and the main reason why the evolution of human societies
selected this mode of production. A competition during socialism gave to the winners some
publicity, a certificate of honor, maybe a trip to a "sanatorium" (that is, a health spa), and
other bagatelles that people usually did not appreciate. But most importantly, society as a whole
did not enjoy a significant improvement in well-being.
People were not sufficiently stimulated and were underpaid, which explained the lower labor
productivity compared to capitalist countries. Moreover, this is despite the notion that the means
of production, at last, belong to the workers themselves. People had a famous saying that can be
considered the quintessence of Soviet-style socialism:
"They [the government] pretend
to pay, and we pretend to work."
Socialism is a set of systems that try to
artificially inhibit the free flow of
objective economic laws by creating subjective barriers in the form of specific legislation and
punitive policies
. Socialists mistakenly think that if they assault private property and
market relations, the economic laws will also change. They have taken up the task which, in
principle, has no rational solution. Nothing good comes from the idea of ignoring or violating the
fundamental laws of economics. These laws still exist, regardless of opinions and neglect to
recognize their real character and the impossibility of changing them.
Socialism disrupts the evolutionary process and leads society to a dead end.
The desperate economic situation of ordinary folks in
Venezuela
,
Cuba
,
and North Korea -- the remnants of socialist undertakings -- is a direct result of building a society
in defiance of the natural action of the fundamental law of economics. As a rule, socialist regimes
were buying time by employing slave labor, plunder, coercion, and everything else that an
aggressive totalitarian regime could offer. However, in the end, the means of socialistic life
support was exhausted, and than returning to the natural and healthy market relations, where the
laws of economics work for the benefit of the human race.
The same laws of market economics have worked in different human societies: from pre-historic to
post-industrial, but
still socialists continue to entertain the idea of tampering with
these forces of nature.
So easy to say when you so blithely ignore the historical injustices, the inequality of
opportunity and the theft - the first person to claim a parcel of land as their own exclusive
property was committing an act of theft.
It's not entrepreneurial; it's base rent-seeking and
it was a violent act of forced approbriation by denying natural rights to others.
The
subsequent claims to title are enforced by the threat of violence through the emergence of a
pervasive state.
A modern example is the oligarchs who carved up the commons in a collapsing and
disintegrating Soviet Union. Their's was an act of theft committed against society and the
common good. Your definition of freedom is predicated on theft and is a denial of natural
freedoms,
"... "Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?" ..."
"... "Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose? Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240 billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27 billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing our market... ..."
"... "Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis] ..."
"... Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance. ..."
"... What's happening is a titanic struggle to make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy. ..."
I'd like barflies to ponder the following thought/probability: Radar Saturated
Environment--radiation not from just individual, discreet, identifiable points, but from such
a vast multitude that no single point can be discerned.
To further my brainstorming de-escalation, I'd like to point out what Putin said in his
Direct Line
yesterday about the economic war being waged against Russia in accordance with the Ukraine
Coup in 2014. Pavel Zarubin asks:
"Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western
sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are
appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to
everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?"
I thought this a capital question very similar to Iran's dilemma. Putin's response is
quite long, so I won't cite it all. Rather, I'll limit it to his initial reply and conclusion
as they both deal with the Big Picture:
"First, what does it mean 'to make peace'? We have not fought with anyone and have no
desire to fight with anyone.
"Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose?
Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of
these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240
billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27
billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing
our market....
"Now to the question of whether some things would be different if we give in and abandon
our fundamental national interests. We are not talking about reconciliation here. Perhaps
there will be some external signals, but no drastic change. Look, the People's Republic of
China has nothing to do with Crimea and Donbass, does it? We are accused of occupying
Donbass, which is nonsense and a lie.
But China has nothing to do with it, and yet the tariffs for Chinese goods are rising,
which is almost the same as sanctions.
"Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The
objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global
rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will
continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become
stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis]
This year's Direct Line was as usual filled with domestic issues some that lead to foreign
policy issues. The overall scope and distinctness of the minutia are as vast as Russia. I've
followed these over the years and note they reveal Russia's strengths and fragilities. I'm
tempted to cite more but will leave it to the reader to pursue, but after 90 minutes you
still won't be finished because the transcript isn't yet complete, which while frustrating is
also amazing.
Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's
a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few
days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he
uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual
Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance.
What's happening is a titanic struggle to
make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy.
The question about the causes of the collapse and destruction of the Soviet Union – is not idle. It does not lose its relevance
today, 22 years after occurred the death of the Soviet Union . Why? because some on the basis of this event concluded that, say,
the capitalist model of the economy more competitive, more efficient and has no alternatives. American political scientist
Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Soviet Union even hastened to declare that it was the "End of history": humanity has reached the
highest and last stage of its development in the form of a universal, global capitalism. The relevance of studying the shadow economy,
ssco opinion of this kind of political scientists, sociologists and economists, discussing the socialist economic model does not
deserve attention.
Better to focus on improving the capitalist model of the economy, i. E. A model that targets all members of society to the enrichment,
and a means of enrichment (profit) is the exploitation of one person by another. However, there are such "Natural" attributes of
the capitalist model of social and income inequality, competition, cyclical crises, bankruptcies, unemployment and the like. All
proposed improvements are aimed only at mitigating the inhuman consequences of capitalism that is reminiscent of utopian attempts
to limit the appetite of a wolf devouring a sheep. We proceed from the fact that the key socio-economic characteristics of the socialist
model are welfare for all members of society (goal), public ownership of the means of production (the main means), income generation
solely for labor, planned nature of the economy, centralization of management, command positions of the state in the economy, the
social consumption funds, the limited nature of commodity-money relations and so on. While this refers to the well-being not only
in the form of products and services that are vital (biological) needs of the person.
This would also include public safety and defense, education, culture, conditions of work and rest. Of course, socialism – not
only the economy and social relations. It also implies a certain type of political power, ideology, a high level of spiritually-moral
development of society and another. High moral and spiritual requests should assume that there are higher goals in relation to socio-economic
objectives.
But let's focus now is on the socio-economic aspect of the socialist model. So the erosion of the socialist model began long before
the tragic events of december 1991, when it signed the infamous agreement on the division of the ussr in the bialowieza forest. It
was already the final act of the political order. It is not only the date of death of the ussr, and date of full legalization of
a new socio-economic model, which is called "Capitalism". However, implicitly capitalism germinated in the depths of soviet society
for nearly three decades.
The soviet economy de facto has acquired the traits of a mixed. It combined socialist and capitalist structures. However, some
foreign researchers and politicians said that de facto in the Soviet Union there was a complete restoration of capitalism in the
1960-ies – 1970-ies. The restoration of capitalism was linked to the emergence and development in the bowels of the ussr the so-called
shadow or "Second" economy.
In particular, in the early 1960-ies member of the german communist party willy dickhut began publishing their articles, which
stated that since coming to power in our country n. With. Khrushchev happened (not started, but it happened!) the restoration of
capitalism in the ussr. The shadow economy functioned on the principles different from the socialist. Anyway, she was tied to corruption,
embezzlement of state property, receipt of unearned income, in violation of the laws (or use of "Holes" in the legislation). Not
to be confused with the shadow economy "Informal" economy, which is not contrary to the laws and principles of the socialist system,
but complemented the economy "Official".
First of all, this self-employment – for example, the work of the farmer on the plot or the citizen in his summer cottage. And
in the best of times (under stalin) widely developed the so-called fishing cooperation, which was occupied by production of consumer
goods and services. In the Soviet Union state and party authorities chose to ignore the phenomenon of the shadow economy. No, of
course, the police had uncovered and suppressed various operations in the sphere of the shadow economy. But the leaders of the ussr,
commenting on this kind of history, fobbed off with phrases such as "Exception", "Some shortcomings", "Defects", "Bugs" and the like.
For example, in the early 1960-ies of the then first deputy of the ussr council of ministers anastas mikoyan has identified black
market in the Soviet Union as "A handful of some dirty foam appearing on the surface of our society. "The shadow economy of the ussr:
acincinnati some serious research shadow ("Second") economy in the ussr was conducted until the late 1980-ies. Abroad, such studies
came first. First of all we should mention the work of american sociologist gregory grossman (university of california), which was
called "Destructive independence. The historical role of genuine trends in soviet society".
She became widely known after was published in 1988 in the book "The light at the end of the tunnel" (university of berkeley,
edited by stephen f. Cohen). However, the first article of grossman on this topic appeared in 1977 and was called "The second economy
in the ussr (journal problems of communism, september-october 1977). You can also mention the book emigrated to the United States
, the soviet lawyer konstantin simis "Corruption in the Soviet Union – the secret underground world of soviet capitalism", published
in 1982. The author in the 1970-ies is closely in contact with some shady businessman, a lawyer which he performed at the trials.
However, quantitative assessments of shadow ("Second") economy k. Simes does not. Later appeared the work of american sociologists
and economists of Russian origin Vladimir tremlia and michael alexeev. Since 1985, gregory grossman and Vladimir treml produce periodic
collections of the "Second economy" of the ussr. Releases continued until 1993, only 51 were published a study involving 26 authors.
Many studies represented surveys of families of immigrants from the Soviet Union (a total of 1061 family). To studies have also
used surveys of emigrants from other socialist countries, the official statistics of the ussr, publications in mass media and scientific
journals of the Soviet Union . Despite the differences in some quantitative estimates of the individual authors, these differences
were not fundamental. The differences arose due to the fact that some authors considered "Informal economy", the other – the shadow
economy; however, their definitions of both economies could not match. Here are some results of these studies. 1.
In 1979 the illicit manufacture of wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages, as well as speculative resale of alcoholic beverages
produced in the "First economy", provided the income, equal to 2. 2% of gnp (gross national product). 2. In the late 1970-ies in
the ussr was flourishing black market gasoline. From 33 to 65% of purchases of gasoline in urban areas of the country, individual
owners of cars had petrol sold by drivers of public enterprises and organizations (gasoline were sold at a price below the state).
3. In the soviet hairdresser 'left' incomes exceeded the amounts that customers have paid through cash.
This is just one example of what some state-owned enterprises de facto belonged to the "Second" economy. 4. In 1974 the share
of employment in private and home gardens accounted for almost a third of the total working time in agriculture. And this was almost
10% of the total working time in the soviet economy. 5. In the 1970-ies, about a quarter of agricultural products produced on private
plots, much of it was directed at kolkhoz markets. 6.
In the late 1970's, around 30% of all income of the urban population was obtained through various types of private activity –
both legal and illegal. 7. By the end of 1970-ies the proportion of people employed in the "Second economy", reached 10-12% of the
total workforce in the ussr. At the end of 1980-ies there appeared a number of works on the shadow and "Second" economy in the ussr.
First and foremost is the publication of the soviet economist tatyana results and director of the research institute of the state
planning commission valery rutgajzer. Here is the data from the t.
The results of the "Shadow economy of the ussr". The annual value of illegally produced goods and services in the early 1960-ies
amounted to about 5 billion rubles, and in the end of 1980-ies was already reached 90 billion rubles. At current prices, the gnp
of the ussr was (in billions of rubles): in 1960 – 195; in 1990, 701. Thus, the economy of the ussr for thirty years has increased
3. 6 times, and the shadow economy – 14 times.
If in 1960 the shadow economy relative to official gdp was 3. 4%, while by 1988 this figure rose to 20%. However, in 1990 it was
equal to 12. 5%. This decline was due to changes in soviet legislation, which transferred to discharge a legal a range of economic
activities, which were previously considered illegal. The number of employed in the shadow economy, estimated to be the results,
in the beginning of 1960-ies was 6 million people, and in 1974 their number increased to 17-20 million people (6-7% of the population).
In 1989, the such shadow was already 30 million people, or 12% of the population of the ussr. The threats and consequences of the
development of the shadow economy in sssri american and soviet researchers pay attention to some features of the shadow economy and
its impact on the overall situation in the Soviet Union .
"... Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south, and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not. ..."
"... Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist. ..."
"... Daesh are like another Gladio, but on steroids. ..."
Yes. Originally, creation of the "Arc of Crisis" was proposed by Bernard Lewis as a means to divide and rule, which has always
been the British Empire's mody operandi , and Zbigniew Brzezinski wanted to create an "Arc of Crisis" all along the southern
border of the USSR and later, Russia.
Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south,
and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in
perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies
whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not.
There are many different aspects to this, like from the moment that large numbers of prisoners on death row in S.A. were given
the ultimatum for joining the FSA or decline and face certain execution.
Too often regions are deliberately being exploited by greedy individuals and mixed into politics.
Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist.
The Tax Justice Network, organized in 2003 to fight offshore tax evasion and corruption,
has censored a podcast its founding director recorded when I spoke at the Offshore Alert
Conference in November in London. I didn't write about this before now, because I though the
TJN leaders might change their minds. But it turns out they are either cowardly or
corrupt.
####
Browder's tentacles run far, but only as far as his backers allow him, which leads me to
ask 'what would it take for them to drop him'? Browder has a shelf-life and at some point he
will be surplus to requirement .
That's a very sad story. You can really only take on someone like Browder when you have
nothing to lose – it seems that as soon as you attract interest at an organizational
level, it turns out that organization is afraid of losing its funding, and bows to the power
which threatens to take it away. Note that he was not able to intimidate Nekrasov into not
making his film, but he was able to browbeat theatres into not showing it.
Sooner or later it will all come crashing down for Browder. But The USA will protect him
until they have something to replace the Magnitsky Act so they can continue to legally
discriminate against Russia. If Browder goes down, the act he worked so hard to get on the
books will be revealed as partisan bullshit, and nobody in the west wants that.
Astoundingly arrogant, not to mention immature. If Russia produced a study on how to destroy
America, there would be screams of rage at the unmitigated evil which must motivate a
national effort to wreck the economy of another, and cause misery and social collapse for
millions of people who were completely innocent. But only the Exceptional Nation can discuss
it impassively, as if the study were nothing more than a coffee-table book. Because, you
know, it is destined to rule and to triumph over all. So many parallels to Rome, yes, yes.
Americans were blessed with a wonderful, rich and bountiful country. Instead of being
content with it, the repellent US government has set its sights on world domination so as to
draw upon global wealth to increase American personal wealth and influence. It really sees
itself as sitting at the pinnacle of a global empire in which all other countries are either
vassals or resources. And the American people, while you could not really call them
complicit, are mostly sold on the notion that this is their birthright as Americans, and that
anyone who tries to forestall its unfolding in this fashion is trying to upset the natural
order of things. Americans cannot be content with simply having America – they have to
own and control it all. Oddly enough, the very ambition which was attributed to the
Communists.
Jake
says: Next New Comment May 22, 2019 at 3:27 pm
GMT 100 Words This is good writing: "The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that
post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened calf
being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards
discovered that their country was to play the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they
were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards.
Correct Sam. From The Art of War to win one must know the enemy like one knows ones self.
There were terrible consequences for the failure of the West to know Hitler's intentions and
fail to act appropriately. England and France were duped by themselves into a policy of
submission until it was almost too late. England held on by a thread and somehow managed to
break the appeasement strategy and go on to total war. You know the "We shall fight them on
the Beaches" speeches which were the defining moments after the failed diplomacy that changed
the course of history.
But there is a problem with hindsight. Every hammer sees a problem as a nail. Our past
victories are, in the end, no prediction of our future successes. We need to evaluate every
emerging condition as an entirely new problem to be solved with no preconceptions. We need to
cast a wide net and explore multiple paths for the successful defense of the Nation. We need
to be able to correctly see the future and take actions.
This is where we have failed believing we have no existential threat we are willing to
admit to ourselves except for the old threadbare reasons we find solace and comfort in
dusting off the old playbook for World actions believing that the old plans will somehow
guarantee success.
We need to move beyond a model of our preeminence and our position as the leading nation
in the World which still relies on our former dominance and our ability to direct the course
of foreign nations.
The entire population of the Planet is growing stronger and more diverse. The voices from
emerging nations are growing louder. China is investing the cash they got from the West to
implement new strategies to provide basic services to developing nations. Their aim is not
philanthropy but eventual control.
We can no longer afford to expect that some foreign devil nation will rear its ugly head
so we can chop it's head off like we did in WWII. Instead we should be preparing for the new
frontier where former adversaries and allies are making inroads in building the new economies
of the future.
There is only one option. We need to stop focusing on our past victories and the methods
we used to achieve those victories and begin to correctly assess the opportunities out there
where we can still influence the rest of the World in positive ways. China and Russia are not
waiting for us to catch up.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:20
I have read that after WW II, the Soviets made overtures to the Truman government, but
those were rejected in favor of hostility. It seems the capitalists' fear of socialism
overcame good sense.
DW Bartoo , May 1, 2019 at 11:59
Truman knew Russia posed no threat to the U$, Tedder, but chose, like many a predecessor,
to create a monster, an enemy of fearful dimension and ruthless intent, to keep the highly
profitable militarization of the U$ going. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not
done to bring the Japanese to their knees, they were already there, it was to send a message
to the Soviet Union.
All that remained was to stoke domestic fear, inculcate loathing, and extend military
empire, as evidenced by what soon transpired on the Korean Peninsula.
U$ history courses omitt so very much, being most often hagiographic exercises designed to
impart unquestioning patriotism.
Truman instituted the peace-time draft for precisely the same reason, and Hollywood
supplied the fictive depictions designed to instill a manly notion of ass-kicking which would
dictate policy henceforth.
Truman and Eisenhower both knew that anti-communism was a lark, but it persuaded JFK to
begin the war against Vietnam (and Cambodia and other hapless nearby nations). Vietnam
presented no more threat to the U$ than had North Korea. Both were attacked to intimidate
China and the Soviet Union.
The claim was that the wars were necessary to stop the spread of "monolithic communism"
when, in fact, China and the Soviet Union were hardy bosom buddies and deeply distrusted each
other.
But it was FDR who really sought what has become the US empire.
Though you will find no mention of that in most U$ history courses, any more than you will
find but passing mention, if any at all, of General Smedley Butler, who made clear that his
task had not been to protect the people of the U$, in his foreign engagements, but to open
doors for banking and corporate interests.
We are at the tail end of a long series of provoked wars and fake news (when William R.
Hearst found a day without news, he simply invented it -- imagine what that means if today's
young historians seek to research the past by looking at "old" newspaper accounts).
Jeff Harrison , April 30, 2019 at 23:59
I would like to point out that the useless UN has repeatedly caved to US violations of
international law, the UN charter, and any number of UN sanctioned treaties. How, exactly, is
this any different than the League of Nations and Nazi Germany?
Zhu , April 30, 2019 at 01:31
Whoever moves into the White House, post ritual election, nothing much ever changes. As a
society, we are committrd to constant warfare. It pleases our national vanity.
Sam F , April 29, 2019 at 21:03
It is a very good thing that "extremist ideologues accelerate America's already evident
decline as a global power." It has long been apparent that US democracy cannot be saved from
the tyranny of the rich, who now control all of its tools of democracy: its elections, mass
media, and judiciary. Jefferson wrote that "the tree of liberty must be watered with the
blood of tyrants" every 20 years or so, now long overdue. Certainly the US can only be
rebuilt from a very low state, when the rich have been controlled and prohibited, if it is to
be saved from violent revolution or conquest. So its economic destruction by imbecile
demagogues is a blessing indeed, every step of the way. Let them take America to the
recycling center, the sooner to be reworked as a real democracy for the new century.
Roberto , April 30, 2019 at 08:13
It's kind of like "Planet of The Apes", in the sense that the underlings support the
process as religious fanatics, who are servants of an oligarchy.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:22
Sam, climate disruption will probably interfere with everything; hopefully, America's
decline will be an intelligent response to actuality. I won't hold my breath.
KiwiAntz , April 29, 2019 at 19:35
America should be booted out of the United Nations & the Organization moved to another
Country, outside of the US? Because this Country doesn't obey International Laws, there's no
point in the US being part of it? Its a pariah, rogue State & must be treated as such
& designated a Terrorist Nation! America is a AIDS virus infecting & poisoning the
World & must be isolated & contained, like any deadly virus? Attempts by the
International community to wean their economies away from the US Dollar system, must be
accelerated & all the other Nations who rely on Iranian Oil, & others, need to stand
together & say with one united voice, we reject your threats, your sanctions & your
War crimes behaviour! This Global Bully called America, who thinks it can threaten every
Nation on Earth with sanctions & threats in order to get its own way, must be stopped?
Trumps geriatric, old white guy, hopeless Presidency & his lunatic appointment's of
Bolton & Pompeo has exposed the true rotten face of US Imperialism, its benevolent face
shown to be a complete lie & farce & thanks to Trump & his cronies, everyone can
now see this Nation for what it really is? It's a criminal, Mafia, gangster Nation shaking
down other Nations for oil & loot? Lashing around like a drunken buffoon on his last
legs, America's last desperate effort to maintain its Hegemonic status is slipping through
its fingers like water, in a increasingly multipolar World lead by Russia, China & every
other Nation that's abandoning the suicidal, Western model of the US in favour of the One
Belt, One Road Initiative & economic model of the future, leaving America behind in its
wake as a has been, decaying Empire in its death throes, living on its past glories!
dfnslblty , April 30, 2019 at 13:12
"America should be booted out of the United Nations & the Organization moved to
another Country, outside of the US? Because this Country doesn't obey International Laws,
there's no point in the US being part of it?"
Excellent idea that points to usa's hypocracy and attendant violence.
JohnP , April 29, 2019 at 19:35
Besides the influence of Pompeo and Bolton upon Trump, there is Kershner and I sense
Trump's desire to gift powerful Zionists who can then promote his business and his ego.
Israel wants the Golan Heights it said, because it is defensive, however that may be true,
there is also gas and oil there, and they are already taking it away from Syria, just as they
deny the Palestinians the energy just off the Gaza shore.
As thick as Trump is, he has an ability to use vulnerable people to his advantage. I just
wish they could or would see that.
JohnP , April 29, 2019 at 19:48
I meant to say at the start that I think it is Israeli influences through his advisors
including Trumps son-in-law that have set the Iranian policy. They are the ones who helped
Hizballah get Israel out southern Lebanon which Israel considers part of Greater Israel.
Twice they have kicked Israel out of Lebanon.
Zhu , April 30, 2019 at 01:37
Christian Zionists, like Pompeo & Pence, have the political clout. We Americans are
responsible for our own follies, not scapegoats in any other country.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:24
And Golan has water, worth more than gas and oil
boxerwar , April 29, 2019 at 19:28
NORTH KOREA BEGS, ON BENDED KNEES FOR AMERICAN EASE OF SANCTIONS
SO THAT N. KOREAN PEOPLE CAN HAVE ADEQUATE FOOD SUPPLIES, MEDICAL SUPPLIES, FERTILIZER FOR
FARMS, OPEN COMMERCE WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE WAR SHOOTING WITH KOREA CAME TO AN END DECADES AGO!!!!!!
WHY THE RUCK ARE WE STILL, IN EFFECT, HOLDING THAT NATION OF PEOPLE AS PRISONERS-OF-WAR
FIFTY + FU-KEN YEARS AFTER OUR ABSOLUTELY TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF ALL THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE,
ROADS, DAMS, FARMS, HOSPITALS, UTILITIES, LEAVING THEM ABSOLUTELY DEPENDENT ON THE SMALL
CHARITY FROM COMPASSIONATE NATIONS.
THAT QUESTION 60 FRIGG'EN YEARS AFTER WE BOMBED THEM INTO HOLY CRAP AND'VE FORBIDDEN OTHER
NATIONS, FOR NOW SIXTY YEARS, FROM DOING ANY SORT OF FREE TRADING ??? !!!
WHO THE G UCK ARE WE???? TO ENSHRINE AND ENFORCE SUCH TERRORISM UPON A PEOPLE WHOM'VE HAD
NOT-A-THING TO DO WITH A WAR FRAUGHT UPON THEM SIXTY FRIGGIN YEARS AGO !!!!!!???????!!!!
ARE YOU (we) SO-CALLED PATRIOTS -- OR FRIGGEN PARTICIPANTS IN THE CONTINUED MASS MURDER OF
CIVILIAN HUMAN BEINGS, STRUGGLING & STARVING UNDER OUR HOSTAGE INTERNATIONAL BULLYING /
BARRIERS, I REPEAT ! AFTER NOW 70 FULL YEARS OF SANCTIONS/EMBARGOES and CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILIANS . !!!!!!
dfnslblty , April 30, 2019 at 13:16
boxerwar:
Excellent plea and challenge ~ keep Protesting and Writing!
IRRATIONAL -: adverse, unfavorable, improper, pernicious, noxious, EVIL, and, so on -- in
terms of ruthless,or, imprudent bully-ism.
Such behavior is typical in the life of our unscrupulous, narcisistic Flim-Flam remorseless
fiend, the American POTUS Trump.
WHAT BRUTAL HARMS HAVE BEEN INFLICTED ANYWHERE THIS WORLD BY THE PEOPLE/NATION OF IRAN ? ?
? ?
(as compared to Saudi Arabia and/or Israel ==== Both Our "Allies " whom have NO Compunction
against bombing civilians )
Repeat the words of Secretary of State Condelezza Rice, "WHAT WE SEE NOW ARE THE BIRTH
PANGS OF A NEW MIDDLE EAST."
(other officials stated openly that our intent in fomenting war in the Middle East was/is the
purpose of "OPENING MARKETS.")
don't be fooled by love songs (patriotic) and/or lonely hearts (deceitful men)our
'leaders' are rapaciously greedy, evil persons /
why don't they reveal the un-redacted Mueller Report?! -- Same reasons for JFK report and
Saudi's allowed to fly after 9/11.
Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying to say?
Boxerwar , April 30, 2019 at 15:17
"Such behavior is typical in the life of our unscrupulous, narcisistic Flim-Flam
remorseless fiend, the American POTUS Trump"
JOHN CHUCKMAN -- "Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying
to say?
++++ "The US Moves on Iran's Oil Market as an Expression of an Irrational Foreign Policy"
++++
Mr. Chuckman; Recognize and Rationalise POTUS Trump in his narcissistic mind-set as the
(a) 21st century NERO .
A neurotic / egotistical Fool, CONTROLLING Levers of World Economy,Commerce and Military
POWER.
Mr. Chuckman; add to that the Power and Authority to OWN foreign government
banks/politicians/sovereign Right of Control over THEIR NATIONAL RIGHT TO OWN AND CONTROL
THEIR OWN ECONOMIES !!! ???
Mr. Trump is the face of an International Interloper, and/or is the shocking spearpoint of
the brave-new-world of
Sentient Androids / Robots / Artificial Intelligence / TransHumanism. (wake up
everybody!)
George Gilder warned of this in his 1989 book MICROCOSM
"BEWARE THE SENTIENT ANDROID" says Ian McEwan' book, "Machines Like Me"
Which Have -- NO HUMAN FEELING
No Human Feeling / No Compassion/ No Mercy --
This is Trumpian Nomenclature/ his Conclave'
his Obsequious blindness to the "android-istic
Inhuman-istic selfishness of his Personal Character.
Trump and his ilk would not fit well with the
human characters met in Theodore Sturgeon
likelyMore less in the sermons of Spurgeon.
boxerwar , April 30, 2019 at 15:46
Get it right, Chuckman,
Trump is a man out of place
in this period of time
But a Fool Out of his own
Place and Time w/ Robots
and CRISPER DNA Splicing .
Our next Future POTUS,
Aware of Trans humanism
will be Empowered by
Emerging Science and the
Robotic / Android world
seen by A. Turing & A. Toffler
My second reply, Mr. Chuckman, (my first reply apparently hasn't been approved)
In regard to what I'm 'trying to say' --
The decrepit history of our Brutally Arrogant and Obsequiously Religious belief in The
NATIONAL EXCEPTIONALISM,
that affords us the RIGHT to Construct 'wars' with Enemies-Of-Our-Choice, solely at the call
of Oil Company Executives, or WarPlane execs, or Trade War Expansionists or Bomb Makers or
corporatists like Iraq War Apologist Donald Rumsfeld, who championed and pushed through U S
and international markets, the killer sugar substitute Nutrasweet to millions and millions of
Overweight and/or Diabetic sufferer's. -- -- -- -- -- -- Rumsfeld, who championed The Iraq
War, where MILLIONS of innocent humans were Slaughtered or Displaced by the FALSE ACCUSATION
THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN was the culprit of the 9/11 WTC Event.
Like the Gulf of Tonkin CREATED EVENT and our CIA and DEA cocaine involvement in Central
America that created the DRACONIAN Crack Epidemic of Death and Imprisonment in American
'Inner-Cities' -- that also introduced the exorbitant overflow of firearms inside densely
populated Black & Latino neighborhoods. -- These were Planned Events, with planned
purpose -- AN EVIL PLAN.
God Bless America, right !! ?
What lies ahead is ever encroaching Artificial Intelligence -- Robots, Sentient Androids,
Gene Splicing, Trans Humanism, DNA Networks, " A Crack In Creation" -- CRISPER and the
ability to change the genetic makeup of humans -- -- Non-Human Minds interacting with IDIOT
NUMB-SCULLS like POTUS Trump !
Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying to say?
CHUCKMAN; In Morse Code it would be -- -- --
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:27
When the Crazies state somehow that Iran is the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the
world, I cringe. I follow the news, and I have not noticed one incidence of Iranian terrorism
in many years -- perhaps the Embassy Takeover after the Revolution, but that can be excused
as a defense against the CIA.
"At the same time, Trump's desire to negotiate with adversaries -- Russia, Iran, North
Korea -- is entirely defensible. But the "down to zero" Iran policy to take effect this week
can be read as a signal of the president's failure to counter the foreign policy Manicheans
who surround him."
Not sure if I agree with Lawrence on this point. Trump indeed always wanted to negotiate
with Russia and NK. However , a distinction must be made when it comes to Iran specifically.
Trump has always been a staunch hawk toward Iran, always; he didn't need any cajoling from
Bolton or Pompeo Maximus. He's merely continuing his hostility against Iran. (Cue Sheldon
Adelson of course.)
David G , April 30, 2019 at 04:43
Dead right. The same can be said for Venezuela.
I don't know how much credit Trump deserves for his gaseous musings about better relations
with Russia and North Korea, and about disengagement from war in Syria and Afghanistan --
swamped and overturned as they have been by the Beltway consensus -- but whatever you want to
grant him with respect to those countries, there's no public evidence that his brutal
hostility toward Iran and Venezuela required any convincing.
rosemerry , April 30, 2019 at 16:31
The brutal hostility is of course entirely unjustified. His "choice" of advisers just
makes the whole problem worse-it would be difficult to find worse people than Pompass, Bolton
and Abrams.
earthling1 , May 1, 2019 at 13:18
The plan is to regime change Venezuela and steal their oil. Blockade Iran from selling
their oil and use Venezuelas oil to maintain low gas prices. Regime change Iran and move
missiles to Russias southern flank.
Blow up Russian pipelines/blockade export of Russian oil. Regime change Russia and
complete "containment" of China's northern flank. Regime change China.
The Following text is Section 6 of The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,
by the Italian Committee No War No NATO
*
Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO,
Florence, April 7, 2019
In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this
important document, which will also be available as an E-book.
*
Contents
1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO
***
1. Multiple factors make Libya important in the eyes of the United States and the European
powers. It has the largest oil reserves in Africa, precious for its high quality and low cost
of extraction, and large reserves of natural gas. On these, the Libyan state maintains strong
control, leaving limited profit margins to US and European companies. In addition to black
gold, Libya has white gold: the immense reserve of fossil water from the Nubian aquifer, which
extends under Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad. Relevant are the sovereign funds, the capital that
the Libyan state has invested abroad, in particular to provide Africa with its own financial
bodies and its own currency.
2. On the eve of the 2011 war, the United States and the European powers "froze", or seized,
the Libyan sovereign funds, delivering a mortal blow to the entire project. The emails of
Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State of the Obama administration in 2011), which came to light
later, confirmed the real purpose of the war: to block Gaddafi's plan to use Libyan sovereign
funds to create autonomous financial bodies of the African Union and an African currency as an
alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc (the currency that 14 African countries, ex-French
colonies are forced to use). It was Clinton – the New York Times would later document
– who had President Obama sign "a document authorizing a covert operation in Libya and
the supply of weapons to the rebels".
3. Tribal sectors hostile to the government of Tripoli and Islamic groups that had until a
few months before been defined as terrorists were financed and armed. At the same time special
forces infiltrated Libya, including thousands of easily disguised Qatari commandos. The entire
operation was led by the United States, first through the African Command, then through NATO
under US command.
4. On 19 March 2011, Libya's air-sea bombing began. In seven months, US/NATO air forces
carried out 30,000 missions, of which 10,000 were attacks involving the use of over 40,000
bombs and missiles. Italy participated in this war using its military bases and forces and
tearing up the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between the two countries. For
the war on Libya, Italy made seven air bases (Trapani, Gioia del Colle, Sigonella, Decimomannu,
Aviano, Amendola and Pantelleria) available to the US/NATO forces, providing technical
assistance and supplies. The Italian Air Force participated in the war by carrying out over a
thousand missions, and the Italian Navy engaged on several fronts.
5. With the US/NATO war of 2011, the Libyan state was demolished and Gaddafi himself
assassinated. That State was demolished which, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean
facing Italy, maintained "high levels of economic growth" (as the World Bank itself documented
in 2010), recording "high indicators of human development" including universal access to
primary and secondary education with 46% of the population at university level. Despite the
disparities, the standard of living of the Libyan population was considerably higher than that
of other African countries. This was evidenced by the fact that over two million immigrants,
mostly Africans, found work in Libya.
6. Sub-Saharan African immigrants were also affected by the war, who, persecuted on charges
of collaborating with Gaddafi, were imprisoned or forced to flee. Many, driven by desperation,
attempted the crossing of the Mediterranean towards Europe. Those who lost their lives were
also victims of the war in which NATO demolished the Libyan state.
*
Sections 7-16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research
This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at
the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
"... Promotion of myths about rich natural resources in the territory, where the ethnic group lives ..."
"... In large, this situation has become possible due to a de-facto inaction of or even unofficial ideological protection from authorities. If one takes a detailed look at the Russian elite, he will find that a significant part of it consists of westernized adherers to "liberal democratic order" while another consists of representatives of national family clans. ..."
"... Many of these persons do not associate themselves with the ordinary population and consider the territory of Russia only as a source to increase their personal wealth. ..."
Bugajski's ideas are not new at all. Globalist think tanks have been advancing the same for
decades.
Mud-slinging in order to undermine Russian statehood aims at fueling radicalism, nationalism
and regionalism. It has the wave-like behavior. The previous wave top targeted pretty much the
same regions: the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, Siberia and the Far East. Tricks and methods
employed are not divers. The only difference between them is geographical location and names of
the influenced ethnic groups.
These approaches could be provisionally marked as the "Polish style". This term has no links
to modern Poland. We employ it only because the approaches provided below, except for the first
point, Poland really has a great written history, are quite similar to the ones that were first
used to fuel Polish nationalism in the 19 th and 20 th centuries and
applied to the same geopolitical area.
The main ideas of this model are:
Creation of a pseudo-history of a nation or ethnic
group. Usually this pseudo-history is dated back to the ancient world and legendary times. This
"history" is based on pseudo-historical works and research papers composed by authors unknown
to the world academic community. Promotion of ideas of exceptionalism among members of the
nation or ethnic group. These ideas argue that the nation or ethnic group is superior to
neighbors and instigate a grotesque sense of national identity (exceptionalism based on
ethnicity). Creation of the myth of a historical archenemy, who has been oppressing the nation
or ethnic group, often attempting to eliminate its "exceptional" culture. This historical
archenemy is described as the reason for the group's undoing and thus its poor state in the
modern world. The historical archenemy can be constructed from various states existing in
different periods of history but, through which a historical succession or links can be traced.
For example, the Golden Horde, the Moscow state, the Russian Empire, the USSR and the Russian
Federation. The myth is actively fueled by speculation regarding historical events, which can
neither be confirmed nor denied using factual data. Creation and promotion of the idea of the
nation as once great but now defective, where this position of greatness had been stolen from
it. Instigation of religious or intra-religious tensions, if the nation or ethnic group has a
similar religion to that of its neighbors. The main approaches employed are:
Promotion and
creation of religious cults, including heathen customs, which are allegedly linked to the
"ancient history" of the nation or ethnic group;
Promotion of discords or sectarianism within
the main religion of the nation. For example, for Orthodox Christianity: the Old Believers or Schismatical cults; for Islam: Sunni sects or Shia branches;
Instigation of religions tensions
between the religion of the ethnic group and other religions of the state. For example:
Islam/Christianity or Orthodox Christianity/Catholicism.
Promotion of myths about rich natural
resources in the territory, where the ethnic group lives. Therefore, if this ethnic group were
to rule this area "independently", its wealth would grow and grow. A part of this effort is
propaganda against government actions concerning the use of natural resources from the
territory, where this ethnic group lives. The negative impact on the ecological situation is nightmarized by dissemination of myths about the barbaric exploitation of nature. A vivid
example is the disseminated information about the alleged irreparable damage to Lake Baikal
that is harmed by the plant producing bottled mineral water.
Instigation of territorial and
intraregional economic disputes between the neighboring nations or ethnic groups.
Discredit of
everything linked with the dominating state culture, language and history. For example, bashing
everything "Russian", the creation and promotion of offensive language and terms (Russian
– Vatnik), a wide spread of derogatory language and the mutilation of words, terms and
names.
The previous wave of information onslaught on nations and ethnic groups of Russia was aimed
at the following targets:
The Northern Caucasus. The influence was mostly aimed at the Kabardians living in the
Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, Stavropol Krai and the Republic of
Adygea. The Ossetians in the Republic of North Ossetia – Alania were also targeted.
Recently the Ingushs living in the Republic of Ingushetia, Moscow and St. Petersburg were again
considered as a priority goal in "the Northern Caucasus target list".
The Southern Federal District. The main effort was to instigate nationalism, regionalism and
separatism among the Cossacks, mostly in Rostov Oblast. The Cossacks are not an ethnic group.
However, they are a large social group, which makes them a likely target.
The Northwestern Federal District. The goal was to instigate regional nationalism among
Finno-Ugric ethnic groups. Another point of pressure was to create nationalism tendencies among
ethnic Russian population in the Republic of Karelia and Arkhangelsk Oblast in order to form a
new large ethnosocial group. For example, in April, the city of Arkhangelsk experienced a
series of rallies held in breach of law. This situation happened under the passive eye of
regional authorities. Furthermore, initial reactions and attitude of the regional authorities
played a notable role in fueling the protest moods. These protests, caused by a project of
landfill site in the nearby area, is being actively exploited by the so-called non-system
opposition and "liberal media" to fuel tensions between the different groups of local
population as well as the regional government.
Separate efforts were contributed to influence the population of Saint Petersburg, which in
terms of culture is one of the most westernized city of Russia alongside with Kaliningrad.
There was also an attempt to instigate local separatism using the concept of Ingermanland.
The Volga region. Ethnic nationalism and religious radicalism were instigated among the Kalmyks, Bashkirs and Tatars. Small ethnic groups and nations, often described as Russians: the
Mokshas and Erzyas also became the target of foreign influence. Among small ethnic groups and
nations, local nationalism can take ugly forms.
Western Siberia. The goal was to create a separate ethnic-social group describing itself as
the citizens of Siberia and separating itself from the rest of Russian citizens. The main
targets were the Altai Republic, Novosibirsk Oblast and the city of Novosibirsk (the capital of
the Siberian Federal District). The foreign influence achieved notable successes in these
areas.
Eastern Siberia. The campaign in this region was aimed mostly at Buryats and Tuvans. Yakuts
were also a target.
The Far East. Local regionalism and separatism were actively fueled in Khabarovsk Krai and
Primorsky Krai, especially in the cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. Besides this, the
foreign influence is actively exploiting simultaneously both pro-Chinese intentions and the
myth of the Chinese threat.
It should be noted that the article "Managing Russia's dissolution" published by The
Hill points to the same regions for further operations designed to dismantle Russia. These
operations will be more dangerous than the previous ones because they will exploit the
successes already achieved in some fields. For example:
the nationalism and religion issues
in the North Caucasus; the nationalism of ethnic groups in the Volga region – Bashkirs,
Tatars, Erzyas, Moshkas; the nationalism and regionalism of Buryats in eastern Siberia. the
creation of a new separate pro-western identity by a good part of the people living in the
cities of Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad, that distance itself from the rest of Russia; the
creation of a separate ethnic-social identity in Western Siberia:
The regions have been targeted by multiple campaigns undermining and discrediting nationwide
traditions and behaviors, for example the New Year traditional family holidays, social events
of Soviet or Old Russian origin as well as common history of Russia. Individualism, neoliberal
attitudes and values are successfully promoted in Saint Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Western
Siberia. Education is simplified and westernized. Meanwhile stakeholders describe these
tendencies as ugly and hostile examples to residents of the North Caucasus, southern Russia and
other regions, promoted ultra-hardline or far right ideology. Local regionalism and ideology
tensions are being successfully fueled.
In large, this situation has become possible due to a de-facto inaction of or even
unofficial ideological protection from authorities. If one takes a detailed look at the Russian
elite, he will find that a significant part of it consists of westernized adherers to "liberal
democratic order" while another consists of representatives of national family clans.
Many of
these persons do not associate themselves with the ordinary population and consider the
territory of Russia only as a source to increase their personal wealth.
The term "new
aristocracy", which has recently got spread in Russian media, has initially appeared as a proud
self-designation among Russian elite families emphasizing exceptionality of their members.
Nonetheless, supporters of Bugajski ideas do not consider the aforementioned tendencies as
sufficient for dismantling Russian statehood without additional strivings. While on the
regional level they have achieved some results, the identified nationwide goals have not been
accomplished. The system of Russia has not yet come close to an imbalance, that is, to the
condition where destructive trends are already beginning to grow on their own, without
additional artificial influence.
The negative tendencies so far set in motion could still be
stopped and reversed. In this situation, we may expect a new wave of information onslaught
toward Russia, traditionally backed by Western funds.
This is pure projection.
All the faults and failings and problems listed apply far more to the United Snakes and EU
than to Russia.
There is a remarkable continuity in western aggression towards Russia from Hitler till the
present day.
Carve up Russia into artificial mini states and loot its resources.
Bismarck used to say, Russia is not as strong as it seems. But it's not as weak as it seems
either.
People point to the discrepancy in GDP and military spending. US v. Russia $21 trillion and
$1.6 trillion, and $1,134 billion and $49 billion respectively.
That's true so far as it goes, but money buys 3 x as much in Russia. So that 1.6 figure is
more like 4 plus, or around the size of the German economy.
Then there is the artificial dollar yardstick. The US organized a speculative attack on the
rouble, driving it down from 30 to 80 to the dollar. So in dollar terms, the economy was
reduced to less than half its previous size. But they were producing just as many cars and
just as much oil and wheat as before. Exports were cheaper. The rouble was allowed to float
back to around 55. Gold and foreign currency reserves were not wasted defending it, as
Washington wanted. There was a great boost in domestic production. America can bankrupt
itself with its endless wars and bloated inefficient war machine if it wants.
And if you look at the US economy, 40% is unproductive, rent seeking finance, Wall Street
spivs pushing around worthless derivatives toilet paper and pretending it is worth trillions.
Or the bloated rent seeking of the drug and insurance companies, 17% of the economy, charging
$5,000 per hospital journey and $750 for a pill that costs a few cents to produce. So much
else is accounted for by the military boondoggles.
When you take that into account, the figures are more like 8 trillion v. 4 trillion.
So much US wealth is eaten up by the gargantuan level of graft and corruption.
It is the US and EU that are at far greater risk of collapse – maybe a lot sooner than
anyone realises.
Anti Russian policies really took off in the 1780's when Catherine the Great was moving South
(including taking Crimea). The British saw Russia as a threat to its business empire in India
and possibly replacing parts of the Ottoman Empire if that was to finally crumble. The icing
on the cake for the Russophobes came with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Russian soldiers
bedded down on Parisian streets in 1814 got the paranoid juices flowing, from that time on
the narrative has been that Russia is expanding aggressively and intends to dominate Europe
while destroying European colonies in Asia.
The Revolution just increased Western paranoia;
Russia was no longer just Russia but a Communist State and one immensely stronger with the
formation of the USSR. When the Union collapsed and Russia was suddenly so much smaller and
less powerful it was no surprise that plans developed to finally divide it up while hostility
continues unabated.
It's almost as if the West needs the threat but not the war. In 250 years
Britain has only once attacked Russia head on, during the French, Turkish, British attempt to
seize Crimea in the 1850's. Although Sevastopol was destroyed the Allied forces had to
withdraw.
Usually Britain has fought with Russia, against Napoleon and then the Germans in both World Wars.
In global terms , Russia is particularly stable but, for reasons best known to itself –
is risking global contagion due to its own neoliberal ideology (see below: reply to TTIC).
Other than that, it is the whole integrated system that is susceptibly fragile to contagion.
Russia and America are separated only by discourse – as revealed by capital flows.
And
the epicentre of debt inertia could just as easily be the East – centred on China. For
the precise reason that China built its way out of GFC 1.0. It won't build its way out of GFC
2.0 – which is likely to be many times the magnitude of the first one due to the debt
hangover. We will discover what moral hazard and contagion really mean this time. And there
will be no easy restart – negative interest rates and massive credit stimulus to
reinflate the "mother of all bubbles'?
There are so many contradictions and fragilities, that predicting the where and when is a
mugs game. But neither will there be any morality or false karmic retribution to it. The
deliberately impoverished poor, sucked dry of their life essence by BOTH America and Russia
(and Britain and China – see below) will suffer the most. The best thing humanity could
do is reject as ecologically and evolutionarily redundant the entire hierarchical tributary
system of globalised debt and death.
Entropically and ecologically, we can't afford it any
more. But, psychologically, we probably won't. Some people seem to like it too much. They are
not all American or European though. Even in their home countries – humanity has been
left behind.
The M$M lies: everyone knows its main purpose is para-state political propaganda – the
integrated Fourth Estate. But it does not lie without purpose – there is the
Herman/Chomsky model of controlling consent and consensus in the debatable public forum of
acceptable discourse the Overton Window that focuses on the liberal democratic 'extreme
centre'. It creates the spectacle of electoral politics – including Brexit and its
transatlantic equivalent 'Obstructiongate'. This political 'bread and circuses' spectacle is
extended into the fantasy imaginal of East/West geopolitcs. So is there intracapitalist
inter-relational tensions and contradictions between East and West? Of course, ones that
might get us all killed if they develop. But it also obscures what is happening beneath the
radar – within and without the trained and political propaganda focused microscope
– which is an International World Capitalism that is killing us all softly while our
gaze is averted and focused on simulated and superficial spectacle elsewhere.
After the other day, I thought I better wind my neck in and do some actual research into
international loans and FDI. There is plenty, if anyone wants to substantiate what I have
said – there is no East and West to International World Capitalism (IWC). This should
be obvious, but it isn't because the focus is on the ripples – sometimes large –
on the surface of the pond. IWC works below the surface as integrated flows and counter-flows
– round-tripping for treaty, tax, and money-laudering of illicit flows purposes. All of
this is deregulated – and occurs 'elsewhere' beneath the public radar, and beneath the
created spectacle that is deliberately narratively constructed to conceal it.
Nick Shaxson is a prime source, and one of the few journalists that cover the 'spiders
web'. A web that is still centred on the City of London Corporation – that controls 25%
of world trade. The other main centres are NY and Switzerland (Zurich – the BIS is
'elsewhere' to). Analysis of actual capital flows is not easy – deliberately so, as it
is deliberately made to conceal the capital origination and through a series of accounting
measures – make it look as it originated 'elsewhere'. But what analysis is available
consolidates Wallerstein's World Systems Theory of a core, semi-periphery, and deliberately
pauperised periphery.
Like it or not, (and downvotes won't change anything), it also shows that the 'network
core' is the aforementioned ZUSUK ('Z' for Zurich) extended alliance of 'Pax Americana' and
the City's post-colonial 'British Empire' – supported by a sub-imperial semi-periphery
of the 'Eastern Block' and 'Greater China' as this paper shows.
So my unpopular proposal is that IWC is a parasitical hierarchical tributary system based
on interest bearing debt, and Compounded Annual Rates of Growth (CAGR) that are are drawing
the entire world into a deflationary death spiral. ZUSUK is the imperialist network core:
with Russia/China as the sub-imperial, semi-periphery – drawing on the rest of the
world. One that costs the poorest countries $1.2tn pa (in 2008). It is not a dynamic that
anyone can do anything about, particularly when it is deliberately kept as a stealth dynamic
– below the public radar. You can thank the media for that. But then, that's their job.
Our job is to expose the lies and the underlying dynamics of death. It is globalised and
integrated – and arranged hierarchically – not hemispherically. There is no East
and West to capitalism not beneath the surface.
As Wallerstein has said: to understand World Systems – you have to forget what we
have been inculcated with about the nation-state. We do not live in that regulated space
anymore. The real world was deregulated for capital decades ago – though the neoliberal
restructuring is ongoing. As soon as humanity realises that the teleology for capital
accumulation is not an Ecological Civilisation – but deregulated Global Governance it
may be able to consolidate the considerable anti-globalisation pushback growing in every
country. Maybe, if and when we stop pretending the East has a capitalised Eco-Shangri-La
rising. That, I'm afraid is capitalist propaganda.
Some pretty strange ideas if we are taking about oil. What they are smiling at RAND?
Notable quotes:
"... That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms. ..."
"... of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is all so very sad.. ..."
"... No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian ethos.) ..."
"... I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced. ..."
"... Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give “free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets? ..."
According to RAND the best option to overextend and unbalance is to produce more oil:
Expanding U.S. energy production would stress Russia's economy, potentially constraining its government budget and, by extension,
its defense spending. By adopting policies that expand world supply and depress global prices, the United States can limit Russian
revenue. Doing so entails little cost or risk, produces second-order benefits for the U.S. economy, and does not need multilateral
endorsement.
That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make
a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production
comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields
at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There
is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to
survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms.
The second best option says RAND is to increase sanctions of Russia. This also doesn't make much sense. Russia can produce everything
it needs and it has free access to the world's largest markets, China and India.
The best military options listed by RAND are all useless. All the new weapon systems Russia has revealed over the last two years
are way more capable than anything the U.S. is able to field. If the U.S., as RAND advocates, invest more in certain fields, it will
only be to catch up. That does not impose any new costs on Russia.
... ... ...
In all I find it a bit impertinent to publicly argue for "overextending and unbalancing Russia". Where is the need to do such?
The study demonstrates again that strategic analysis by U.S. think tanks is woefully shallow-minded. The "experts" writing these
have no deep understanding of Russia, or even of the economic-political complexity of the real world.
Four of the eight best options the RAND study found start with the words "Invest more in ...". It is a sign that the foremost
motive its writers had in mind is to grab more taxpayer money. Fine. Give it to them already. Overextending and unbalancing the U.S.
by more abstruse expenditure for weapon systems that do not work will neither hurt me nor Russia.
thanks b.. of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools
for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more
money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is
all so very sad..
@1 steven.. well, as i read you, you are essentially supporting a continuation of the usa pouring endless
money into the military then, regardless the accuracy of the accounts on the new Russian weapons.. do i have that right?
No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think
it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is
the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian
ethos.)
However, since I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think
pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced.
>> The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production
beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers.
Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give
“free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal
subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets?
Of course, the money is not “free”. Depreciating the currency, an inflation tax, shows up in lower-quality goods (like frankenfood—
we cannot afford healthy food any more) and higher prices in everything. But, again, who’s counting? The BLS and the media? Yep.
"... The fish rots from the head; or so it's said. That does however, exactly describe the rolling disaster, earstwhile known as U.S. foreign policy; there isn't any! Just guns, more guns, bigger guns; but it's not working... ..."
"... Bolten, Pompeo, and Pense are in panic mode. Generally not known to produce clear, logical thinking. But their ideological positions also corrupt their cognitive skills(?)/conclusions. Buckle up; its going to be one hell of a ride... ..."
The RAND Corporation think-tank report is of a piece with Janusz
Bugajski's flight into fancy with his January 2019 article for The Hill, "Managing Russia's
Dissolution" , which portrays Russia as a failing nation with a repressive authoritarian
government, a predatory political elite that steals energy and mineral resources from
colonial territories in Siberia and the Far East regions, decaying infrastructure and falling
standards of living. At least Bugajski's article lays out a strategy for the US to infiltrate
Russia and hasten its break-up which, surprise of all surprises, turns out to be a
regime-change strategy it has pursued in Syria and other parts of the world, past and
present. It is the same kind of regime-change strategy the US chased in Russia when Boris
Yeltsin first became Russian President in the early 1990s, and all of a sudden conflicts
around the country's border regions (especially in Chechnya and Dagestan) began to spring
up.
That such pieces as Bugajski's article and the RAND Corporation report have appeared about
the same time is in itself a suggestion that the US Deep State truly exists on another plane
of unreality. I wouldn't be surprised if a third hit-piece advocating regime change in Russia
were to come out soon, either in the US or in the UK, but if that happens then we'll know
we're really on a path to self-destruction.
RAND produced a paper because it was contracted to produce a paper. There wasn't any demand
that the paper be useful; rather, all that was wanted was the product--then paper. Now RAND
can work on the next paper it's contracted to produce. I heard this next one does come with a
requirement that its pages have perforations for easy tearing, absorbency, and be
biodegradable.
Wait, this idiot isn't considering Siberia seceding from Russia? If that's the case, it's not
just they live in their own reality, it's also that they're terminally stupid and completely
ignorant of basic facts. From the Urals to Bering Straits, the bulk of the population is
Russian, there's just no local ethnicity that can hope to go into guerrilla mode and secede.
And since there's actually a continuum of Russian population going from Vladivostok to St.
Petersburg, there's no sense of being a far away colony, like the US could have in 1770; it
would be as if Florida felt to be a colony from Washington DC.
And the Russians I've met who
came from Siberia felt very much Russian, belonging to Mother Russia, and didn't feel Moscow
or Peter were a world of alien oppressive occupiers, they knew it was their country and their
culture - with the classical shift between those who prefer and feel more alike to Moscow or
to St. Petersburg (as most Russians, most Siberians I met feel akin to Moscow).
They should stick with the old plan of carving up the Caucasus, it's pretty much the only
place where that can work and where secession can gain traction. It's a border region after
all. The other major ethnies, Mordvins, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash would all be enclaves
inside Russia.
Well, there's always Tuva, but that wouldn't mean much as long as Russia has
good relations with Mongolia, that's a small quite irrelevant area, and Defense Minister
Shoygu is half-Tuvan so there's barely any way for a significant independance movement there
for probably decades.
Trump will be fuming when he hears what the Big Girls and the Naughty Little Girls at RAND
are day-dreaming about now. Like any sane observer of the effects AmeriKKKan Foreign Policy,
he knows Russia is just one of The Swamp's many imaginary "enemies of convenience."
He also
knows that The Swamp, and its Global Judeo-Christian partners in crime and corruption, are
the root cause of most of the military strife AND ter'rist insanity in the world.
In some ways this tosh can be seen as an extension of Richard Perle's Oafus Mawkish - A
Clean Break - A Strategy For Securing The Realm.
The fish rots from the head; or so it's said.
That does however, exactly describe the rolling disaster, earstwhile known as U.S. foreign
policy; there isn't any!
Just guns, more guns, bigger guns; but it's not working...
Bolten, Pompeo, and Pense are in panic mode. Generally not known to produce clear, logical
thinking.
But their ideological positions also corrupt their cognitive skills(?)/conclusions.
Buckle up; its going to be one hell of a ride...
That such pieces as Bugajski's article and the RAND Corporation report have appeared about
the same time is in itself a suggestion that the US Deep State truly exists on another plane
of unreality. I wouldn't be surprised if a third hit-piece advocating regime change in Russia
were to come out soon, either in the US or in the UK, but if that happens then we'll know
we're really on a path to self-destruction.
@Jen | Apr 27, 2019 5:38:18 PM | 19
It's easy to be mesmerised into focusing on Fink Tank drivel instead of the stuff
happening outside the stale atmosphere of their unventilated tanks. The French peasants seem
to have woken up to the fact that the Macron NeoLib govt has betrayed them and is only
pretending to listen. It's only a matter of time until the Gillet Jaunes remember the words
of jocular Neoliberal poster-boy Grover Norquist about "government small enough to drown in
the bathtub."
Of course, when funny-man Grover said that he meant govt too small to responsibly oversee
and administer all of its obligations to The People, thereby necessitating the 'outsourcing'
of the juiciest govt obligations to Private Profiteers. Unfortunately, when a govt becomes
too small and pompous to listen and respond to the legitimate concerns of The People, it runs
the risk of having its size compared with the size of the Disenchanted demographic and,
eventually, drowned. Hopefully metaphorically, although History says that when the French
neglect reform for too long, metaphorical solutions tend to be neglected too.
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support
our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this
alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany
as it provides 9% of their needs.
Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a
problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state
-- Ukraine.
As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially
this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases
they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is
just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.
To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal
society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).
And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the
people" and neo-McCarthyism.
But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of
this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global
military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East
even if Iran is occupied)
In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While,
at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities
of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies
forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.
Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians
already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.
Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.
Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the
last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)
The dream of dismantling Russia is still very much alive in Washington neocon think tanks and intelligence agencies
Notable quotes:
"... This sort of drivel is nothing new, dissolution of Russia has been a long-standing intent of the US, NATO and their boot licking lackeys like the Polish government and the coup government in Kiev. Putin and fellow politicians have said precisely this on several occasions. ..."
"... "Russians paying big money to have their babies born in US" https://www.foxnews.com/us/... I don't see any Americans traveling to Russia to have their babies born there ..."
"... Isn't it amazing how so many Russians have "Faith" in the future of the United Sates and NONE in their own country of Russia that they'd flock to the US so their children can have a U.S. passport. ..."
"... Lots of people want to go USA for better life and that is a simple human desire as USA can provide at least basic living standards to majority, but the question is how they can do that... ..."
"... Answer; They print dollars, they go around and kill people and pillage countries of their human and material capital, install governments in other countries that work against their own people for the benefit of USA etc... ..."
This sort of drivel is nothing new, dissolution of Russia has been a long-standing intent of
the US, NATO and their boot licking lackeys like the Polish government and the coup
government in Kiev. Putin and fellow politicians have said precisely this on several
occasions.
Thanks for the confirmation of the articles truth IVAN.
I hear Russian woman will pay big money to travel to the the U.S. so they can have their
babies born here. Anchor babies with U.S. citizenship as 'Insurance' against the next
inevitable Russian political/economic collapse.
"Russians paying big money to have their babies born in US"
https://www.foxnews.com/us/... I don't see any Americans traveling to Russia to have their babies born there, doublely so
these days with the Russian FSB looking for Americans in Russia to take as hostages.
Isn't it amazing how so many Russians have "Faith" in the future of the United Sates and
NONE in their own country of Russia that they'd flock to the US so their children can have a
U.S. passport.
Lots of people want to go USA for better life and that is a simple human desire as USA can
provide at least basic living standards to majority, but the question is how they can do
that...
Answer; They print dollars, they go around and kill people and pillage countries of
their human and material capital, install governments in other countries that work against
their own people for the benefit of USA etc...
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
If NATO were a person, it would be five years past retirement age
. In fact,
as Ron Paul notes
, NATO should have retired back in the early 1990s when its reason for
existence - the Warsaw Pact - ceased to exist. Instead, new missions had to be created and new
enemies had to be made to justify the massive behemoth that provides lush jobs for the
well-connected and vast fortunes for the weapons makers.
NATO must die and the sooner the
better
.
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created 70 years ago in 1949 it was formed as a
blatant military instrument for waging the Cold War, a war that the US, Britain and other European
allies had newly embarked on.
NATO's public relations cant about "peace and security" is
but Orwellian rhetoric.
But,
as The Strategic Culture Foundation notes,
the supposed allies of the Soviet Union
hastily went from an ostensible joint purpose of defeating Nazi Germany during the Second World War
to initiating hostility towards Moscow.
Already in 1946, British war-time leader Winston
Churchill was fulminating about "an Iron Curtain" descending across Europe, in language adapted
from Third Reich propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels. The ensuing Cold War would last for nearly
half a century until the Soviet Union collapsed from its internal political and economic stresses.
NATO's first secretary general, Britain's Lord Ismay, was candid in the mission of the military
alliance. Its objective, he said, was to,
"Keep Russia out, the Americans in, and
Germany down".
Of course,
Western propaganda always portrayed the Soviet Union as the "aggressor",
alleging that the so-called Red Menace had designs on conquering all of Europe. Not much has
changed when one listens to Western contemporary claims of Russia being an aggressor. As in the
past, present innuendo casting Moscow as a demonic force has a decidedly hollow quality, at least
for those willing to be critical about Western state and media "information".
Lord Ismay, perhaps unwittingly, let the cat out of the bag in his statement all
those years ago.
The purpose of NATO was to serve as a means of dividing and ruling
over Europe for Washington and its always closely aligned, servile British partner.
If countering Soviet aggression was the real purpose of NATO, as officially claimed, then one
must ask why is this organization still in existence – some 30 years after the alleged "evil
communist empire" dissolved?
NATO is a military monster desperately in search of a purpose.
The substitution
of Russia as an enemy in place of the Soviet Union doesn't quite hold the same propaganda cachet,
but nonetheless that is why Moscow continues to be designated the official "enemy" – in order to
justify the existence of NATO. The US-led military bloc needs enemies like a junkie needs a
narcotic fix.
NATO's real function is at least three-fold
.
First, it gives the US an excuse to justify its enormous military presence in Europe.
Instead of appearing as an occupying force, which it is, the Americans claim to be a
protector of allies against malign Russia, or formerly the Soviet Union. This allows Washington
to exert political control over its so-called European allies, and specifically to prevent any
normalized relations with Russia. US vice president Mike Pence this week scolded Germany and
fellow NATO member Turkey for daring to continue relations with Moscow, in the form of the Nord
Stream 2 gas project and Ankara's purchase of Russian S-400 air defense system. Pence inferred
treasonous conduct on the part of Berlin and Ankara just because these two nominally independent
countries have chosen to do business with Russia. Pence was thus demonstrating the classic NATO
purpose of dividing Europe from Moscow.
A second function of NATO is to serve as an extension of the US military-industrial
complex and, in turn, an important buttress for American corporate capitalism, which is totally
dependent on military spending.
When President Donald Trump castigates European allies,
like Germany, for not spending enough on military and NATO, his real concern is for European
nations to buy more American weaponry, such as the vastly over-priced and over-rated F-35
fighter jet. If NATO were to be disbanded – as it should from its obsolete objective purpose –
then US capitalism would suffer a major withdrawal of European subsidy in the form of decreased
weapons purchases.
The irony here is that Trump has previously denigrated NATO as obsolete. In his irascibility,
he is more correct than he seems to realize. But Trump has – despite superficial griping – still
continued to boost NATO for the purpose of hiking European military spending. What Trump means
by "obsolete" is that the past financial tribute from the Europeans to the US militarized
economy must henceforth be significantly increased. The outrageous demands by Trump are inciting
tensions within NATO. At a time of massive civilian social needs across Europe being neglected
due to "fiscal constraints", the American ultimatums for more military spending are bound to be
seen by the wider European populace as an intolerable dictate.
A third function of NATO for its American leadership is that it gives a pseudo legal
cover of "multinationalism" to what would otherwise be seen as blatant US imperialist aggression
all over the globe.
NATO forces have assisted US illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, among other
interventions. This by an organization that self-declares itself a bastion of security and
peace.
It was 20 years ago that US-led forces under the cover of NATO bombed Serbia and its capital
Belgrade. That marked a watershed assault on international law, and the unleashing of US global
violence with impunity.
Washington could not carry out its aggression without the political and legal cover of NATO.
Jens Stoltenberg, the present NATO secretary general, was in Washington this week calling for
more aggression towards Russia. The Norwegian figurehead is a shameless warmonger who is
violating the UN Charter for the sake of feathering his career as an American puppet.
It is all the more disturbing that this week in Washington, foreign ministers of the 30
member states belonging to NATO deferred to the US calls for naval forces to be deployed to the
Black Sea "in defense" of Ukraine and Georgia from "Russian aggression".
These two
countries have done everything possible to provoke Russia. They are cat's paws for their NATO
master, and are reckless enough to instigate a full-on war. Washington and its NATO minions have
the audacity, or intelligence deficit, to call such an explosive situation as "defense" against
Russia.
NATO, or rather the US, is giving itself a green light to mount even more aggression
against Russia than it already has done over the past 30 years.
In that period, NATO
membership has almost doubled with the result that the military bloc is now on Russia's border –
and at the same time claiming with Orwellian double-think that it is defending Europe from Russian
aggression. As Russian wit would have it: Russia has had the temerity to move its border towards
NATO offensive forces.
Global security and peace is too serious for jokes.
The maintenance of
NATO, with its original aggressive objective against Moscow still intact, is a grotesque joke. A
joke sickeningly played on the people of Europe who could benefit greatly from halting the
squandering of billions of dollars each year on military budgets. NATO's gratuitous belligerence
towards Russia – based on trumped-up, ridiculous propaganda – is an obscenity. This organization is
a dinosaur that somehow outlived its Cold War environment because those powers who control it from
Washington and London want it to live on for their own selfish, ideological, economic reasons.
For the sake of world peace, the citizens of North America and Europe should demand that
NATO be liquidated. Thirty years too late.
"... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
"Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as
European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot
toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012
The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles
across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim.
The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political
establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.
Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division"
in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington.
That's what Russiagate is really all about.
US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly
confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy
focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence."
In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten
the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region
in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically
axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.
. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its
enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's
known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic
Books, page 31, 1997)
14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and
demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It
was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt
from the speech:
"As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot
point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be
smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership,
secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will
therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific
region
Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge
technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than
half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015,
we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."
("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)
The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy
theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and
diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's
provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao
summed it up like this:
"The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military
alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American
government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on
us from the east, south, and west."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced
Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's
relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.
Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war
era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted
from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and
gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening
rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred
and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.
Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors
in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention
in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That
plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which
acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging
everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.
This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail
Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.
What does that mean in practical terms?
It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community
(The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces.
Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts
to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)
Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's
grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.
As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains
how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China.
Here's an excerpt:
"China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They
are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress
their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity."
They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories,
employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)
Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries
around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')
"Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries
target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation
bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news
stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense
one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:
"Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively
compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing
a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political
and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.
We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control
in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts,
including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .
Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement
with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests
" ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community",
USG )
Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that
Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East,
and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault
with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given
Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:
"We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy
complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps
in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines
start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political
whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly
relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."
The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate.
This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012,
Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to
re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it,"
she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."
"Slow down or prevent it"?
Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national
debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?
Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and
thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.
But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free
market system more effectively that the US.
Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.
"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We
are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a
security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition,
not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."
(Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign
policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)
"Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions
of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound
up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:
"China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model
"China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .
Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.
Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions
and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system",
is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line,
because it's not a fair system.
These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon
and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with
Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At
the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The
greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion,
the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.
And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed
to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with
the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes
on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations
(PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately
the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."
The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and
perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the
The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia,
Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles,
even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight
each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.
Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of
the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with
Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite –
US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.
Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan
(incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants
far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.
Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight
– whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience
to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning
a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan,
watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia
and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe.
And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is
a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year
there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the
real problem for the U.S.
"The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes
and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their
vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "
Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence
officer.
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing
"Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist"
and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation
of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself
proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".
Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives'
is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent
arrogance.
Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how
difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.
One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral
'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).
"The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its
tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda,
but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire
Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."
TRUE!
I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.
"Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants
in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn
the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging,
and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle
Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."
Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist
Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform
that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense
backing down to prevent mass slaughter.
Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own
backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South
America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And
he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic
sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields
related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing
more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki
himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American
Primacy".
Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability
to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the
military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't
apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.
(Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981
"Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services
began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979
In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give
a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted
about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.
@DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm
Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?
Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist
revolutionary groups?
This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by
any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks
total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
@anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic
states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons
to attack Russia.
The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian
Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in
the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against
Russia.
"... the behavior of the US after the Cold War suggests NATO was primarily for US hegemony and not for fending off the Evil Empire of the Soviets. ..."
"... After all, Gorbachev and Reagan ended the Cold War. And then communism collapsed(or was collapsed from the top) in Russia. And Russia was reaching out to the West for friendship and aid. Russia was at its weakest position since who knows? And it was totally friendly to the West. It was a tamed bear. But what did the US do when Russia was most pro-Western and most willing to submit(and even surrender its sovereignty)? The US expanded NATO up to Russian borders. ..."
"... Why expand NATO when there's no more Soviet threat and when Russia wants to be a friendly player with the West? It's like the moment when Vito Corleone realizes it had been Barzini all along. ..."
"... It seems NATO was never about the principle of defending free nations from the Soviets. It was about imposing US hegemony on Europe. So, the chances are that, even if Soviets had ended the Occupation of Eastern Europe soon after end of WWII, the US would have created something like NATO and pushed it all the way up to Soviet borders. ..."
"... @Asagirian As Lord Ismay once said: "The purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." ..."
It's been our understanding that NATO was necessary
because of the Iron Curtain. Soviets took over Eastern Europe and denied it freedom, and there
was the danger that Soviets would expand further West.
So, US and Western European nations made a Three Musketeers or Mickey Mouseketeers pact of
'one for all and all for one'.
Now, suppose we do a thought experiment of alternative history: The Soviets withdrew from
Eastern Europe, and Eastern European nations like Poland and Hungary became democratic and
capitalist soon after WWII. And there is no East and West Germany but just democratic
Germany.
Would NATO still have been created? If so, for what? To contain the Soviets? But the Soviets
left Eastern Europe in our hypothetical scenario. If NATO was created even after Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe soon after WWII,
there could be only one reason: US hegemony and domination over Western Europe.
Now, there is no way to validate a 'what if' scenario.
However, the behavior of the US after the Cold War suggests NATO was primarily for US
hegemony and not for fending off the Evil Empire of the Soviets.
After all, Gorbachev and Reagan ended the Cold War. And then communism collapsed(or was
collapsed from the top) in Russia. And Russia was reaching out to the West for friendship and
aid.
Russia was at its weakest position since who knows? And it was totally friendly to the West. It
was a tamed bear. But what did the US do when Russia was most pro-Western and most willing to submit(and even
surrender its sovereignty)? The US expanded NATO up to Russian borders.
Why expand NATO when there's no more Soviet threat and when Russia wants to be a friendly
player with the West? It's like the moment when Vito Corleone realizes it had been Barzini all along.
It seems NATO was never about the principle of defending free nations from the Soviets. It
was about imposing US hegemony on Europe. So, the chances are that, even if Soviets had ended
the Occupation of Eastern Europe soon after end of WWII, the US would have created something
like NATO and pushed it all the way up to Soviet borders.
...NATO is even more of a US
imperialist project. And this time, the 'new cold war' was entirely the fault of the US.
"... Well, since 2002, people made a lot about the neo-cons being heavily influenced by Leo Strauss. I think this is only part of it. These people seem to me to be just as heavily influenced by George Berekeley: things don't really exist, there's no causation, therefore there's no consequences to one's own actions. ..."
"... "Corruption cannot lead to prosperity." Nor can it field a competent military with functional weapon systems. ..."
"... The comments at the end about how Turkey can maintain good relations with NATO and at the same time develop cooperation with Russia is clearly nonsense. NATO whole reason for existence now is as an anti-Russia military alliance. Pence is absolutely right about that ... you cannot be a member of NATO and develop close cooperation with Russia. ..."
Tweeting direct from NATO
meeting provides inside details not found in press articles, particularly the NATO
talking-point ending. IMO, the tweeter Mehta was right to highlight this exchange:
"Bennan: Do you know what the US policy in syria is?
"Çavuşoğlu: No, and this is the problem.
"He points to different statements from WH, Pentagon, CENTCOM, State. 'There is no clear
strategy. This is the problem.'"
Further on:
"Wow. Çavuşoğlu just compared Turkey to Ukraine, saying Ukraine let
itself be told it had to decide between West and Russia, and look what happened; Turkey
cannot be forced into same choice."
Pence threat is also stupid as there is no mechanism to expulse any member from NATO. NATO
members can only leave voluntarily.
Since when this stopped the USA?
The reason Turkey won't exit NATO are many. Among them:
1) Turkey's economy is in meltdown. It only didn't collapse yesterday because, luckily,
Turkey has only "burnt" one third of its Dollar reserves. For comparison, the usurper
government which toppled Dilma Rousseff burnt almost 50% of Brazil's then gigantic US$ 795
billion -- only to try to keep interest at a staggering 9.5% rate. Lucky for the Turkish
people, Erdogan survived the 2016 coup, but he was already trounced in the three main cities
and those reserves won't last forever. Time is in favor of the Americans in this case;
2) Contrary to, e.g. China and Russia, Turkey has a strong pro-USA political-popular base.
It really doesn't need to topple Erdogan through a violent coup (Obama made an unforced error
in 2016) in order to install a puppet government in Turkey;
3) The USA has the IMF. The IMF is the only institution which can do regime change and
nobody will question. Erdogan is, for now, refusing its "aid", but he's just one man. That
means that, even if Turkey remains with an Islamist (Ottomanist) or end up electing a neutral
government, the Americans will still be capable of exerting formidable pressure;
4)Turkey is, perhaps, the geostrategically most important individual country for NATO. If
the Americans still dream of defeating and balkanizing Russia through a hot war, then the
path will go through Turkey and the Bosphorus. It is not on rogue POTUS or Veep who will
change that.
"But current American elites have no concept of own actions having consequences."
Well, since 2002, people made a lot about the neo-cons being heavily influenced by Leo
Strauss. I think this is only part of it. These people seem to me to be just as heavily
influenced by George Berekeley: things don't really exist, there's no causation, therefore
there's no consequences to one's own actions.
Bolton
unwittingly utters truism but has no idea that it applies to him and the Outlaw US
Empire billions of times over: "Corruption cannot lead to prosperity." Nor can it field a
competent military with functional weapon systems.
Another OT note, this one about the technical development of generation 6 military
aircraft,
Hypersonic and hydrogen fueled and most likely piloted by droids or remotely given speed
and G-forces.
The US are threatening friend and foe alike, whereas those sanctions against their foe's are
real, sanctions against NATO members can be counterproductive, for instance Germany being
told to stop Nord Stream 2 and increase its contributions to NATO, 2% of Germany's GDP [4
trillion dollars] is an enormous amount of money to protect against a non existent enemy.
The
time will come when the US will be ignored, then, unless the US acts on those threats, its
own credibility will be called into question, then the only way is down.
Whenever anyone suggests that we should stop supplying bombs and military equipment to the
Saudis who are murdering Yemenis, moralists like Mike Pence, Pompeo, and the rest of the
religious right thunder, 'THEY WILL BUY ARMS FROM THE ROOOSHINS!'
So it is quite funny that they are willing to play hardball with the Turks.
The comments at the end about how Turkey can maintain good relations with NATO and at
the same time develop cooperation with Russia is clearly nonsense. NATO whole reason for
existence now is as an anti-Russia military alliance. Pence is absolutely right about
that ... you cannot be a member of NATO and develop close cooperation with Russia.
At
least in the eyes of NATO (i.e. the US) Russia is the enemy.
Долгие годы я
жил в ощущении
правильности
произошедшего
в 1991 и 1993 годах. Хотя,
конечно, у меня
были серьезные
внутренние
разногласия с
той толпой,
которая
носилась по
Москве и ломала
памятники. Но я
это в себе как-то
давил. В 1993 году
мне казалось
правильным, что
танк стреляет
по дому с
вооруженными
людьми. Я тоже
хотел
раздавить
гадину, потому
что гадина
представлялась
мне гадиной. Я
был юн и еще не
понимал, что
демократия -- это
всегда толпа,
ломающая
памятники. И что
любой
парламент -- это
всегда гадина.
Но это не значит,
что его надо из
танков
расстреливать.
Но даже когда
ко мне пришло
понимание этих
двух
постулатов, я
все равно
продолжал
смеяться над
мифологией
защитников
гадины. О
массовых
расстрелах на
стадионе
"Красная Пресня".
И, конечно, о
таинственных
снайперах,
которые
стреляли по
простым
прохожим. Зачем
снайперам
стрелять по
простым
прохожим? Какой
в этом военный
тактический
смысл? Однако
время всё
ставит по своим
местам.
Снайперы,
стреляющие по
простым
прохожим нужны
для того же, для
чего нужны две
бочки хлора. Для
провокации.
А где же еще мы
видели
снайперов,
стрелявших по
людям для
провокации
насилия?
Правильно, мы
видели их в
Киеве на
Майдане. И вот
когда у тебя в
голове вдруг
складывается
Майдан и 1993 год, то
становится
неприятно.
Потому что ты
начинаешь
понимать
природу
произошедшего
в 1993 году. Это был
такой же Майдан.
И он, как и в
Киеве, победил.
Раздавили
гадину. Америка,
матушка-спасительница,
помогла. И в 1993м. И в
2014. Только почему
же ты, сволочь,
тогда был на
одной стороне, а
потом -- на
другой? А потому
что дурак был.
А когда
картинка
сложилась,
сразу же много
стало понятнее.
И весь тот ад
девяностых,
который был так
похож на то, что
ныне
происходит на
Украине. Война
против
собственных
граждан
негодной,
разворованной
армией. Полный
крах экономики,
зависимость от
денег МВФ,
выделяемых по
милостивому
разрешению США.
Вооруженные
люди, убивающие
друг друга в
центрах
городов.
Эта мысль
может
показаться
диковатой, но
вот, наконец, у
нее случилось
документальное
подтверждение.
В США
опубликованы
расшифровки
телефонных
разговоров
президента
Билла Клинтона.
В том числе и с
президентом
Борисом
Ельциным. В
которых Ельцин
пугает
Клинтона
коммунистами,
жалуется, что
коммунисты,
если победят,
могут отобрать
Крым (!). И просит
два с половиной
миллиарда
долларов на
выборы. После
чего МВФ
выделяет
России займ, а в
Москве
приезжают
американские
политические
консультанты. И
выборы 1996 года
превращаются в
Оранжевую
революцию --
только вместо
концертов на
Майдане тур
"Голосуй или
проиграешь". А в
результате всё
равно
сфальсифицированные
результаты.
Методы и те же,
разве что
последовательность
разная.
И вот с высоты
этого
понимания
хорошо бы
оглядеть
перспективы. В
России
случился Путин,
она очистилась
от скверны и
таки приняла
вернувшийся
Крым. Значит ли
это, что
подобный исход
событий
возможен на
Украине?
Интересная
могла бы
получиться
экстраполяция:
Порошенко
находит
какого-то
малоизвестного
человека,
выходца из СБУ,
которого
назначает
преемником.
Этот человек
выгоняет
американцев,
восстанавливает
экономику,
мирится с
Донбассом,
равноудаляет
старых
олигархов и
возвращает
Крым? Сценарий,
как вы
понимаете,
фантастический.
И дело даже не в
Крыме, который
никуда
"возвращаться"
не собирается,
потому что он
уже вернулся
домой. Дело в
том, что Ельцин
вовсе не хотел,
чтобы Путин
сделал всё то,
что он сделал. Он
хотел просто
гарантий
безопасности
для себя и семьи.
И то, что Путин
оказался не тем,
кем его
представлял
себе Ельцин --
это счастливая
случайность.
Божий промысел,
если хотите. Pussy Riot
просили
Богородицу,
чтобы она
забрала Путина,
а устами
художника
всегда говорит
Бог. То есть,
прося
Богородицу,
чтобы она
забрала Путина,
Pussy Riot тем самым (и
сами того не
понимая)
говорили нам,
что Богородица
Путина нам дала.
Это шутка,
конечно.
Впрочем, как мне
кажется,
довольно
изящная.
Порошенко,
разумеется,
тоже ничего из
того, что сделал
Путин, не хочет.
Он хочет или
остаться у
власти (что
мирным путем
невозможно) или
же обеспечить
себе
безопасность.
Кто именно мог
бы обеспечить
ему такую
безопасность
(то есть -- быть
потенциальным
украинским
Путиным) отсюда
пока никак не
просматривается.
Но вопрос ведь
не в этом. Вопрос
в том, будет ли к
этому иметь
отношение
Богородица.
А также в том,
что нам теперь
совсем не с руки
смеяться над
нынешней
Украиной и ее
выбором. Мы с
вами вышли из
такого же
дерьма. Природа
современного
русского
государства
такая же --
поддержанный
американцами
майдан. И хорошо
бы никогда об
этом не
забывать. И
соответственно
относиться к
тем, кто тоскует
по тем
временам.
А лично мне
достаточно
того, что
Богородица не
послушала Pussy Riot. И
слава богу. RT
Wealthy politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption in their native lands are fleeing to a safe haven where their wealth
and influence shields them from arrest.
They have entered this country on a variety of visas, including one designed to encourage investment. Some have applied for asylum,
which is intended to protect people fleeing oppression and political persecution.
The increasingly popular destination for people avoiding criminal charges is no pariah nation.
It's the United States.
An investigation by ProPublica, in conjunction with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, has
found that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, South Korea, Bolivia and Panama have found refuge for themselves and
their wealth in this country, taking advantage of lax enforcement of U.S. laws and gaps in immigration and financial regulations.
Many have concealed their assets and real-estate purchases by creating trusts and limited liability companies in the names of lawyers
and relatives.
American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges.
But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.
One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after
his country's Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school
lunch program.
Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department's radar since he was elected in 2009.
That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began
sending diplomatic cables warning
about the president's "dark side," including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.
Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in
the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country's Supreme Court.
On Jan. 28, 2015,
just hours before
the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a
meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium
on Miami's swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.
The State Department declined to comment on Martinelli's case, saying visa records are confidential and it is the U.S. Customs
and Border Protection that decides who is allowed to enter the country. CBP said privacy regulations prevent the agency from commenting
on Martinelli.
Efforts to reach Martinelli, including a registered letter sent to his Miami address, were unsuccessful.
In September this year, Panama asked to extradite Martinelli, but the former president is fighting that request, arguing there
are no legal grounds to bring him back to his home country where the investigation has broadened to include insider trading, corruption
and abuse of authority. Last December, Panama's high court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he used public funds to
spy on over 150 political opponents. If found guilty, he could face up to 21 years in jail.
Rogelio Cruz, who is defending Martinelli in Panama's Supreme Court, said that the former president "will return to Panama once
adequate conditions exist with respect to due process, where there are independent judges -- which there aren't."
The United States has explicit policies that bar issuing visas to foreign officials facing criminal charges in their homelands.
In 2004, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation
designed to keep the United States from becoming a haven for corrupt officials. Proclamation 7750, which has the force and effect
of law, directed the State Department to ban officials who have accepted bribes or misappropriated public funds when their actions
have "serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States."
Under the rules implementing Bush's order, consular officers do not need a conviction or even formal charges to justify denying
a visa. They can stamp "denied" based on information from unofficial, or informal sources, including newspaper articles, according
to diplomats and State Department officials interviewed for this report.
The State Department declined to provide the number of times Proclamation 7750 has been invoked, but insisted that it has been
used "robustly."
But numerous other foreign government officials, including former presidents and cabinet ministers, have slipped through the cracks,
according to court documents, diplomatic cables and interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in the United States and abroad.
The charges involved a wide range of misconduct, from stealing public funds to accepting bribes.
Six months before Martinelli entered the United States, a former Colombian agriculture minister and onetime presidential candidate,
Andres Felipe Arias, fled to Miami three weeks before he was convicted of funneling $12.5 million to wealthy political supporters
from a subsidy program that was intended to reduce inequality in rural areas and protect farmers from the effects of globalization.
The U.S. embassy in Bogota had been following Arias' trial closely and
reporting on the scandal in cables to Washington.
The trial
featured documents and witnesses saying that under Arias' watch, the agriculture ministry had doled out millions in subsidies
to affluent families, some of whom, according to media reports, had donated to Arias' political allies or his presidential campaign.
Subsidies went to relatives of congressmen, companies owned by the richest man in Colombia, and a former beauty queen. One powerful
family and its associates received over $2.5 million, according to records released by prosecutors. Another family, which included
relatives of a former senator, received $1.3 million. Both families had supported Arias' chief political ally, former Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe, with campaign contributions.
The law that
established the program did not ban wealthy landowners from getting grants, but some elite families had received multiple subsidies
for the same farm. They gamed the system by submitting multiple proposals in the names of different family members and by subdividing
their land so they could apply for grants for each parcel, court records indicate.
Yet, in November 2013, while the trial was going on, the U.S. embassy in Bogota renewed Arias' visitor visa. The State Department
refused to discuss the case, saying that visa records are confidential. But a
recent filing in federal court
showed that the U.S. embassy had flagged Arias' application, and asked him to provide documents to support his request to leave the
country while charges were pending. Arias submitted documents from the Colombian court, including a judicial order that allowed him
to travel. In the end, the embassy issued a visa because he had not yet been convicted.
Andres Felipe Arias, a former Colombian agriculture minister, who fled to the United States before he could be convicted
of funneling money from a subsidy program (GDA via AP Images)
On the night of June 13, 2014, three weeks before the judges convicted him of embezzlement by appropriation, a Colombian law that
penalizes the unauthorized use of public funds to benefit private entities, Arias packed his bags and boarded a plane. The following
month, the U.S. embassy in Bogota revoked the visa. But Arias hired an immigration attorney and applied for asylum.
"If you looked up 'politically motivated charges' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Andres Arias next to it," said
David Oscar Markus, Arias' lead attorney. "The case [against him] is absurd and not even one that is recognized in the United States."
Over the next two years, Arias built a new life in South Florida with his wife and two children, opening a small consulting company
and renting a house in Weston.
On August 24, he was
arrested by U.S.
authorities in response to an extradition request from Colombia. He spent several months in a detention facility until his release
on bail in mid-November. Arias argues that the United States cannot extradite him because it has no active extradition treaty with
Colombia, but the U.S. Attorney's Office disagrees. A plea for asylum does not shield defendants from extradition if they are charged
in Colombia with a crime covered by the treaty between the two countries.
The agency that administers the program, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has adopted regulations designed to prevent
fraud, including requiring foreign investors to submit evidence, such as tax returns and bank statements, to prove they obtained
their money legally.
But these safeguards did not stop the daughter-in-law and grandsons of former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan from using Chun's
ill-gotten gains to get U.S. permanent residency.
In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of receiving more than $200 million in bribes while in office in the 1980s, from companies
such as Samsung and Hyundai. He was ordered to return the bribes, but refused.
Part of Chun's fortune was funneled into the United States through his son, who purchased a $2.2 million house in Newport Beach,
California, according to South Korean prosecutors and real-estate records.
Millions of dollars from Chun's bribery proceeds were hidden in bearer bonds, which are notoriously difficult to trace. Unlike
regular bonds, which belong to registered owners, there is no record kept about the ownership or transfer of bearer bonds. The bonds
can be cashed out by whoever has them.
Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan addresses the press at the White House in 1985. Chun's relatives later gained
permanent residency in the United States by using money Chun obtained through bribes. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
In 2008, Chun's daughter-in-law, a South Korean actress named Park Sang-ah, applied for an immigrant investor visa. Park listed
her husband's bearer bonds as the source of her funds without mentioning that the money had been initially provided to him by Chun.
Eight months later, Park and her children received their conditional U.S. permanent residency cards in the mail.
In 2013, at the request of South Korean prosecutors, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Chun family's
wealth in the United States and subsequently
seized $1.2 million of the family's U.S. assets in the United States. The money was returned to South Korea. Despite that, Chun's
family members have retained their residency status.
Chun's relatives obtained their permanent residency by investing in an EB-5 project managed by the Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation, a nonprofit company. The PIDC pooled Chun's $500,000 with money from 200 other foreign investors to finance an expansion
of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.
The same project in Philadelphia also helped to secure permanent residency for Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese government official accused
of embezzling more than $40 million from a state-owned grain storehouse, according to reports in the People's Daily, the Chinese
Communist Party's newspaper. Qiao had divorced his wife, Shilan Zhao, in China in 2001, a fact he did not disclose to U.S. immigration
authorities. When Zhao applied for an EB-5 visa, Qiao qualified for U.S. permanent residency as an applicant's spouse.
The Justice Department launched an investigation only when it was tipped off by Chinese authorities. In January 2014,
a federal grand jury indicted Zhao and her ex-husband, Qiao, for immigration fraud, money laundering and internationally transporting
stolen funds. Zhao was arrested and released on bail. Federal authorities are pursuing Qiao, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
A trial has been set for February 2017. U.S. government attorneys have filed asset forfeiture cases to recover real estate linked
to Qiao and Zhao in Flushing, New York, and Monterey Park, California.
In April 2015, Qiao appeared on the Chinese
government's list of 100 "most wanted" officials who fled abroad after being accused of crimes such as bribery and corruption.
He and 39 other government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders on the list allegedly fled to the United States.
The list, called "Operation Skynet," is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has vowed to take
down what Chinese officials describe as corrupt "tigers" and "flies" within the country's ruling Communist Party.
Fengxian Hu was another fugitive on China's list. A former army singer and radio broadcaster, Hu headed the state-owned broadcasting
company that had a joint venture with Pepsi to distribute soft drinks in Sichuan province. In 2002, The Washington Post and The Wall
Street Journal
reported that Pepsi had accused Hu of looting the joint venture and using company funds to buy fancy cars and go on European
tours.
The same year, in a widely publicized move, Pepsi filed a case with international arbitrators in Stockholm, asking that the joint
venture be dissolved. Despite this, Hu was given a visa that allowed him to fly regularly to Las Vegas, where he was a VIP client
at the MGM casino.
In January 2010, Chinese authorities investigated Hu for corruption. But the month before, Hu had entered the United States on
a B1 visitor visa, joining his wife, a U.S. citizen living in New York.
Hu tried to obtain a green card through his wife, but the petition was rejected by U.S. immigration authorities. He applied for
asylum instead.
Meanwhile, he had gotten into trouble in the United States for losing millions in a Las Vegas casino and failing to pay a $12
million gambling debt. In 2012, he was indicted in a Nevada court on two counts of theft and one count of intentionally passing a
check without sufficient funds.
Hu pled not guilty to the charges; his lawyers claimed that his checks bounced because his bank account had been closed by Chinese
authorities. The charges against him in the U.S. were considered an aggravated felony, which is a common basis for deportation. Hu,
however, had a pending asylum case and so could not be deported.
In August 2015, a New York immigration judge denied the asylum claim. But Hu's lawyers argued that he would be tortured if he
returned to China and invoked the United Nations Convention
Against Torture , which says that an alien may not be sent to a country where he is likely to be tortured. In the end, the immigration
court suspended Hu's removal order, allowing him to remain in the United States and work here indefinitely. He will not, however,
be given permanent residency or be allowed to travel outside the country.
The absence of an extradition treaty -- coupled with a high standard of living -- makes the United States a favored destination
for Chinese officials and businessmen fleeing corruption charges.
In April 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security , made a 48-hour trip to Beijing. The visit
was intended to pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit in September 2015, according to a memorandum Johnson wrote,
which was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the memo, Johnson said the Chinese government is seeking 132 people it said have fled to the United States to avoid prosecution.
This represents a greater number of fugitives than Chinese authorities have publicly acknowledged.
"I'm told that in prior discussions, the Chinese have been frustrated by the lack of any information from us about the 132 fugitives,"
Johnson wrote.
The Chinese request for assistance posed a dilemma for the United States. American officials are concerned about a lack of fairness
in China's criminal justice system. Human rights groups say that China continues to use torture to extract false confessions from
suspected criminals. Torture has also been documented to be part of shuanggui -- a secretive discipline process reserved for
members of the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts see the crackdown on corrupt officials as part of a purge aimed at the current regime's political rivals and ideological
enemies. U.S. officials say this makes returning corrupt officials to China a delicate issue for the United States.
In 2003, headlines around the world reported
widespread
street protests in Bolivia that led to security forces killing 58 people, most of them members of indigenous groups. Not long
afterward, as protesters massed up on the streets of La Paz demanding his resignation, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
resigned and fled his country along with his defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.
The two men flew to the United States, where they continue to reside. In 2006, Berzain applied for political asylum, which he
was granted in 2007. On
his application, when the form asked, "Have you or your family members ever been accused, charged, arrested, detained, interrogated,
convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned in any country other than the United States?" Berzain checked the box "no," even though by
then he and de Lozada had been formally accused of
genocide by Bolivia's attorney
general. The indictment was approved
by Bolivia's Supreme Court in 2007. Berzain also stated on his application that the State Department had arranged for his travel
to the United States.
The de Lozada administration was vocally pro-American. Before it was ousted, officials had announced they would facilitate gas
exports to the United States.
After their departure, Bolivia's attorney general
publicly stated
that the administration had embezzled millions from government coffers, but did not formally file charges. He said de Lozada
had taken some $22 million from the country's reserve funds before fleeing.
De Lozada and members of his administration have dismissed the allegations as part of a politically motivated smear campaign,
but there is evidence to suggest irregularities may have occurred in the handling of the reserve funds. The former president signed
a decree shortly before leaving office authorizing the interior and finance ministers to withdraw money from Bolivia's reserve funds
without going through the normal approval process. De Lozada's former interior minister
pleaded guilty in 2004 to embezzlement after $270,000 in cash was found in an associate's home.
De Lozada, a mining mogul before he became president, moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. He
now lives in a two-story brick house bought for $1.4 million by Macalester Limited, a limited liability company that was formed in
the British Virgin Islands and lists a post office box in the Bahamas as its principal address.
De Lozada's immigration status is unclear. He said in a sworn deposition in 2015 that he was not a U.S. citizen. His son-in-law,
who spoke to ProPublica on his behalf, would not say whether de Lozada had applied for asylum.
Berzain, meanwhile, settled in South Florida. Records show that he and his brother-in-law personally own or are listed as officers
or members of business entities that together control around $9 million worth of Miami real estate.
Some of the purchases were made in the names of entities that appear to list different variations of Berzain's name in business
records.
In addition, in the purchase of two properties, Berzain's name was added to business records only after the deal had gone through.
Berzain's brother-in-law incorporated a company called Warren USA Corp in October 2010, for example, and the company purchased a
$1.4 million residential property the following month. Three weeks after Warren USA Corp became the owner of an elegant Spanish-style
villa in Key Biscayne, Berzain was added as the company's secretary.
The following year, in May 2011, Berzain's brother-in-law created Galen KB Corp and registered as the company's president. A month
later, Galen KB Corp purchased a $250,000 condo. In August, Berzain replaced his brother-in-law as the company's president, according
to business records. Berzain is no longer listed as a company officer in either company.
During an interview in January, Berzain told ProPublica "I don't have any companies." When asked about several of the companies
associated with his name or address in public records, the former defense minister said he had a consulting firm that helped clients
set up companies and that he was sometimes added to the board of directors. Efforts to reach Berzain's brother-in-law, a wealthy
businessman and the owner of a bus company in Bolivia, were unsuccessful. Berzain's brother-in-law has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The practice of purchasing real estate in the name of a business entity like a limited liability company, or LLC, is a common
and legal practice in high-end real-estate markets, and one that enables celebrities and other wealthy individuals to protect their
privacy.
But the practice also allows foreign officials to hide ill-gotten gains. U.S. regulations allow individuals to form business entities
like LLCs without disclosing the beneficial owner. The LLCs can be registered in the names of lawyers, accountants or other associates
-- or even anonymously in some states -- and used to purchase real estate, making it nearly impossible to determine the actual owner
of a property.
Government investigators and lawmakers have pointed out persistent gaps in U.S. policy that have enabled corrupt officials to
evade justice and hide their assets in this country. But little has changed.
Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation
said it can be "difficult" for immigration officials to identify the true source of an immigrant investor's funds. Immigration
officials told the government auditors that EB-5 applicants with ties to corruption, the drug trade, human trafficking and other
criminal activities have a strong incentive to omit key details about their financial histories or lie on their applications.
"It's very easy to get lost in the noise if you're a bad person," said Seto Bagdoyan, the accountability office's director of
forensic audits, who co-authored the GAO report.
Immigration officials, he added, have an "almost nonexistent" ability to thoroughly evaluate investors' backgrounds and trace
their assets.
Despite such weaknesses, Congress has continually
extended the EB-5
program with minor changes. The program is backed by
real-estate lobbyists who argue that it is a crucial source of financing for luxury condos and hotels. The program is
expected to thrive in a
Trump presidency because the president-elect is a developer and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received $50 million in EB-5 funds to
build a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey.
In 2010, a Senate report described how powerful foreign officials and their relatives moved millions of dollars in suspect funds
into the United States. The report said investors bypassed anti-money laundering regulations with help from U.S. lawyers, real-estate
agents, and banking institutions. Last year, ABC News
reported that lobbyists for real estate and other business groups spent $30 million in 2015 in an effort to protect the EB-5
program.
Senate investigators proposed legislation that would require companies to disclose their beneficial owners and make it easier
for authorities to restrict entry, deny visas and deport corrupt foreign officials.
A few of the proposals have been adopted, but they have not made much difference. Banks have stepped up their efforts to identify
corrupt officials and monitor their accounts. Professional groups such as the American Bar Association have issued non-binding guidelines
for their members on compliance with anti-money-laundering controls. The U.S. government has also worked with the
Financial Action Task Force , an international body set up
to fight money laundering, to bring its anti-corruption controls in accordance with the body's guidelines.
In May, the Treasury Department enacted a new rule that will take full effect in 2018 and will require financial institutions
to identify the beneficial owners of shell companies. Some advocates see the rule as a step backward. The new rule allows shell companies
to designate the manager of the account as the beneficial owner, concealing the identity of the person ultimately exercising control.
The State Department declined to say what progress, if any, it has made on the Senate subcommittee's recommendation to more aggressively
deny visas through Proclamation 7750. "The Department takes seriously congressional recommendations and devotes resources to addressing
corruption worldwide," a State Department official wrote in response to questions.
In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The small unit, which has grown
to include 16 attorneys, aims to recover assets in the United States that are tied to foreign corruption and return the money to
the looted countries.
Over the past six years, the unit has filed around two dozen civil asset forfeiture cases in an attempt to seize money, real estate
and other assets tied to government officials from 16 countries. Assets have ranged from a lone diamond-encrusted glove worn by Michael
Jackson that was purchased by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President, Teodoro Obiang, to a $1 billion fund tied to Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak.
Yet most of the money the Department of Justice has pursued remains in limbo. The case involving Chun, the former president of
South Korea, is one of only two instances in which corrupt gains have been returned to the home country through the Justice Department's
efforts. The other arose when Justice Department officials
returned $1.5 million to Taiwan from property bought with bribes paid to the family of Chun Shui Bian, the former president of
Taiwan.
The agency faces myriad challenges when attempting to seize and return assets acquired by corrupt foreign officials, including
a lack of witnesses, said Kendall Day, head of the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. These officials
often shield their transactions through shell companies, offshore companies or a network of associates.
"The mission of the Kleptocracy Initiative is really to target what we call grand foreign corruption that impacts the U.S. financial
system," Day said, citing the Chun case as an example.
The 2012 Magnitsky Act gives the government power to deny visas and freeze the assets of Russian nationals accused of corruption
or human rights violations. The Global Magnitsky Act would extend the same sanctions to the rest of the world, but it has yet to
be passed by Congress. Unlike Proclamation 7750, the Magnitsky laws require the government to publish a list of foreign government
officials who are barred from the United States.
In addition, the Treasury Department imposed regulations this year that aim to crack down on the use of shell companies to purchase
real estate in places like Miami and Manhattan. Title insurance companies are now required to identify the real owners of companies
purchasing high-end real estate without a mortgage. These regulations, however, are temporary.
Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the
post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan
Crisis.
The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia which is the
goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the attitude toward Russia
to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
This is anold, 2015 article that is still rrrelenet today. Well written overview of British policies toward Russia
Notable quotes:
"... Lyndon LaRouche has observed that anybody acting according to this British agenda with the intention of coming out on top is a fool, since the British financial-political empire is bankrupt and its entire system is coming down. ..."
"... EU: British imperial interests are intent on destroying Prime Minister Putin's bid for the Presidency, and throwing Russia into deadly political turmoil. ..."
"... In her testimony, Diuk came off like a reincarnation of a 1950s Cold Warrior, raving against the Russian government as "authoritarian," "dictators," and so forth. She said, "The trend lines for freedom and democracy in Russia have been unremittingly negative since Vladimir Putin took power and set about the systematic construction of a representation of their interests within the state." She announced at that point that the elections would be illegitimate: "[T]he current regime will likely use the upcoming parliamentary elections in December 2011 and presidential election in March 2012 with the inevitable falsifications and manipulations, to claim the continued legitimacy of its rule." ..."
"... The British-educated Nadia Diuk is vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy, from which perch she has spread "Cold War" venom against Putin and the Russian government. ..."
"... Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert, two top profilers of the Russian Internet, noted that the Runet grew five times faster than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East, in 2000-08. ..."
"... NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny (inset), the online "anti-corruption" activist and cult figure of the December demonstrations. Addressing crowds on the street, Navalny sounds more like Mussolini than a proponent of democracy. A Russian columnist found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic. Shown: the Dec. 24 demonstration in Moscow. ..."
January 9, 2012 -Organizers of the December 2011 "anti-vote-fraud" demonstrations in Moscow have announced Feb. 4 as the date
of their next street action, planned as a march around the city's Garden Ring Road on the 22nd anniversary of a mass demonstration
which paved the way to the end of the Soviet Union. While there is a fluid situation within both the Russian extraparliamentary opposition
layers, and the ruling circles and other Duma parties, including a process of "dialogue" between them, in which ex-Finance Minister
Alexei Kudrin is playing a role, it is clear that British imperial interests are intent on-if not actually destroying Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin's bid for reelection as Russia's President in the March 4 elections-casting Russia into ongoing, destructive political
turmoil.
Lyndon LaRouche has observed that anybody acting according to this British agenda with the intention of coming out on top
is a fool, since the British financial-political empire is bankrupt and its entire system is coming down.
Review of the events leading up to the Dec. 4, 2011 Duma elections, which the street demonstrators demanded be cancelled for fraud,
shows that not only agent-of-British-influence Mikhail Gorbachov, the ex-Soviet President, but also the vast Project Democracy apparatus
inside the United States, exposed by EIR in the 1980s as part of an unconstitutional "secret government,"[1]
have been on full mobilization to block the current Russian leadership from continuing in power.
Project Democracy
Typical is the testimony of Nadia Diuk, vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), before the Subcommittee
on Europe and Eurasia of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs last July 26. The NED is the umbrella of Project Democracy;
it functions, inclusively, through the International Republican Institute (IRI, linked with the Republican Party) and the National
Democratic Institute (NDI, linked with the Democratic Party, and currently headed by Madeleine Albright).
Diuk was educated at the U.K.'s Unversity of Sussex Russian studies program, and then taught at Oxford University, before coming
to the U.S.A. to head up the NED's programs in Eastern Europe and Russia beginning 1990. She is married to her frequent co-author,
Adrian Karatnycky of the Atlantic Institute, who headed up the private intelligence outfit Freedom House[2]
for 12 years. Her role is typical of British outsourcing of key strategic operations to U.S. institutions.
EU: British imperial interests are intent on destroying Prime Minister Putin's bid for the Presidency, and throwing Russia
into deadly political turmoil.
In her testimony, Diuk came off like a reincarnation of a 1950s Cold Warrior, raving against the Russian government as "authoritarian,"
"dictators," and so forth. She said, "The trend lines for freedom and democracy in Russia have been unremittingly negative since
Vladimir Putin took power and set about the systematic construction of a representation of their interests within the state." She
announced at that point that the elections would be illegitimate: "[T]he current regime will likely use the upcoming parliamentary
elections in December 2011 and presidential election in March 2012 with the inevitable falsifications and manipulations, to claim
the continued legitimacy of its rule."
Diuk expressed renewed hope that the disastrous 2004 Orange Revolution experiment in Ukraine could be replicated in Russia, claiming
that "when the protests against authoritarian rule during Ukraine's Orange Revolution brought down the government in 2004, Russian
citizens saw a vision across the border of an alternative future for themselves as a Slavic nation." She then detailed what she claimed
were the Kremlin's reactions to the events in Ukraine, charging that "the leaders in the Kremlin-always the most creative innovators
in the club of authoritarians-have also taken active measures to promote support of the government and undermine the democratic opposition...."
Holos Ameryky
The British-educated Nadia Diuk is vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy, from which perch she has spread
"Cold War" venom against Putin and the Russian government.
While lauding "the democratic breakthroughs in the Middle East" in 2011, Diuk called on the Congress to "look to [Eastern Europe]
as the source of a great wealth of experience on how the enemies of freedom are ever on the alert to assert their dominance, but
also how the forces for freedom and democracy will always find a way to push back in a struggle that demands our support."
In September, Diuk chaired an NED event featuring a representative of the NED-funded Levada Center Russian polling organization,
who gave an overview of the then-upcoming December 4 Duma election. Also speaking there was Russian liberal politician Vladimir Kara-Murza,
who predicted in the nastiest tones that Putin will suffer the fate of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. In this same September period,
Mikhail Gorbachov, too, was already forecasting voting irregularities and a challenge to Putin's dominance.
The NED, which has an annual budget of $100 million, sponsors dozens of "civil society" groups in Russia. Golos, the supposedly
independent vote-monitoring group that declared there would be vote fraud even before the elections took place, has received NED
money through the NDI since 2000. Golos had a piecework program, paying its observers a set amount of money for each reported voting
irregularity. NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny-the online anti-corruption activist and cult figure of the December demonstrations-since
2006, when he and Maria Gaidar (daughter of the late London-trained shock therapy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar) launched a youth debating
project called "DA!" (meaning "Yes!" or standing for "Democratic Alternative"). Gorbachov's close ally Vladimir Ryzhkov, currently
negotiating with Kudrin on terms of a "dialogue between the authorities and the opposition," also received NED grants to his World
Movement for Democracy.
Besides George Soros's Open Society Foundations (formerly, Open Society Institute, OSI), the biggest source of funds for this
meddling, including funding which was channeled through the NDI and the IRI, is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Officially, USAID has spent $2.6 billion on programs in Russia since 1992. The current acknowledged level is around $70 million annually,
of which nearly half is for "Governing Justly & Democratically" programs, another 30% for "Information" programs, and only a small
fraction for things like combatting HIV and TB. On Dec. 15, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
Philip Gordon announced that the Obama Administration would seek Congressional approval to step up this funding, with "an initiative
to create a new fund to support Russian non-governmental organizations that are committed to a more pluralistic and open society."
Awaiting McFaul
White House/Pete Souza
The impending arrival in Moscow of Michael McFaul (shown here with his boss in the Oval Office), as U.S. Ambassador to Russia,
is seen by many there as an escalation of Project Democracy efforts to destabilize the country.
People from various parts of the political spectrum in Russia see the impending arrival of Michael McFaul as U.S. Ambassador to
Russia as an escalation in Project Democracy efforts to destabilize Russia. McFaul, who has been Barack Obama's National Security
Council official for Russia, has been working this beat since the early 1990s, when he represented the NDI in Russia at the end of
the Soviet period, and headed its office there.
As a Russia specialist at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Hoover Institution, as well as the
Carnegie Endowment, and an array of other Russian studies think tanks, McFaul has stuck closely to the Project Democracy agenda.
Financing for his research has come from the NED, the OSI, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation (another notorious agency of financier
interests within the U.S. establishment). He was an editor of the 2006 book Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic
Breakthrough, containing chapters by Diuk and Karatnycky.
In his own contribution to a 2010 book titled After Putin's Russia,[3]
McFaul hailed the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine-which was notoriously funded and manipulated from abroad-as a triumph of "people's
political power from below to resist and eventually overturn a fraudulent election."
Before coming to the NSC, one of McFaul's many positions at Stanford was co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. He has also
been active in such projects as the British Henry Jackson Society which is active in the drive to overthrow the government of Syria.
The Internet Dimension
The December 2011 street demonstrations in Moscow were organized largely online. Participation rose from a few hundred on Dec.
5, the day after the election, to an estimated 20,000 people on Bolotnaya Square Dec. 10, and somewhere in the wide range of 30,000
to 120,000 on Academician Sakharov Prospect Dec. 24.
Headlong expansion of Internet access and online social networking over the past three to five years has opened up a new dimension
of political-cultural warfare in Russia. An EIR investigation finds that British intelligence agencies involved in the current
attempts to destabilize Russia and, in their maximum version, overthrow Putin, have been working intensively to profile online activity
in Russia and find ways to expand and exploit it. Some of these projects are outsourced to think tanks in the U.S.A. and Canada,
but their center is Cambridge University in the U.K.-the heart of the British Empire, home of Bertrand Russell's systems analysis
and related ventures of the Cambridge Apostles.[4]
The scope of the projects goes beyond profiling, as can be seen in the Cambridge-centered network's interaction with Russian anti-corruption
crusader Alexei Navalny, a central figure in the December protest rallies.
While George Soros and his OSI prioritized building Internet access in the former Soviet Union starting two decades ago, as recently
as in 2008 British cyberspace specialists were complaining that the Internet was not yet efficient for political purposes in Russia.
Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism produced a Soros-funded report in 2008, titled "The Web that Failed:
How opposition politics and independent initiatives are failing on the Internet in Russia." The Oxford-Reuters authors regretted
that processes like the Orange Revolution, in which online connections were crucial, had not gotten a toehold in Russia. But they
quoted a 2007 report by Andrew Kuchins of the Moscow Carnegie Center, who found reason for optimism in the seven-fold increase in
Russian Internet (Runet) use from 2000 to 2007. They also cited Robert Orttung of American University and the Resource Security Institute,
on how Russian blogs were reaching "the most dynamic members of the youth generation" and could be used by "members of civil society"
to mobilize "liberal opposition groups and nationalists."
Scarcely a year later, a report by the digital marketing firm comScore crowed that booming Internet access had led to Russia's
having "the world's most engaged social networking audience." Russian Facebook use rose by 277% from 2008 to 2009. The Russia-based
social networking outfit Vkontakte.ru (like Facebook) had 14.3 million visitors in 2009; Odnoklassniki.ru (like Classmates.com) had
7.8 million; and Mail.ru-My World had 6.3 million. All three of these social networking sites are part of the Mail.ru/Digital Sky
Technologies empire of Yuri Milner,[5]
with the individual companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore locations.
The Cambridge Security Programme
Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert, two top profilers of the Russian Internet, noted that the Runet grew five times faster
than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East, in 2000-08.
Two top profilers of the Runet are Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, who assessed its status in their essay "Control and Subversion
in Russian Cyberspace."[6] At
the University of Toronto, Deibert is a colleague of Barry Wellman, co-founder of the International Network of Social Network Analysis
(INSNA).[7] Rohozinski is a
cyber-warfare specialist who ran the Advanced Network Research Group of the Cambridge Security Programme (CSP) at Cambridge University
in 2002-07. Nominally ending its work, the CSP handed off its projects to an array of organizations in the OpenNet Initiative (ONI),
including Rohozinski's SecDev Group consulting firm, which issues the Information Warfare Monitor.
The ONI, formally dedicated to mapping and circumventing Internet surveillance and filtering by governments, is a joint project
of Cambridge (Rohozinski), the Oxford Internet Institute, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and
the University of Toronto.
Deibert and Rohozinski noted that the Runet grew five times faster than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East,
in 2000-08. They cited official estimates that 38 million Russians were going online as of 2010, of whom 60 had broadband access
from home; the forecast number of Russia-based Runet users by 2012 was 80 million, out of a population of 140 million. Qualitatively,
the ONI authors welcomed what they called "the rise of the Internet to the center of Russian culture and politics." On the political
side, they asserted that "the Internet has eclipsed all the mass media in terms of its reach, readership, and especially in the degree
of free speech and opportunity to mobilize that it provides."
This notion of an Internet-savvy core of the population becoming the focal point of Russian society is now being hyped by those
who want to push the December demonstrations into a full-scale political crisis. Such writers call this segment of the population
"the creative class," or "the active creative minority," which can override an inert majority of the population. The Dec. 30 issue
of Vedomosti, a financial daily co-owned by the Financial Times of London, featured an article by sociologist Natalya
Zubarevich, which was then publicized in "Window on Eurasia" by Paul Goble, a State Department veteran who has concentrated for decades
on the potential for Russia to split along ethnic or other lines.
Zubarevich proposed that the 31% of the Russian population living in the 14 largest cities, of which 9 have undergone "post-industrial
transformation," constitute a special, influential class, as against the inhabitants of rural areas (38%) and mid-sized industrial
cities with an uncertain future (25%). Goble defined the big-city population as a target: "It is in this Russia that the 35 million
domestic users of the Internet and those who want a more open society are concentrated."
The Case of Alexei Navalny
In the "The Web that Failed" study, Oxford-Reuters authors Floriana Fossato, John Lloyd, and Alexander Verkhovsky delved into
the missing elements, in their view, of the Russian Internet. What would it take, they asked, for Runet participants to be able to
"orchestrate motivation and meaningful commitments"? They quoted Julia Minder of the Russian portal Rambler, who said about the potential
for "mobilization": "Blogs are at the moment the answer, but the issue is how to find a leading blogger who wants to meet people
on the Internet several hours per day. Leading bloggers need to be entertaining.... The potential is there, but more often than not
it is not used."
NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny (inset), the online "anti-corruption" activist and cult figure of the December
demonstrations. Addressing crowds on the street, Navalny sounds more like Mussolini than a proponent of democracy. A Russian columnist
found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic. Shown: the Dec. 24 demonstration
in Moscow.
It is difficult not to wonder if Alexei Navalny is a test-tube creation intended to fill the missing niche. This would not be
the first time in recent Russian history that such a thing happened. In 1990, future neoliberal "young reformers" Anatoli Chubais
and Sergei Vasilyev wrote a paper under International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) auspices, on the priorities
for reform in the Soviet Union. They stated that a certain personality was missing on the Soviet scene at that time: the wealthy
businessman. In their IIASA paper, Chubais and Vasilyev wrote: "We now see a figure, arising from historical non-existence: the figure
of a businessman-entrepreneur, who has enough capital to bear the investment responsibility, and enough technological knowledge and
willingness to support innovation."[8]
This type of person was subsequently brought into existence through the corrupt post-Soviet privatization process in Russia, becoming
known as "the oligarchs." Was Navalny, similarly, synthesized as a charismatic blogger to fill the British subversive need for "mobilization"?
Online celebrity Navalny's arrest in Moscow on Dec. 5, and his speech at the Academician Sakharov Prospect rally on Dec. 24 were
highlights of last month's turmoil in the Russian capital. Now 35 years old, Navalny grew up in a Soviet/Russian military family
and was educated as a lawyer. In 2006, he began to be financed by NED for the DA! project (see above). Along the way-maybe through
doing online day-trading, as some biographies suggest, or maybe from unknown benefactors-Navalny acquired enough money to be able
to spend $40,000 (his figure) on a few shares in each of several major Russian companies with a high percentage of state ownership.
This gave him minority-shareholder status, as a platform for his anti-corruption probes.
It must be understood that the web of "corruption" in Russia is the system of managing cash flows through payoffs, string-pulling,
and criminal extortion, which arose out of the boost that Gorbachov's perestroika policy gave to pre-existing Soviet criminal networks
in the 1980s. It then experienced a boom under darlings of London like Gaidar, who oversaw the privatization process known as the
Great Criminal Revolution in the 1990s. As Russia has been integrated into an international financial order, which itself relies
on criminal money flows from the dope trade and strategically motivated scams like Britain's BAE operations in the Persian Gulf,
the preponderance of shady activity in the Russian economy has only increased.
Putin's governments inherited this system, and it can be ended when the commitment to monetarism, which LaRouche has identified
as a fatal flaw even among genuinely pro-development Russians, is broken in Russia and worldwide. The current bankruptcy of the Trans-Atlantic
City of London-Eurozone-Wall Street system means that now is the time for this to happen!
Yale Fellows
In 2010, Navalny was accepted to the Yale World Fellows Program, as one of fewer than 20 approved candidates out of over a thousand
applicants. As EIR has reported, the Yale Fellows are instructed by the likes of British Foreign Office veteran Lord Mark
Malloch-Brown and representatives of Soros's Open Society Foundations.[9]
What's more, the World Fellows Program is funded by The Starr Foundation of Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, former chairman and CEO
of insurance giant American International Group (AIG), the recipient of enormous Bush Jr.-Obama bailout largesse in 2008-09; Greenberg
and his C.V. Starr company have a long record of facilitating "regime change" (aka coups), going back to the 1986 overthrow of President
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Navalny reports that Maria Gaidar told him to try for the program, and he enjoyed recommendations
from top professors at the New Economic School in Moscow, a hotbed of neoliberalism and mathematical economics. It was from
New Haven that Navalny launched his anti-corruption campaign against Transneft, the Russian national oil pipeline company, specifically
in relation to money movements around the new East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline. The ESPO has just finished the first year of operation
of its spur supplying Russian oil to China.
Navalny presents a split personality to the public. Online he is "Mr. Openness." He posts the full legal documentation of his
corruption exposés. When his e-mail account was hacked, and his correspondence with U.S. Embassy and NED officials about funding
him was made public, Navalny acknowledged that the e-mails were genuine. He tries to disarm interviewers with questions like, "Do
you think I'm an American project, or a Kremlin one?"
During the early-January 2012 holiday lull in Russia, Navalny engaged in a lengthy, oh-so-civilized dialogue in Live Journal with
Boris Akunin (real name, Grigori Chkhartishvili), a famous detective-story author and liberal activist who was another leader of
the December demonstrations, about whether Navalny's commitment to the slogan "Russia for the Russians" marks him as a bigot who
is unfit to lead. Addressing crowds on the street, however, Navalny sounds like Mussolini. Prominent Russian columnist Maxim Sokolov,
writing in Izvestia, found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic.
Navalny may well end up being expendable in the view of his sponsors. In the meantime, it is clear that he is working from the
playbook of Gene Sharp, whose neurolinguistic programming and advertising techniques were employed in Ukraine's Orange Revolution
in 2004.[10] Sharp, a veteran
of "advanced studies" at Oxford and 30 years at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, is the author of The Politics of Nonviolent
Action: Power and Struggle, which advises the use of symbolic colors, short slogans, and so forth.
While at Yale, Navalny also served as an informant and advisor for a two-year study conducted at Harvard's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, one of the institutions participating in the OpenNet Initiative, launched out of Cambridge University in the
U.K. The study produced a profile titled "Mapping the Russian Blogosphere," which detailed the different sections of the Runet: liberal,
nationalist, cultural, foreign-based, etc., looking at their potential social impact.
Allen Douglas, Gabrielle Peut, David Christie, and Dorothea Bunnell did research for this article.
[1] "Project Democracy:
The 'parallel government' behind the Iran-Contra affair," Washington, D.C.: EIR Research, Inc., 1987. This 341-page special report
explored the connection between the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the illegal gun-running operations of Col. Oliver
North, et al., which had been mentioned in cursory fashion in the Tower Commission report on that "Iran-Contra" scandal. Lyndon
H. LaRouche, Jr.'s introduction to the report identified the roots of North's "Irangate" gun-running in Henry A. Kissinger's reorganization
of U.S. intelligence under President Richard M. Nixon, in the wake of post-Watergate findings by the 1975 Senate Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). The process of replacing traditional
intelligence functions of government with National Security Council-centered operations, often cloaked as promoting ``democracy''
worldwide, was continued under the Trilateral Commission-created Administration of Jimmy Carter. Supporting ``democracy''--often
measured by such criteria as economic deregulation and extreme free-market programs, which ravage the populations that are supposedly
being democratized--became an axiom of U.S. foreign policy. The NED itself was founded in 1983.
[2] "Profile:
'Get
LaRouche' Taskforce: Train Salon's Cold War Propaganda Apparat,"EIR, Sept. 29, 2006, reviews the Truman-era roots
of relations among Anglo-American intelligence figures John Train, James Jesus Angleton, Jay Lovestone, and Leo Cherne, all of
whom were later active against LaRouche and his influence. Cherne's International Rescue Committee (IRC) was described by Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, its one-time director of public relations, as an instrument of "psychological warfare." The closely related
Freedom House project was directed by Cherne for many years. Geostrategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has written that
Russia is destined to fragment as the Soviet Union did, have sat on its board.
[3] Stephen K. Wegren,
Dale Roy Herspring (eds.), After Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010,
p. 118.
[4] Craig Isherwood,
"Universal Principles vs. Sense Certainty," The New Citizen, October/November 2011, p. 12 (http://cecaust.com.au/pubs/pdfs/cv7n6_pages12to14.pdf).
Founded as the Cambridge Conversazione Society in 1820, by Cambridge University professor and advisor to the British East India
Company, the Rev. Charles Simeon, the Apostles are a secret society limited to 12 members at a time. Its veterans have held strategic
intelligence posts for the British Empire, both in the heyday of overt colonialism, and in the continuing financial empire and
anti-science "empire of the mind," for nearly two centuries, during which Cambridge was the elite university in Britain, Trinity
College was the elite college within Cambridge, and the Apostles were the elite within Trinity. Isherwood reported, "Among other
doctrines, the Apostles founded: Fabian socialism; logical positivism specifically against physical chemistry; most of modern
psychoanalysis; all modern economic doctrines, including Keynesianism and post-World War II 'mathematical economics'; modern digital
computers and 'information theory'; and systems analysis. They also founded the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory as the controlling
priesthood for science, to attack Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, in particular.... John Maynard Keynes, a leader of the Apostles,
... traced the intellectual traditions of the Apostles back to John Locke and Isaac Newton, and through Newton back to the ancient
priesthood of Babylon." The group's abiding focus on influencing Russia is exemplified by not only Bertrand Russell himself, but
also the involvement of several members of the Apostles, including Lord Victor Rothschild of the banking family, and future Keeper
of the Queen's Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt, in the Anglo-Soviet spy rings of the mid-20th Century.
[5] Billionaire Milner
is a self-described failed physicist. He worked for the World Bank on Russian banking issues in the 1990s, before making his fortune
as one of Russia's newly minted "oligarchs"-a business partner of now-jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Menatep banking group,
among other projects.
[6] In Access Controlled:
The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, an OpenNet Initiative (ONI) book, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010.
[8] Anatoliy Chubais
and Sergei A. Vasiliev, "Privatization in the USSR: Necessary for Structural Change," in Economic Reform and Integration: Proceedings
of 1-3 March 1990 Meeting, Laxenberg, Austria: IIASA, July 1990. The authors' notion of a charismatic businessman-entrepreneur
comes straight from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who coined the term Unternehmergeist, or "entrepreneur-spirit,"
to describe people he called agents of "creative destruction."
I have this quote by Morgenthau on my desktop on my computer--it is from 1957 lecture in
Naval War College:
"I would say, and I have said many times before, that if the czars still reigned in
Russia, that if Lenin had died of the measles at an early age, that if Stalin had never been
heard of, but the power of the Soviet Union were exactly what it is today, the problem of
Russia would be for us by and large what it is today. If the Russian armies stood exactly
where they stand today, and if Russian technological development were what it is today, we
would be by and large confronted with the same problems which confront us today."
In 2015 Kissinger basically reiterated the point when stated that the goal of US elites is
a break up of Russia.
I was told the same thing by Soviet specialists of the US Army who thought that what I did
was irrelevant except for my demonstrated ability to recruit Soviets.
Hmmmm I think IMHO that any analogies with Gorbachev are misplaced and superficial. I
don't think Gorbachev knew what he was doing and was profoundly naive (or worse, but that's
the best that can be said about him, let's leave it at that – and I admired him as a
teen behind the iron curtain).
I think Sanders knows what he's doing and is clear eyed about who he's dealing with in
terms of system and people -- unlike Gorbachev.
As for people in the USSR giving up – I don't think they got anything of what they
really wanted, and I don't think anyone really asked them. So they never had a chance to give
up anything. They were simply led along a short hopeful path – and then summarily and
mercilessly crushed.
Sanders is a healthy thing for this country and the Dem party. Unlike Gorbachev, he's
ushering in healthy forces. Let the chips fall where they may.
Forward, Comrades (Russian: Вперед,
товарищи; Chinese:
前进，达瓦里希; pinyin: Qiánjìn,
dáwǎlǐxī; literally: "Advance, tovarish") is a 2013 Chinese animated
short film by Wang Liyin of the Beijing Film Academy. The film focuses on the fall of the
Soviet Union as its main theme, told from the perspective of a young girl. As an original net
animation with a strong political backdrop, the film has triggered strong reactions from
various audiences.
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his
public tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to
the last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video
discussing this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date
with brandscum...
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his public
tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant Sergei
Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to the
last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video discussing
this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date with
brandscum...
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
The former head of Boris Berezovsky's
security service spoke about the relationship between famous blogger Alexey Navalny and the
British MI6 intelligence service. He succeeded in exporting about 60 servers containing a huge
amount of correspondence and documents.
"23rd December, 2007 - to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service A. Belt.
Report of agent Solomon about ending Navalny's verification and the assignment of the
pseudonym "freedom".
Had a conversation over an encrypted communication channel between the employee and the CRS
(SIS) and agent Solomon. The agent got approval for a confidential cooperation with Alexei
Navalny. It was mentioned that it is necessary for Navalny to arrange financial support to
carry out the tasks within the framework of special operation "Shiver" to undermine the
existing constitutional order in the Russian Federation. Navalny has a nickname of "freedom",
reads one of the documents.
Agent Solomon is the notorious William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, inspirer of the
Magnitsky act, and a person who made a fortune in Russia in the 90's.
Operation "Shiver" had already been developed at Langley in 1986. The documents were signed
by then-CIA Director William Casey. The main goal of the project was to "change the
constitutional and political system in Eastern Europe and the USSR".
Tasks are described in as much detail as possible: to change the political and
constitutional state system, to acquire control over financial flows, and to extract assets
from emerging economies.
The USSR has not existed for a quarter of a century, however, the project "Shiver" is still
relevant.
"Browder spreads lies, and all his company is based solely on lies. Navalny is his student
and successor of his ideas. They partly work together, working in parallel. They absolutely
face the same direction," said Pavel Karpov, a former investigator of the Moscow Criminal
Investigations Department. He is one of those who has stirred Browder's "snake nest" and opened
schemes of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares in Russia under the leadership of
Hermitage Capital.
Here is an example of correspondence between Navalny and Browder in 2006:
"Let me very frankly formulate what I want to offer. I will teach you to grab the monsters
of the Russian economy by the balls. Soon you will become a hero of the minority shareholders
and can have their reputational capital. Probably, and political. In return I ask you to
support me when my problems come out. Am I clear?" asks Browder to Navalny. "Your information
in exchange for the loyalty of my potential. However, I'm afraid you banked on the wrong
figure. I could have problems even in my party. There I seem to be a nationalist," -- says
Navalny.
Then, under the leadership of Browder, and with his financial support, the still unknown
blogger opened the cycle of revelations. At the same time the scene appears banker Vladimir
Ashurkov. He dealt with money matters for "revelatory activities".
"Agent "freedom" was acquainted with the first phase of the secret denunciation of the
conviction of corruption and embezzlement of Russian state assets. To implement the first phase
of the plan, agent "freedom" was funded to the amount of 100 million rubles. The first part of
funds, 7 million rubles, will be transferred to our authorised representative of the Moscow
Helsinki Group until January 26th. Agent A. Belt".
The activities of the Hermitage Capital in Moscow has been completely phased out as auditor
Sergey Magnitsky was appointed to clean up any traces that remained.
"People say that he was Browder's lawyer. This is an outright lie! He was an accountant, who
was engaged in tax evasion for Browder, i.e. registered companies through which money was
withdrawn from. As I was told by Magnitsky himself, these millions were withdrawn by his own
chief, who, as I learned later, was Mr. Browder," recalls journalist Oleg Lurie.
When Magnitsky was arrested, Navalny wrote to Browder, "William, sincerely sorry. People get
used to like those who suffer in our country I'm not saying that the suffering of Sergei is
your trump card, but the more these journalists and people will learn about this suffering, the
less they will want to know what is happening".
Browder's goal was to create the maximum noise possible with information, however the
situation abroad with the "legal auditor" responded little.
"20th September 2009. To the Director of Central Intelligence.
A conversation between agent Solomon and an employee of MI6.
Further growth of public resonance will be gone unless we make adjustments to the plans of
our ongoing special events. In his message to the agent, based on information available for it,
he noted the deteriorating health of Magnitsky. It was proposed to the agent, through
authorized persons in the penitentiary system of Russia, to organize a disruption of medical
assistance to Magnitsky. The deterioration of his health will be designated as a medical error
that could lead to his death. Please pay special attention to this information", -- stated the
documents.
Magnitsky was literally sacrificed. In November 2009, he died in the hospital of the
"Matrosskaya Tishina" detention facility, and Browder announced that the prisoner was tortured,
he was also refused medical care. And then there was the "Magnitsky list".
Here is what is said in the secret documents about it:
"January 23, 2010. Sash reports on a meeting with the agent "freedom", during which he gave
the agent $300,000 for the upcoming program to support the "Magnitsky list" on social networks.
The report of the agent Sash also said that the project is linked with the death of Sergei
Magnitsky, and already in the early stages it greatly undermined the credibility of Russian
citizens in the Russian judicial and law enforcement system. This leads to growing chaos in the
Russian judicial and law enforcement system, a reduction of its credibility, and a reduction in
the credibility of Vladimir Putin. Agent A. Belt".
All this time, Browder warned Navalny against political activity.
"We have our own tasks. Bill asks you to be careful. Urge you not to interfere in the
electoral process -- it is not your task. Monitoring, reporting -- Yes. Protests -- no," --
said in his message.
Apparently, the situation has since changed. It is noteworthy that the Skype accounts of Browder and Navalny, where they started talking
in 2006, are still operational. But we failed to contact subscribers.
Dominance in technology still represent pretty powerful lever used to damage and possibly subdue Russia. King of
technological imperialism.
Notable quotes:
"... As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods. ..."
"... In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions. ..."
"... - Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces. ..."
"... In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. ..."
"... -- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures. ..."
"... And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial. ..."
"... It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. ..."
Article from the newspaper: weekly "Arguments and Facts" № 1-2 09/01/2019
Is the scenario of suffocation of the USSR, carried out by the US 30 years ago, similar to
the events that are happening now, and what Russia needs to fear most? "AiF" asked these
questions to the Director of the Institute of new society, economist Vasily Koltashov.
How the world has changed
Alexey Makurin," AIF": Looking at the events taking place in recent years, you catch
yourself thinking that all this has already happened. The current strategy of suffocation of
Russia by America one in one copies the same strategy of times of Reagan. In the eighties, the
United States also hampered the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. The fall
in oil prices also drained our budget, and defense spending grew. And the army was involved in
the conflict in the southern country: Afghanistan. The West deliberately repeats the plan that
brought him victory in the cold war?
Vasily Koltashov: it's more of a coincidence. But even if there is some scenario, the game
this time is some stupid. In the days of Reagan and Bush senior Americans were more rational,
thinner. And now, in everything they do, there is an element of hysteria caused by the need to
respond to the complex state of their own Affairs. Compared with the eighties in the us huge
public debt and huge bubbles in the stock market, threatening investors ruin. The imbalances
that have accumulated in the economy are blocking the development of industrial production.
Much other than agriculture and raw material extraction is often expensive and uncompetitive.
These problems provoke a conflict not only with Russia, but also with China, with other
Eurasian centers of capitalism, which took shape in recent decades.
30 years ago, Western countries revived and developed after the crisis of the seventies. The
orbit of influence of the USA included Pakistan, Turkey, China. Now Trump has stopped financing
Pakistan. In Turkey, there was an attempt of a coup d'état in which Ankara accused
Washington. The Americans are waging a trade war against the Chinese. These and other countries
that do not find a common language with the United States, are increasingly trading among
themselves. The American press writes about the" Eastern Entente", implying the Eurasian
powers.
Increasingly, there are disputes and conflicts between Americans and their European allies,
which was unthinkable before. In such a situation, a plan to weaken Russia, similar to the
scenario of Reagan advisors, can no longer work.
-- What did the West want, putting pressure on the USSR in the eighties?
- I think the West did not seek to destroy the Soviet Union, but just tried to solved a more utilitarian
problem: acquiring new markets for their products. At that time, neoliberal globalization became the
main mechanism of economic growth, it was important for the West to draw countries into its
orbit, which were previously somehow isolated from the world market. They bought the Russian nomenklatura like they buy local
elites in Latin America and tried to concert Russia into Latin American country. They almost succeeded.
How did Ronald Reagan scare the USSR by joking on August 11, 1984?
-- What about Reagan's "evil Empire"statement?
-- It was preparation for the beginning of negotiations from a position of strength. Behind
this ideological rhetoric was another meaning: if you continue to maintain its planned economy,
closed to free trade, we will begin to destroy it, and if you agree to our terms, we will offer
you a deal.
As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington:
they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries.
Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs,
enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national
corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over
time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods.
In
response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions.
- What is their purpose in the current situation?
- Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its
representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian
domestic market and get the fattest pieces.
How Russia has changed
- This time Russia does not give up and attacks itself, as is happening in the same Syria.
What changed?
- The country and enterprises are now run by people with a market view of the world who know
the value of the wealth they dispose of. It was for Gorbachev that Soviet factories were an
abstraction, he did not understand their true value. His concessions to the US and Europe were
completely irrational from a commercial point of view. It's impossible now.
In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has
accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with
ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more
attractive. The war in Afghanistan was declared meaningless. And now the Syrian conflict,
Russia does not solve a particular ideological goals. The military plays the role of guards of
its economic interests. Without any doubt, it would be more difficult for our government to
agree with OPEC on limiting oil production, if not for the successes in Syria. This agreement
in 2017-2018 allowed to raise oil prices and helped to resume economic growth in Russia.
-- Was it possible for the Soviet leadership to influence world oil prices?
- The USSR, too, nothing prevented to sit down at the negotiating table with OPEC. But that
wouldn't change the situation. Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were then loyal allies of
the United States. The West then concentrated all the world's capital, he put the OPEC
countries conditions: create comfortable prices for us, and we will invest in your economy.
And today, Saudi capital seeks to play an independent role, Riyadh's relations with
Washington have become cooler, and with Moscow, on the contrary, warmer. And the US itself is
increasingly supplying hydrocarbons for export: it is predicted that in 2019 they will come out
on top in the world for oil production. But this leadership is provided to Americans by
expensive shale oil, the extraction of which becomes unprofitable at prices below $ 40 per
barrel. So, for the US, very low oil prices are now also unprofitable.
On the other hand, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas today is also higher
than 30-35 years ago, when the country had a more powerful industry. This is an additional
risk.
-- What new qualities acquired by the Russian economy allow it to successfully withstand
Western pressure?
-- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working
printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The
planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business
is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but
also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged
very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues
exceed expenditures.
Where the main threats
-- But aren't the military expenditures, which have to be made in the conditions of
confrontation with the United States, too high? Will it not be possible that the new arms race
will be too much for the country?
- Financing of the defense industry to the detriment of consumer and other civil industries
usually occurs in the planned mobilization system, where all the resources of the country are
concentrated by the state. And in a market economy, such imbalances appear only during the war,
when budget distortions arise and private companies begin to focus more on military orders than
on grass-roots demand. There is no such thing in Russia now, although the government's
attention to defense capability is growing along with the pressure of the US and its
allies.
- Where does the main danger come from in such a situation?
-- Not exactly from the USA. The main threat to Russia is low effective demand within the
country. The weakness of the ruble, the low rate of economic growth -- all this is a
consequence of the poverty of the mass buyer.
And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a
new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end
of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in
price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to
act and strongly non-trivial.
With whom will trade? Expert on how Russia can live under sanctions
It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At
the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a
new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within
the country. This is a traditional trade on the "method of cat Matroskin", which existed for
thousands of years: "To buy something you need, you must first sell something unnecessary." All
need to produce themselves.
And it is important to support the Russian buyer. This may be a preferential mortgage loan
at 3-5% per annum, which will stimulate demand for housing and the sectors of the economy that
are associated with construction. This may be an increase in the number of school teachers,
doctors and kindergarten workers. We need an hourly wage to let people know what their time is
worth. It is extremely important to have a tax-free minimum income (at least 50 thousand rubles
per month). It is necessary to interest migrant workers to live in Russia and leave money in
our country, which will help to create new jobs. We need to directly give people money and
encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship, release the economic energy of society.
Do you think Trump is in anyway worse than his predecessors?
Well from my perspective, he's worse than his predecessors because, for a brief period of
time, he offered to hand me over to Putin!
Well, I would imagine you do have skin in the game because of that.
Also, he doesn't seem to have the level of he doesn't read briefing reports or have any
specifications at all about what this guy's up to.
What is your opinion on the future of America as a result of what Putin did during the 2016
election? Has he succeeded in striking a permanent blow against democracy in this country, for
lack of a better way of putting it?
Well, I believe that the institutions of United States are now being tested. It's kind of
like a it's a virus that has now has tried to infect the United States. I believe the
institutions are the immune systems in the United States. I think that United States will
survive this attack, and as far as Putin is concerned, I think that he has done himself very
grave long-term harm to his own interests. Because the next regime in the United States is
going to come down so hard on Putin, he's not going to know what hit him. He's playing such a
short-term game that he doesn't understand that whether it's Democrats or Republicans, any
normal reasonable person will want to be absolutely, devastatingly aggressive towards Russia
after Trump is finished.
So in a sense this pop-culture image of Putin as a grand strategist you think is flawed?
I think he's a highly effective short-term tactician and a very, very stupid strategist,
because his long-term interests are not served by alienating the entire Western world to sort
of rally against him. He can do all these frauds and scams and tricks on a short-term basis,
but pretty much everybody understands what he's up to.
But without that
basic level of trust and understanding between them, any dialogue rests upon shaky foundations.
It was never supposed to be like this. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new
era.
For a time Russia retreated from the world stage, but now it is back with a vengeance, eager
to consolidate its position nearer home; to restore something of its former global role and to
make up for perceived slights perpetrated by the West.
So where did it all go wrong? Why were Russia and the West unable to forge a different type
of relationship? Who is to blame? Was it US over-reach and insensitivity, or Russia's nostalgia
for Soviet greatness? Why have things now got so bad and is it correct to describe the present
state of affairs as a "new Cold War"?
In 2014, in the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimea, Mr Putin spoke to the Russian
Duma, noting that "if you compress the spring all the way to its limit it will snap back hard.
You must remember this", he stressed.
xxx 10 hours ago (Edited) Washington is having radioactive ambitions. This is the worst time
in history to pick a fight against Russia. They haven't been this motivated and ready to fight
against external threats than today.
If the cabal couldn't do it after 1989, they deserve a good spanking if they think they
could do it now.
Anyway this is also the worst of times for the USA to try to attack Russia given the
situation back home.
America is becoming more and more moronic by the day...
xxx 10 hours ago Wake up and quickly. xxx 8 hours ago After the forced dissolution of the
USSR in 1991 , America in all its perfidious and treacherous glory , promised that NATO ( their
auxiliary army ) would not move one inch towards the Russian border....ever ! In true American
honesty , they kept their word until the ink was nearly dry and instantly started surrounding
Russia with hundreds of military bases. However , their arrogance and childlike
superciliousness led them to take their eye of the ball.....they really believed that they were
" The Indispensable Nation ". Russia , determined never to be humiliated again , quietly began
to develop 21st century weaponry and is now years ahead of America.
America can be as bombastic and militaristic as they like, but recent developments in the ME
has shown the awakened world that they are a spent force verging on bankruptcy and their future
is similar to what they had planned for Russia .....corruption , decay and disintegration !!!
xxx 8 hours ago (Edited) Yes it did and there was no ink to dry. It appears it was a verbal
promise. That is Gorbi's excuse which I think is BS. Gorbi is an agent thus he got his
foundation in San Francisco (don't tell anyone) later on.
on the other hand the USA is in a financial shitstorm. I'm guessing there is one brother who
wants to "nuke it" and the other brother is like, well lets not do that..
because anyone who is promised a piece of russia eats their nukes 11 hours ago Until the US
collapses on it's own accord there will be plenty of exceptional kool aid drinking small ****
clowns from the one exceptional nation on the planet that will push for war and destruction to
"keep us safe" and "kill them over there so they don't do it here." Plenty of idiots out there
that believe the outrageous military budget is a "small price to pay for our freedom" and
others who say we don't spend anywhere near enough. USA USA USA never wrong always right.
Ah yes, our freedoms that we must cherish. Our cars, phones, and internet devices squeal on
us. Cops and the IRS stealing your money and property with no charges levied. In one instance
the cops staked out nurseries and if you bought too much fertilizer it was assumed you were
growing pot. Based only on this the cops got a warrant and in the dead of night and busted into
the home of 2 ex CIA employees and handcuffed and terrorized these people as they tore their
house apart. Nothing was found as these people were not growing pot there or anywhere. Or some
loser in LA calling the the Wichita KS cops giving a local Wichita address claiming he already
shot one person and was holding others hostage. All a big lie with an unarmed man shot dead by
the cops. One phone call to the cops, whether true or not, and your freedom evaporates. Or some
idiot hates you so doctors a video that goes viral and you lose your job, your friends shun
you, and hate mail piles up in your mailbox and your boss won't hire you back even when the
truth wins out.
As far as confiscation far too many believe it is connected to drug deals. Plenty of small
business owners had their money stolen by the IRS because they were making regular cash
deposits under 10 grand and the banks were required to turn them in. In the eyes of the IRS
with no other proof that money was from dealing drugs. Plenty of people stopped for minor
infraction so the cops toss the car and if you're carrying a bunch of cash, even if you can
produce a withdrawl slip, it's confiscated as you must have acquired it dealing drugs. Happened
to one guy buying a car from a seller who would take only cash. In one instance they caught a
kid dealing drugs and confiscated and sold his parents house even though he did not make any
deals in the house, they couldn't prove it but assumed he did, nor were drugs found there. No
charges filed. Ah, but the DA's and cops say they are underfunded and need to do crime to fight
crime. Like giving themselves raises and vacations and having parties. Or your local cops
stocking up on hard core military hardware.
7 hours ago It's quite stunning that in the 'Land of The Free' the police routinely steal
citizens wealth as they want to. I'm not sure even the Robber Baron's in Europe hundreds of
years ago were that blatant.
Is there a plan to prevent this? A Union of decent people to join the police to force the
rotten core out and to form shell companies that safeguard people's possessions?
If not: why not make one now.
11 hours ago Lebensraum?
Were the National Worker's Socialist Party and the Third Reich on the right trail?
11 hours ago This has been the policy since the Clinton years. Nothing new here. 12 hours ago
(Edited) This Janusz Bugajski dude is a generic Russophobe of Polish descent. His irrational
hatred of all-things Russian is typical of the rabid Catholic Poles who've invaded Orthodox
Christian Russia multiple times over the last millennia.
In fact, in the early 17th century, during Russia's "Time of Troubles", the Catholic Poles,
with the Pope's blessing, invaded Russia several times burning hundreds of villages across
Russia while slaughtering many thousands of innocent ethnic Russian men, women, and children
when they wouldn't convert to Catholicism. This culminated in 1611 when the Poles nearly burned
Moscow to the ground.
After what the Catholic Poles (and various fk'ing Popes) have done to Orthodox Christian
Russians over the centuries, who can blame the Russians for wanting a little payback after WW2.
12 hours ago Russia owes the Poles trillions in reparations. A moar satanic betrayal is hard to
find as occurred in the period of 1939-1945. 11 hours ago
(Edited) Reparations can work both ways, particularly in Europe with its millennia-long history
of back-and-forth wars between nations.
Dependent upon what you define as the statue of limitations, are war reparations pegged to
the last century, three centuries, five centuries, etc ?. Be careful what you ask for; the
Catholic Poles have a nasty violent history that goes back many centuries, long before the USSR
ever existed.
If there's one thing everyone in today's Washington can agree on, it's that whenever an
official or someone being paid by the government says something truly outrageous or dangerous,
there should be consequences, if only a fleeting moment of media fury.
With one notable exception: Arguing that the US should be quietly working to promote the
violent disintegration and carving up of the largest country on Earth.
Because so much of the discussion around US-Russian affairs is marked by hysteria and
hyperbole, you are forgiven for assuming this is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn't.
Published in the Hill under the dispassionate title "Managing
Russia's dissolution," author Janusz Bugajski makes the case that the West should not only
seek to contain "Moscow's imperial ambitions" but to actively seek the dismemberment of Russia
as a whole.
Engagement, criticism and limited sanctions have simply reinforced Kremlin perceptions
that the West is weak and predictable. To curtail Moscow's neo-imperialism a new strategy is
needed, one that nourishes Russia's decline and manages the international consequences of its
dissolution.
Like many contemporary cold warriors, Bugajski toggles back and forth between overhyping
Russia's might and its weaknesses, notably a lack of economic dynamism and a rise in ethnic and
regional fragmentation. But his primary argument is unambiguous: That the West should actively
stoke longstanding regional and ethnic tensions with the ultimate aim of a dissolution of the
Russian Federation, which Bugajski dismisses as an "imperial construct."
The rationale for dissolution should be logically framed: In order to survive, Russia
needs a federal democracy and a robust economy; with no democratization on the horizon and
economic conditions deteriorating, the federal structure will become increasingly
ungovernable...
To manage the process of dissolution and lessen the likelihood of conflict that spills
over state borders, the West needs to establish links with Russia's diverse regions and
promote their peaceful transition toward statehood.
Even more alarming is Bugajski's argument that the goal should not be self-determination for
breakaway Russian territories, but the annexing of these lands to other countries . "Some
regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from whom Moscow has
forcefully appropriated territories in the past."
It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without sparking
a series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version the US would
directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800 Serbian nuclear
warheads.
So who is Janusz Bugajski, and who is he speaking for?
The author bio on the Hill's piece identifies him as a senior fellow at the Center for
European Policy Analysis, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. But CEPA is no ordinary talk shop:
Instead of the usual foundations and well-heeled individuals, its financial backers seem to be mostly arms of the US
government, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Mission to
NATO, the US-government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, as well as as veritable
who's who of defense contractors, including Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Lockheed
Martin and Textron. Meanwhile, Bugajski chairs the South-Central Europe area studies program at
the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State.
To put it in perspective, it is akin to a Russian with deep ties to the Kremlin and
arms-makers arguing that the Kremlin needed to find ways to break up the United States and, if
possible, have these breakaway regions absorbed by Mexico and Canada. (A scenario which alas is
not as far-fetched as it might have been a few years ago; many thousands in California now
openly talk of a "Calexit," and many more in Mexico of a reconquista .)
Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine a quasi-official voice like Bugajski's coming out in favor
of a similar policy vis-a-vis China, which has its own restive regions, and which in
geopolitical terms is no more or less of a threat to the US than Russia. One reason may be that
China would consider an American call for secession by the Tibetans or Uyghurs to be a serious
intrusion into their internal affairs, unlike Russia, which doesn't appear to have noticed or
been ruffled by Bugajski's immodest proposal.
Indeed, just as the real scandal in Washington is what's legal rather than illegal, the real
outrage in this case is that few or none in DC finds Bugajski's virtual declaration of war
notable.
But it is. It is the sort of provocation that international incidents are made of, and if
you are a US taxpayer, it is being made in your name, and it should be among your outrages of
the month.
Putin knows that if he ignores the West and provides strong path for Russia growth,
re-building economy, manufacturing and military; building international relationships - it
will strengthen the country in a horror of it's enemies.
While others panicked over drop in oil prices - Putin was making adjustments to weather
out the storm. While many nations were taking out massive development loans [advised by city,
chase, goldman, etc] - Russia balanced the budget. While US government is in mayhem over
protecting the border [seems like no brainer] - Putin continues with strong central policy.
And the US sanction that crushed so many countries - appears to have limited effect [slowing
down some growth].
This author, Bugajski, [MI5 agent] wrote countless self-promoting books. Russia will never
want to fight a war with NATO [their customers]. Britain and France already lost that war.
Russia is just waiting for EU and NATO to collapse over money disagreement. Because they were
all happy as long as US was paying for all of it. Not anymore. Standby for Collapse of EU and
NATO show coming soon.
The Russian Confederation of Labour (KTR) says that the average life expectancy for men is
actually less than 65-years-old in over 60 regions in Russia. "KTR does not support such
decisions and declares its intention to launch a broad public campaign against their
implementation," the organization said in a statement .
You start off with "Putin is a cuck" which may or may not be a fact but if you actually
read the article it clearly states "President Medvedev" and raising the retirement age
from...wait for it... 60 to 63?? Really??
Most west european countries have a retirment age of around 65 years. In scandinavic
countries they are going to increase to 67. They realized that importing rapefugees is not
going to solve the demographic crisis.
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders
from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's famous "not one inch eastward" assurance about NATO
expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of
a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other
Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991 ,
according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by
the National Security Archive at George Washington University ( http://nsarchive.gwu.edu ).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and
Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991 , that discussions of
NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited
to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints
about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and
telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates's criticism of "pressing ahead with
expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that
wouldn't happen. "
[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is "led to believe."
President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989
that the U.S. would not take advantage ("I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall") of
the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at
that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the
collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.
[2]
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990 , when
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public
speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1)
informed Washington that Genscher made clear "that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German
unification process must not lead to an 'impairment of Soviet security interests.' Therefore,
NATO should rule out an 'expansion of its territory towards the east , i.e. moving it closer to
the Soviet borders.'" The Bonn cable also noted Genscher's proposal to leave the East German
territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.
[3]
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
falconflight 13 hours ago It was a horrible betrayal of a promise that should have been greatly
enhanced by promoting free enterprise concepts, and personal freedoms propaganda (Not lies),
and even economic assistance where reasonable. A historical opportunity lost. Those powerful
Kremlinologists couldn't pivot, it was easier to continue to treat Russia as an existential
adversary and in certain circumstances, purposely attempt to humiliate them, such as in
Serbia.
Today I participated in a nice web-based program started by the Central Bank of Russia (it
will be posted soon). An economist is being interviewed by another, and then the one who has
been interviewed becomes in his/her turn the interviewer of yet a third one. My friend Shlomo
Weber, the head of the New School of Economics interviewed me, and then I interviewed
Professor Natalya Zubarevich, from the Lomonosov Moscow State University and a noted scholar
of Russian regional economics.
Just a couple of days ago Natalia gave a very well-received talk at the Gaidar Forum in
Moscow on (what one might call) "unhealthy convergence" of Russian regions. In fact, Natalia
shows that most recently regional per capita GDPs have started a mild convergence, but that
this is due first to low growth rate of most of them and the economy as a whole, and to the
redistribution mechanism (mostly of the oil rent) between the regions. A healthy convergence,
Natalia says, would be the one where economic activity, and especially small and medium size
private businesses, were much more equally distributed across some ninety subjects of the
Russian Federation. She also had very interesting insights into the excessive
"verticalization" of economic power and decision-making in Russia, and the economic growth of
Moscow (much faster than of any other part of Russia) driven by centralization of that power,
and concentration of large state-owned or state-influenced enterprises as well as bureaucracy
in Moscow.
What most attracted my attention during Natalia's presentation at the Gaidar Forum was her
description of the current period of low growth rates in Russia as zastoi, or stagnation.
Now, zastoi has a very special political meaning in Russian because it was a disparaging term
used in the Gorbachev era, and by Gorbachev himself, to define the Brezhnevite period of
declining growth rates, lack of development perspectives, unchanging bureaucracy, and general
demoralization and malaise.
But I asked Natalia the following question. Looking over the past 150 years of Russian
history (and I think it is hard to go further back), were not really the best periods for
ordinary people exactly the periods of zastoi: incomes rose by little for sure, but the state
repression was weak, there were no wars, and probably if you look at violent deaths per
capita per year, the lowest number of people died precisely during the periods of zastoi. So
perhaps that zastoi is not so bad.
Natalia said, "I know I lived through the Brezhnevite period. Many people were
demoralized; but I used it to study. I never read so many books and learned so much as then
-- you could do whatever you wanted because your actual job really did not matter much."
(Even art, as I saw in the Tretyakovska Gallery, even if some of these paintings were never
exhibited in the official museums, seems to have done well during the Brezhnevite zastoi. And
as the recent film, which I have not seen, but read the reviews, Leto, appears to indirectly
argue as well.)
The best growth periods, as Natalia said, and as is generally accepted by economic
historians were the 1950s up to about 1963-65, and then the period of the two first Putin's
terms. In both cases, the growth spurs came as a ratchet effect to the previous set of
disasters: in the Khrushchev period, to the apocalypse of the Second World War, in the Putin
period, as a reaction to the Great Depression under Yeltsin during the early transition.
So this then made us think a bit back into the past (say, going back to 1905) and put
forward the following hypothesis: that Russian longer-term economic growth is cyclical. The
cycle has three components. First a period of utter turbulence, disorder, war, and huge loss
of income (and in many cases of life as well), followed by a decade or so of efflorescence,
recovery and growth, and finally by the period of "calcification" of whatever (or whoever)
that worked in that second period -- thus producing the zastoi or stagnation.
I do not know if this is something specific to the Russian economic history. It made me
think of Naipaul's observation on successful and unsuccessful countries. The history of the
former consists of a number of challenges and setbacks indeed, but certain things are solved
forever, and then new challenges appear. Take the United States: the Indian challenge and
then the independence from Britain were not easy to overcome/acquire, but eventually, they
were and they never came back; then the Civil War and the Emancipation; then the Great
Society etc. But unsuccessful countries, according to Naipaul (and he had, I think, Argentina
in mind) always stay within the circular history. The same or similar events keep on
repeating themselves forever without any upward trend -- and no single challenge is forever
overcome. In each following cycle everything simply repeats itself.
The challenges for Russia today is, I think, to break this cycle.
A perfectly good article, I'm sure, but why diffuse ourselves [and engender feelings of
fear and hopelessness as you express] when a strategic pressure point has presented?
Johnstone makes no mention of Bill Browder. Nor do the [100, so far] commenters.
BILL BROWDER is a key figure in the anti-Trump, anti-Russia hysteria. The notorious Trump
Tower meeting was about the Magnitsky Act, a fabrication by Browder to hide his financial
crimes. Browder "testified" in the Senate expressly to demonize Putin. Browder's contacts in
the IC, the Jewish Lobby, and the fawning media have enabled his propaganda assault this
week. He's appeared -- unchallenged, virtually unquestioned -- on countless talk shows. But
he's been running scared at the mention of interrogation by Russians. There are huge holes in
his story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case. The truth will bring him down!
And perhaps his Deep State supporters, along with him.
Ask your Senators if they've heard/read Browder's 2015 deposition in the Prevezon
case. (See comment 161 under The Untouchable Mr. Browder? by Israel Shamir for
links.)
BTW, have you seen "THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES" that Phil Giraldi
posted today? Debunking anti-Russian criminal sociopaths like Bill Browder will go a long way
to improving relations. Not to mention easing pressure on the unfortunate Trump.
@RobinG
UWell, we here in Russia know all this (about Browder) for quite a time. What new did you
find? It's just one story in long list of those written and spoken for western idiots like
Scripals
, MH17, chemicals in Syria and WMD in Iraq, Russian meddling in f-n US elections and so on.
Eat it all dummies.
Why Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on March 11, 1985? Was there a will of Yuri
Andropov? What was the cause of the sudden death of defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, who could be the first person in the
country? Was the Secretary General Konstantin Chernenko really poisoned by low-quality fish? And why did Victor Grishin lose his
chance to become the Secretary General of the "master of Moscow"?
Gorbachev was recruited in 1976-77 years when he visited Europe, then eliminate Kulakov and promote the Central Committee
Gorbachev. I am sure that the KGB had their own people recruited by the CIA and pursued a policy of promoting their candidacy
for the post of first person of the USSR.
The stupidest commentaries are here. This rotten system has outlived its usefulness.........and no leader was able to save
her. There is no progressive Communist state in the world and can not be!
Not Gorbachev, so someone else.The USSR was naive and doomed.What, one Gorbachev did everything? Full of vultures sat and
waited for the corpse. My uncle, being the mayor of Tikhvin, in the late 70s, said that the country is doomed because we are
engaged in self-eating.Huge funds went to support the Communist parties around the world.
@Asenovska Tatiana uncle rasskazyval, as mayor....What the University taught me.....
And I , being the senior officer, after 4 wounds the write-off on the ground, the pilot....Past Afghan, and not only.....
I saw our planes to be cur in peaces on orders from Gorbachev.... .And submarines, costing hundreds millions. Payed by people who
save on everyting to secure indepence of the country.
And this creature, was given Nobel Peace Prize for selling everthing to the USA for pennies on the dollar...
The West praised him, and he DESTROYED noth the ARMY AND NAVY and then the USSR ... He gave up our victory in
WWII without and fight's...
After Gorbachov the USA was able to bomb Belgrade, and Iraq, and Livia without any fear for retribution. He should be executed .
And the body of this traitor should be disposed in manure...
And if not Putin, we would be the colony of the USA much like Latin american countries. .And the USA would bomb Syria into stone
age, kill the President and grap all the oil
Only Putin is not GORBACHEV!!!!! And the Big Uncle blew up in Syria and they did not risk thier place to test Russia
anti-aircraft missile systems.
Gorbachev first created a deceptive impression of a young, wise, business-like head of state. In fact, he was a banal traitor
of his country, sold the sovereignty of a great country for perdpnal fortume and villa in Germany. While Wewst grbbed all opur
natiural resourses and large part of iundustry. YELTSIN destroyed completely the economica, and high technolgy ijndurites in
the country, sold everything to oligarchs for pennies. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin are enemies of the Fatherland .
Gorbachev came to the sinking ship and it was too late to patch the holes in it. The cold war and the arms race sucked the
last currency reserves from the USSR. The Kremlin Party bonzes forgot about the economy, forgot about the people. They
were obsessed with matching the weaponry of the phantom enemy (Americans), and as a result of the cold war the USSR
disintegrated and broke up into 15 independent States.
While we can blame the weakling and traitor Gorbachev, even before him the agriculture was in deep and irreversible
decline. We were forced to buy grad for abroad. After the US has imposed sanctions that have artificially reduced oil prices
to such a low level that game was over. Currency flow from oil sales seizes and there was no alternative then to take
loans from the West.
The Treasury started printed too much rubles, inflation started and with it nationalist feeling that finished off the
country. Add to this Chernobyl disaster. When in Armenia in December 1988 there was the major earthquake, the Kremlin
requested the "decadent West" about the humanitarian aid.
Economy of the Soviet Union fell through the floor and no wonder Gorbachev was tilted towards the West, toward privatization
of the industries.
Of course he was a fool and allowed West to plunder the country, but essentially he have no choice, reforms were needed
and he lost control of them, tried to stage a fake coup to regain control and was deposed as the result. Because he was very
weak, incompetent politician, not fit for such a grave moment in the history of the country, he destroyed the country.
The socialist camp collapsed, and Gorbachov refused to help the socialist countries, it was necessary to save his own ass. He
also finished stupid and unnecessary war in Afghanistan. That was the only positive step he made. And that was too little too
late.
Instead of that asshole, Heydar Aliyev should have been elected by Politburo. The only person who was really able to
pull the country out of the crisis, it was Aliyev G. in any other scenario, the country was doomed to collapse . And
about Gorbachev , you can say so in Russian history , no traitor is worse and higher rank than this pederast!!!, All
pleasant viewing!
And why the interior Ministry, KGB were inactive. As well as Party Control? How could this hump with foreign help and
some special color revolution technology to destroy all the obstacles. How he managed to subdue the Politburo power
structure ( including the axis of the Gromyko-Primakov and Yakovlev) ? As he had no trouble to expel from the Central
Committee able and less corrupted members of the Central Committee (V. Sherbitsky , V. Grishin, G. V. Romanov, G. A.
Aliyev, D, Kuhn...)?
Gorbachev - zero as the head of state, but the soil he has prepared Khrushchev and Brezhnev (Moskva), they let the country
drift, theft, drunkenness, took away people's faith.
А хули дебилам объяснять. Горбачев открыл окно в мир. Живите уроды ,работайте развивайтесь. Но началась элементарная борьба за
власть. Так как в этой стране на протяжении всей истории ничего путного создать не умели. Что с татар взять. Страна не могла
не развалится. Если бы не Беловежское соглашение, крови было бы немерянно. В каждой республики были свои лидеры которые тупо
хотели быть президентами и якобы независимыми.. Кто виноват ,что страна наводнена ублюдками у власти. которые вместо того что
бы создавать могучую страну напичканную всей таблицей Менделеева, начали ее растаскивать.И грабят по сей день, под
руководством Единой россии. Вспомните как все визжали, когда страна стала открываться. Когда народ перестал поклонятся
импортным одноразовым зажигалкам и фантикам от жвачек. Думать надо, прежде чем повторять кремлевские методички. Теперь
катаетесь на Порше кайене, живете в особняках и хотите назад в СССР. Я с вас хуею..
Хорошо помню 1985 год когда вьібрали Горбачева .То у нас в Тернополе наш учитель политекономии тогда говорил нам студентам что
старьіе партейцьі говорят что Горбачев будет изменик .А почему мьі спрашивали .А потому что он не любит наши отечественьіе
костюмьі а любит английские ....Сколько лет прошло а только времья показало кто прав а кто нет .Китай например посмотрел на
нашу историческую ошибку и принимает все необходимьіе мерьі чтобьі подобньіх Горбачевьіх там у руля власти не оказалось ....Все
большие Иудьі бьіли меченьіе ,как и бьіл мечен Горбачев ...Горбачева можна сравнить из Нероном которьій розвалил большое ....
У господина Млечина с аналитикой большие проблемы, а ведь журналист должен знать всё о своём герое. В отношении Горбачёва он
так и не понял, почему Семи- частный отверг кандидатуру Горбачёва. Семичастный знал, что Горбачёв не чист на руку, короче
говоря один из первых советских мафиози в г. Ставрополе по производству алкоголя. Мне лично рассказал об этом брат убитого по
приказу Горбачёва следователя (по пути из Краснодара в Невинномысск), который напал на след этого упыря, но ему была устроена
автомобильная катастрофа, в которой погиб этот следователь. А почему Брежнев убрал Семичастного, потому что Семичастный знал
всю кухню правительственного переворота по смещению Хрущёва, поэтому Брежнев, по словам самого Семичастного убрал его из
Москвы подальше, и в Киеве устроил третьим замом председателя правительства Украинской ССР, выступая Семичастный сказал, я так
и не понял, кем я стал работать, работы практически не было, он просто отсиживался на этой высокой должности до пенсии.
Слушаю и все время одна мысль в голову лезет - как же надо было руководить страной , до какого идиотизма довести ситуацию с
продуктами питания , если академики и композиторы с мировым именем и даже дочь генсека !!!! искали знакомства и расположения
директора магазина !!! . О чем думают люди , пишущие вечные сентенции - "какую страну мы потеряли " - а ведь в провинции было
все гораздо хуже и японцы создали анекдот - "Самая лучшая система снабжения создана в СССР - все товары завозятся в Москву - а
благодарный народ САМ развозит по стране..." Не могла быть жизнеспособной страна при таком маразме..
Лично мне похуй!!! Если сравнить СССР ,где все было нельзя и под запретом, под наблюдением людей в плащах и шляпах,то при
Горбачеве, народ вздохнул глоток свежего,опьяняющего,долгожданного и запретного воздуха из вне... Первые кооперативы, джинсы,
машины, кафе, иномарки,музыка, фильмы!!! Что то новое принес! Нельзя так,было больше жить.. Виновен он во многом,но есть и
плюсы его политики. Предали его, а он предал нас....
Горбачёв был типичный южный дурачок . Они умеют 3 вещи -выглядеть выгодно(лучше чем есть на самом деле ,подмазать где
надо , и болтать .... А ЛЮБОЕ дело которое им поручишь -ОБГАДЯТ . СИСТЕМА СССР была уже слаба тем ,что потеряла
ЖЁСТКОСТЬ и ЗАЩИТУ от Дурака . При Хрущёве -она сработала и дурачка убрали ,при Горби - ЕМУ ДАЛИ РУЛИТЬ ,и ВСЁ
развалилось .
Престарелый Черненко - это плохо. А не престарелые Горбачёв, Яковлев, Шеварднадзе и Лигачёв - это жутко хорошо? Дело,
похоже, не только и не столько в возрасте, сколько в деловых и моральных качествах его носителей. Все члены названнй
компашки реально вредили и реально (и крепко) навредили стране. А ведь престарелыми они отнюдь не были!
Поражаюсь туполобости некоторых "демократов-капиталистов" в комментариях. Почти тридцать лет мы живём в капиталистическом
обществе, имеем полный доступ к любой информации - изучай сколько влезет, называется... И вы за эти тридцать лет так и не
смогли впихнуть в свой мозг информацию о происходящих в мире тенденциях, её систематизировать и сделать из неё вывод - вы
безнадёжны.
Никто из вас не удосужился изучать источники разной направленности по теме капитализма и социализма, вы лишь прочли/услышали
что-то одно, и приняли это за аксиому. Это совершенно ненаучный и не конструктивный подход к изучению проблемы! К сожалению,
некоторые люди просто не способны думать объёмно, для них существует только плоскость или даже прямая линия, что есть признак
ужасно узкого кругозора.
Я увидел в комментариях одно выражение, которое просто повергло меня в шок: "Нет на свете ни одного прогрессивного
коммунистического государства и быть не может!" - здрасте! :D Вы хоть историю-то изучали? То есть СССР не был мировой
сверхдержавой? А, ну да, это же была "страшная, отсталая, грязная и бедная страна-недоразумение, которая возникла по ужасной
ошибке", как же я мог забыть современных историков) А как-же нынешний Китай? Он официально считается экономической
сверхдержавой, кандидатом в мировые сверхдержавы, и темпы развития в нём имеют наивысший показатель на данный момент.
Плоскость и однонаправленность вашего мышления меня просто поразила, вы имеете радикальные взгляды, а радикализм - это всегда
ошибочно. Кто-то написал: "Китай только официально коммунистический, на деле в нём другое устройство!" - ну это просто апогей
идиотизма) Вы разве не понимаете, что человеческие взгляды могут совершенствоваться и изменяться, а система реформироваться? В
Китае именно социалистический строй, который претерпел реформацию, в которой безусловно нуждался. Советский социализм также
нуждался в реформации, и никто не говорит, что он был идеальным социализмом.
Совершенствование системы - это неотъемлемая часть прогресса, и если вы считаете, что социализм может быть только таким, каким
он был в СССР - то вы глубоко ошибаетесь, и совершенно не понимаете значение слова "прогресс". Китай построил такой социализм,
который даёт ему возможность делать поистине чудеса экономики, Китай богатеет и уровень жизни в нём растёт - если это не
прогресс, то что тогда? Также хочу упомянуть КНДР. Да-да, США на неё повесили ярлык "отсталого голодающего тоталитарного
государства", и скорее всего вы, радикальные капиталисты, даже не думали с ними спорить и что-то дополнительно про КНДР
узнавать, что, опять-же, говорит о плоскости и некритичности, я бы даже сказал суеверности вашего мышления. КНДР - страна
очень маленькая, в основном с горной местностью, и природных ресурсов в ней очень мало. "Демократы" из ООН и НАТО обложили
КНДР санкциями со всех сторон, из-за которых она не может развивать внешнюю торговлю, что губительно для маленькой страны с
худым запасом ресурсов. Поддерживать экономику, снабжать людей достатком товаров и в целом держать страну на современном
уровне в условиях торговой изоляции и недостатка ресурсов - это неподъёмная задача для капитализма. Но корейский социализм
умудрился, при всех этих условиях, победить голод, поддерживать бесплатное образование, медицину и т.д., обеспечивать людей
местом жительства, работой и доходом, сохранить суверенность своего государства и идеологию, и, ВНИМАНИЕ,
создать с нуля ядерную бомбу
. Это чудеса, северокорейский строй решает задачи, которые поистине неподъёмные в её
условиях.
Конечно,
в КНДР жесткий тоталитаризм, ведь когда страна изолирована от внешнего мира во всех аспектах, соседние страны настроены
враждебно (а со стороны США вообще идёт угроза прямого вторжения, или даже ядерного удара), со страной ведут жёсткую
идеологическую информационную войну, сохранить существующий строй - задача крайне сложная, и выполнить её можно только при
жёсткой дисциплине и контрпропаганде. Я уважаю Северную Корею, она наглядно показывает, что социализм может творить чудеса.
Конечно же, я вас переубедить не смог, радикальные вы капиталисты, но тем из вас, кои способны хоть немножко думать своей
черепушкой, я, возможно, поселил мысль о том, что социализм - это далеко не только плановая экономика, что он может меняться и
прогрессировать, что именно к нему идут все развитые страны, и что утопический коммунизм - это строй, который мы ещё
представить себе не можем, но который обязательно наступит через многие годы, или столетия прогресса. Избавляйтесь от своих
радикальных взглядов, и старайтесь думать объективно - это очень полезно для кругозора. Спасибо.
По Млечину : хорошо разработанная и осуществлённая операция по устранению конкурентов и внедрению "своего". Возникают вопросы:
кто проводил операцию? Где была организация отвечающая за государственную безопасность (КГБ)? В 2017м демпартия США подняла
вой о,якобы,вмешательстве России в избирательный процесс в США. Кто ответит:было ли вмешательство заграницы в процессы, о
которых поведал Млечин? Если было,то России так же, по образу и подобию, надо поднимать вой. Это серьёзно.Кто ответит?
Горбачев Родину продал, а Ельцин её пропил. Горбачев виноградники повырубал, а Ельцин травил народ не качественным спиртом. В
итоге, если бы не Путин, то развязка была бы давным давно, хотя он тоже не подарок, отдал страну на разграбление олигархам.
Горбачёв типичный номенклатурщик. Послушный, мягкий, ну может и прогибался ради своей высокой карьеры, но наверняка не чаял
президентом стать. Но потом когда всё случилось, стал входить во вкус, то есть жена стала проникаться важностью своего
положения при таком муженьке. А когда пришлось отказаться от власти он НИСКОЛЬКО не скорбел о потерянном кресле и стране. Его
посдили "на мягкую подушечку" и он стал жить поживать в Америке, даже не понимая, что его бездарность, как политика, послужила
развалу СССР. Он не понимает этого и сейчас. А может НЕ желает признавать. Может на смертном одре передумает строить из себя
униженного и оскорблённого и в чём-нибудь признается, хотя бы самому себе. Правда, для этого смелость нужна.
Горбачев не увлекался горячительными напитками???? Ну ну!!! Я родственник председателя крайкома СК в бытность Горбачева...Его
из машин вытаскивали лежа
Нечего горбачева обеливать!Он виноват,да еще как!Будь он трижды проклят!Этот человек не руководитель,разве не видно было из
его речей,что за он скоморох?!Как может шут руководить огромной страной и как вообще можно было доверить легкомысленному
человеку руководить государством,он же не "А ни Б,НИ КУКАРЕКУ"?!Полный идиот!!!!!
Перед развалом Союза ,этот придурок начал обсирать КАЗАКСТАН,я тогда ушёл в запас,и было обидно за академика Кунаева,За
родину мою,а на флоте мы гордились ,когда перед строем кораблей Старший офицер Азаров говорил казакстанцы ,мы едим хлеб из
каз-й муки тушёнка из kz,балык и икра,одеты мы в KZ канадки и свитера из Кызыл орды,А вот атомные ПЛ из казакстанского
титана- и мы были горды за казакстан И вот ОН наносит обсирающий удар?а дальше нам все стало ясно.
Млечный как всегда врет , не умного Горбатого плохо говорящего по русски двигала ЦРУ и как я понимаю сейчас многие советские
парта геносе знали об этом , почему , ???почему они продали все советское в котором жили ???за деньги или разочарование
произошло от этого марксизма и ленинизма, ,,,мы простые люди не когда не узнаем...но я уверен , что Брежнев уже был не
руководитель что Путин ,,,,почему ???что то им мешает , а то и наоборот они и есть гарантия чтоб страна не развивалась ,
Пшеницу покупали в Канаде,Союз изжил себя,,,вина Горбача только в одном,,,первое Крым хохлам не отдавать,,и русских в
Прибалтике не трогать,все это надо было говорить Бушу,,ставить условия
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
Throughout its existence the Soviet Union was hobbled by the sanctions imposed on it by
the capitalist world. Despite being uniquely qualified, by virtue of its geography and
culture, to survive without being part of the international economy, it had to pay much more,
by being forced to rely on its own resources, than other countries for every advance that it
made economically.
And then it was constantly under threat of coordinated military attack by the richest and
most technically advanced powers, led by the anglo-US empire. Twice it was invaded by massive
international coalitions, in 1918 and 1041. Twice its industrial base and its infrastructure
were reduced to smoking ruins.Twice it had to rebuild, from the ground up without the
assistance of foreign capital.
By contrast the imperial powers, bent on crushing it by economic or military means,
throughout its existence came through the period virtually unscathed-its great rival the US
actually thrived from threw two world wars.
It was this fate which China, under imperial pressure after the 1949 Revolution, was
determined to escape. And so far, since it changed course and played the US and the Soviet
Union off against each other, it has made great strides forward-advances complementing the
enormous gains made after 1949, during which period all the basic indicators of well being,
life expectancy included, rose and a firm base was established for future improvement. And
this at a time when the US used every means in its power, including biological warfare, to
weaken China and reduce its people to starvation.
For example China-well known for its polluted air-is well in advance of North America in its
development of renewable energy sources and seems genuinely committed to replacing fossil
fuels.
Nor is it using its growing strength to engage in military adventures and impose its rule on
others.
It is important when considering China not to repeat the mistakes of some of the
neo-Trotskyist factions whose theory that the Soviet Union was just another capitalist
society (something that most Russians disagree with) was an important part of the Empire's
ideological struggle against the Soviet Union in the world and socialism everywhere. China is
not a communist country but it serves its people much better than, for example, India. And it
certainly plays a vital role, together with Russia in resisting the Imperial ruling class's
campaigns to reduce the globe to accepting the diktats of Washington, Wall St and
Hollywood.
... In the introduction to the second volume in his series, The State and the
Opposition , Rogovin noted:
A peculiarity of the counter-revolution realized by Stalin and his accomplices was that it
took place under the ideological cover of Marxist phraseology and never-ending attestations
of loyalty to the October Revolution Naturally, such a counter-revolution demanded
historically unprecedented conglomerations of lies and falsifications, the fabrication of
ever-newer myths
Similar to the Stalinists, modern anti-communists use two kinds of myths: namely,
ideological and historical. Under ideological myths we have in mind false ideas, oriented to
the future -- that is, illusory prognoses and promises. These sorts of products of false
consciousness reveal their mythological character by way of their practical realization.
Myths that appeal not to the future but to the past are another matter.
In principle, it is easier to expose these myths than anti-scientific prognoses and
reactionary projects.
Like ideological ones, historical myths are a product of immediate class interests
products of historical ignorance or deliberate falsification -- that is, the concealment of
some historical facts, the tendentious exaggeration, and the distorted interpretation of
others.
Refuting these myths is only possible by rehabilitating historical truth -- the honest
portrayal of actual facts and tendencies of the past.
In this work, Rogovin argued that the fundamental problem facing the USSR was "a
deepening of socially unjustified differentiation of incomes and the comforts of life."
"Workers regularly encounter instances of unearned enrichment through the deceit and the
ripping-off of the state and the people. [ ] Certain groups of the population have the means to
meet their needs at a scale beyond any reasonable norms and outside of their relationship to
social production. [ ] There does not exist any systematic control of sources of income and the
acquisition of valuable goods," he wrote.
In a remarkable statement, inequality, he insisted, not wage-leveling, expressed "in
essence, the social structure of [Soviet] society."
Rogovin called for the implementation of income declarations, whereby people would be
required to report the size of their total income, not just their official wages, so that the
government and researchers might actually know the real distribution of earnings. He advocated
for the establishment of a "socially-guaranteed maximum income" to combat "unjustified
inequality."
Vadim Rogovin and Nina Naumova's 1984 Social Development and Societal
Morals
Elsewhere, Rogovin further argued that inequality lay at the center of the USSR's falling
labor productivity. In a work co-authored with Nina Naumova, Social Development and
Societal Morals , he maintained that the socio-economic crisis facing the USSR stemmed
from the fact that inequality was growing in Soviet society; people worked poorly in the Soviet
Union not because their work was inadequately remunerated relative to others, but
because their commitment to social production had been eroded by intensifying social
stratification that was unrecorded in official statistics.
In 1983, the very same year that Rogovin authored his critical report on the state of
inequality in the USSR that ended up in the hands of the Moscow authorities, another
sociologist, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, would issue a report, kept secret at first but later leaked
to the Western press, advocating a transition to "economic methods of management," -- in other
words, market-based reforms. A central aspect of this was policy centered around increasing
inequality in workers' compensation in order to stimulate production. Zaslavskaya noted at the
time that such reforms would be opposed by what she described as "the more apathetic, the more
elderly, and the less qualified groups of workers."
In a few years, Zaslavskaya would become a leading advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and one of
the main architects of the pro-market, perestroika reforms. In 1986, she was appointed
the head of the Soviet Sociological Association. Her positions were widely embraced by the
discipline.
Tatiana Zaslavskaya and Mikhail Gorbachev 1989 at Congress of People's Deputies.
[Copyright RIA Novosti]
In contrast, Rogovin's views were frequently, and ever more so, the object of sharp
criticism. In 1985, a discussion occurred at the Institute of Sociology regarding a report
produced by Rogovin and his research team about Soviet lifestyles. In it, Rogovin made openly
critical comments about the anti-egalitarian impact of the shadow economy and the transfer of
wealth through inheritance. It was sharply criticized by some of the Institute's top scholars,
who both disagreed with its content and were nervous about the response it might get from the
authorities. At the discussion, one such individual remarked:
The report by the author presented here has two basic failings: 1) it is inadequately
self-critical; 2) the authors, and in particular, Rogovin himself, aren't appropriately
thinking of the addressee to whom this report is directed. The report is going to the highest
levels [of the Communist Party] and superfluous emotion is not necessary. The next criticism
[I have] is about "unjustified inequality." In principle, there can be no such thing.
[ ] in the note to the TsK KPSS [Central Committee of the Communist Party] [ ] the
recommendations [that you make] demand the utmost care in how you approach them, particularly
those that relate to the "third economy" and taxes on inheritance. [There should be] a
minimum of categoricalness and a maximum of conciliatoriness.
As the decade wore on, Rogovin began to adopt an ever more critical stance on
perestroika , whose devastating economic consequences were increasingly showing
themselves. Rather than bringing prosperity to the masses, Gorbachev's reforms created a total
crisis in the state sector of the economy, exacerbating widespread shortages in food, clothing
and other basic necessities. Economic growth declined from 1986 onwards. In 1989, inflation
reached 19 percent, eroding the gains the population had made in income over the preceding
years. As the scholar John Elliot noted, "When account is taken of additional costs, real per
capita income and real wages probably decreased, particularly for the bottom half of the
population. These costs included: deteriorating quality and unavailability of goods;
proliferation of special distribution channels; longer and more time-consuming lines; extended
rationing; higher prices and higher inflation-rates in non-state stores (e.g., collective farm
market prices were nearly three times those in state stores in 1989); virtual stagnation in the
provision of health and education; and the growth of barter, regional autarky, and local
protectionism."
Newly established private enterprises had great leeway to set prices because they faced
little to no competition from the state sector. They charged whatever the market would bear,
which led to substantial increases in income inequality and poverty, with the most vulnerable
layers of the population hardest hit. The changes were so severe that Elliot insists that
"income inequalities had actually become greater in the USSR than in the USA." In the late
1980s, fully two-thirds of the Soviet population had an income that fell below the
officially-recommended "decent level" of 100 to 150 rubles a month. At the same time, the
shadow economy alone is estimated to have produced 100,000–150,000 millionaires in the
late 1980s. By the early 1990s, one-quarter of the population or 70 million people were
destitute according to official Soviet estimates. Miners' strikes and other signs of social
discontent erupted across the country.
Sociologists were intimately aware of the growing popular discontent. The Communist Party
bureaucracy called upon them to help manage the situation. In 1989, the director of the
Institute of Sociology received a request from the highest layers of the Communist Party. He
was asked to respond to a letter from a rank-and-file party member that expressed extreme
hostility towards the country's "elites." The letter writer described the party as dominated by
an "opportunist nucleus" and called for the waging of a "class war" by the working masses
against their policies. The ideology division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
wanted the Institute's director to respond to the letter because the sentiments expressed in it
were "widespread (representative) [sic] among the working class."
Soviet economist and
sociologist Genady Lisichkin
In the midst of these circumstances, Rogovin came under fire in one of the country's media
outlets for articles he was writing against the promotion of social inequality. Since the
mid-1980s, he had been championing the implementation of income declarations that would require
people to report their full earnings, progressive taxes, and a socially-declared maximum
income. Based on the amount of positive correspondence he was receiving from readers, it was
clear that his views resonated with the population, a fact noted by Western scholars at the
time. In a public press debate with the economist Gennady Lisichkin, the latter accused Rogovin
of wanting to strengthen the hand of the bureaucracy and implied that he was a Stalinist. He
was allegedly guilty of "Luddism," religious-like preaching, misquoting Marx to find support
for his arguments, wanting the state to have the power to move people around "like cattle,"
defending a deficit-system of distribution based on "ration cards," suffering from "left-wing"
infantilism, and being a "demagogue" and a "war communist." He attempted to link Rogovin to the
very force to which he was most hostile -- Stalinism. The head of the Soviet Sociological
Association, Tatiana Zaslavskaya, openly endorsed Lisichkin's positions.
The disagreements between Rogovin and other scholars over perestroika evolved into
a fierce dispute about Soviet history and the nature of Stalinism. Rogovin identified a
relationship between cheerleading for pro-market reforms and historical falsification. There
was an increasingly widespread effort to link egalitarianism with Stalinism, the struggle for
equality with political repression. In Was There an Alternative? , Rogovin frequently
talked about the fact that the move towards a market economy was accompanied by the propagation
of myths about Soviet history. This was one of those myths.
In 1991, Zaslavskaya co-authored a book that claimed that the Soviet Union's problems lay in
the fact that in the late 1920s it abandoned the New Economic Policy (NEP), during which the
government had loosened state control of the economy and restored market relations to an
extent, in an effort to revitalize the economy under conditions of isolation, backwardness, and
near economic collapse due to years of war. A one-sided and historically dishonest account of
the NEP, this work did not contain any discussion of the political struggle that occurred
during the NEP between Stalin and the Left Opposition over the malignant growth of inequality,
the bureaucratization of the state and economy, and the crushing of inner-party democracy. The
book skipped over this history because it would have cut across one of the central arguments
made at the time in favor of perestroika -- that market relations were inherently at
odds with the interests of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The book's account of labor policy
under Stalin was also false. It insisted that during the 1930s revolutionary enthusiasm was the
primary method used to stimulate people to work, ignoring the fact that income inequality rose
substantially at this time. As the scholar Murray Yanowitch has pointed out, under Stalin
"equality mongering" was labeled the brainchild of "Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Bukharinites and
other enemies of the people."
In the 1980s, sociologists and other scholars promoting perestroika sought to imbue
these policies with a humanitarian mission, insisting that market reforms would allow "the
human factor," which had been crushed under the weight of bureaucratic stagnation, to rise
again. The "human factor" was defined as man's desire for personal recognition through
differentiated, material reward. It was supposedly the primary driver of human activity. To the
degree that official wage policy in the USSR led to a relatively egalitarian distribution of
social resources with wages leveled-out between skilled and unskilled labor, it flew in the
face of man's desire for recognition of his own individual contribution. Rising inequality in
income -- necessitated by the demands of socio-economic development -- was part of the process
of "humanizing socialism." The argument was made that increasing social stratification would
ultimately provide real "socialist justice."
As Tatiana Zaslavskaya claimed in 1990, "Despite all its limitations, the 'classical' market
is, in fact, a democratic (and therefore anti-bureaucratic) economic institution. Within the
framework of its exchange relationships, all participants are at least formally equal; no-one
is subordinated to anyone else. Buyers and sellers act in their own interests and nobody can
make them conclude deals they do not want to conclude. The buyers are free to select sellers
who will let them have goods on the most advantageous terms, but the sellers too can chose
buyers offering the best price."
In making this argument, scholars relied upon the official Soviet definition of socialism --
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor" -- that was enshrined in
the country's 1936 constitution. This was also known as the Stalin constitution.
In 1988, Rogovin used the concept of the "human factor" to make a very different argument.
In a piece entitled, "The Human Factor and the Lessons of the Past," he insisted that the
defense of social inequality by the Soviet elite was one of the key reasons why the "human
factor" had degenerated in the USSR. The very best elements of "the human factor" had been
crushed by Stalin during the Terror. Corruption, disillusionment, parasitism, careerism and
individual self-promotion -- the most distinctive features of the Brezhnev era -- were the
"human factor" created by Stalinism. In promoting inequality and the market, Rogovin insisted,
perestroika did not mark a break with Stalinism or the legacy of the Brezhnev era, as
was so often claimed, but rather their further realization.
One year later he wrote, "The adherents of the new elitist conceptions want to see Soviet
society with such a level of social differentiation that existed under Stalin but having gotten
rid of Stalinist repression. It is forgotten that the debauched character of these repressions
[ ] flowed from the effort to not simply restrain, but rather physically annihilate above all
those forces in the party and in the country that, though silenced, rejected the social
foundations of Stalinism."
After years of studying these questions in near-total isolation, Rogovin was finally able to
write openly about this subject. He tested the waters by first publishing "L.D. Trotsky on Art"
in August 1989 in the journal Theater . It was followed shortly thereafter by an
article entitled "The Internal Party Struggles of the 1920s: Reasons and Lessons," also
published in a journal outside of his discipline, Political Education . Moving closer
to a forum likely to be followed by his colleagues in sociology, in early 1990 Rogovin
published "L.D. Trotsky on NEP" in Economic Sciences . And finally, a few months
later, "L.D. Trotsky on Social Relations in the USSR" came out in the flagship journal of his
discipline, Sociological Research .
Rogovin's first article on the subject within his discipline reviewed Trotsky's role in
Soviet history during the 1920s and summarized his seminal work, The Revolution
Betrayed . It made clear to whom Rogovin fundamentally owed the views he had been
advancing over the course of the previous decade.
Trotsky, however, continued to be vilified by Soviet officialdom. In 1987, on the 70th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Gorbachev described Trotsky as "the arch-heretic of
Soviet history, an 'excessively self-assured politician who always vacillated and cheated."
As a result of Rogovin's profound sympathies for Trotskyism and efforts to place his work in
the tradition of the Left Opposition's critique of Stalinism, he was increasingly isolated from
his colleagues, several of whom entered the Yeltsin administration and helped facilitate the
eventual implementation of shock therapy, a key component of capitalist restoration in Russia.
His discipline never forgave him for his intransigence and principles. One will find almost no
mention of Rogovin or his contributions in the numerous monographs and other publications that
have come out over the last 20 years about sociology in the USSR.
But Rogovin's isolation from Soviet sociology did not undermine his capacity to work.
Rather, it coincided with the start of the publication of Was There an Alternative? In
1992, Rogovin met the International Committee of the Fourth International, and established a
close political and intellectual relationship with the world Trotskyist movement that would
intensify over the course of the next several years. This relationship was the basis upon which
Rogovin made his immense contribution to the fight to defend Trotsky and historical truth. Two
recently republished tributes to Rogovin by David
North review this history.
Despite his death twenty years ago, through his work Rogovin continues his struggle to arm
the working class with historical consciousness.
"... It seemed to start with Bill Browder being kicked out of Russia. So I would assume that the main reason is that the west became aware that Russia was (had been) taking back control of their economy and resources and kicking out the western carpet-baggers. ..."
"... In June of 2016 a bill named Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 was introduced into the house by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu. H.R. 5181 sought a "whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions" to counter "foreign disinformation and manipulation," which they believe threaten the world's "security and stability." A similar bill was introduced in March in the Senate long before Russia gate. It was passed signed by Obama in December after the Russia Gate was played up following the election. ..."
"... Like I said US and UK are basically one entity on such matters. Soon after being passed we saw Prop or Not introduce its hit list of alt media sites. Sadly over the last 2 years alt media has been decimated. Engdahl seems to be the latest to fall, helped no doubt by Soros suit for 1 million against him for calling out his daughters NGO. Now he has fallen into line and backing Trump. Maybe next he will support the Climate Change meme. ..."
"... As I posted on an earlier thread, the demonization of Russia by Anglos began with the First Afghan War in the late 1830s and has continued at differing degrees of intensity ever since always due to geopolitics. ..."
"... The US State Department gives the title "public diplomacy" to its propaganda. ..."
"... Just ask John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was sent to prison for telling the truth about US torture. ..."
"... Thanks, that looks great and should be reposted across alternative media- most of these groups use "anti-Russia" as a front to dismantle dissent and left-wing politics on behalf of the Multinationals and the Neoliberal Establishment- let's call it the "blob," and let's call that list Counter-Propornot. ..."
"... karlof1... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of Ukraine dynamics and Russia commitment to going into Syria.. around that time it all really picked up steam.. now you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available for this.. ..."
"... This is an incomplete narrative, think tanks are basically mercenaries who relieve the population from the need to think about the complicated matters, letting the folks to believe what is either true or should be believed to be true for the "common good". ..."
"... And indeed, Russian danger was identified ca. 2014 as the major worthy theme in the central parts of that nexus. So who are the paymasters? In part, "capitalists", wealthy individuals with means and motivation to set the course for the West and all forces of good. In part, intelligence agencies. Here Integrity Initiative seems an erratic creature: apparently, run by spooks on military and intelligence payroll, and yet also benefiting from a government grant that makes them a quango, "a semipublic administrative body outside the civil service but receiving financial support from the government, which makes senior appointments to it." In other words, they double dip. The total amount is relatively modest, so rather than getting fat on taxpayer money they merely double or triple they spare official salaries thus reaching "upper middle class" level. Therefore the morale in the outfit was mediocre and we can see one of the more amusing leaks of 2018. ..."
"... Note: Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed was published on August 29, 2014. Within weeks of its publication, the Obama Administration was in full anti-Russia swing. Trump would enter the race for Republican nomination 9 1/2 months after Kissinger's Op-Ed (June 15, 2015). ..."
"... The hate campaign against Russia is just the old campaign, against any country resisting the Empire's hegemony, focused on the one power that had resisted since 1917 and was able to do so, returning to its old role of saying 'Niet' when all the rest of the world said either 'Aye Aye,Sir' "If you insist" or kept quiet and said nothing at all. ..."
"... One can't just edit a Wikipedia article, no matter how fact-based. It will almost immediately be retracted if it doesn't follow the 'official' narrative. If said person then tries to reestablish that content or tries to engage in a discussion with the admins, in many cases, they simply get banned then. ..."
"... Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgGx9LM5cM It's about a former female STASI-employee turned fighter for freedom and democracy. Currently she is the head of the Antonio-Amadeo-Foundation dedicated, to put it bluntly, to doing the bidding for the usual suspects - and to add insult to injury taxpayer funded to a large part. ..."
"... Russia is the go to enemy when you need to bump up your purchasing of very expensive military equipment and to pour money into various security projects to achieve to goals (1 is to lock down infrastructure etc. but the other is to suppress the US citizens so a two-for). ..."
"... The long game plan, which continues unabated regardless of which party or who is in power, is American hegemony of the planet. When you consider the US has military bases in 155 countries (who essentially have become colonies) it seems like the goal is nearly completed unless you consider that major nuclear armed nations are resisting (Russia, China and maybe Pakistan and India as well). ..."
"... If you take a look at Russia during Yeltsin the US companies nearly bought everything in the country and the raping was in full vigor. Someone at DoS or the CIA very badly miscalculated letting Putin come into power. He was, after all, a minor minion and basically came out of no where. I am assuming they thought he would continue the raping and disarmament of all former Soviet weapons and Russian businesses. Sadly for them he turned out to be a patriot and actively resisted everything the US was trying to do to Russia. I believe the Yukos deal was the final straw which would have given nearly all Russian oil and gas to Exxon/Mobil. So, Putin has been battling the US successfully since and is very slowly eliminating all the oligarchs the US put into power and draining his swamp of Atlantacists and 5th column. ..."
"... i recall how quickly 'cambridge analytica' came and went, in spite of the strength of the data on them manipulating much... i imagine a similar story hee with 'integrity initiative'.. ..."
"... as for wikipedia - everyone knows it's a full on propaganda site masquerading as a neutral info site. ..."
"... the Chinese government currently has its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible for Ms. Meng's arrest ..."
"... "MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan....To prevail, Empire strategists recognized that USA needed to be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that required re-developing nationalism. In short, 'MAGA'." ..."
"... Trump's invocation of MAGA on the campaign trail was presented in such a way as to seem to overwhelmingly favour a pullback from Imperialism in order to make things right at home. ..."
"... Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy. The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through. If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign positions, such as the border wall, for example. ..."
"... Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn; and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview: ..."
The person(s) who first published documents of the shady UK organization Integrity Initiative decided that the discussion is about
the Initiative is not yet sufficient and published more documents.
The
first dump on the Cyberguerilla site happened on November 5. We discussed it
here . A smaller
dump on November 29 revealed more about the UK government paid Integrity Initiatives influence work in Germany, Spain and Greece.
A
third dump followed today.
The leaker, who uses the widely abused Anonymous label, promises to publish more:
Well-coordinated efforts of the Anonymous from all over the world have forced the UK politicians to react to the unacceptable
and in fact illegal activity of the British government that uses public money to carry out misinformation campaigns not only in
the EU, US and Canada but in the UK as well, in particular campaigns against the Labour party.
The Integrity Initiative is now under first official investigation. We promise to give close scrutiny to the investigation that
we believe should be conducted honestly, openly and absolutely transparently for the society, rather than become an internal and
confidential case of the Foreign Office.
To show our expertise in the investigation as well as to warn the UK government that they must not even try to put it all down
to the activity of some charity foundations and public organizations we reveal a part of documents unveiling the true face of
The Institute for Statecraft and some information about its leadership.
...
As the scandal in the UK is gaining momentum, it is ever so striking that European leaders and official representatives remain
so calm about the Integrity Initiative's activity in their countries. We remind you that covert clusters made up for political
and financial manipulation and controlled by the UK secret services are carrying out London's secret missions and interfering
in domestic affairs of sovereign states right in front of you.
...
This is another part of documents that we have on the Integrity Initiative. We do not change the goals of this operation. When
we return with the next portion of revelations, names and facts depends on how seriously the UK and EU leaders take our intentions
this time.
The dump includes invoices, internal analyses of international media responses to the Skripal affair, the Initiative's operations
in Scotland, France and Italy, some strategy papers and various other stuff. There are some interesting bits about the cooperation
of the Initiative with British Ministry of Defense. It will take me a while to read through all of it.
A "strictly confidential" proposal by the French company Lexfo to spread
the Integrity Initiative's state-sponsored propaganda through an offensive online influence campaigns for a monthly pay per language
of €20-40.000. The proposal also includes an offer for "counter activism" through "negative PR, legal actions, ethical hack back,
etc." for €50,000 per month.
The offer claims that the company can launch hundreds of "news" pieces per day on as many websites. It notably also offers to
"edit" Wikipedia articles.
In short: This proposal describes large disinformation operations under the disguise of fighting alleged Russian disinformation.
It is at the core what the Integrity Initiative, which obviously requested the proposal, is about.
But as we saw in the information
revealed yesterday there is more to it. The Initiative, which has lots of 'former' military and intelligence people among its
staff, is targeting the political left in Britain as well as in other countries. It is there where it becomes a danger to the democratic
societies of Europe.
I'd bet a weeks wages on it that this is where Craig Summers came from and what he was ! This blog is the antidote to the official
spin! It was good to here from Craig Murray very thought provoking regards tactics.we all need our own method ! But not be gagged.
I respect others ways we are on the same side .being united is the defence against devide and rule.
I wonder what the Tory's
think of this scandal they must be angry at this attack on democracy, nah only joking! It'l be the dog that did'nt bark ! just
like the media oh and the police ! One rule for them 'no rule' opression for us 99%
thanks b.... aside from wondering if this is Russia accessing and sharing this, i think the sticking point is in this "Unintegrity
initiative" going after the uk political left... that is where i think this is going to get traction as more folks are going to
wake up if they see how deep and ugly this goes in targeting their own..
i could be wrong, but if this news catches on, or the uk MP women keeps hammering away on this, i think we will see some results..
i opened the pdf... here is a quick list of their objectives..
investigate sources of disinformation, perform threat assessment, and identify opportunities to combat false narratives
debunk fake news and black PR operations
discredit and intimidate the platforms broadcasting fake news
promote democratic principles and criticize the Russian illiberal model in the public debate, online. This plan should
be implemented in every targeted country and language, including Russian.
In Australia the scale of tendentious anti-Chinese propaganda is absurd . Australia is flailing around trying to cope with changing
circumstances . Already at a disadvantage in 'reading ' the world because of her geographical isolation the clear bias of information
she now faces from the Anglo/ U S media and government systems puts her at a disadvantage in forming intelligent policies .
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Dec 14, 2018 4:38:49 PM |
link
Can anyone make a zip with all dumps and files? For sharing and archiving this would be much easier.. As i believe it will not
last long till the scribd uploads etc are DMCAed.. My LUKS+Veracrypt secured storage system would be a safe bet for archiving,
so i would volunteer..
Much appreciated!
Note that this document --and I've seen more-- presumes there is a large scale Russian disinformation campaign going on. Other
documents presume Skripal was poisoned by Russia.
Once you run with these documents, beware that you are making those presumptions yours . That may be the objective here.
Integrity Initiative got a lot of scrutiny because they used their Twitter account to attack Corbyn. In it's latest info dump,
Anonymous describes additional UK political manipulation, writing that the Director of The Institute for Statecraft Christopher
Donnelly:
... lobbied the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee for an inquiry into Russia's interference in
the Catalan referendum. He invited members of the Integrity Initiative Spain cluster Francisco de Borja Lasheras and Mira Milosevich-Juaristi.
At that moment they were receiving funds from the Foreign Office, i.e. the UK intelligence paid its own agents for fake
proof of Russia's interference in the Catalan referendum and later told them to lie to the Parliament to convince it to take
anti-Russian steps .
"Simon Bracey-Lane: Currently runs the IfS "Integrity Initiative" network communications and network development process; deep
experience in democratic election campaign processes in UK and especially in USA, viz: Regional Campaign Organiser: John Wisniewski
for Governor of New Jersey, USA. January - May 2017; Statewide Campaign Organiser: Bernie Sanders for President 2016, USA. Sept
2015 – May 2016; special study of Russian interference in the US electoral process."
Whatever the truth of the matter, he can definitely multitask. Running the II network communications and development process
(cultivating, recruiting, handling?) while also being a research fellow at the II's 'parent organization' Institute for Statecraft?
I wonder how many hours he has left in a day to sleep!
Then again he seems to have form in this regard. 'Special study of Russian interference in the election process' simultaneously
as being a key organizer in Sanders' campaign. Maybe he did his 'special study' in his free time?
Pure brazen depravity. And how will the average UK citizen become informed of what seems treasonous activity? Seems venders with
broadsheets in the style of yesteryear standing on street corners yelling EXTRA! need to return so the public can be informed
of its government's activities--Social Media is not sufficient.
Bevin and other UK citizens: What do you call your Swamp?
Any thoughts as to why exactly Russia became the chief demon? It seems the hysterical propaganda was focused exclusively on ISIS
until Putin spoke at the UN announcing Russia's intervention in Syria. Then the propaganda shifted, first directed at Putin, then
generally at Russia and Putin together. Is it anger over the prevention of imperialist design in the Middle East?
It seemed to start with Bill Browder being kicked out of Russia. So I would assume that the main reason is that the west
became aware that Russia was (had been) taking back control of their economy and resources and kicking out the western carpet-baggers.
This belated realisation, that the prize that the west had gained and plundered in the '90s (from the collapse of the Soviet
Union) had managed to wriggle free, seems to be something that the west can't accept.
In June of 2016 a bill named Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 was introduced into the house by Congressmen
Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu. H.R. 5181 sought a "whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions" to counter "foreign
disinformation and manipulation," which they believe threaten the world's "security and stability." A similar bill was introduced in March in the Senate long before Russia gate. It was passed signed by Obama in December after
the Russia Gate was played up following the election.
Like I said US and UK are basically one entity on such matters. Soon after being passed we saw Prop or Not introduce its hit
list of alt media sites. Sadly over the last 2 years alt media has been decimated. Engdahl seems to be the latest to fall, helped
no doubt by Soros suit for 1 million against him for calling out his daughters NGO. Now he has fallen into line and backing Trump.
Maybe next he will support the Climate Change meme.
Oh well, looks like its almost over for Truth, although some truth probably gets allowed if enough of the lies are also presented. So my take is the anti Russia hysteria was just a clever way of getting support for a war on Truth (fake news).
Russia now has a similar initiative said to combat fakes news from US which will likely be used against Putin critics (US agents).
The law allows them "to block online content, including social media websites, whose activities are deemed "undesirable" or "extremist."
Maybe Putin is part of the Fake Wrestling game. Heel or Face, your choice.
I see the EU has set up a rapid alert system to help EU member states recognize disinformation campaigns, and increase the
budget set aside for the detection of disinformation from . It will also press technology companies to play their part in cracking
down on fake news. Major social media platforms have already signed up to a code of conduct. One minister said the EU would not
stand for "an internet that is the wild west, where anything goes".
Macron introduced a bill recently seeking to get " judges and the media sector's regulator involved in the fight against fake
news. A fact-checking state-run website would be created and social media would have to pitch in by warning users when a post
is sponsored -- or when someone pays to give it better visibility in a feed."
I suppose the War on Truth has gone global. I wont bother to mention China as they are the role model the West
follows.
As I posted on an earlier thread, the demonization of Russia by Anglos began with the First Afghan War in the late 1830s and
has continued at differing degrees of intensity ever since always due to geopolitics.
@14 What do you call your Swamp? "The Establishment", coined, I believe, by the historian AJP Taylor.
The founder of modern journalism William Cobbett used to call it "The Thing"
The US State Department gives the title "public diplomacy" to its propaganda. Robert Parry wrote about it, and its contrast with
truth, a couple years ago.
The idea of questioning the claims by the West's officialdom now brings calumny down upon the heads of those who dare do it.
"Truth" is being redefined as whatever the U.S. government, NATO and other Western interests say is true. Disagreement with
the West's "group thinks," no matter how fact-based the dissent is, becomes "fake news."
So, we have the case of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius having a starry-eyed interview with Richard Stengel, the State
Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, the principal arm of U.S. government propaganda.
Entitled "The truth is losing," the column laments that the official narratives as deigned by the State Department and The
Washington Post are losing traction with Americans and the world's public.
Stengel, a former managing editor at Time magazine, seems to take aim at Russia's RT network's slogan, "question more," as
some sinister message seeking to inject cynicism toward the West's official narratives.
"They're not trying to say that their version of events is the true one. They're saying: 'Everybody's lying! Nobody's telling
you the truth!'," Stengel said. "They don't have a candidate, per se. But they want to undermine faith in democracy, faith
in the West." . . here
Just ask John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was sent to prison for telling the truth about US torture.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 14, 2018 8:47:12 PM |
link
@15
Thanks, that looks great and should be reposted across alternative media- most of these groups use "anti-Russia" as a front
to dismantle dissent and left-wing politics on behalf of the Multinationals and the Neoliberal Establishment- let's call it the
"blob," and let's call that list Counter-Propornot.
@ 15 jayc, @18 ADKC and @21 karlof1... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with
the advent of Ukraine dynamics and Russia commitment to going into Syria.. around that time it all really picked up steam.. now
you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available for
this..
... now you have think tanks and etc. etc. profiting from the sale of anti-russia spin.. there appears to be endless money available
for this..
Posted by: james | Dec 14, 2018 9:19:09 PM | 26
This is an incomplete narrative, think tanks are basically mercenaries who relieve the population from the need to think about
the complicated matters, letting the folks to believe what is either true or should be believed to be true for the "common good".
And the "common good" is decided by paymasters. Somewhere in between are mass media populated by folks particularly averse to
thinking -- again, they were selected by the employers not to think but to write and talk "correctly". But the press/TV lords
will not chisel all details of what is true and important, and what is false, unimportant or both, so journalists can absorb it
from think tanks and briefing from government informed sources. There are also astro-turfs and so on.
And indeed, Russian danger was identified ca. 2014 as the major worthy theme in the central parts of that nexus. So who are
the paymasters? In part, "capitalists", wealthy individuals with means and motivation to set the course for the West and all forces
of good. In part, intelligence agencies. Here Integrity Initiative seems an erratic creature: apparently, run by spooks on military
and intelligence payroll, and yet also benefiting from a government grant that makes them a quango, "a semipublic administrative
body outside the civil service but receiving financial support from the government, which makes senior appointments to it." In
other words, they double dip. The total amount is relatively modest, so rather than getting fat on taxpayer money they merely
double or triple they spare official salaries thus reaching "upper middle class" level. Therefore the morale in the outfit was
mediocre and we can see one of the more amusing leaks of 2018.
... my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of ukraine dynamics
and russias commitment to going into syria..
I think we can surmise that the Russian objection to US bombing Syria in September 2013 was countered with a two-prong strategy:
> doubling down in Syria via ISIS;
> pushing hard for overthrow of Ukrainian government to: a) punish Russia, and b) keep Russia busy so that the Russians
refrain from any further support for Syria
It was a superb and well-thought out strategy . . . that failed miserably. The coup in Ukraine succeeded and ISIS came within
weeks of defeating Assad BUT Russia managed to secure the best parts of Ukraine -and- intervened in Syria anyway (along with Iran).
Even as the lessons of challenging decades are examined, the affirmation of America's exceptional nature must be sustained.
History offers no respite to countries that set aside their sense of identity in favor of a seemingly less arduous course
. But nor does it assure success for the most elevated convictions in the absence of a comprehensive geopolitical strategy.
So the strategy changed once again. MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan. Obama's devious faux peacefulness
that used covert action and proxy forces could not succeed against determined opposition from Russia/China. To prevail, Empire
strategists recognized that USA needed to be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that
required re-developing nationalism. In short, "MAGA".
My reading is that Kissinger is asserting that the US can and should do whatever it takes to keep the US preeminent – even
if that means ignoring allies and/or the post-war international structure (UN, UNSC). That exceptional! message comes through
loud and clear despite his 'triage' formalism. And it is a message that is comforting to the elite who read the WSJ (before
a holiday weekend), though it should give Joe Sixpack nightmares if fully understood.
There is a lot more there which would take much longer to unpack. But I'll point to one more thing: Note how he forms
an equivalence between all the troubles that the 'West' now face, and ignores US/Western actions that have contributed to these
conflicts by conflating them. NC readers understand this via Merschemer's (in today's links) work on Ukraine and many links
regarding ISIS (like this one).
This comforting message [from Kissinger] is needed because the Ukraine gambit has failed miserably – as many independent
obeservers [sic] predicted– and a deeper conflict with Russia (possibly extending to others) is now in the cards. Like
the true neocon that he is, Kissinger has doubled down on Nuland's obnoxious and misguided "f*ck the EU" with an exceptional!
"f*ck the World".
Note: Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed was published on August 29, 2014.
Within weeks of its publication, the Obama Administration was in full anti-Russia swing. Trump would enter the race for Republican nomination 9 1/2 months after Kissinger's Op-Ed (June 15, 2015).
Trump was the ONLY populist, out of 19 contenders, in the Republican race. Hillary told Democratic-friendly media to focus
on Trump and did things during the Presidential race that call into question her desire to actually win. Trump is a MUCH better
choice for a MAGA nationalist than Hillary.
You were right then, and you are right now. My one beef with your 2016 election analysis is that it seems to me you shortchange
slightly the evidence of a real conflict and possibly fissure within the oligarchic elite, only certain segments of which seem
convinced that now is the time for MAGA. Others among the actual power brokers would I think have preferred HRC and 4-8 more years
of neoliberal internationalist interventionist grift a la Obama before having to finally turn to the MAGA nationalist strategy
(which given the resource struggles that will emerge over the next decades was always inevitable once the Project for the New
American (Israeli) Century collapsed, as it was bound to once Russia called its bluff in Syria.) But this is a minor point. What
is much more important is that behind MAGA is an envisioned world war on the scale of WWI and WWII in which "The West" takes on
China-Russia leading to the death of probably everybody.
"..my impression is the anti russian meme got real traction somewhere about 2014-2015 with the advent of ukraine dynamics and
russias commitment to going into syria..."
I think that the proper context begins with the failure of Medvedev's Russia to veto the UNSC motion establishing a No Fly
zone over Libya. Inter alia this led to a real reverse for and an humiliation of China which had large financial investments as
well as large numbers of personnel involved in Ghadaffi's imaginative schemes.
My guess, and it is not a particularly well informed one, is that after the Libyan disaster-the worst sort of imperialist over
reach and brutality not only did China realise that Imperialism was reverting to its nightmarish type, but Russians leaders saw
that a permanent alliance-until the defeat of the empire- was the only alternative that it and China had to 'hanging separately'.
And that the same went for Iran and Syria-nobody could trust the west any longer and it would be foolish, and dangerous, to continue
to do so.
The hate campaign against Russia is just the old campaign, against any country resisting the Empire's hegemony, focused on the
one power that had resisted since 1917 and was able to do so, returning to its old role of saying 'Niet' when all the rest of
the world said either 'Aye Aye,Sir' "If you insist" or kept quiet and said nothing at all.
Of course, 2011 was the last in a long series of increasingly stupid US aggressions, all of which Russia knew very well were aimed
at it as much as the selected sacrificial victim.
Those who say that Saddam was about oil could not be more wrong: he was a human sacrifice, slaughtered ritually on the corpses
of a million of his fellows, to demonstrate that the USA can do what it chooses when it wishes.
Karl Rove was wrong: not even Empires can create their own realities. The extravagant and bloody theatre of decades swaggering
around the middle east finds the US not only poorer but weaker than it was in 1980.
"It notably also offers to "edit" Wikipedia articles." b
Wikipedia stopped being a reliable source for accurate information a long time ago.
Finding reliable alternatives is a bit more effort; but worth it for accurate information.
Wikipedia stopped being a reliable source for accurate information a long time ago.
Finding reliable alternatives is a bit more effort; but worth it for accurate information.
Posted by: V | Dec 14, 2018 11:37:12 PM | 32
It is more complicated. Wikipedia is sprawling and manipulations happen on entry basis, and it often leaves "controversies".
I also discovered that it is worth to brush up on language skills, if there are any. For example, on recent events in Crimea there
is an entry "Crimea Crisis" with Russian and Polish versions, and Polish "pro-Westerners" somehow left few traces of activity.
I wonder how is it in German and French Wikipedias. In English, think tanks and deep states indeed lack sufficient counter-activity.
Why didn't you make an archive yourself? Meanwhile the leakers account at Scribd has been slashed and all the files with it. Anyway - here is a Mediafire zip created yesterday of (allegedly) all files published so far.
IntegrityInitiative.zip
. Save it as long as it is available.
@ jackrabbit, I've heard other observers make the link with Kissinger's op-ed, but your demonstration is very convincing. William
Engdahl made the same call, Hillary's not a suitable player to pull off MAGA with masses of deplorables. Unfortunately for
Anglo-American
strategists, Trump with his linear cretinism lacks the necessary wherewithal to implement and execute a comprehensive geopolitical
strategy. Kissinger comes from another era, and probably cannot grasp how far devolution has taken American elites in the cesspit
of post modern hedonism.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 15, 2018 12:54:41 AM |
link
@V
It's illuminating to see this NATO-backed operation looking at a PR firm to edit Wikipedia because this brings to mind the
notorious "Philip Cross," which, for those not in the know, was uncovered by Craig Murray and others (
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross-affair/)
as having edited the pages of prominent left wing people and Labour Party people. In Germany, Left Party Bundestag member Diether
Dehm has highlighted a similar figure in German language Wikipedia, "Feliks," targeting socialists in that country. The similarities
of both to the proposals made by the PR firm above are eerie.
Can't speak for the French version of Wikipedia but with the German edition it is as bad as anywhere else when it comes to
social and political issues, particularly so if geopolitics (the West, ME, Russia ..) is concerned.
Two people, a biologist and a journalist, independently investigated networks on a senior editor and admin level active within
WikipediaG. What they found is rather shocking. One can't just edit a Wikipedia article, no matter how fact-based. It will almost
immediately be retracted if it doesn't follow the 'official' narrative. If said person then tries to reestablish that content
or tries to engage in a discussion with the admins, in many cases, they simply get banned then.
These guys can also be found on Youtube: Gruppe42 (group42)
Unfortunately their main documentaries are only available in German language but there's some other content 'Geschichten aus Wikihausen'
- 'The Tales of Wikihausen' with English subtitles.
Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlgGx9LM5cM
It's about a former female STASI-employee turned fighter for freedom and democracy.
Currently she is the head of the Antonio-Amadeo-Foundation dedicated, to put it bluntly, to doing the bidding for the usual suspects
- and to add insult to injury taxpayer funded to a large part.
The BBC won't taalk about it but when it is in the House of Commons they have to
Sole result of a search "Integrity Initiative" on the BBC news website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bv9zxj
(12/12 when then question was raised in the house of commons)
Posted by: Soft Asylum | Dec 15, 2018 4:36:27 AM | 39
Such people might be some of the worst examples of humans, but that doesn't mean they're trolls. In fact, plucking some
kind of motivations out of their psychopathic minds might be a good thing for the rest of us. If people such as them are posters
here, this would allow an opportunity to study them.
You feel you lack opportunities to study them? Pick up a newspaper, or turn on the cable news.
B: this info is astounding! Or perhaps not? Maybe the fact that the spooks are notoriously inept is what's astounding? I mean
you would think that what with all dweebs working for the state (eg GCHQ), they would be able to protect their own excreta? The earlier disinfo (it's a Russian plot etc) makes sense but it didn't work!
Old Microbiologist , Dec 15, 2018 7:09:31 AM |
link
Jay @15
Sorry, I didn't read any of this until this morning. Russia is the go to enemy when you need to bump up your purchasing of very
expensive military equipment and to pour money into various security projects to achieve to goals (1 is to lock down infrastructure
etc. but the other is to suppress the US citizens so a two-for).
Asymmetrical wars against tiny nations without air support are
hard to justify spending Trillions of dollars forever. That dog just won't hunt after 18 years of a no-win war in Afghanistan
(or anywhere else). So, Russia and now just to make it even more critical, China are enemies that demand massive military buildups
of equipment that won't ever actually (hopefully) be put to use. This is to fight a two theater war against two nuclear superpowers.
Basically, it is insanity but it will make a few people very rich.
The long game plan, which continues unabated regardless of which party or who is in power, is American hegemony of the planet.
When you consider the US has military bases in 155 countries (who essentially have become colonies) it seems like the goal is
nearly completed unless you consider that major nuclear armed nations are resisting (Russia, China and maybe Pakistan and India
as well).
If you take a look at Russia during Yeltsin the US companies nearly bought everything in the country and the raping
was in full vigor. Someone at DoS or the CIA very badly miscalculated letting Putin come into power. He was, after all, a minor
minion and basically came out of no where. I am assuming they thought he would continue the raping and disarmament of all former
Soviet weapons and Russian businesses. Sadly for them he turned out to be a patriot and actively resisted everything the US was
trying to do to Russia. I believe the Yukos deal was the final straw which would have given nearly all Russian oil and gas to
Exxon/Mobil. So, Putin has been battling the US successfully since and is very slowly eliminating all the oligarchs the US put
into power and draining his swamp of Atlantacists and 5th column.
That is the over simplified view but it sums it up enough to explain what we are seeing. It is as always all about money. So,
Putin has resisted aggressively all US encroachments into the Russian sphere of influence. The sanctions actually help Russia.
A devalued ruble is great for oil exports which are only 12% of Russia's GDP. More self sufficiency is also a huge benefit. A
partnership with China ensures the US cannot ever achieve their goals of global domination. The US military has proven for the
past 70+ years they are incapable of any meaningful fighting and that the military is woefully incompetent. The ABM test results
even when cheating heavily are only roughly a 50% hit rate. That is against "normal" ballistic missiles. Russia's new systems
already circumvent this system by mid-flight course corrections.
The biggest problem is the neocon elites really believe all their own propaganda. That is very scary.
Jayc: you ask why Russia and specifically Putin? Cast your mind back to 1991 and the fall of the USSR and Yeltsin's coup and
the theft of billions of Russia's capital resources by Goldman Sachs et al. The Empire figured what was left of the former USSR
was a pushover and its vast natural resources, highly educated population, ripe for plucking and along comes the Tatar Putin,
a descendent of Genghis Khan! Whoops!
And only just in time. Then think about the invasion of Iraq in 1991 and later in 2003 and then Libya. The Russians stood by.
But Syria was a step too far and too near!
Jayc, it's Western, racist hubris. The Russkies are just a bunch of jumped up peasants (Hitler made the same mistake), so when
they asserted their right to resist, and it really started in 2015 with the Western financed 'revolution' against Assad, it came
as a real shock to the system to see that Russia actually did have real guns that fired and real jets and satellites to watch
it all. After all, it was those peasant Russians who went into space first (Duck agogo Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the genuine father
of space exploration).
It must have rocked the bastards back on their heels. So they hate Putin! He restored Russia's faith in itself and that is
simply not permissible! And do it with a military budget a small fraction of the Empire's and one that Putin CUT by 10% this year!
Wakey-wakey!
Okay, this is a vastly simplified explanation and I'm not going to deal with the internal contradictions of Russia, that's
for the Russians to do. But it seems that once more, the Russkies are saving our tired, sorry Western arses.
Bill
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 9:29:46 AM |
link
William Bowles @ 57
I commented at the Saker at the time of the first Ukrainian war that it looks like Mother Russia is being set up to defeat
fascism for the second time in 100 years. History may not exactly repeat itself but it does rhyme.
If I were the West I would tread very carefully, after the catastrophes of the 1990's the Russians are in no mood to roll over
for anyone. The West was surprised at the weapons and operational arts displayed in Syria, and that was just the conventional
stuff....
karlofi - Britain doesn't have swamps (environmental sort), but it does have lots of Bogs. And Bog is also another term for lavatory/toilet
- so one might describe Westminster, the City of London and the rest of the bourgeois British world as one Big Bog (if only someone
would flush it).
Well, I was excited about the supposed "lots on Skripal" and thought maybe there would be a smoking gun. Disappointed (mediafire
zip linked by b)! All I opened was the files with the word skripal in the name - nothing but ultra-boring newspeak from what seem
like spotty adolescents trying their best to feed their paymasters with the propaganda they want. The only one of any interest at all was the one reporting on skripal news coverage in Greece: the author was relatively normal,
and coverage in Greece was pretty neutral and sceptical of the UK propaganda.
There were only 100 documents in the zip which was supposed to be everything released so far (i.e. all three dumps).
Is there any evidence to confirm that all three dumps were done by the same person/people? I can't help wondering whether the
third dump might have been damage control from the Integrity Initiative themselves, to try to show that there is not much there.
As I said though, I didn't open anything except the files with skripal in the filename, so maybe there is something interesting
somewhere else. It may be that by specifically looking for skripal I failed to find any files with policy or analysis. All the
files I looked at seemed to be reports from the clusters in various countries (often addressed to Simon), or pure propaganda (spotty
teenagers) with no analysis.
ZH has a posting up about the Integrity Initiative and gives MoA a hat tip for being early onto the issue. This should insure that it won't be buried but I suspect it is time for another big shiny thing to appear to distract the masses
See also Namebase, the original collection of intelligence agents.
NameBase - Wikipedia
Founder Daniel Brandt began collecting clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence agents in the
1960s and especially in the 1970s after becoming a member of Students for a Democratic Society, an organization that opposed US
foreign policy.
[Search domain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybase] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spybase
Posted by: William Bowles | Dec 15, 2018 11:16:15 AM | 67
That piece sums it up well, especially NATO's increasingly aggressive posture. And how self-righteously stupid the US is being.
I think 70% might be optimistic. This situation is even more like 1914 than 1914 was, in that the reallywantingwar-to-bluster
ratio looks even worse. Meanwhile Trump, with his self-indulgent saber-rattling, is like a twitter-empowered Kaiser. Imagine that
back then.
Another commenter up above says this'll be Russia's second go-round with fascism. Yup, and they can send US/NATO where they
sent Hitler, Napoleon, Charles XII.
Russ, I wish I could be that optimistic. Yes, madmen they may be but they're madmen with tactical nukes! And judging by another
End of Days scenario, they actually seem to be contemplating their use, gambling that the Russians wont call their bluff! More
like the Cuban Missile Crisis than Sarevevo. So which side will blink first?
And then of course, we have Global Heating, which the Empire figures will 'take care' of that surplus to requirement population,
whilst the 1% wait it out in their bunkers.
I'm glad I'm at the other end of my life, rather than the beginning.
" we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can
ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation,
the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it". -- Frederick Engels, from the introduction
to 'The Dialectics of Nature', 1883.
thanks everyone for giving a response to either my comment, or @jayc's initial comment on what started this russiaphobia... i
think many of the answers are relevant and there is no one answer...
i recall how quickly 'cambridge analytica' came and went, in spite of the strength of the data on them manipulating much...
i imagine a similar story hee with 'integrity initiative'..
as for wikipedia - everyone knows it's a full on propaganda site masquerading as a neutral info site... the fact that it is
mentioned in this integrity initiative data dump shows just how mainstream and 'go to' in the world of propaganda it is viewed
by the intel services and anyone else trying to get in on some of the gov't money handouts for this type propaganda.. it would
be very cool if the wikipedia site made a statement saying we no longer need donations, as the intel services of the west have
been paying us to continue... at what point does wikipedia become an official and open arm of western propaganda?? why continue
to try to hide this when it is so apparent??
"at what point does wikipedia become an official and open arm of western propaganda?? why continue to try to hide this when
it is so apparent??"
That's one of neoliberalism's refinements over classical fascism: Just as they figured out you don't need to kill dissenters
since no one listens to us anyway, so you also don't need formal Gleichshaltung under a de jure Geobbels ministry since
the MSM will happily "coordinate" itself and really doesn't need to be told what to do. They already know since theirs is the
same ideology.
Well, I'm only optimistic about that last part if they really can keep it to just shooting and not let the missiles fly.
On the other hand I'm not at all optimistic about that. Though even then I suspect it'll hit the West worst, precisely because
any such leveling is hardest on the most complex, most high maintenance, most just-in-time, least robust, least resilient, most
top-heavy Tower of Babel. That would be the US, Europe, and their dependencies.
from the link in b's post: As we see it, the main weakness in the Russians' disinformation campaign is their embrace of a quantity
- over quality and credibility - strategy as shown by their lack of credible spokespeople, their publication of a high volume
of "easily" identifiable propaganda and "fake news", and their heavy reliance on a few biased partisan sites, dubious social media
pages and uninspired trolls. Their stories are hard to believe,...
That sounds so much like a self-description of the US-UK MSM it is uncanny. (Bellingcat anyone? for ex.) Which, imho, shows
a complete lack of creativity, suppleness, or even a low-level semi-efficient approach to the general problem of information
/ narrative control. Because that is what it is all about: much of the discourse around it is waffle, which masquerades as
'new' as it invokes 'new info' double-speak: social circuits, fake news, distribution, deep learning, connectivity, targetting,
etc. (and other terms that are less readily comprehensible..)
Hah! I think it was Goebbels who said that the biggest mistake a propagandist can make is to believe his own propaganda and
I think your quote exemplifies it! But note it always has to contain an element of truth eg, 'as shown by their lack of credible
spokespeople'. Yes, the Russians, just like the North Koreans ain't very good at spin and thank goodness. It was a lesson that
Nixon never learned, the Emperor really is naked!
on the newest thread bjd make what i thought was an exceptional comment, which is easy enough to gloss over, but i think worth
repeating on this thread... here it is
"...why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- (aren't they) proudly proclaimed and advertised,
in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for..."
The fact that they aren't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between
every two lines that they put on paper."
I'm sure Bernard is going to ban me soon but before he does, you have to read this from Ron Unz on the Huawei debacle:
Although it is far from clear whether the very elderly [Sheldon] Adelson played any direct personal role in Ms. Meng's arrest,
he surely must be viewed as the central figure in fostering the political climate that produced the current situation. Perhaps
he should not be described as the ultimate puppet-master behind our current clash with China, but any such political puppet-masters
who do exist are certainly operating at his immediate beck and call. In very literal terms, I suspect that if Adelson placed
a single phone call to the White House, the Trump Administration would order Canada to release Ms. Meng that same day.
Adelson's fortune of $33 billion ranks him as the 15th wealthiest man in America, and the bulk of his fortune is based on
his ownership of extremely lucrative gambling casinos in Macau, China. In effect, the Chinese government currently has
its hands around the financial windpipe of the man ultimately responsible for Ms. Meng's arrest and whose pro-Israel minions
largely control American foreign policy. I very much doubt that they are fully aware of this enormous, untapped source of political
leverage.(my emph.
Averting World Conflict With China
The PRC Should Retaliate by Targeting Sheldon Adelson's Chinese Casinos
"MAGA was as much a policy change as it was a campaign slogan....To prevail, Empire strategists recognized that USA needed to
be able to call on regular troops and a deep sense of patriotism and righteousness that required re-developing nationalism. In
short, 'MAGA'."
@28 Jackrabbit
I highlight these lines of your interesting post because, in the context of the Kissinger Op-Ed you refer to, they capture
an angle I had not considered and have to a degree nudged my thinking off what had been a steady course of assumptions and beliefs
relating to MAGA that go in the opposite direction from your hypothesis.
Trump's invocation of MAGA on the campaign trail was presented in such a way as to seem to overwhelmingly favour a pullback
from Imperialism in order to make things right at home. It drew from, and fed on, the angst and diminishing prosperity of the
segment of the population that had been hit hardest by Globalization of the economy, to which Imperial adventures can be, and
after are, associated. The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions
in a disenfranchised segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war
effort in two world wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of
past Imperial adventures such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was
a bombshell, in my opinion).
Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy.
The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated
positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through.
If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign
positions, such as the border wall, for example.
But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the
former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further
Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy.
Doing it smarter and better than Obama did seems to the ticket to legitimacy for whatever Trump does in the foreign policy
realm. Replacing ISIS with actual American troops (while protecting a core capacity to revive ISIS if needed) is an example of
doing it differently from Obama, but the net result – with parts of Syria denied to the legitimate government – still supports
stark Imperialist, interventionists goals in a different way. The Russians and Syrians have free reign to attack ISIS, but do
not have the same liberty against American troops. The flip-side is that the American troops do not have the freedom of action
of ISIS to attack Syria. This creates a static line that serves the purpose of a partitionist goal. (ISIS is being allowed to
survive to enable an element of proxy action, for harassment purposes).
I find I can no longer dismiss Trump's appointments, in particular Pompeo and Bolton to key positions directing and shaping
US foreign policy, as some kind of 5-D chess move. They are signs that he is either a hostage President, or he is in on the act.
There is so much that remains unknown, but the clear outward indicators are that nothing really has changed when it comes to US
foreign policy objectives, only the methods and approaches are different.
Remember Obama's 'Change' meme? We don't understand that behind all these guys, and they are mostly men, stands industry and
its skills; advertising, marketing, statistics, psychology, pr, on and on it goes. And billions, billions, to spend! We are the
amateurs! Remember Saatchi & Saatchi's campaign to have Thatcher elected?
A new extremely lucrative 'industry' has sprung up.
a) to exploit hugely massive data sets (Facebook's trove and money earner..) and influence ppl => attitudes, behavior, votes,
etc. For ex. Cambridge Analytica. Much of this stuff is for now on the level of a scam. E.g. Trump was not elected due to any
type of manipulation or meddling by anyone, excepting those who financed him (other story, hard bucks and bribes - not! internet
detritus or subliminal messages) and imho the US MSM - TV specially - who care more about ratings and the money it brings than
anything else.
These efforts have got a lot of press, imho it is all smoke. If anyone has a good ex. of success ? (The model is built on about
200 years of advertising lore.)
b) Further upstream is to control the information that goes out / the audiences who are allowed to see whatever info, react
to it, communicate it - other. With the corollary of repressing dissident, unwelcome, contradictory, info, etc. Been going on
since say the Upper Paleolithic.
Today, what has to be managed is the extreme free-flow (internet): the only way this can be done is:
- to limit the channel, block info or some proportion of it, make the channel too expensive / unusable / forbid, repress
- to limit or corral the users (via propaganda / coercion / permission / certification / numbers / privilege / cost, etc.)
- to triage the information, the 'news', the narratives, the opinions, the appeals, etc. which represents the ultimate control
and is the choice made by the US-UK to mention only those.
Noirette, yuo want proof? Check out 'Programming of the President' by Roland Perry, Aurum Books, 1984. It's About Richard Wirthlin
and the Mormons. Can a computer be used to elect a president? Wel it elected Ronald Reagan. It's only a coupleof quid on Abe Books.
Essential reading IMHOP.
Re: "The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised
segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world
wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures
such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).
Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy.
The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated
positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through.
If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign
positions, such as the border wall, for example.
But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the
former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further
Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy."
Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who came up through intelligence positions
in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create
the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.
"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.
"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar
Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History
will not be and should not be kind with that decision."
When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without
the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."
Flynn, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, also said that the American military response following 9/11 was
not well thought-out at all and based on significant misunderstandings.
Interesting, very interesting. As noted in the Flynn sentencing memo last night there were some curiously framed explanations
of events surrounding his FBI inquisition.
Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn;
and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview:
from the comments:
Curt says:
December 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm
This could be big news! Judge Emmet Sullivan was the same judge that had prosecutors investigated for criminal actions they took
in the Sen. Ted Stevens FALSE prosecution. Some on Mueller's team, including Weinstein, were held in contempt. One prosecutor
committed suicide. Others threatened with disbarment and some were suspended. "A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction
of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate
whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case (2008) should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing.
Mueller
was also involved in that horrible attempt by prosecutors to frame Sen. Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan has absolutely no use for
this group of prosecutors. He smells a rat here and is asking for all investigative materials, including 302s. This judge will
not hesitate to take action against these crooked prosecutors if he finds evidence of ANY wrong doing.
On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury
before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. "In nearly 25 years on the bench," he said, "I've
never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case.
. . .
For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury
convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former
Alaska senator be dismissed.
On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.
In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors' handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted
that the misconduct allegations were "too serious and too numerous" to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation.
He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial
team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.
12-13-18 Following the allegations, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday ordered that both the Mueller investigation and
the Flynn team turn over all documents [the "302s"] relating to the fateful interview, including all contemporaneous notes, before
3pm Friday.
In recent days we have discovered that Flynn was advised not to have counsel present during his FBI interview and that the
FBI is withholding the actual interview notes. The same FBI cabal that has dogged Trump - but AFAIK, Trump has said nothing about
the Flynn case.
Yet another reason to believe that Trump is not a "populist" savior but yet another agent of the establishment/Deep State.
Michael Flynn's a well known islamophobe who'd gladly defend zionist interests to the last american soldier. He'd fit right
in with Bolton on the NSC council. Flynn in his own words: "Islam is not a real religion, but a political ideology masked behind
a religion," While campaigning for Trump in 2016: ''Islamism a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people that has to
be excised "
I wonder how he planned on excising the cancer ? Deploying more stormtroopers to the levant to fight Iran ?
As Trump assumed control of the executive in early 2017, it didn't take long for Flynn to push for direct military involvement
in Yemen and confrontation with Iran: "Instead of being thankful to the United States for these agreements, Iran is now feeling
emboldened... As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice."
Michael Flynn was also a fellow at the foundation for defence of democracies a well known den of zionists and universal fascists
such as Michael Ledeen. In fact they both wrote a book together The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical
Islam and Its Allies, where we find such nuggets as:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Putin has declared the United States (and NATO generally) to be a national security threat
to Russia, and "Death to America" is the official chant of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both the Putinists and the radical Iranian
Muslims agree on the identity of their main enemy. Hence, one part of the answer is surely that their alliance is simply the logical
outgrowth of their hostility toward America.''
"The Russians and Iranians have more in common than a shared enemy. There is also a shared contempt for democracy and an agreement
-- by all members of the enemy alliance -- that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate."
Flynn's angle was to exploit any potential fissure to pry Russia away from Iran and China. Presumbably after having dealt with
Iran and the middle Kingdom, the hegemon could then strike a final blow to defeat and contain an isolated Russia. https://www.amazon.com/Field-Fight-Global-Against-Radical/dp/1250131626
The subtitle of this effusively admiring biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Grand Strategist, does not reflect its
true purpose. A more accurate one might be this: "Just as Smart as the Other Guy." The other guy, of course, is Henry Kissinger. The
implicit purpose of Justin Vaïsse's book is to argue that in his mastery of strategic thought and practice, Brzezinski ranks as Kissinger's
equal.
Notable quotes:
"... That Brzezinski, who died last year at age 89, lived a life that deserves to be recounted and appraised is certainly the case. Born in Warsaw in 1928 to parents with ties to Polish nobility, Brzezinski had a peripatetic childhood. ..."
"... After graduating from McGill, Brzezinski set his sights on Harvard, which at the time was the very archetype of a "Cold War university." Senior faculty and young scholars on the make were volunteering to advise the national-security apparatus just then forming in Washington. For many of them, the Soviet threat appeared to eclipse all other questions and fields of inquiry. In this setting, Brzezinski flourished. Even before becoming an American citizen, he was thoroughly Americanized, imbued with the mind-set that prevailed in circles where members of the power elite mixed and mingled. Partially funded by the CIA, the Russian Research Center, Brzezinski's home at Harvard, was one of those places. ..."
"... From his time in Cambridge, he emerged committed, in his own words, to "nothing less than formulating a coherent strategy for the United States, so that we could eventually dismantle the Soviet bloc" and, not so incidentally, thereby liberate Poland. To this cause, the young Brzezinski devoted himself with single-minded energy. ..."
"... Convinced that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc were internally fragile, he believed that economic and cultural interaction with the West would ultimately lead to their collapse. The idea was to project strength without provoking confrontation, while patiently exerting indirect influence. ..."
"... This limited academic influence probably did not bother Zbig; he never saw himself as a mere scholar. He was a classic in-and-outer, rotating effortlessly from university campuses to political campaigns, and from government service to plummy think-tank billets. According to Vaïsse, Brzezinski never courted the media. Even so, he demonstrated a pronounced talent for getting himself in front of TV cameras, becoming a frequent guest on programs like Meet the ..."
"... Toward the end of his life, Brzezinski even had a Twitter account. His last tweet, from May 2017, both summarizes the essence of his worldview and expresses his dismay regarding the presidency of Donald Trump: "Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse." ..."
"... Although not an ideologue, Brzezinski was a liberal Democrat of a consistently hawkish persuasion. Committed to social justice at home, he was also committed to toughness abroad. In the 1960s, he supported US intervention in Vietnam, treated the domino theory as self-evidently true, and argued that, with American credibility on the line, the United States had no alternative but to continue prosecuting the war. Even after the war ended, Vaïsse writes, Brzezinski "did not view Vietnam as a mistake." ..."
"... Yet Vietnam did nudge Brzezinski to reconsider some of his own assumptions. In the early 1970s, with an eye toward forging a new foreign policy that might take into account some of the trauma caused by Vietnam, he organized the Trilateral Commission. Apart from expending copious amounts of Rockefeller money, the organization produced little of substance. For Brzezinski, however, it proved a smashing success. It was there that he became acquainted with Jimmy Carter, a Georgia governor then contemplating a run for the presidency in 1976. ..."
"... When Carter won, he rewarded Brzezinski by appointing him national-security adviser, the job that had vaulted Kissinger to the upper ranks of global celebrity. ..."
"... Because of Brzezinski's limited influence on foreign policy after Carter, Vaïsse's case for installing him in the pantheon of master strategists therefore rests on the claim that on matters related to foreign policy, the Carter presidency was something less than a bust. Vaïsse devotes the core of his book to arguing just that. Although valiant, the effort falls well short of success. ..."
"... From the outset of his administration, Carter accorded his national-security adviser remarkable deference. Brzezinski was not co-equal with the president; yet neither was he a mere subordinate. He was, Vaïsse writes, "the architect of Carter's foreign policy," while also exercising "an exceptional degree of control" over its articulation and implementation. ..."
"... The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and eventually of the Soviet Union itself was, in his view, a nominal goal of American foreign policy, but not an immediate prospect. ..."
"... The Camp David accords did nothing to resolve the Palestinian issue that underlay much of Israeli-Arab enmity; it produced a dead-end peace that left Palestinians without a state and Israel with no end of problems. And the Brzezinski-engineered embrace of China, enhancing Chinese access to American technology and markets, accelerated that country's emergence as a peer competitor. ..."
Underlying that purpose are at least two implicit assumptions. The first is that, when it comes to statecraft, grand strategy
actually exists, not simply as an aspiration but as a discrete and identifiable element. The second is that, in his writings and
contributions to US policy, Kissinger himself qualifies as a strategic virtuoso. For all sorts of reasons, we should treat both of
these assumptions with considerable skepticism.
That Brzezinski, who died last year at age 89, lived a life that deserves to be recounted and appraised is certainly the case.
Born in Warsaw in 1928 to parents with ties to Polish nobility, Brzezinski had a peripatetic childhood. His father was a diplomat
whose family accompanied him on postings to France, Germany, and eventually to Canada. The Nazi invasion of 1939, which extinguished
Polish independence, also effectively ended his father's diplomatic career. With war engulfing nearly all of Europe, Brzezinski would
not set foot on Polish soil again for nearly two decades.
Although the young Brzezinski quickly adapted to life in Canada, the well-being of Poles and Poland remained an abiding preoccupation.
After the war, he studied economics and political science at McGill University, focusing in particular on the Soviet Union, which
by then had replaced Germany as the power that dominated the country of his birth. Brzezinski was a brilliant student with a particular
interest in international affairs, a field increasingly centered on questions related to America's role in presiding over the postwar
global order.
After graduating from McGill, Brzezinski set his sights on Harvard, which at the time was the very archetype of a "Cold War university."
Senior faculty and young scholars on the make were volunteering to advise the national-security apparatus just then forming in Washington.
For many of them, the Soviet threat appeared to eclipse all other questions and fields of inquiry. In this setting, Brzezinski flourished.
Even before becoming an American citizen, he was thoroughly Americanized, imbued with the mind-set that prevailed in circles where
members of the power elite mixed and mingled. Partially funded by the CIA, the Russian Research Center, Brzezinski's home at Harvard,
was one of those places.
From his time in Cambridge, he emerged committed, in his own words, to "nothing less than formulating a coherent strategy for
the United States, so that we could eventually dismantle the Soviet bloc" and, not so incidentally, thereby liberate Poland. To this
cause, the young Brzezinski devoted himself with single-minded energy.
A s a scholar and author of works intended for a general audience, Zbig, as he was widely known, was nothing if not prolific.
Churning out a steady stream of well-regarded books and essays, he demonstrated a particular knack for "summarizing things in a concise
and striking way."
Clarity took precedence over nuance.
And with his gift for stylish packaging -- crafting neologisms ("technetronic")
and high-sounding phrases ("Histrionics as History in Transition") -- his analyses had the appearance of novelty, even if they often
lacked real substance.
Whether writing for his fellow scholars or addressing a wider audience, Brzezinski had one big idea when it
came to Cold War strategy: He promoted the concept of "peaceful engagement" as a basis for US policy.
Convinced that the Soviet Union
and the Soviet bloc were internally fragile, he believed that economic and cultural interaction with the West would ultimately lead
to their collapse. The idea was to project strength without provoking confrontation, while patiently exerting indirect influence.
Yet little of the Brzezinski oeuvre has stood the test of time. The American canon of essential readings in international relations
and strategy, beginning with George Washington's farewell address and continuing on through works by John Quincy Adams, Alfred Thayer
Mahan, Hans Morgenthau, and a handful of others (the list is not especially long), does not include anything penned by Brzezinski.
Although Vaïsse, a senior official with the French foreign ministry, appears to have read and pondered just about every word his
subject wrote or uttered, he identifies nothing of Brzezinski's that qualifies as must-reading for today's aspiring strategist.
This limited academic influence probably did not bother Zbig; he never saw himself as a mere scholar. He was a classic in-and-outer,
rotating effortlessly from university campuses to political campaigns, and from government service to plummy think-tank billets.
According to Vaïsse, Brzezinski never courted the media. Even so, he demonstrated a pronounced talent for getting himself in front
of TV cameras, becoming a frequent guest on programs like Meet the Press . He knew how to self-promote.
Toward the end of his life, Brzezinski even had a Twitter account. His last tweet, from May 2017, both summarizes the essence
of his worldview and expresses his dismay regarding the presidency of Donald Trump: "Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua
non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse."
F rom the time Brzezinski left Harvard in 1960 to accept a tenured position at Columbia, he made it his mission to nurture and
facilitate that sophistication. For Zbig, New York offered a specific advantage over Cambridge: It provided a portal into elite political
circles. As it had for Kissinger, the then-still-influential Council on Foreign Relations provided a venue that enabled Brzezinski
to curry favor with the rich and powerful, and to establish his bona fides as a statesman to watch. Henry's patron was Nelson Rockefeller;
Zbig's was Nelson's brother David.
Although not an ideologue, Brzezinski was a liberal Democrat of a consistently hawkish persuasion. Committed to social justice
at home, he was also committed to toughness abroad. In the 1960s, he supported US intervention in Vietnam, treated the domino theory
as self-evidently true, and argued that, with American credibility on the line, the United States had no alternative but to continue
prosecuting the war. Even after the war ended, Vaïsse writes, Brzezinski "did not view Vietnam as a mistake."
Yet Vietnam did nudge Brzezinski to reconsider some of his own assumptions. In the early 1970s, with an eye toward forging a new
foreign policy that might take into account some of the trauma caused by Vietnam, he organized the Trilateral Commission. Apart from
expending copious amounts of Rockefeller money, the organization produced little of substance. For Brzezinski, however, it proved
a smashing success. It was there that he became acquainted with Jimmy Carter, a Georgia governor then contemplating a run for the
presidency in 1976.
Zbig and Jimmy hit it off. Soon enough, Brzezinski signed on as the candidate's principal foreign-policy adviser. When Carter
won, he rewarded Brzezinski by appointing him national-security adviser, the job that had vaulted Kissinger to the upper ranks of
global celebrity.
Zbig held this post throughout Carter's one-term presidency, from 1977 to 1981. It would be his first and last time in government.
After 1981, Brzezinski went back to writing, continued to opine, and was occasionally consulted by Carter's successors, both Democratic
and Republican. Yet despite having ascended to the rank of elder statesman, never again did Brzezinski occupy a position where he
could directly affect US policy.
Because of Brzezinski's limited influence on foreign policy after Carter, Vaïsse's case for installing him in the pantheon of
master strategists therefore rests on the claim that on matters related to foreign policy, the Carter presidency was something less
than a bust. Vaïsse devotes the core of his book to arguing just that. Although valiant, the effort falls well short of success.
From the outset of his administration, Carter accorded his national-security adviser remarkable deference. Brzezinski was not
co-equal with the president; yet neither was he a mere subordinate. He was, Vaïsse writes, "the architect of Carter's foreign policy,"
while also exercising "an exceptional degree of control" over its articulation and implementation.
In a characteristic display of self-assurance and bureaucratic shrewdness, as the new president took office, Brzezinski gave him
a 43-page briefing book prescribing basic administration policy. Under the overarching theme of "constructive global engagement,"
Brzezinski identified 10 specific goals. The first proposed to "create more active and solid cooperation with Europe and Japan,"
the 10th to "maintain a defense posture designed to dissuade the Soviet Union from committing hostile acts." In between were less-than-modest
aspirations to promote human rights, reduce the size of nuclear arsenals, curb international arms sales, end apartheid in South Africa,
normalize Sino-American relations, terminate US control of the Panama Canal, and achieve an "overall solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
problem."
While Brzezinski's agenda was as bold as it was comprehensive, it nonetheless hewed to the Soviet-centric assumptions that had
formed the basis of US policy since the end of World War II. Zbig recognized that the world had changed considerably in the ensuing
years, but he also believed that any future changes would still occur in the context of a continuing Soviet-American rivalry. His
strategic perspective, therefore, did not include the possibility that the international order might center on something other than
the binaries imposed by the Cold War. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc and eventually of the Soviet Union itself was, in his
view, a nominal goal of American foreign policy, but not an immediate prospect.
Using Brzezinski's 10 policy objectives as a basis for evaluating his performance, Vaïsse gives the national-security adviser
high marks. "Few administrations have known so many tangible successes in only four years," he writes, citing the Panama Canal Treaty,
the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, and improved relations with China. Yet while Panama remains an underappreciated achievement,
the other two qualify as ambiguous at best. The Camp David accords did nothing to resolve the Palestinian issue that underlay much
of Israeli-Arab enmity; it produced a dead-end peace that left Palestinians without a state and Israel with no end of problems. And
the Brzezinski-engineered embrace of China, enhancing Chinese access to American technology and markets, accelerated that country's
emergence as a peer competitor.
More troubling still was Brzezinski's failure to anticipate or to grasp the implications of the two developments that all but
doomed the Carter presidency: the 1978 Iranian Revolution and the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Vaïsse does his best to
cast a positive light on Brzezinski's role in these twin embarrassments. But there's no way around it: Brzezinski misread both --
with consequences that still haunt us today.
The Iranian Revolution, which Brzezinski sought to forestall by instigating a military coup in Tehran, offered a warning against
imagining that Washington could shape events in the Islamic world. Brzezinski missed that warning entirely, although he would by
no means be the last US official to do so. As for the Kremlin's plunge into Afghanistan, widely interpreted as evidence of the Soviet
Union's naked aggression, it actually testified to the weakness and fragility of the Soviet empire, already in an advanced state
of decay. Again, Brzezinski -- along with many other observers -- misread the issue. When clarity of vision was most needed, he failed
to provide it.
Together, these two developments ought to have induced a wily strategist to reassess the premises of US policy. Instead, they
resulted in decisions to deepen -- and to overtly militarize -- US involvement in and around the Persian Gulf. While this commitment
is commonly referred to as the Carter Doctrine, Vaïsse insists that it "was really a Brzezinski doctrine."
Regardless of who gets the credit, the militarization of US policy across what Brzezinski termed an "arc of crisis" encompassing
much of the Islamic world laid the basis for a series of wars and upheavals that continue to this day. If, as national-security adviser,
Brzezinski wielded as much influence as Vaïsse contends, then this too forms part of his legacy. When it mattered most, the master
strategist failed to understand the implications of the crisis that occurred on his watch.
The most glaring problem anyone faces in trying to assert Brzezinski's mastery of world affairs, however, rests not in Iran or
Afghanistan, but in how the Cold War came to an end. Indeed, Brzezinski viewed it as essentially endless. As late as 1987, just two
years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was still insisting that "the American-Soviet conflict is an historical rivalry that
will endure for as long as we live."
B rzezinski was certainly smart, flexible, and pragmatic, but he was also a prisoner of the Cold War paradigm. So too were virtually
all other members of the foreign-policy establishment of his day. Indeed, subscribing to that paradigm was a prerequisite of membership.
Yet this adherence amounted to donning a pair of strategic blinders: It meant seeing only those things that it was convenient to
see.
Which brings us back to Zbig's last tweet, with its paean to American leadership as the sine qua non of global stability. The
tweet neatly captures the mind-set that the foreign-policy establishment has embraced with something like unanimity since the Cold
War surprised that establishment by coming to an end. This mind-set gets expressed in myriad ways in a thousand speeches and op-eds:
The United States must lead. There is no alternative; history itself summons the country to do so. Should it fail in that responsibility,
darkness will cover the earth.
This is why Trump so infuriates the foreign-policy elite: He appears oblivious to the providential call that others in Washington
take to be self-evident. Yet adhering to this post–Cold War paradigm is also the equivalent of donning blinders. Whatever the issue
-- especially when the issue is ourselves -- it means seeing only those things that we find it convenient to see.
The post–Cold War paradigm of American moral and political hegemony prevents us from appreciating the way that the world is actually
changing -- rapidly, radically, and right before our very eyes. Today, with the planet continuing to heat up, the nexus of global
geopolitics shifting eastward, and Americans pondering security threats for which our pricey and far-flung military establishment
is all but useless, the art of strategy as practiced by members of Brzezinski's generation has become irrelevant. So too has Zbig
himself.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
Vesti News
Published on 26 Nov 2018
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On Monday, the Russian General Prosecutor's Office announced the initiation of a new criminal case against William Browder,
an international schemer and fraudster. Now Browder is suspected of organizing and leading a criminal community in Russia.
For many years, Browder has been making frantic efforts to avoid going to Russian prison.
Well, lucky for him Interpol can't come after him, now that he almost singlehandedly
prevented a Russian from becoming Director. He's only Assistant Director, so he must be
powerless.
There; you see? The GRU could obviously learn a few lessons from Browder. If you want to rub
someone out, don't use a distinctive nerve agent that everyone will know came from Russia,
you numbskulls. Try to make it something undetectable, but if you can't manage that, at least
make it something so general it might have come from anywhere. Then immediately announce that
Browder did it.
This two years old article can be written yesterday...
Notable quotes:
"... "Aiming to calm European fears about US-Russia ties, Vice President Mike Pence told world leaders Saturday that the United
States will stand firm against Moscow while also seeking avenues for cooperation." ..."
Pence told a room full of Washington lapdogs that the United States would "continue to hold Russia accountable". Then Lavrov
went up to the podium and straightened him out. Rudy Panko Sun, Feb
19, 2017 | 400 words 38,161
417 YOLO Lavrov
"Aiming to calm European fears about US-Russia ties, Vice President Mike Pence told world leaders Saturday that the United
States will stand firm against Moscow while also seeking avenues for cooperation."
This is the opening line
to CNN's report on the predictable saber-rattling that took place at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
Lavrov is our spirit animal
Pence also told the audience that Washington remained "unwavering" in its commitment to NATO as it faced a "more assertive Russia."
Shortly after Pence had finished his war liturgy, Russia's Foreign Minister took to the podium.
Lavrov said that the time when the West called the shots was over and, dismissing NATO as a relic of the Cold War, added: "I
hope that (the world) will choose a democratic world order -- a post-West one -- in which each country is defined by its sovereignty."
Lavrov said Moscow wanted to build relations with Washington which would be "pragmatic with mutual respect and acknowledgement
of our responsibility for global stability."
Lavrov is a career diplomat and a true gentleman. But we've noticed a subtle change in his approach to U.S. bullshittery over
the last two years. He rarely dances around issues anymore. Sure, he still refers to Washington as "our western friends" or "our
American colleagues". But he doesn't hold back after that.
The crisis in Ukraine made it clear that Washington wanted blood. But the U.S.-led crimes against the people of Syria is what
made Russia realize that they are not dealing with normal, reasonable people. Washington is a cabal of psychopaths.
The war in Syria has also ushered in a new era: We are witnessing a seismic shift in how international relations are conducted.
Russia and Iran just proved that fighting the bully works. And other countries have taken notice.
Lavrov's comments are more than just an invitation to all nations to join Russia in the creation of a new world order based on
state sovereignty and international consensus.
He was also issuing a warning to Washington: Pack your bags. It's over.
Well, that would be the brain-dead, full of shit, Fox News/CNN version of events.
The USA has made it clear that unless Russia allows the full raping of its economy and submits to second rate lapdog status
(are you listening Germany?) that they will continue to encroach and threaten.
Crimea would never have happened had it not been for the US seeded, illegal coup.
The USA is the nation responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths over the past 15+ years, not Russia.
AND remember that whatever the purpose of overthrowing or even merely meddling inside countries - really -- as many as there
are american embassies...
the consequences -- the repercussions of these -- result in BILLIONS in misery, unnecessary suffering and difficulty -- once
the effects of american meddling , operations, influence, trouble-making are accounted for.
take the economy alone...an american company ....without all the bombings obviousness --
IF AN american mining company goes to a country and ''obtains'' bending the rules so the company can mine all they want --
hire private security or EVEN a corrupt government's ARMY or rogue generals to ''provide security" against peasants or workers
who complain they are not being paid well , their health disregarded, the environment and village they live in polluted -- and
the company takes all the profits OUT --
the consequences of that american company's activities harms far more, far longer and deeper - you count that along with all
other activities and behavior the USA commits across the world wherever there is an american embassy, representative, organization
working for ''american interests''
and what do we get in TOTAL if a proper accounting were made?
BILLIONS OF LIVES and UNTOLD DAMAGE TO THE ENVIRONMENT , FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE HERITAGE OF THEIR COUNTRIES ACROSS THE
WORLD, ACROSS GENERATIONS RUINED.
from effects in poverty, wealth gaps, misery, descent by populations in poverty into criminality, destruction of farm and natural
lands, social cohesion disturbed...divisions created...death , terrorism, and an endless list of MISERY brought by america's ''INSTITUTIONS".
If America don't respect it's own indigenous people, how can they do it with the rest of the world?!?!?
America is leading the world!! To it's destruction....
What a whitewash.
Blankets infected with smallpox ...
Massacres ...
Alcohol ...
Broke every treaty ...
The indigenous Americans were the subjects of the greatest genocide the world has known. We can only estimate the numbers, but
they were huge.
They were a majestic and beautiful people. No doubt they had tribal indifferences, but they were not genocidal.
Shame on you.
You are right. From the point of view of Russia, the situation looks like this: NATO forces located on our borders are not
a big threatening force.
Dangerous other:
First: the Americans gave the nuclear weapons at the disposal of its partners in NATO. The Polish, Danish and other aircraft
can fly with nuclear bombs along our borders.
Second: latest launchers for cruise missiles are close to our border. This means that the flight time to, for example Saint
Petersburg, becoming about 3 minutes.
That is, in case of any error, accidental launch due to a technical fault no one have time for any questions. No time for a phone
call or any other communication, anti-missile system Russia will work automatically.
That is, the previous policy and NATO leaders created a situation which is extremely dangerous in itself. No matter how hostile
their intentions.
Yes very much so, I hate it. No need for this insanity. Saw pictures of NATO troops taking group shots right on Russias boarder.
And all it takes is one tiny mistake, Americans are famous for making mistakes , thats how they justify killing people. Ever watch
Reilly interview Trump? Could smack that bloating neocon oreilly. Europeans don't get it , if this goes bad it will get real bloody
for them as well, they have no shield of protection, when are they going to finally wake up n realize NATO is using them n their
land to launch attacks on Russia, so stupid
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
Oil and commodity markets were used as a finishing move on the Soviet system. The book,
"The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century" by James R. Norman details the
use of oil futures as a geopolitical tool. Pipelines change the calculus quite a bit.
No, you're right; Magnitsky was a tax accountant employed by Firestone Duncan, the auditing
firm in its turn employed by Hermitage Capital Management. I don't know if the 'Duncan' is
still part of the outfit, but Firestone Duncan was headed by Jamison Firestone. He's an
American lawyer, born in Los Angeles and a member of the New York state bar.
I and others have hazarded a guess that Magnitsky was persistently referred to as a lawyer
because testimony between a lawyer and his/her client is protected by attorney-client
privilege; thus, much of what the Russian state might want to know from Magnitsky might fall
under this protection. But of course Russia would not be fooled into thinking he was a lawyer
– the device was likely just for western consumption, so Browder could scream that
Russia was suborning testimony illegally from Magnitsky.
Browder, however, had no real reason to believe Magnitsky was a lawyer, as he admitted
when questioned under oath.
" In a 2015 deposition regarding Prevezon, Browder again described Magnitsky as his
lawyer. He was quickly questioned by opposing counsel. This time, Browder was under oath
(page 25):
Q: Mr. Magnitsky is an attorney; you think that's accurate?
BROWDER: He was my attorney.
Q: I see. And he had a law degree in Russia?
BROWDER: I'm not aware that he did.
Q: I see. And he went to law school?
BROWDER: No.
Magnitsky had been granted power of attorney on several occasions, but he was not a
lawyer. As Browder would detail in his deposition, when there was a 2002 challenge regarding
tax payments, Magnitsky represented Hermitage in court."
That's a very useful source, incidentally; it discusses that Magnitsky never once
mentioned in his testimony the tax fraud which the Russian government supposedly perpetrated
to steal millions, and Hermitage did not lose anything thereby; the Russian treasury absorbed
the loss. And the fraud was discovered by testimony delivered by Rimma Starova, who worked
for one of the shell companies accused. But Magnitsky is regularly and stubbornly credited
with having discovered the theft, and his alleged stubborn investigation is in turn credited
with his arrest, to get him out of the way.
Browder agreed to be deposed in 2015, in an action he initiated against Prevezon, which
firm he accused of using the profits from the alleged tax rebate scheme to purchase New York
real estate. Prevezon was represented in this action by Natalia Veselnitskaya. I'm sure you
will recognize her name.
Here are a couple of my old posts, one of them an excellent one by kovane which drew on
some Russian sources and which demonstrated that Browder – in collusion with Magnitsky
– claimed tax deductions for hiring handicapped employees who either did not perform
the jobs for which they had been hired or did no work at all. Magnitsky signed their
employment books, and Browder himself signed off on the tax deduction application. They
pertain directly to the Magnitsky deception and to Browder's slippery background.
"... Browder is chuffed to pieces, because it is a big victory for him and his pal Khodorkovsky. ..."
"... Pretty soon it will be every country for itself, with ad-hoc coalitions forming for short-term situations, and the whole international system of justice and law will just fall apart. For which you can thank ruthless crooks like Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. So Browder might as well have said thanks for being the saps I always knew you were. ..."
People should remember, when international institutions continue to falter and crumble after
all the decades of effort to build them, that they were doing what makes Michael McFaul
happy. I hope that's enough.
Oh well, whatever tickles these pathetic people's fantasies Michael McFawl going
buuuuk-buk-buk and Bill Brawder ('cos he's full of electrolytes) must not have very much to
do these days except think about what Vladimir Putin does every early morning.
Realistically, this IS a tactical defeat for Russia. The votes had already been counted, and
Prokopchuk was pretty much a shoo-in. Then the U.S. launched a campaign to stop this, and
must have intimidated a lot of the countries into changing their vote.
Russophiles should just admit that it was a tactical defeat, shrug it off, and continue
the war Because it IS a war. One battle lost Realistically.
As I keep saying, it is a tactical defeat for international institutions. They are exposed as
merely fronts for American influence, with no genuine objectivity. Prokopchuk is already a
Deputy Head of Interpol, and will remain one. Browder was simply exercising self-preservation
disguised as the usual progressive activism, but when people who were in a position to cast
votes see that they are being personally thanked by Michael Mcfaul, then by God any one of
them who does not realize he or she has been had is thicker than most people are who are
allowed out unsupervised.
Russia – and Putin – was never going to 'run' Interpol; in fact, if Prokopchuk
had won, the USA would be tying itself in knots trying to impede every Interpol investigation
after that, just to spite Russia. Washington simply did not want a Russian to win, and it was
successful in scaring enough people to prevent it from happening. But Prokopchuk hasn't gone
away, and will still be as influential as he was before. Nothing has really changed very much
at Interpol, but the USA just publicly turned on a huge influence campaign to change the
decision. Does that mean Interpol is just another political western tool? It surely does. Who
can't see that now? Anyone?
Browder is chuffed to pieces, because it is a big victory for him and his pal
Khodorkovsky. They were the two 'high-profile dissidents' who were cited in a
flood-the-English-speaking newspapers campaign that said Putin was about to get control of
Interpol. They pointed out that the Nazis had control over it in the 1930's, but apparently
that was not as bad as Putin running it. Of course they managed to panic enough voters that
the Russian who had been the favourite was repudiated. But the whole thing is just too
childish for words, because the net effect is to showcase how political international
institutions have become, and undermine confidence in them.
Pretty soon it will be every country for itself, with ad-hoc coalitions forming for
short-term situations, and the whole international system of justice and law will just fall
apart. For which you can thank ruthless crooks like Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. So
Browder might as well have said thanks for being the saps I always knew you were.
Prosecutor General: Magnitsky chemically poisoned as a diversion on Browder's
orders
You dirty Russian rats can't pin that goddam rap on me!!!
A new criminal case has been opened in the Russian Federation against William
Browder, founder of the Hermitage Capital Foundation, international financial speculator,
lobbyist for anti-Russian sanctions and a sponsor of a significant part of the Russian
liberal opposition.
Details revealed at a special briefing organized by the Office of the Prosecutor
General of the Russian Federation.
Browder has been accused of creating a criminal organization (part 1 of article 210 of
the criminal code), which had been operating since 1999, which was formed for "committing
serious economic crimes on Russian territory and that of other countries". Nikolay Atmon'ev,
advisor to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, said that companies in Cyprus,
Latvia and Switzerland had ben established in Browder's interests and had cashed and
laundered hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Office of the Prosecutor General believes it "very likely" that the auditor Sergei
Magnitsky and several other of his accomplices were killed on Browder's direct orders because
they were undesirable witnesses: "Initially, the deaths of Gasanov, Kurochkin and Magnitsky
were considered to have been through natural causes, because of sicknesses that they had; the
death of Korobyeinikov seemed to have been accidental. However, further data was obtained,
indicating the violent nature of the deaths of these persons". The Investigative Committee
opened a murder inquiry into Browder's business partners Oktai Gasanov, Valeriy Kurochkin and
Sergei Korobyenikov. Browder is a suspect as regards the elimination of financier Alexander
Perepelichny, who died in 2012 in the British town of Weybridge (in the Russian immigrant's
stomach were found traces of Asian poisonous plant Gelsemium elegans). According to Atmen'ev,
the Prosecutor's office sent to the Investigative Committee notification of its decision that
an inquiry be opened as regards making a criminal case against Browder because of the
suspicion that he had been involved in the murder of Perepelichny. As for Magnitsky, who died
in 2009 at the hospital of the "Matrosskaya Tishina" remand centre, the Office of the
Prosecutor General believes that he was poisoned "as a diversion and by a chemical substance
consisting of aluminium compounds", which brought about the development of his cardio-hepatic
failure. "What Browder was especially interested in was that Sergei Magnitsky die so as to
avoid his being exposed", said Atmon'ev.
"Amongst the chemicals that pose a hidden threat to humans, there is a group of toxic
aluminium compounds. In Russia, there has not been an investigation targeted at these
substances. Detailed analysis of scientific information shows that for several decades
toxicological studies of aluminium compounds have been carried out previously and there
continues exclusive research into them by organizations in the the United States, France and
Italy. There has been studied particularly closely the acute and chronic toxicity of a number
of hazardous aluminium compounds that are ingested orally or inhaled and their effects on the
human body Analysis of substances obtained from the bodies of Kurochkin, Korobyenikov,
Gasanov and Magnitsky has led to the conclusion that the deceased persons had signs of
chronic poisoning with a toxic water-soluble aluminium compound that had been administered
orally", said a representative of the Office of the Russian Prosecutor, Mikhail
Alexandrov.
In the very near future, the Russian Federation will announce that Browder is on the
international wanted list under the UN Convention against transnational crime. "There is the
possibility of extradition provided for in the Convention, even in cases when between the
countries that decide the issue of extradition,there is no bilateral extradition Treaty",
said Atmon'ev.
They gotta be joking! Trust me! I'm as straight as they come!
RT keeps stating that Magnitsky was employed by Browder. I'm pretty sure he wasn't. He was
employed by an audit company, Firestone Duncan, that advised Browder in his shady,
tax-dodging operations.
Browder has always tried to make out that he was a pal of Magnitsky and how he grieved for
his fate.
Browder not once visited his "friend" Magnitsky when he was held on remand.
At least they have stopped calling Magnitsky a "lawyer".
Browder persisently called him a lawyer, though, in numerous interviews, when he must have
known damned well he was no such thing.
You'd think the British would have tried to sort out the taxation implications of Markly
Meg's marriage to Prince Harry BEFORE they got married. It's not as if this is the first time
someone in the British political establishment has been hit with this issue of being a US
citizen and therefore liable to pay tax to the IRS on income earned outside the US as well as
within the country.
Well, she could always do what Mr. Capitalism Bill Browder did, and renounce her American
citizenship. The US government has demonstrated on more than one occasion that, in his case,
it does not hold that against him although he plainly did it for tax reasons.
" Persons who wish to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware of the fact that
renunciation of U.S. citizenship may have no effect on their U.S. tax or military service
obligations (contact the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Selective Service for more
information). In addition, the act of renouncing U.S. citizenship does not allow persons to
avoid possible prosecution for crimes which they may have committed or may commit in the
future which violate United States law, or escape the repayment of financial obligations,
including child support payments, previously incurred in the United States or incurred as
United States citizens abroad "
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-legal-considerations/us-citizenship/Renunciation-US-Nationality-Abroad.html
They still get you even when you're no longer an American citizen.
Oh, bullshit. If a former American like, say, Bill Browder, murders somebody in England, the
USA is going to get nowhere demanding his extradition to be tried as a previous American
citizen for murder. What would be the use of renouncing one's citizenship as an American if
all American rules still apply to you?
I can see the US authorities going after you if you renounced your citizenship just to
escape child support or alimony, providing you have a job in your new country. But I don't
see how the USA could just access your bank account – in another country – and
drain off payments; doesn't sovereignty count for anything?
Presumably, as well, the USA is not going to get into a pissing contest with the British
Royal Family over what it claims as its share of Markle's newfound wealth.
Buffoon Boris of Bullingdon Club notoriety and British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
risability got whacked with a US tax bill because he too was a US citizen. He huffed and
puffed and said he would not pay and would renounce his being one of the Exceptional Nation.
In the end, he coughed up what he owed, but he still renounced his US citizenship.
I assume the passage I quoted is basically saying that renouncing US citizenship will not
automatically wipe out previous or outstanding unpaid tax liabilities, crimes committed in
the past in territories under US jurisdiction or future crimes in the same territories. So
even if the Markly One does renounce US citizenship, any income she receives individually or
jointly with her husband, including gifts, can still be subjected to taxation if she still
owes unpaid tax to the authorities.
Then that's probably reasonable – the United States could recover income from her up to
the amount she has outstanding in US taxes. Unless she has one of those
invisible-but-building student loans, such a sum would probably not amount to much. But the
way the law is worded suggests US citizenship is far more a curse than a gift, in that
renouncing it frees you from none of the responsibilities. It implies that American law
follows you around like a bridal train.
As part of their hissy fit over a Russian in charge of Interpol (a Russian whose brother is a
Ukrainian diplomat lol), Senators wants it so anyone whose name is put on a red notice by
Russia cannot be denied entry or asylum.
Reminds me of when Castro sent all the trash from Cuba to the United States once they made
a similar law.
That'd be awesome. Get the bunting and the confetti ready at O'Hare for the arrival of a
couple of hundred Pavlenskys, who will promptly nail their sacks to the parking lot of the 35
East Wacker Building, a Chicago landmark. Most appropriate. I think you will agree.
Just this morning (Monday 19 Nov) the Russian prosecutor's office opened a criminal case
against William Browder. He is accused of (1) organizing a criminal gang, (2) poisoning his
gang member Sergei Magnitsky, and (3) also killing several other members of the gang. It is
alleged that Browder used military-level "diversionary chemical substances" [whatever that
is] mixed to aluminium, to form the poison.
Browder denies the charges, and also points the finger at Major-General Alexander
Prokopchuk of the Russian Federation police. Prokopchuk is in the running to become head of
Interpol. Which, if he does, he said he will pursue Bill Browder to the ends of the earth,
and nowhere on this planet will it be safe for him any more.
Which is why Browder is worried about Prokopchuk's nomination.
Now we know why the UK staged the Skripal farce. It is a redirection attempt to make Browder
look like a victim. The fallout of Browder being convicted of using chemical weapons from
criminal purposes would make NATzO look bad since NATzO invested itself in his "victimhood"
and elevated the corrupt accountant Magnitsky into a human rights martyr saint.
I imagine they mean the poison was mixed with other substances to conceal the presence of the
poison itself, since he would certainly be autopsied if he died. And poisoning would
certainly explain his very sudden and rapid turn for the worse. But Browder never visited him
– neither did anyone from Hermitage Capital Management or Firestone Duncan, to the best
of my knowledge. Browder's story was always that Magnitsky was the sole employee left behind,
because he – Browder – had pulled everyone else out, for their safety. Who
administered the poison? And in what circumstances – Browder's story also was that
Magnitsky died from beatings and neglect, in that the prison authorities would not let anyone
bring him the medicine he needed for a known condition. In medicine would be the perfect way
to deliver a poison, but Browder's story was that he was denied medicine, and he'd surely be
suspicious of anything else, wouldn't he? Here, Sergey; brought you a nice meat pie, old man.
quite apart from the likelihood that prison authorities would not let non-family visitors
give him any food, since he was the prosecution's star witness.
Of all the fuckers who simply make up scurrilous crap about Russia and Russians, Browder
is the one I'd most like to see them get. My dream is that he would go to prison in Russia,
but we mustn't be greedy, and I think we all know that will never happen.
Could aluminium phosphide have been put into Magnitsky's cell in the form of tablets or
pellets mixed with water, supposedly to get rid of an insect or rat infestation?
Inhaling the compound is as dangerous as consuming it and inhalation could have caused his
fatal heart attack. Water would be an ideal way to transport the poison especially if it is
colourless in that medium.
Come to think of it, my earlier comment was unnecessarily complicated: the poison, if it had
been aluminium phosphide, only had to be given to Magnitsky in a glass of water when he got
thirsty.
Don't need exotic "made only in Russia" chemicals. AlP is not going to leave a trail back to
its source. And both Al and P are found in the body so forensic identification is not
trivial.
Anything is possible, but visitors to the state's star witness would be viewed with the
greatest suspicion if they were not family, you would think, as doubtless the state would
have stressed what a valuable prisoner he potentially was. I would imagine they would be
subjected to a pretty thorough scan and search. And there would be a record of all visits and
visitors. Anyone who was Russian and still living in Russia would doubtless be investigated.
I think there's about three years left before the rest of the terms expire for all the judges Russia elected (including the one
from Russia).
I have no idea if the government actually values the ECHR, but they have a free excuse to leave if they desire. This is a court
with elected judges, and Russia's participation in it is already cut off.
I think Russia remains a participant in international institutions, despite how it is treated, in the hope that the current madness
will pass and things will go back to some approximation of the way they were instead of this constant agitation for war. It's
hard to walk away from organizations which took decades if not centuries to build, because once the door closes on you, you won't
be asked back. The west recognizes its mistake in ever letting Russia participate on an equal basis, and if it could ever get
rid of the Russian permanent-member UN veto, Washington at least would be over the moon with pleasure. The Russian veto has prevented
several opportunities for the USA to rampage and smash and regime-change as it loves to do, and once that restriction was gone
it could re-order the world to its heart's content. If Russia left voluntarily, the most it would ever be granted again would
be observer status.
Norway and Finland have accused Russia of causing GPS malfunction that ocurred during the latest NATO arsing around close to Russian
frontiers.
No evidence given, mind.
"Norway has determined that Russia was responsible for jamming GPS signals in the Kola Peninsula" said a Nato spokesman.
Then the Norwegian Ministry of Defence stated that had traced the source of jamming that ocurred in Norway and Finnish Lapland
"to a Russian military base on the Kola Peninsula".
So then the Finnish prime minister joined in with the condemnation, whilst at the same time conceding that the Norwegian authorities
were unlikely to present any proof, saying that there still was "every reason to trust them",
It's that old "very likely" mantra again! Loud accusations and nothing to back up the accusations.
I wonder when former Secretary of State for the USA Kerry is going to present evidence that he uneqivocally stated the US had
as regards the persons who were responsible for downing MH-17.
He started shouting his mouth off about this before the bodies of those who died as a result of that tragedy were even stiff.
Quite a bit like that stranded Russian secret submarine in Swedish waters, which was sending distress signals that the Swedes
or somebody in that neck of the woods was picking up. A great burst of alarms and outcries, no proof, nothing shown to the public,
silence and then forgetting. It'll be the same this time; it has become fashionable in western circles to accuse Russia of all
manner of aggression, and brings approval from Washington and Brussels. Hopefully Russia has a longer memory.
I wonder if they will tie the collision of the Norwegian frigate with the tanker to GPS jamming – they didn't know where they
were, poor dears. But warships use a gyro to navigate, not GPS. Still, fortune favours the bold.
The frigate Helge Ingstad and the oil tanker Sola collided near Bergen which, if I am not mistaken, has to be at least 2,300 km
away from the Kola Peninsula and any Russian military bases there.
Yes; Russian GPS jamming in this incident is beyond unlikely. I'm just being sarcastic. Like I said, it has become fashionable
to blame Russia for everything bad that happens, no matter how preposterous the case.
There's a captain who is all finished in the navy, even if he/she doesn't go to jail for incompetence. Responsibility stops
with the Captain no matter what happens because he is responsible overall for everything that happens in his ship, but in a congested
waterway with limited maneuverability, he would be on the bridge and in command. There will be no sloughing it off on a junior
officer. And the part about turning on their AIS after the collision just makes it look like they were trying to cover up. What
a disaster.
Incidentally, if anyone was wondering why so little has been mentioned about the crew and suspected some political dimension
– congratulations. Four of five navigators aboard Helge Ingstad were women, and the Norwegian Armed Forces had barely gotten done
championing her as a stake in the heart of the patriarchy. Jeez; we just can't get away from it, can we?
In the Norwegian magazine, Armed Forces Forum No. 2 in 2017 it was stated that "Four out of five navigators on frigate KNM
Helge Ingstad are women".
"It is advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a natural thing and a completely different environment, which
I look at as positive," Lieutenant Iselin Emilie Jakobsen Ophus said. She is a navigation officer at KNM Helge Ingstad, according
to Defense Forum. In yet another politically correct nod, the text notes that: "The Navy receives a much higher number of women
after general conscription duty was introduced. Therefore, more women are also more motivated for further career opportunities
in the Armed Forces."
"There has always been a perception that the Armed Forces are characterized by a very masculine environment, and in many
ways it is true. It is mostly men in the Armed Forces, but it is important for me to show that you do not have to be 'one of the
guys' to assume a role in the Armed Forces. Finding one's place should not be at the expense of being a woman," said Ophus.
When more women are able to work together, it becomes easier to discover and to create a more balanced defense, the Armed
Forces Forum opined. "It is important that the integration of women should work in every aspect: from officers and constables,
to people," Ophus said, adding: "The most important thing for me is that my job makes sense because you work for something bigger
than yourself."
In the same magazine where the Norwegians boast about gender equality in their Navy, they also explained that they are looking
into every department of their Armed Forces to apply the same formula.
Gender would have had nothing to do with this accident; a woman can fuck up just as easily as a man and no more. But all that
bunk about it being 'important to be a woman, and not acting like one of the guys to find one's place aboard' is just that – bunk.
On board you are just a sailor and you have a job to do that does not require you to showcase your womanhood. Similarly, 'having
a lot of women on board' is no more 'advantageous' than having a lot of men. All that politically-correct bullshit looks very
unfortunate now.
The ship was not insured – I'm pretty sure you cannot get coverage for a warship, and lots of personal insurance policies have
a clause which states that if you die as a result of combat action in war you are not covered, something a lot of people do not
know – and will be a total loss. That loss will equal Norway's entire annual defense budget, according to this source. If you
watch the maritime center's radar recording, Helge Ingstad displayed no AIS identifier and was doing more than 17 knots just before
the collision. She appeared to intend to cross the tanker's bow, but if that was the intent it was beyond stupid because that
course would have taken her into the center of the passage where several other ships were on similar opposing courses.
It is important to note that input from the navigator in home waters would normally not be required, and navigating such a
well-traveled waterway would be an exercise in chart-reading and radar-picture management which would fall to the Officer of the
Watch regardless whether he/she is a navigator. But the Captain would normally be on the bridge when other marine traffic was
expected in close proximity, because mistakes happen.
"Traditional political blindness": Russia has responded to the adoption of the UN resolution on the Crimea
In the Crimea, the adoption of the UN resolution on alleged human rights violations on the peninsula has been condemned. In
the state Duma and the Federation Council, representatives of the region and local legislators are confident that the Ukraine,
which presented this document to be voted on, is trying to present to the world the best image of itself that it can,whilst thos
countries that support the position that the Ukraine has taken are displaying "political blindness". RT interlocutors stressed
that after the reunification with Russia, there had been created all the conditions for inhabitants of the peninsula regardless
of their ethnic or religious affiliation. The Commissioner for human rights in the republic, Lyudmila Lubina, had invited UN representatives
to visit the Crimea. They were convinced of the absence of violations. An earlier positive assessment of the situation in the
region had been given by independent delegations from the United States, Germany, Italy and other countries.
The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly, which is responsible for social, humanitarian and cultural issues, adopted
a resolution proposed by the Ukraine that condemns alleged violations of human rights on Crimea territory.
67 countries voted in support of the document, 26 against: 82 countries abstained. The number of countries that adhere to neutrality
in this matter has increased: in the year 2017 in a similar situation, 76 countries abstained and in 2016 -- 77.
The text of the resolution was made in Kiev. It reported on the "illegal establishment of Russian Federation laws, jurisdiction
and administration" in the region. According to the authors of the document, on the peninsula there is "increased pressure on
communities of religious minorities, including frequent police raids, threats and harassment against supporters of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate and Protestant churches, mosques and Muslim religious schools, the Greek Catholics, the
Roman Catholics and "Jehovah's Witnesses", and the "groundless prosecution of dozens of peaceful Muslims for their alleged affiliation
to the Islamic organizations" was condemned
"Uncompromising war with Russia"
Deputy permanent representative of Russia to the UN, Gennady Kuzmin, commented on the content of the resolution, noting
the aggressiveness of the text presented by the Ukraine.
"The authors have tried hard to present the situation in the Crimea as a kind of armed conflict, using terms like "annexation",
and occupation". According to this terminology, the Ukraine for four years has been waging an uncompromising war against Russia.
But Russia has simply been part of this war: no one is going to quarrel with the Ukrainian people, who have the same blood ties.
To punish the population of the Crimea for its choice in favouring Russia will not succeed", he stressed.
The Russian diplomat also pointed out that the referendum on the reunification of the Crimea with Russia was carried out
strictly in accordance with international law.The inhabitants of the peninsula voted openly, expressing their desire "to live
without the new Ukrainian idol: Bandera, Shukhevych and other Nazi collaborators" and to defend their right to education in and
to speak freely in their native language: Russian, Ukrainian or Crimean Tatar.
"No oppression. None"
In the Crimea there is outrage over the text of the resolution. Representatives of the region in the Federation Council
and the state Duma emphasize that the situation on the peninsula does not correspond to what is set out in the document.
"There is neither oppression of religious minorities nor raids, arrests and persecution as regards freedom of speech and
freedom of religion. Moreover, all conditions have been created to meet the needs of all religious communities", said Sergey Tsekov,
a member of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs of the Republic of the Crimea in an interview with RT
The violations that were noted in the UN resolution have been created by the Ukraine, the "illusion of non-existent human
rights abuses in the Crimea", said Vice-Premier of the Crimean government, Dmitry Polonsky.
"That political blindness has become a tradition for nearly 70 states (those that voted for the resolution. -- RT) does
not surprise anyone. This disease does not allow them to see the amazing extent of human rights violations in the Ukraine, which
already for several years has been waging war against its own people on the territory of the Donbass", said the Crimean government
representative.
Sadly, international institutions don't really matter any more, since the ridiculous obeisance you have to show to gain their
approval amounts to a complete abrogation of sovereignty. In this the USA has managed its greatest success in Ukraine; Washington
chafes under the burden of upholding all the regulations it helped write in order to place hobbles on others, not itself, and
now finds it has little use for international law or international regulation. So it has created the conditions for its irrelevance.
Countries that pay their political figures high salaries to sit in the UN and bleat and blather are wasting their money; they
should just remove their representatives and bring them home, and teach them some useful trade.
Human rights evaluation by a popularity vote. What a joke! Give us real cases of abuse and not claims by Tatar clowns based outside
Crimea. All of the sudden Crimean Tatars are the most precious minority in the world. They have to be given everything they demand
or it is oppression. How come Canada's native population gets to rot on reservation ghettos and nobody cares? America ripped up
the last of the substantial treaties it had with the aboriginals during the 1960s and expropriated their lands. Last time I checked
2014 is not 1930 and nobody is in a rush to give the US aboriginals back their lands.
All of it is designed to irritate Russia, with a secondary function of reassuring Ukraine that the west is in its corner. That's
pretty good value for money, when you think about it – the Ukies will go on struggling for the price of a pat on the head, and
the west does not have to actually buy their stuff or support them beyond a couple of billion in emergency aid once a year or
so. But the whole effort is gaining next to no traction at all; I can't even remember the last time I saw Mustafa Dzemilev mugging
with the adults, looking like a little wrinkled kid dressed in his dad's clothes. Absent urgent entreaties from the Crimeans themselves,
it all just looks like harassment. The west just has to do something for the Two Minutes Hate.
"... "He [Browder] is afraid of the Russian probe that has conclusive evidence of his financial crimes and proof that his theory of Magnitsky's death is an absolute fake. That's why Browder is ready to stage any provocation," ..."
"... "influenced by the fact that the entire network of offshore companies that make up his organized criminal group is located on the territory of Cyprus." ..."
"... "the Cypriot government is actively assisting the Russian government in furthering human rights violations through assistance with politically motivated prosecutions, in contravention of its obligations under European conventions," ..."
A group of MEPs have urged Cyprian authorities not to cooperate with Russia on an inquiry
against the man behind the Magnitsky Act, William Browder. Now, a Russian lawyer claims that
Browder himself arranged this petition to hide data on his operations.
Browder, a US-born British investor and the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, fears
that his fraudulent investment schemes involving offshore assets in Cyprus would be revealed to
European authorities if Cyprus continues to cooperate with Moscow on its probe against him,
Natalya Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who conducted her own investigation into Browder's
operations, told RT. She added that Browder is actively trying to paint the investigation
against him as politically motivated.
"He [Browder] is afraid of the Russian probe that has conclusive evidence of his
financial crimes and proof that his theory of Magnitsky's death is an absolute fake. That's why
Browder is ready to stage any provocation," Veselnitskaya said. She went on to say that
the investor's decision to intervene was particularly "influenced by the fact that the
entire network of offshore companies that make up his organized criminal group is located on
the territory of Cyprus."
The incident that Veselnitskaya was referring to took place in late October 2017. At that
time, 17 members of the European Parliament appealed to Cypriot President Nikos Anastasiades in
an open letter, in which they called on him to stop assisting Russia in its investigation
against Browder.
The MEPs particularly expressed their concerns over the fact that "the Cypriot
government is actively assisting the Russian government in furthering human rights violations
through assistance with politically motivated prosecutions, in contravention of its obligations
under European conventions," as reported
by the local Cyprus Mail daily.
"... "The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky." ..."
"... This is not some funny Skripal affair. This is a real case of several murders (see four cold bodies) ordered by the known scoundrel. ..."
"The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all
of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him
unfolded.
The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare
water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths An investigation into four possible murders has
been opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky The prosecutors claim that Browder was the
party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky."
– This is not some funny Skripal affair. This is a real case of several murders
(see four cold bodies) ordered by the known scoundrel.
That Browder (a liar and cheat that made a huge fortune in Russia) has "benefited most
from the death of Magnitsky" is undoubtedly true.
Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama proudly, even imperially, described it when
delivering the Commencement address to America's future generals, at West Point Military
Academy, on
28 May 2014 :
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation . [Every other nation is
therefore 'dispensable'; we therefore now have "Amerika, Amerika über alles, über
alles in der Welt".] That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the
century to come. America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else
will...
Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's
economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle
classes compete with us. [He was here telling these future U.S. military leaders that they
are to fight for the U.S. aristocracy, to help them defeat any nation that resists.] ...
In Ukraine, Russia's recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern
Europe. But this isn't the Cold War. Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia
right away. [He was proud of the U.S. Government's effectiveness at
propaganda, just as Hitler was proud of the German Government's propaganda-effectiveness
under Joseph Goebbels.] Because of American leadership, the world immediately condemned
Russian actions; Europe and the G7 joined us to impose sanctions; NATO reinforced our
commitment to Eastern European allies; the IMF is helping to stabilize Ukraine's economy;
OSCE monitors brought the eyes of the world to unstable parts of Ukraine.
No other nation regularly invades other nations that never had invaded it. This is
international aggression. It is the international crime of "War of Aggression" ; and the only
nations which do it nowadays are America and its allies, such as the Sauds, Israel, France, and
UK, which often join in America's aggressions (or, in the case of the Sauds' invasion of Yemen,
the ally initiates an invasion, which the U.S. then joins). America's generals are taught this
aggression, and not only by Obama. Ever since at least George W. Bush, it has been solid U.S.
policy. (Bush even kicked out the U.N.'s weapons-inspectors, so as to bomb Iraq in 2003.)
In other words: a mono-polar world is a world in which one nation stands above international
law, and that nation's participation in an invasion immunizes also each of its allies who join
in the invasion, protecting it too from prosecution, so that a mono-polar world is one in which
the United Nations can't even possibly impose international law impartially, but can impose it
only against nations that aren't allied with the mono-polar power, which in this case is the
United States. Furthermore, because the U.S. regime reigns supreme over the entire world, as it
does, any nations -- such as Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua,
Cuba, and Ecuador -- that the U.S. regime (which
has itself been scientifically proven to be a dictatorship ) chooses to treat as an enemy,
is especially disadvantaged internationally. Russia and China, however, are among the five
permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and therefore possess a degree of international
protection that America's other chosen enemies do not. And the people who choose which nations
to identify as America's 'enemies' are America's super-rich and not the entire American
population, because
the U.S. Government is controlled by the super-rich and not by the public .
If one of the five permanent members of the Security Council would table at the U.N. a
proposal to eliminate the immunity that the U.S. regime has, from investigation and prosecution
for any future War of Aggression that it might perpetrate, then, of course, the U.S. and any of
its allies on the Security Council would veto that, but if the proposing nation would then
constantly call to the international public's attention that the U.S. and its allies had
blocked passage of such a crucially needed "procedure to amend the UN
charter" , and that this fact means that the U.S. and its allies constitute fascist regimes
as was understood and applied against Germany's fascist regime, at the Nuremberg Tribunal in
1945, then possibly some members of the U.S.-led gang (the NATO portion of it, at least) would
quit that gang, and the U.S. global dictatorship might end, so that there would then become a
multi-polar world, in which democracy could actually thrive.
Democracy can only shrivel in a mono-polar world, because all other nations then are simply
vassal nations, which accept Obama's often-repeated dictum that all other nations are
"dispensable" and that only the U.S. is not. Even the UK would actually gain in freedom, and in
democracy, by breaking away from the U.S., because it would no longer be under the U.S. thumb
-- the thumb of the global aggressor-nation.
Only one global poll has ever been taken of the question "Which
country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?" and it found
that, overwhelmingly, by a three-to-one ratio above the second-most-often named country, the
United States was identified as being precisely that, the top threat to world-peace . But then,
a few years later, another (though less-comprehensive) poll was taken on a similar question,
and it produced
similar results . Apparently, despite the effectiveness of America's propagandists, people
in other lands recognize quite well that today's America is a more successful and
longer-reigning version of Hitler's Germany. Although modern America's propaganda-operation is
far more sophisticated than Nazi Germany's was, it's not entirely successful. America's
invasions are now too common, all based on lies, just like Hitler's were.
On November 9th, Russian Television headlined "'Very insulting': Trump bashes
Macron's idea of European army for protection from Russia, China & US" and reported
that "US President Donald Trump has unloaded on his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, calling
the French president's idea of a 'real European army,' independent from Washington, an insult."
On the one hand, Trump constantly criticizes France and other European nations for allegedly
not paying enough for America's NATO military alliance, but he now is denigrating France for
proposing to other NATO members a decreasing reliance upon NATO, and increasing reliance,
instead, upon the
Permanent Structured Cooperation (or PESCO) European military alliance , which was begun on
11 December 2017, and which currently has "25 EU Member States participating: Austria, Belgium,
Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary,
Italy, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania,
Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden." Those are the European nations that are now on the path
to eventually quitting NATO.
Once NATO is ended, the U.S. regime will find far more difficult any invasions such as of
Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, Yemen 2016-, and maybe even such as America's bloody coup
that overthrew the democratically elected Government of Ukraine and installed a racist-fascist or
nazi anti-Russian regime there in 2014 . All of these U.S. invasions (and coup) brought to
Europe millions of refugees and enormously increased burdens upon European taxpayers. Plus,
America's economic sanctions against both Russia and Iran have hurt European companies (and the
U.S. does almost no business with either country, so is immune to that, also). Consequently,
today's America is clearly Europe's actual main enemy. The continuation of NATO is actually
toxic to the peoples of Europe. Communism and the Soviet Union and its NATO-mirroring Warsaw
Pact military alliance, all ended peacefully in 1991, but
the U.S. regime has secretly continued the Cold War, now against Russia , and is
increasingly focusing its "regime-change" propaganda against Russia's
popular democratic leader, Vladimir Putin, even though this U.S. aggression against Russia
could mean a world-annihilating nuclear war.
Europe's desire to create its own army and stop relying on Washington for defense is not
only understandable, but would be "positive" for the multipolar world, Vladimir Putin said
days after Donald Trump ripped into it.
" Europe is a powerful economic union and it is only natural that they want to be
independent and sovereign in the field of defense and security," Putin told RT in Paris where
world leader gathered to mark the centenary of the end of WWI.
He also described the potential creation of a European army "a positive process," adding
that it would "strengthen the multipolar world." The Russian leader even expressed his
support to French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently championed this idea by saying that
Russia's stance on the issue "is aligned with that of France" to some extent.
Macron recently revived the ambitious plans of creating a combined EU military force by
saying that it is essential for the security of Europe. He also said that the EU must become
independent from its key ally on the other side of the Atlantic, provoking an angry reaction
from Washington.
Once NATO has shrunk to include only the pro-aggression and outright nazi European nations, such as
Ukraine (after the U.S. gang accepts Ukraine into NATO, as it almost certainly then would
do), the EU will have a degree of freedom and of democracy that it can only dream of today, and
there will then be a multi-polar world, in which the leaders of the U.S. will no longer enjoy
the type of immunity from investigation and possible prosecution, for their invasions, that
they do today. The result of this will, however, be catastrophic for the top 100
U.S. 'defense' contractors , such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon,
because then all of those firms' foreign sales except to the Sauds, Israel and a few other
feudal and fascist regimes, will greatly decline. Donald Trump is doing everything he can to
keep the Sauds to the agreements he reached with them back in 2017 to buy
$404 billion of U.S. weaponry over the following 10 years . If, in addition, those firms
lose some of their European sales, then the U.S. economic boom thus far in Trump's Presidency
will be seriously endangered. So, the U.S. regime, which is run by the owners
of its 'defense'-contractors , will do all it can to prevent this from happening.
"... With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends. ..."
"... Full scale bull ****. No single former Soviet bloc country get into economic level of pre-Berlin wall fall. They are done. ..."
With all due cynical respect... I find it highly ironic that some of the biggest money
launderers and Mafiosi are Baltic banks. The hilarity never ends.
Here is classic: GDP PPP per capita. What to pay attention.
#1, After 30 years and joining EU and NATO there is no difference in former Soviet bloc.
Just looks like Russia is greatest profiteer. Now those parasites are chained to west.
#2, countries of former Soviet bloc are in better shape than countries that were in sphere
of western imperialism. Especially look at countries where USA imperialism worked since 1823
Monroe's doctrine. Chart shows that in 200 years USA was not able to achieve much progress
despite permanent military interventions and political influence.
As much as I like the idea of taking my state to Estonia status, too many winner-take-all
politicians and weak thinkers to recognize that new borders would solve lots and lots of
problems.
Socialists are clearly smart, but in actuality just simple evil, immoral thieves. They
will be unlikely to support any secession because they know their enemies are the source of
their lucre.
Balkanization, what little there will be, will most likely come after we are drug into
WWIII and we are back to a 1700's subsistence existence.
A pessimist is never disappointed, but I will happily take an optimist's surprise if
people just stop and live and let live.
.............. try, try to "Unchain America" next July 4. What better way to celebrate
Independence Day than with a joining of hands across the land, if not to secede, then to
affirm our right to, one state at a time?
It's 2,790 miles from New York to Los Angeles, which is 14,731,200 feet. At three feet per
person, it would take around 4,910,400 people -- less than 1/66th of the US population -- to
make a human chain like the three Balkan states did.
"... Along with Nemtsov, Kara-Murza was an early backer of the US congressional passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which targets Russian oligarchs and officials who support the Putin regime and are accused of corruption and human rights abuses. ..."
"... Since 2014, Kara-Murza has worked for the Open Russia Foundation, which was founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who rose to become one of the most powerful and richest oligarchs of Russia during the 1990s and was imprisoned by Putin in 2003. ..."
"... Gessen also teaches at Columbia University's Journalism School and is the brother of Masha Gessen, who has been heavily involved in the anti-Putin media propaganda for many years. ..."
On Wednesday, October 17, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a leading Russian liberal oppositionist, was interviewed by Keith Gessen, editor
of the n+1 magazine, in an event hosted by Columbia University's Harriman Institute for the Study of Eurasia, Russia and
Eastern Europe. The event was a stark testimony to the advanced preparations for a US-backed "color revolution" in Russia, i.e.,
an imperialist-orchestrated and funded movement of a section of the oligarchy and upper middle class to topple the Putin regime,
similar to those that have taken place in Ukraine and Georgia.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is one of the many shadowy figures of Russian politics who, while little known to most people inside or outside
Russia, are playing a key role in directing and supporting the US anti-Russia policy and the course of the Russian pro-US liberal
opposition. The son of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Sr., who was a major figure in the oligarch-controlled Russian media under Boris Yeltsin
in the 1990s, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Jr. worked for many years as the right-hand man of Boris Nemtsov, one of Yeltsin's key allies
in the 1990s and a right-wing political opponent of Putin, who was assassinated in 2015 under murky circumstances.
Along with Nemtsov, Kara-Murza was an early backer of the US congressional passage of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, which targets
Russian oligarchs and officials who support the Putin regime and are accused of corruption and human rights abuses. He has lobbied
for the adoption of similar legislation by governments throughout the world. Through this work, Kara-Murza also became close to the
late John McCain, one of Washington's foremost supporters of "color revolutions" throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union.
In August, Kara-Murza served as a pallbearer at McCain's funeral, along with former Vice President Joe Biden and the actor Warren
Beatty.
Since 2014, Kara-Murza has worked for the Open Russia Foundation, which was founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who rose to become
one of the most powerful and richest oligarchs of Russia during the 1990s and was imprisoned by Putin in 2003.
In short, Kara-Murza has been at the center of the operations for a color-revolution-type movement in Russia for years. And this
is precisely what he was invited to speak on with the self-styled leftist and Russia expert Keith Gessen, founding editor of the
n+1 magazine, one of the most popular magazines among pseudo-left circles. (Gessen also teaches at Columbia University's
Journalism School and is the brother of Masha Gessen, who has been heavily involved in the anti-Putin media propaganda for many years.)
The event started with Keith Gessen asking Kara-Murza about the
assassination of Boris Nemtsov which the
latter, of course, attributed to the Kremlin. For most of the discussion, however, Kara-Murza detailed his involvement in the preparations
for a color revolution in Russia.
Kara-Murza insisted that "the history of Russia teaches us that big political changes in our country can start quickly and unexpectedly."
He referred to both the 1905 Revolution and the February Revolution of 1917, which, as Kara-Murza pointed out, even took Lenin by
surprise, and then the collapse of the USSR "in three days" in 1991. "This is how things happen in Russia", he insisted, and "the
problem with this is that nobody is prepared. We [at the Open Russia Foundation] see it as our mission to begin those preparations
for future change now. We cannot afford to not be ready again. Most of the things we do inside of Russia is targeted at preparing
for this future transition."
The Open Russia Foundation, he continued, had 25 regional branches and a series of working groups which were already elaborating
plans for political reforms and constitutional changes for the post-Putin period. Furthermore, they were focusing on "work with the
new generation, the people who will be in charge of Russia" through training and education programs. Lastly, they were doing "international"
work, which he himself was in charge of, which included "outreach" directed, again, at preparing the "future transition."
When later asked by an audience member how he saw the future of Russia in the next few decades, he declared that this change would
come not within the next few decades, but within the next few years.
When he was asked from the audience whether the latest pension reform, which is opposed by over 90 percent of the population,
could trigger the kind of "sudden change" he was expecting, Kara-Murza said: "It could but it doesn't have to. There is always the
argument that it's [going to be] something of a socio-economic nature. Actually, if we look at the two decades of Putin, the peak
of the protests was in December 2011 when the middle class was booming. It was about dignity, it had nothing do to with social issues.
The trigger will not be necessarily economic."
He continued, "The only really shaky point [for Putin] was when so many people felt insulted that the government was wiping its
feet over them. I think it's going to be something like that. A color revolution of dignity," like the events in Ukraine in 2014.
In other words, what Kara-Murza and the Open Russia Foundation are working on is the promotion of a right-wing middle-class movement
similar to the Maidan in Ukraine, which would provide the basis for a coup to topple the current government.
The key figures and mechanisms for such a "color revolution" were also addressed at some length. Keith Gessen asked how Kara-Murza
viewed the campaign of the blogger Alexei Navalny, who, as the WSWS has written, is a
far-right, pro-US figure who cloaks his right-wing
program behind murky phrases about corruption. Just how fraudulent and politically calculated this focus is became clear in the discussion
when Keith Gessen asked whether Navalny's focus on corruption as the center of his political platform was "a winning platform." Kara-Murza
responded: "Yes, it is. Corruption is such a widely understandable issue. It's an issue that everybody is aware of."
In the discussion, a graduate student from Harriman asked whether the Open Russia Foundation had a "particular road map" for what
to do when the "sudden event" Kara-Murza expected actually occurred. Kara-Murza replied: "If there were a model, it would be something
like the Polish roundtable [of 1989]. The way we want a transition to happen in Russia is peaceful and smooth. We don't want a violent
revolution. Russia has had enough revolutions. The problem is that the people who are in power today are doing everything for a revolution
to occur."
Then, he went into the figures who would be included in such a roundtable. "Of course, Boris Nemtsov would have been at the roundtable",
but, he assured his audience, there were many others. The figures he named were: Yevgeni Roizman, the mayor of Yekaterinburg, who
is a notorious far-right-winger, with deep ties to the local mafia. In Russia, he became known above all through his alleged "drug"
relief program, which has involved heavy physical abuse of drug addicts.
He also named Galina Shirshina, a member of the liberal opposition party Yabloko (which Nemtsov led until his assassination) as
well as Lev Shlosberg, a local politician in Pskov who is also a leading member of "Yabloko." Finally, Kara-Murza named Dmitri Gudkov,
who is heading the opposition "Party of Changes" with Ksenia Sobchak, the daughter of Putin's mentor Anatoly Sobchak, who
ran as a presidential candidate this year
.
"Navalny and Khodorkovsky would obviously also be at the roundtable", Kara-Murza added. When Gessen asked "What about the Communists?"
Kara-Murza said that Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Stalinist and National Bolshevik "Left Front", may also hope for a seat at
the roundtable. "We have very different views, but we have a good personal relationship. He's a decent human being, politically and
on a human level."
Then, he added, "there are also many nationalists who are not controlled by the Kremlin" and who could join the roundtable. Throughout
the event, Kara-Murza repeated that he and his allies were the true patriots and Russian nationalists, as opposed to Putin and the
oligarchs and officials around him. "I just don't want to bore everyone with a long list of names," he said, as he concluded his
enumeration of prospective of roundtable participants.
Like all Russian liberal oppositionists, Kara-Murza makes a hue and cry about rigged elections under Putin. Yet at no point did
he even mention the possibility of an election before or after such a "roundtable," the participants of which have most evidently
already been discussed and set.
There could hardly be a more open statement about the complicity of the so called opposition forces in Russian in a premeditated,
US-backed plot to overthrow the Putin regime and install another, more pro-US, right-wing government in its place.
Kara-Murza speaks for a section of the oligarchy which not only seeks to gain control over the social and economic wealth of Russia,
but also fears that a continuation of the Putin regime will threaten not only Russia's geopolitical position, but also social revolution.
They see their main goal in making sure that a reshuffling within the oligarchy and upper middle class takes place, to assure both
a reorientation of Russian foreign policy more directly in line with the interests of imperialism, and the ongoing suppression of
the working class.
The complete indifference toward the implications of these policies for the masses of working people in Russia was at full display
when Kara-Murza defended the process of capitalist restoration and the 1990s as time when Russia was actually make headway on the
world stage: Russia was included in the G8 and finally internationally recognized, Kara-Murza stressed.
He contemptuously dismissed any criticism of the 1990s by referring to this decade as the "supposedly horrible 90s." The fact
that the Russian economy experienced the worst collapse recorded in modern history for peacetime; that life expectancy plummeted,
that hundreds of thousands committed suicide and were driven into substance abuse and that workers were going without pay for months
and years, all of this is evidently of no concern to him.
Underlining the recklessness of the whole operation, the question of the potential consequences of a "color revolution" was not
even raised. But anyone who looks at the past three decades of US foreign policy knows where this type of intervention of leads:
civil war, ethnic strife, dictatorial regimes, and decades of economic, social and economic crisis. In the case of Russia, a "color
revolution" would most likely mean the violent break-up of the Russian Federation -- many opposition leaders in fact argue for different
borders of Russia. It would, moreover, raise the very immediate danger of a nuclear catastrophe: what if a section of the military
resorts to the vast nuclear arsenal of Russia to defend its interests? And what will the US military and NATO do if a color revolution
underway in Russia suddenly threatens to go astray? Will they intervene directly militarily?
The involvement of Keith Gessen in this dubious event is revealing. At no point did he raise something akin to a critical question.
His role was nothing but to ask polite questions and provide Kara-Murza with a platform. A self-styled leftist, Gessen has translated
and published the writings of Kirill Medvedev, a leading figure in the Russian Socialist Movement (RSM), a Pabloite formation in
Russia. This year, he published a novel "A Terrible Country" in which he, yet again, promotes the Russian pseudo-left. In 2014, the
RSM fully backed the far-right coup in Kiev. In Russia itself, the RSM has long shifted toward full support for Alexei Navalny's
right-wing "anti-corruption campaign," ignoring or dismissing his history of support for Russian fascism and racism. The role of
Gessen in this event is emblematic of the role of these forces as handmaidens US and European imperialism.
It was befitting for Columbia University's Harriman Institute to host this event: the first interdisciplinary Russia institute
to be formed after the beginning of the Cold War, it has historically been associated with US imperialist plotting against first
the Soviet Union and then Russia. To this day, the Harriman Institute, which is a non-profit, functions primarily as a think tank
as well as an educational and recruiting center for Washington's foreign policy establishment and the CIA.
For much of its existence, the Harriman Institute was dominated by the figure and work of
Zbigniew Brzezinski who, for over half a
century, played a central role in elaborating the world strategy and justifying the war crimes of US imperialism. One of Brzezinski's
political trademarks was his advocacy for fostering political opposition and insurrections in the Soviet Union, to undermine the
regime and thus fight what he saw as one of the US's main competitors for the control of Eurasia. The "color revolution" strategy
of US imperialism since 1991 stands in precisely this tradition. Now as then, far-right forces within the elites and fake left tendencies
are the props of imperialism "on the ground."
Events like the one at Columbia reveal much about the state of world politics. "Color revolutions" which will impact the lives
of hundreds of millions and threaten civil and all-out nuclear war, are being discussed and plotted behind the exclusive doors of
an Ivy League institution with an audience of some 50 people, most of whom are graduate students and professors who, one may assume,
either already are on the payroll of the CIA and the State Department or seeking to get there.
The Putin regime offers no alternative to these imperialist machinations. Like the sections of the oligarchy that Kara-Murza speaks
for, Putin and his cronies have emerged out of and enriched themselves on the basis of the destruction of the Soviet Union which
was carried by the Stalinist bureaucracy hand-in-gloves with imperialism. It considers not imperialism, but the Russian working class
to be its main enemy, and, hence, responds to every imperialist provocation is a response of desperate attempts to find a deal with
imperialism, largely behind closed doors, and the promotion of nationalism and militarism at home.
This sinister event is a warning to the international working class about the advanced preparations for the next step in the efforts
of US imperialism to topple the Putin regime and bring the resources of Russia under its direct control: it is high time for workers
both in the US and in Russia to intervene in politics on an independent basis to put an end to these dangerous conspiracies of imperialism
through the struggle for socialism.
A tweetstorm consisting of quotes from Israel Shamir's excellent
article on Bill Browder showing how he operated in an entirely Jewish milieu. Jewish ethnic
networking is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
Kevin MacDonald @TOOEdit Jul 27, 2018
What makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This probably a uniquely Jewish
quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to political figures,
unz.com/ishamir/the-go...
The Untouchable Mr. Browder?
The Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and
international crime.
Russian NTV channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here they
present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand dollars was given by
Browder's structures officially to the senators and congressmen in order to promote the
Magnitsky Act
12:04 PM-Jul 27, 2018
Much bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff, mega-rich Jewish
American businessmen, said the researchers in two articles published on the Veteran News
Network and in The Huffington Post.
12:05 PM-Jul 27, 2018
Kevin MacDonald @TOOEdit Jul 27, 2018 # Replying to @TOOEdit
"Beneficiary of Browder's generosity is Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, the engine
behind Magnitsky Act. Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior
of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of Israel Lobby.
Kevin MacDonald @TOOEdit
"Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and
international crime. Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin." Lists other Jews he was involved with: Robert Maxwell, Safra,
Berezovsky,
We say Browder, but we mean MI6. He was a part of larger plan concocted by US intelligence agencies to decimate Russia after the dissolution of the USSR.
Of which Harvard mafia played even more important role. The fact that he gave up his U.S. citizenship in
1997 points to his association with MI6.
The level of distortions the US neoliberal MSM operated with in case of Magnitsky (starting with the widely repeated and
factually incorrect claim that he was a lawyers, in create a sympathy; their effort to portrait shady accountant involved in tax
fraud for Browder, as a fighter for justice should be described in a separate chapter on any modem book on the power of propaganda;
this is simply classic ) is compatible with lies and distortions of Skripal affair and point of strong interest ion
intelligence services in both.
Browder and Magnistsky affair really demonstrate that as for foreign events we already live "Matrix environment" of
artificial reality created by MSM and controlled by intelligence agencies and foreign policy establishment; and that ordinary people are forced into artificial
reality with little or no chance to escape.
Notable quotes:
"... Prevezon's American legal team alleged that Browder's story was full of holes -- and that the U.S. and other governments had relied on Browder's version without checking it. ..."
"... The chief American investigator, Todd Hyman of the Department of Homeland Security, testified in a deposition that much of the evidence in the government's complaint came from Browder and his associates. He also said the government had been unable to independently investigate some of Browder's claims. ..."
"... In court documents, Prevezon's lawyers alleged that Magnitsky was jailed not because he was a truth-seeker -- but because he was helping Browder's companies in tax evasion. ..."
"... The Prevezon attorneys charged that Browder "lied," and "manipulated" evidence to cover up his own tax fraud. ..."
"... The story was "contrived and skillfully sold by William F. Browder to politicians here and abroad to thwart his arrest for a tax fraud conviction in Russia," says a 2015 federal court filing by one of Prevezon's lawyers, Mark Cymrot of BakerHostetler. ..."
"... A Russian-born filmmaker named Andrei Nekrasov made a similar set of arguments in a docudrama released last year. Neither Prevezon nor the Russian government had a role in funding or making the film, both parties say, though Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin helped promote it. ..."
As Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya tells it, she met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump aides in New York
last summer to press her case against a widely accepted account of Russian malfeasance, one that underpins a set of sanctions against
Russians.
Trump Jr., who agreed to the June 2016 meeting
at the request of a Russian business associate with a promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton , has said he didn't find much to interest
him in the presentation. And little wonder: The subject is a dense and tangled web, hinging on a complex case that led Congress to
pass what is known as the Magnitsky Act. The law imposed sanctions on individual Russians accused of human rights violations. It
has nothing to do with Clinton.
But the substance of what the pair of Russian advocates say they came to discuss has a fascinating backstory.
It's an epic international dispute -- one that has pitted the grandson of a former American Communist who made a fortune as a
capitalist in Russia against a Russian leader who pines for the glory days of his country's Communist past.
That dossier,
published by Buzzfeed , made other, more salacious allegations about Trump, and FBI Director James Comey briefed the Republican
about it before he took office. The dossier is not favorable to Putin and the Russian government.
Simpson's role on both sides of the Putin divide is set to be explored in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday examining
the Justice Department's requirements for foreign lobbying disclosures.
Due to testify at the hearing is Simpson's longtime opponent in the Magnitsky dispute, William Browder, an American-born hedge-fund
investor who made millions investing in post-Soviet Russia and gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1997.
Simpson's lawyer said he would defy a subpoena to appear Wednesday because he was on vacation, and that he would decline to answer
questions anyway, citing his right against self-incrimination.
Browder, whose grandfather Earl led the American Communist Party, accuses Simpson of peddling falsehoods as an agent of the Russian
government. The law firm Simpson worked with on the case accused Browder in court papers of perpetrating a web of lies. Both men
dispute the allegations.
The Death of Sergei Magnitsky
The story begins with the November 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax accountant who was working for Browder, and
who later died in prison .
Browder's account of Magnitsky's death triggered international outrage. According to Browder, Magnitsky was a lawyer who had been investigating a theft of $230 million in tax rebates paid to Browder's
companies in Russia. Browder says his companies had been taken over illegally and without his knowledge by corrupt Russian officials.
Browder says Magnitsky was arrested as a reprisal by those same corrupt officials, and then was tortured and beaten to death.
Browder presented documents suggesting that some officials who benefited from the alleged fraud purchased property abroad.
That account led Congress to pass the so-called Magnitsky Act in 2012, imposing sanctions on the Russian officials who were alleged
to have violated Magnitsky's human rights.
The Russian government soon imposed a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, ostensibly for other reasons but done in
response, many experts say, to the Magnitsky sanctions.
Forty-four Russians are currently on the Magnitsky sanctions list maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department, meaning their U.S.
assets are frozen and they are not allowed to travel to the U.S.
Once a Putin supporter, Browder became one of the Russian leader's most ardent foes, spearheading a campaign to draw international
attention to the Magnitsky case. He and his employees at Hermitage Capital Management presented information to governments, international
bodies and major news organizations.
Browder's advocacy marks a shift from 2004, when, as one of Russia's leading foreign investors, he praised Putin so vigorously
that he was labeled Putin's
"chief cheerleader" by an analyst in a Washington Post article. Browder has said that Magnitsky's death spurred him to reexamine
his view of Putin.
The State Department, lawmakers of both parties and the Western news media have described the Magnitsky case in a way that tracks
closely with Browder's account. Browder's assertions are consistent with the West's understanding of the Putin government -- an authoritarian
regime that has been widely and credibly accused of murdering journalists and political opponents.
In 2013, the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office sued a Russian company, accusing it of laundering some of the proceeds of the fraud
Magnitsky allegedly uncovered. The complaint incorporated Browder's account about what happened to Magnitsky.
That lawsuit set in motion a process through which that version of events would come under challenge.
The defendant, a company called Prevezon, is owned by Denis Katsyv, who became wealthy while his father was vice governor and
transport minister for the Moscow region, according to published reports. The father, Pyotr Katsyv, is now vice president of the
state-run Russian Railways. Veselnitskaya has long represented the family.
Prevezon hired a law firm, BakerHostetler, and a team that included a longtime New York prosecutor, John Moscow. Also working
on Prevezon's behalf were Simpson, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin.
Simpson, a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, declined to comment.
Simpson also worked with former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele in the creation of the dossier that asserts Trump
collusion with Russian election interference. A source close to him said his work on the dossier was kept confidential from his other
clients.
The federal civil lawsuit by the Manhattan U.S. attorney against Prevezon was the first opportunity for the U.S. government to
publicly present whatever evidence it had to support its legal assertions regarding Magnitsky. It was also an opportunity for the
defendants to conduct their own investigation.
Prevezon's American legal team alleged that Browder's story was full of holes -- and that the U.S. and other governments had
relied on Browder's version without checking it. Browder and the U.S. government disagreed.
The chief American investigator, Todd Hyman of the Department of Homeland Security, testified in a deposition that much of
the evidence in the government's complaint came from Browder and his associates. He also said the government had been unable to independently
investigate some of Browder's claims.
In court documents, Prevezon's lawyers alleged that Magnitsky was jailed not because he was a truth-seeker -- but because
he was helping Browder's companies in tax evasion.
The Prevezon attorneys charged that Browder "lied," and "manipulated" evidence to cover up his own tax fraud.
The story was "contrived and skillfully sold by William F. Browder to politicians here and abroad to thwart his arrest for
a tax fraud conviction in Russia," says a 2015 federal court filing by one of Prevezon's lawyers, Mark Cymrot of BakerHostetler.
A Russian-born filmmaker named Andrei Nekrasov made a similar set of arguments in a docudrama released last year. Neither
Prevezon nor the Russian government had a role in funding or making the film, both parties say, though Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin
helped promote it.
Russians were robbed by Jewish people both domestic & foreign under Yeltsin & president Putin stopped them starting with Yukos
& Khodorkovsky & others like Berezovski fled to UK.
A similar history we found in the 30th in Germany which caused the rise of Adolf Hitler & his anti-Semitism ultimately ending
in the Holocaust.
Presently we see the same happening in USA where the Democratic establishment in media, industry & banks are fighting back
- using any illegal method in the book -against the white 'Waspy' Republicans of Trump. And let's not forget that the US population
is for 72% White!! That's NOT racism but pure & simple democracy at work.
Beckow says:
October 18, 2018 at 1:47 pm GMT 400
Words @Anon 2 You are right that
Central Europe – or more precisely Eastern Central Europe that includes Austria and parts of Germany – has been blesses with a rare
combination of good (great!) geography, enough resources, high quality demographics, good location and weather, fantastic infrastructure
and a relatively normal history. Western countries have suffered from a combination of imperial overreach and the inevitable blowback.
Westerners have also lost the due diligence habits that make civilizations last. They often seem lazy and unserious.
To the east the lawlessness of the open spaces, harsh weather, and the frequent exposures to the nihilistic Asiatic exotica, have
delayed the development of a viable, stable and pleasant way of life. They might get there eventually and I wish them all the best.
Russia has a lot of fundamentals going for it, but it is also possible that the mistakes of the past – and the pathological hatreds
Russia has engendered among the Western and other imperial crazies – will strike again. It is big and tempting.
The endless attempts to slice the borders of Russia, to shrink it as Brzezinski openly dreamt about, are a foolish thing that
might bury us all. A compulsion of obsessive map readers. Russia is at its most destabilising when it is weak. That's when the temptations
become too much and some nutcase – or a 'council' of idiots – push and push. Unfortunately for the imperial builders in the West
they missed their window of opportunity and they don't seem capable of admitting it. We get ' religious schisms ' just to
make sure that no stone remains unturned. It will amount to nothing. They will have to wait for the next dip, there always seems
to be one in the ennui filled steppes.
Central Europe (V4+) is about to take over as the most desirable place on the planet. That's why we are seeing the Western attacks
on it about some very basic and sound ideas like having borders, homogeneous populations, freedom of speech and peace with neighbours,
from the rapidly disintegrating Western world. West cannot stand to live with the mistakes they have made, they want to create a
multi-racial, neo-liberal, war mongering cataclysm in order to hide the painful truth of they have done. The demographic suicide
of the West is probably irreversible. Macron and Merkel can prance around and preach their silly slogans, but they cannot change
the numbers of the ground.
They can still convince some elderly Greek in Istanbul to pour more oil on the fire. What that shows is desperation; if all West
has left are these self-defeating intrigues, they don't have much.
The President has authority under the Global Magnitsky Act to impose sanctions against
anyone who has committed a human rights violation. Congress has already requested a HR
investigation which Trump must act on and report to them within 4 months
It appears my prediction of Saudi gate may be right. This potentially is good news for
Iran and Russia. Perhaps not so good for Trump and Saidis. Israel may not be happy. Perhaps
his wife's plane troubles were a warning shot to remind him who is boss. Who knows ?
Haleys resignation beginning to make sense now. The House of Trump and House of Saud may
soon fall, and Bibi wont be happy losing Trump and MBS. We all know what they are capable of
to get things back on track
Why did the media held back on this so for so long?
Yemen (and Gaza).
CGTN & Al-Jazeera are the only global news outlets consistently and regularly reporting on the US facilitated
genocides in Yemen and Jewish-occupied Palestine/Gaza.
The never-ending Khashoggi non-mystery mystery keeps Yemen & Gaza out of the Jew-controlled Western Media
headlines. Saudi Barbaria and "Israel" are natural allies because each of them is an artificial Western political
construct with a cowardly and incompetent military apparatus and an anti-heroic penchant for slaughtering undefended
civilians - for psychopathic reasons.
--------
Talking about psychopathy...
Oz's Christian Zionist PM, Sco Mo, is blathering about following Trump's lead and moving Oz's Embassy in "Israel" to
Jerusalem. Sc Mo, who has never had an original idea in his life, still hasn't woken up to the fact that Trump's
Jerusalem gambit was a trap for Bibi. So it's hilarious that Sco Mo The Unoriginal, is planning to take a flying
leap into the same trap!
Anyone with more than half a brain would realise that...
1. No civilised country has followed Trump's lead.
2. Trump can, and will, reverse his (illegal) Jerusalem decision out of a 'new-found respect' for International Law.
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Oct 18, 2018 12:14:08 AM |
83
Whoever is ultimately behind this campaign (which I
suspect is a loose association of interest groups spread throughout SA, Turkey, London citi, wall street, whoever)
they will not stop until MbS is paraded through the streets in chains or at least his head at the end of a lance. At
this point the only question how many days will it take to see his head on a pike?
"Their target that night: Anssaf Ali Mayo, the local leader of the Islamist
political party Al-Islah. The UAE considers Al-Islah to be the Yemeni branch of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood,
which the UAE calls a terrorist organization. Many experts insist that Al-Islah, one of whose members won the Nobel
Peace Prize, is no terror group. They say it's a legitimate political party that threatens the UAE not through
violence but by speaking out against its ambitions in Yemen."
"... What we are seeing now are the consequences of classic imperial over-reach – extending one's power so far and so generally that it hoists itself upon its own petard! The implosion of the USA continues afoot, Hillary Clinton being one of its cheerleaders (according to her recent Amappaling interview). ..."
The whole Magnitsky Act thing was supposed to be a convenient tool of western foreign
policy cloaked in Human Rights sugar to justify punished the usual suspects ad
perpituitam, not for attacking allies. It looks like some US politicians actually think it is
about human rights! They'll need to practice their best acting to explain why some are on the
list and others aren't, along with compliant media and governments.
What we are seeing now are the consequences of classic imperial over-reach –
extending one's power so far and so generally that it hoists itself upon its own petard! The
implosion of the USA continues afoot, Hillary Clinton being one of its cheerleaders
(according to her recent Amappaling interview).
Trump is also promising a rapid USG reaction to India buying S-400s, so it really is time
to stock up on the popcorn. I knew for sure that this year would certainly be more
interesting than last year, but 2019 should be a corker. Woo.
I suspect The Netherlands are being targeted because among other things the International Court of Crimes and the International
Court of Justice are based in The Hague. There may be other reasons as well: the Dutch must have a fair few skeletons in their
collective closet and the US could very well target one of these and bring the entire wardrobe crashing down and exposing all
its sordid secrets.
One of these bone-shakers is that The Netherlands is a major corporate tax haven and as such competes with Britain and the
US.
Pence is now accusing of China of hacking the US elections. I know China has been lobbying and making campaign finance contributions
in the past, but the US accusations have a clear pattern. Recall how US blacks were tagged as rapists of fine white virgins. This
reputation was then used to justify apartheid laws. The US is basically accusing Russia and China of violation of America's "dignity".
And is trying to globally treat them as segregated blacks. The same tired shtick for the "exceptional" nation with a self-assigned
"manifest destiny". The country that needs containment is the USA. It has clear, psychotic ambitions to rule the world.
Coming from government ministers of the most powerful state on earth, do not all these accusations directed against all those
other states that are populated by sad, lesser beings who are envious of the "Shining City on the Hill", the "Home of the Brave
and Land of the Free", that epitome of human society, that place where "history has ended", not sound somwhat hysterical, a symptom
of weakness, of self-doubt concerrning the hegemon's might and integrity?
They need an excuse for their colonial racket. During the USSR era, they had the "threat of communism" to rally local elites in
developing countries and also used this "threat" as an excuse to install death squad junta regimes. The death of the USSR deprived
them of the "threat" fig leaf so they had to ramp up the humanitarian concern BS. Countries need to be controlled by demonizing
their leaders for being tyrants and terrorist sponsors. For violating human rights by not letting Soros and NATzO funded 5th column
operations called NGOs do their thing. It seems these transparent pretexts are still effective at convincing people around the
world that America and its vassals are a collection of noble knights doing good deeds and not a pack of hyenas engaged in gang
mutilation of countries that leads to millions of deaths of innocent civilians. What was the point of Libya, Iraq, Syria, and
all the other regime change victims? There was no arrival of democracy and safety. There was only needless death and degradation.
The west returns compulsively to the region because it thinks that this is where things might
tear loose; independence movements in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. Where, as the
western regime-change impulse fondly returns time and again, issues of fundamentalist
religion can be played upon to flare into conflict – it has worked for the west all
around the world, turning Shi'ite against Sunni and this one against that one. It often
signals its interest with plaintive articles by pro-democracy think-tanks implore Vladimir
Putin to let the Chechens be free, instead of imposing a succession of overlords upon them,
bla, bla, you know the drill. How can Putin diss the mighty USA for supporting oppressors of
choice around the world when he won't man up and let the Chechens have their own free state?
In fact, Putin has said in the past that the Chechens can be free and independent if that
is what they really want. But implied in that is that Moscow will no longer underwrite the
new state; that it will have to achieve economic viability itself.
Normally that is where the west comes in, singing siren songs of sovereignty-association
and fabulous prosperity to be had in attaching oneself to the western orbit. But so far not
enough people buy it – there are always the rebel darlings, the tearaways who bleat
discontent and stir the imagination of the western press. But just as often they are
religious nutters and suicide bombers who just want a dramatic death. Like that chap and his
missus – Dagestan, I think it was, a few years back – who had their apartment
shot to rubble with them in it after they repeatedly refused repeated offers to surrender and
live, deigning only for a hi-lift crane bucket to come up to the balcony to give their
daughter into the arms of her wailing granny. Martyrdom and progressive leadership almost
never flourish in the same person, for some reason. Except maybe for Jeremy Corbyn.
Just looked up Ingushetia on Wikipedia and found it's a small federal republic whose
population as of 2014 was less than 500,000.
I rather doubt then that thousands of people turned up in Magas to protest. If there are
no aerial photographs of the protesters, then we have to treat the figures reported by
Reuters and other news agencies outside Russia with suspicion.
There is dispute over the size of the area being transferred to Chechnya: the area
officially being transferred amounts to less than 2,000 hectares but according to Ingushetian
opposition group Mekhk Kkhel 58,000 hectares are being transferred. The difference between
the figures seems suspicious and the upper figure is likely to be an exaggeration.
We strive to shed light and offer a variety of perspectives on ongoing
social, economic and political developments in the region, including in: human
rights, ethnic and religious minorities, labour rights, gender and queer issues,
development, as well as conflict dynamics in the region
OC Media was co-founded in January 2017 by Mari Nikuradze, Dominik K. Cagara, and
Caroline Sutcliffe, initially under the auspices of Chai Khana NGO. It has received funding
from the UK Government's Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, the European Endowment for
Democracy, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung South Caucasus Office, Open Society
Foundations, and the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with
joint commissions with International Alert (EPNK/European Union
Initiative), Civil.ge (COBERM), and Open Democracy Russia.
Vis the Dutch push for a new sanctions regime for Human Rights abusers, apart from global
sponsors of Islamic terrorism who also happen to have $$$, the obvious takeaway that only
just occurred to me is that the push for a European Magnitsky Act must have failed.
This is exactly the same thing, they just dropped the name. The EU is not united and
I don't see the Netherlands as having enough influence in the EU without the UK.
The British military is ready to take this step in case of an "attack" by Russia against one of the Western countries
LONDON, 7 October 2018, 07:28 -- REGNUM The military command of Great Britain has announced its willingness to carry out
a cyber attack against Moscow , writes the British newspaper "The Sunday Times" on 7 October,.
According to the publication, citing an unnamed source closely familiar with the situation , the British military
is ready to take this step in case of an "attack" by Russia against a Western country. This measure will be possible when Britain
has a shortage of conventional defence resources and will manifest itself by the fact that the capital of Russia will have its
energy supplies cut off.
According to the "Sunday Times" source, variants of "Russian aggression", against which the British military is prepared
to use cyber weapons, are said to be an invasion by Russian President Vladimir Putin of Libya in order to seize oil and to
create a new crisis of migrants in Europe and an attempt to capture "small Islands belonging to Estonia". [Such action
would be taken by the UK] so as to comply with a NATO clause, in which an attack against one member is considered to be an
attack against the whole alliance.
We should note that recently the West has been constantly accusing Russia of cyber attacks against the West for economic
sabotage and interference in local political life. However, tangible evidence of Russian guilt as regards such accusations has
not once been provided.
My stress above.
Why should Russia, personified as the Dark Lord, wish to seize oil in Libya? Has Russia no oil of its own?
Sowing disarray in Libya? Now who, I wonder, might have done that before now?
An immigrant crisis in Europe created by the Empire of Evil?
And the present crisis? Created by whom?
Estonian Islands? What need has Russia of islands in the Baltic?
And of course, an unnamed source.
All in all, classic "projection: the West threatening to do what it has long planned and, furthermore, continuously accused
Russia of doing , without providing any evidence whatsoever, so as to psych-up the sheeple for justified retaliation against the
"Putin Regime".
"... Along these lines, the Trump Administration has informed Russia in April 2017 that the period of "strategic patience" is over (well, at least official 'cause being 'patient' didn't seem to deter regime change and covert ops) . They now employ a policy of "maximum pressure" instead. ..."
"... Also note: The Trump Administration has officially labeled Russia and China as enemies when they called them "recidivist" nations in the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2017. (Note: "recidivist" because Russia and China want to return to a world where there is not a hegemonic power, aka a "multi-polar" world). ..."
"... we're already within an ongoing Hybrid Third World War, which is more readily apparent with Trump's Trade War escalation. ..."
"... the "real" US economy is only 5 Trillion, only 25% of what's claimed as the total economy ..."
"... at's clearly happening--and it's been ongoing for quite awhile--for those with open eyes is the Class War between the 1% and 99%. The domestic battle within the Outlaw US Empire for Single Payer/Medicare For All healthcare is one theatre of the much larger ongoing war. ..."
"... Clearly, the upcoming financial crisis must spark a massive political upheaval larger than any ever seen before to prevent institution of the 2008 "solution." ..."
"... The primary dynamic of history is war. This has caused immense suffering. It is now becoming exponentially worse ..."
"... If we think of humankind as a large complex living entity, then like all such entities it will expire at some point. So in the larger picture, what we are moving towards is natural, and to be expected. ..."
It is rather surprising that the Democrats who have demonized Donald Trump at every turn
have voted in favour of the this extremely bloated defense budget, putting even more military
might into the hands of a President and Commander-in-Chief that they seem to despise and who
they are demonizing because of his alleged collusion with Russia.
We've been in WW3 for several years now. Bolton went "Full Monty" with his
declaration that U.S. forces will stay in Syria until Iran vacates. The introduction of a
Yemen War Powers Resolution in the House last week is a hopeful sign. A reason to root
for a Blue Wave in November. Dem leadership, already on record backing the War Powers
Resolution, would be obligated to block U.S. enabling genocide in Yemen.
I disagree with Eric Zusse's belief that USA wants to start WWIII. I think they want to
contain/constrain discontent of allies and citizenry as they attempt to destroy the Russian
and Chinese economies. War is only a last resort. But heightened military tensions mean that
the major protagonists have to divert resources to their military, causing a drag on the
economies.
Along these lines, the Trump Administration has informed Russia in April 2017 that the
period of "strategic patience" is over (well, at least official 'cause being 'patient' didn't
seem to deter regime change and covert ops) . They now employ a policy of "maximum pressure"
instead.
The big concern for me is that "maximum pressure" also means an elevated chance of
mistakes and miscalculations that could inadvertently cause WWIII.
Also note: The Trump Administration has officially labeled Russia and China as enemies
when they called them "recidivist" nations in the National Defense Authorization Act in late
2017. (Note: "recidivist" because Russia and China want to return to a world where there is
not a hegemonic power, aka a "multi-polar" world).
PS IMO Trump election and the Kavanaugh and Gina Haspel nominations are key to the pursuit
of global hegemony.
Most warnings have centered on a financial meltdown, as this article
reviews . As most know, IMO we're already within an ongoing Hybrid Third World War,
which is more readily apparent with Trump's Trade War escalation.
As noted in my link to Escobar's latest, the EU has devised a retaliatory mechanism to
shield itself and others from the next round of illegal sanctions Trump's promised to impose
after Mid-term elections.
In an open thread post, I linked to Hudson's latest audio-cast; here's what he said on the 10th
anniversary of the 2008 crash: "So this crash of 2008 was not a crash of the banks. The banks
were bailed out. The economy was left with all the junk mortgages in place, all the
fraudulent debts."
Another article I linked to in a comment to james averred the "real" US economy is
only 5 Trillion, only 25% of what's claimed as the total economy . Hudson again:
"Contrary to the idea that bailing out the banks helps the economy, the fact is that the
economy today cannot recover without a bank failure ." [My emphasis]
Wh at's clearly happening--and it's been ongoing for quite awhile--for those with open
eyes is the Class War between the 1% and 99%. The domestic battle within the Outlaw US Empire
for Single Payer/Medicare For All healthcare is one theatre of the much larger ongoing
war.
As Hudson's stated many times, the goal of the 1% is to reestablish Feudalism via
debt-peonage. All the other happenings geopolitically serve to mask this Class War within the
Outlaw US Empire. Clearly, the upcoming financial crisis must spark a massive political
upheaval larger than any ever seen before to prevent institution of the 2008 "solution."
Many predict that this crisis will be timed to occur in 2020 constituting the biggest
election meddling of all time.
The crisis will likely be blamed on China without any evidence for hacking Wall Street and
causing the subsequent crash -- a Financial False Flag to serve the same purpose as 911.
Much can occur and be obscured during wartime. The radical changes to USA from 1938-1948
is very instructive--the commonfolk were on the threshold of gaining control over the federal
government for the first time in US history only to have it blocked then reversed (forever?)
by FDR and the 1% who tried to overthrow him in 1933.
Same with the current War OF Terror's use to curtail longstanding civil liberties and
constitutional rights and much more. To accomplish what's being called "Bail-In" within the
USA, Martial Law would need to be emplaced since most of the public is to be robbed of
whatever cash they have, and World War would probably be the only way to get Martial Law
instituted--and accepted by the military which would be its enforcer.
A precedent exists for stealing money from the people--their gold--via Executive Order 6102 , which
used a law instituted during WW1 and still on the books.
The primary dynamic of history is war. This has caused immense suffering. It is now
becoming exponentially worse . Critical graphs are going off their charts. The end is
near.
If we think of humankind as a large complex living entity, then like all such entities
it will expire at some point. So in the larger picture, what we are moving towards is
natural, and to be expected.
Like individual humans, the human population as a whole can pursue activities that
maintain it's health, or it can indulge in activities that create disease and hasten it's
death. Humankind is deep in toxifying behaviors that signal it's demise in the near
future.
@ Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Oct 1, 2018 1:25:43 AM | 73
The collapse of the USSR is a very complex issue, and we still don't have a consensus
(among the people who study this seriously).
I myself think the USSR collapsed because of two main factors that are inteconnected with
the world geopolitics of its time:
1) the USSR couldn't make the transition from the second to the third industrial
revolution in the 70s (i.e. from fordism to toyotism/ohnism). Albeit it is true the USA never
really embraced toyotism (just some pockets in the Silicon Valley and the financial sector),
it is a fact the capitalist world, as a whole, did, because it worked out in Japan and South
Korea -- many of these techonologies bleeding to the world market.
The USSR, since Stalin, adopted a method of "socialist primitive accumulation", where
every techonological revolution depended on a forced (centralized) global collectivization:
the old had to be entirely dismantled for the new to be built over the carcass of this old.
This was a brutal (albeit quick and effective) method, so it was always risky and left the
USSR exposed to the capitalists militarily.
Another problem with the USSR system was that toyotism was based on heavy investment in
"human capital", i.e. investment on the workers' education and specialization. Forced
collectivization, therefore, excluded the possibility of toyotism by design, so it was never
truly an option for the post-Stalin Soviet leaders.
In a world only the USSR and the COMECON countries existed, it could've be stationed in
the second industrial revolution forever: the USSR never had a recession (except in 1990 and
1991, when it was already de facto capitalist). It was stagnant, but not collapsing. But it
didn't exist alone: on the other side of Berlin, there was the capitalist world, and, in this
dual world, not transitioning to toyotism was not an option for the Soviet Union.
2) In a bipolar world, with the toyotism path closed, Soviet bureaucrats developed a class
sentiment, which put pressure from the inside on the Soviet inherent egalitarian system. In
other words, the USSR was a victim of its own success: the problem was that that success came
too early, in a world where capitalism still existed.
In the 1980s, the USSR had already eradicated poverty and the most well-paid worker (a
high bureaucrat) received four times the salary of the lowest-paid worker. The basic public
services (transport, education and healthcare) already were free at the point of use and
universal and of a very good quality.
The problem was that the USSR emphasized too much on the production of infrastructure and
too little on consumption goods, which were already of a poor quality when compared to the
Western ones. The high Soviet bureaucracy, in constant contact with the capitalist world, was
then slowly, but surely, coopted by the delicacies of the West, and thus developed a urge of
class distinction.
This "urge" can be illustrated by an anecdote. When Yeltsin was still the President of
Soviet Russia, George H. W. Bush invited him to Houston. There, he was marvelled by Jack
Daniel's whiskey and asked for some cases for the trip back. Therefore the joke he sold the
Soviet Union for two cases of Jack Daniel's.
Posted the following this morning on last week's Open Thread, so I'm reposting here
This comment will try to focus on the Big Picture while ignoring all the sideshows and distractions
The Big Picture has three parts: (1) 9/11 where it all started (2) Putin was a "good guy" when he was aligned with the "war
on terror" (3) Putin became a bad guy the moment he figured out that ALL these wars were to destroy nations, not save them, and
so he intervened in Syria
(1) the people who did 9/11 are the SAME people who are trying to menace Russia (as well as Syria and Iran) today
9/11 is where it all started .this event led us to where we are now .
There are posted videos of news outlets reporting on building seven collapsing – BEFORE it did. That would be impossible without
ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE of the controlled demolition of that building. Something that Osama and his 19 henchmen would not have been
able to accomplish even if they could have done the rest, which is beyond preposterous.
(2) And so right after 9/11, when the chimp looked into Putin's eyes, and saw a good guy, that was when Putin was aligned with
the nascent "war on terror". Something Vlad was all too familiar with, and happy to help out the West with, in any way he could.
(3) But then Vladimir figured out, (what most have apparently been unable to figure out) – that ALL of these wars – (following
the *OBVIOUSLY* lied about 9/11 false flag), are intended to destroy nations, not save them. Duh.
The people who did 9/11 (Zionists and their lackeys in the West, NATO, CIA, etc..) are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE who are trying to
menace Russia today.
And yet many people haven't even bothered to look into this event. THE event that will be ultimately responsible for the clash
of civilizations to come, when the Zionists demand Putin vacate Syria so they can steal the Golan Heights.
How can a someone ruminate over, write about, postulate and pontificate over a (((Western))) foreign policy that maligns and
menaces Russia.. and yet fail to see the obvious?
For us to have NO curiousity about 9/11 would be like Bashar Assad believing the war he's been fighting was a home-grown event
unaffected by foreign interests.
It all started with 9/11. That was the pretext for Gen. Clark's "We're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting
with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran."
Retired General Wesley Clark.
Have you ever seen the video?
Do you understand how that agenda might have effected the (((West's))) relations with Russia, once Putin put his foot down over
Syria?
Or are all of these things completely independent of each other, and the war on Syria is actually being waged by disgruntled Syrian
Muslims who want a less secular state, with help from NATO ONLY when Assad uses chemical weapons against his own civilians?
Why are otherwise smart people unable to comprehend, (or even contemplate) the big picture?
Use of wahhabi jihadists began in the late seventies in Afghanistan. From there they were shipped to the Russian Caucasus in
the mid nineties to assist with the breakup of the Russian federation.
The petro dollar hegemony began with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe bay in the late sixties.
False flags are a proud American tradition virtually since its inception.
It is interesting also that The US (and other Western Powers) allied with and used Muslims in Yugoslavia. These were posited as
the good guy victims in need of Humanitarian Intervention by carpet bombing the Orthodox Christian Serbs. Of course the Muslims
were financed and equipped as freedom fighters. TV, Radio stations and hospitals with workers in them, were destroyed in this
humanitarian intervention.
Now it is a mishmash of small broken states with US Military bases located in them. One of the largest bases is Camp Bondsteel
in Kosovo. Named for Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient United States Army Staff Sergeant James L. Bondsteel, the name reminds
one of a character from Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bob).
The once successful socialist nation was broken and partitioned and looted by Multinational Corps and Western Banks.
The destruction of that country took years in the making. Reagan admin instituted the first round of sanctions. It became ripe
for the taking after Tito died and the USSR was in chaos.
While each successive admin piled on, Bill Clinton got to be the point man for the prolonged attacks. Interestingly, Hillary
takes credit for urging Bill to bomb civilian population centers.
A precurser to "We Came, We saw, He died...HAHAHAHHAHA).
"... "The true treasures of the Church are the poor, the little ones to be helped not merely by occasional alms but in the way they can be promoted," ..."
"... "He talked particularly of his concern over 'Los Desaparecidos', people who had vanished off the face of Argentinian earth in their thousands. By the conclusion of the 15th minute audience the General began to wish that he had heeded the eleventh-hour attempts of Vatican officials to dissuade him coming to Rome," ..."
"... "His mind was as strong, as hard and as sharp as a diamond. That was where his real power was. He understood and had the ability to get to the centre of a problem. He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the smiling Pope, I was waiting for him 'tirare fuori le unghie', to reveal his claws. He had tremendous power." ..."
"... But John Paul I never lived to exercise his "tremendous power." ..."
"... "The public speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard shouting at the inert form: Who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?" ..."
"... David Yallop revealed that on the day of his death, the Pope had discussed a reshuffle of Vatican staff with Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, who was also to be replaced. Yallop claimed that the Pope had a list of a number of clerics who belonged to the Freemasons, membership of which was strictly prohibited by the Church. The most sinister of these Masonic lodges was the fiercely anti-communist Propaganda Due (P2), which held great influence in Italy at this time, being referred to as a "state within a state." ..."
"... "Had he lived another week, the United States would have been looking at a half a dozen mini-Cubas in its back yard," ..."
"... "The single fact of John Paul II's election in 1978 changed everything. In Poland, everything began Then the whole thing spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in the Philippines and Marcos was out," ..."
"... In 1985, Agca's confederate, Abdullah Catli, who was later killed in a car crash, testified that he had been approached by the West German BND spy organization, which promised him a large sum of money "if he implicated the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the attempt on the Pope's life." ..."
"... "ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his colleagues, under pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the contention that the Soviets were involved. 'The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot,' Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee." ..."
"... In 2011, a new book entitled 'To Kill the Pope, the Truth about the Assassination Attempt on John Paul II', which was based on 20 years of research, concluded that the CIA had indeed tried to frame Bulgaria, in order to discredit communism. ..."
"... The great irony of course is that after the Berlin Wall came down, Pope John Paul II became a strong critic of the inhumane 'greed is good' model of capitalism which had replaced communism. In Latvia, he said capitalism was responsible for "grave social injustices" and acknowledged that Marxism contained "a kernel of truth." He said that "the ideology of the market" made solidarity between people "difficult at best." In Czechoslovakia, he warned against replacing communism with materialism and consumerism. ..."
"... Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
The sudden death of Pope John Paul I, exactly 40 years ago today, stunned the world. The
'Smiling Pope' had only served for 33 days. His demise and replacement by John Paul II marked
an important turning point in the old Cold War. The year 1978, as I argued in a previous op-ed,
was the year today's world was made.
There was nothing inevitable about the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, the rise of groups
like Al-Qaeda and IS, and the downfall of the Soviet Union. The neoliberal, neoconservative
world order and its associated violence came about because of key events and decisions which
took place 40 years ago. The Vatican was at the heart of these events.
The drama which unfolded there in the summer of 1978 would have been rejected as being too
far-fetched if sent in as a film script. In a space of two and a half months, we had three
different Popes. There was no great surprise when, on August 6, the first of them, Pope Paul
VI, died after suffering a massive heart attack. The Supreme Pontiff, who had served since
1963, was 80 and had been in declining health. But the death of his much younger successor,
John Paul I, a radical reformer who wanted to build a genuine People's Church, has fuelled
conspiracy theories to this day.
Cardinal Albino Luciani, the working-class son of a bricklayer (and staunch socialist), from
a small town in northern Italy, was a Pope like no other. He refused a coronation and detested
being carried on the sedia gestatoria – the Papal chair. He hated pomp and circumstance
and pretentiousness. His speeches were down to earth and full of homely observations, with
regular references to popular fiction. He possessed a gentle humor and always had a twinkle in
his eye. He was by all accounts an incredibly sweet man.
But there was steel there, too. Luciani was determined to root out corruption, and to
investigate the complex financial affairs of the Vatican's own bank, and its connection to the
scandal-hit Banco Ambrosiano.
While he had declared communism to be incompatible with Christianity, his father's
egalitarian ethos stayed with him. "The true treasures of the Church are the poor, the
little ones to be helped not merely by occasional alms but in the way they can be
promoted," he once said. At a meeting with General Videla of Argentina, he made clear his
abhorrence of fascism. "He talked particularly of his concern over 'Los Desaparecidos',
people who had vanished off the face of Argentinian earth in their thousands. By the conclusion
of the 15th minute audience the General began to wish that he had heeded the eleventh-hour
attempts of Vatican officials to dissuade him coming to Rome," noted David Yallop in his
book 'In God's Name'.
One cleric, Father Busa, wrote of John Paul I: "His mind was as strong, as hard and as
sharp as a diamond. That was where his real power was. He understood and had the ability to get
to the centre of a problem. He could not be overwhelmed. When everyone was applauding the
smiling Pope, I was waiting for him 'tirare fuori le unghie', to reveal his claws. He had
tremendous power."
But John Paul I never lived to exercise his "tremendous power." He was found
dead in his bed on the morning of September 28, 1978. The official story was that the 'Smiling
Pope' had died from a heart attack. But it wasn't long before questions were being asked. John
Paul I was only 65 and had appeared to be in fine health.
The fact that there was no post-mortem only added to the suspicions. "The public
speculation that this death was not natural grew by the minute. Men and women were heard
shouting at the inert form: Who has done this to you? Who has murdered you?" wrote David
Yallop.
David Yallop revealed that on the day of his death, the Pope had discussed a reshuffle
of Vatican staff with Secretary of State Cardinal Jean Villot, who was also to be replaced.
Yallop claimed that the Pope had a list of a number of clerics who belonged to the Freemasons,
membership of which was strictly prohibited by the Church. The most sinister of these Masonic
lodges was the fiercely anti-communist Propaganda Due (P2), which held great influence in Italy
at this time, being referred to as a "state within a state." The murky world of P2,
and its leaders' links with organized crime, the Mafia and the CIA is discussed in 'In God's
Name'.
Another writer, Lucien Gregoire, author of 'Murder by the Grace of God', points the finger
of blame squarely at the CIA. He notes a seemingly strange coincidence, namely that on
September 3, 1978, just 25 days before the Pope himself died, Metropolitan Nikodim, the
visiting leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who was later revealed to have been a KGB
agent, fell dead at John Paul's feet in the Vatican after sipping coffee. He was only 48.
Gregoire says that the CIA dubbed John Paul I 'the Bolshevik Pope' and was keen to eliminate
him before he presided over a conference the Puebla Conference in Mexico. "Had he lived
another week, the United States would have been looking at a half a dozen mini-Cubas in its
back yard," he writes.
While there's no shortage of suspects if you believe that John Paul I was murdered, it needs
to be stressed that despite the contradictory statements made about the circumstances of his
death, and the strange coincidences, no evidence has yet been produced to show that his death
was not a natural one. What we can say though is that there will have been quite a few powerful
and influential people in Italy and beyond who were relieved that the 'Smiling Pope' had such a
short time in office.
His successor, the Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who took the name 'John Paul II' as a
homage to his predecessor, made it clear that investigating the Vatican's financial activities
and uncovering Freemasons was not a priority. As a patriotic Pole, his appointment was manna
from Heaven for anti-communist hawks in the US State Department. "The single fact of John
Paul II's election in 1978 changed everything. In Poland, everything began Then the whole thing
spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in
the Philippines and Marcos was out," said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, John Paul II's press
secretary.
The way that Pope John Paul II spoke out against what he regarded as communist repression,
not only in his native Poland but across Eastern Europe and beyond, saw him being toasted by
the neocon faction. It might not have been just words either, which helped undermine communist
rule. There was a rumor that 'God's Banker' Roberto Calvi, who in 1982 was found hanging from
Blackfriars Bridge in London, had sent $50mn to 'Solidarity' in Poland on behalf of the
Pope.
In May 1981, John Paul II was shot and wounded by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca. Neocons in
the US promoted the narrative that it was a communist plot (organized by Bulgaria), but Sofia
denied involvement. In 1985, Agca's confederate, Abdullah Catli, who was later killed
in a car crash, testified that he had been
approached by the West German BND spy organization, which promised him a large sum of money "if
he implicated the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the attempt on the Pope's
life."
Martin Lee, writing in Consortium News, also notes
that in 1990, "ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman disclosed that his colleagues, under
pressure from CIA higher-ups, skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the contention
that the Soviets were involved. 'The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the plot,' Goodman
told the Senate Intelligence Committee."
In 2011, a new book entitled 'To Kill the Pope, the Truth about the Assassination
Attempt on John Paul II', which was based on 20 years of research,
concluded that the CIA had indeed tried to frame Bulgaria, in order to discredit
communism.
The great irony of course is that after the Berlin Wall came down, Pope John Paul II
became a strong critic of the inhumane 'greed is good' model of capitalism which had replaced
communism. In Latvia, he said capitalism was responsible for "grave social injustices" and
acknowledged that Marxism contained "a kernel of truth." He said that "the ideology of the
market" made solidarity between people "difficult at best." In Czechoslovakia, he
warned against replacing communism with materialism and consumerism.
Having enlisted the assistance of the Vatican in helping to bring down 'The Reds', the
neo-liberals and neo-cons then turned on the Church. The Church survived communism, but it
hasn't fared too well under consumerism. The Vatican is nowhere near as influential as it was
in 1978. The US, meanwhile, unconstrained by a geopolitical counter-weight, threw its weight
around the world after 1989, illegally invading and attacking a series of sovereign states.
One can only wonder how different things might have been if the 'Smiling Pope' had
lived.
That's amazing example of contlling the nattarive and suppressing alternative sources. Should
go in all textbooks on the subject
Notable quotes:
"... Magnitsky did not disclose the theft. He first mentioned it in testimony in October 2008. But it had already been reported in the New York Times on July 24, 2008. In reality, the whistleblower was a certain Rimma Starova. She worked for one of the implicated shell companies and, having read in the papers that authorities were investigating, went to police to give testimony in April 2008 – six months before Magnitsky spoke of the scam for the first time (see here and here ). ..."
"... Why, then, did I report that about Magnitsky? Because at the time my sole source for the story was Team Browder, who had reached out to the Cyprus Mail and with whom I communicated via email. I was provided with 'information', flow charts and so on. All looking very professional and compelling. ..."
"... For the second article, I conversed briefly on the phone with the soft-spoken Browder himself, who handed down the gospel on the Magnitsky affair. Under the time constraints, and trusting that my sources could at least be relied upon for basic information which they presented as facts, I went along with it. I was played. But let's be clear: I let myself down too. ..."
"... Titled 'The Magnitsky Act – Behind The Scenes', it does a magisterial job of depicting how the director initially took Browder's story on faith, only to end up questioning everything. The docudrama dissects, disassembles and dismantles Browder's narrative, as Nekrasov – by no means a Putin apologist – delves deeper down into the rabbit hole. ..."
"... The point can't be stressed enough, as this very claim is the lynchpin of Browder's account. In his bestseller Red Notice, Browder alleges that Magnitsky was arrested because he exposed two corrupt police officers, and that he was jailed and tortured because he wouldn't retract. ..."
"... It gets worse for Nekrasov, as he goes on to discover that Magnitsky was no lawyer. He did not have a lawyer's license. Rather, he was an accountant/auditor who worked for Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan. Yet every chance he gets, Browder still refers to Magnitsky as 'a lawyer' or 'my lawyer'. ..."
"... The full deposition, some six hours long, is (still) available on Youtube . As penance for past transgressions, I watched it in its entirety. While refraining from using adjectives to describe it, I shall simply cite some examples and let readers decide on Browder's credibility. Browder seems to suffer an almost total memory blackout as a lawyer begins firing questions at him. He cannot recall, or does not know, where he or his team got the information concerning the alleged illicit transfer of funds from Hermitage-owned companies. ..."
"... According to Team Browder, in 2007 the 'Klyuev gang' together with Russian interior ministry officials travelled to Cyprus, ostensibly to set up the tax rebate scam using shell companies. But in his deposition, the Anglo-American businessman cannot remember, or does not know, how his team obtained the travel information of the conspirators. ..."
Before getting down to brass tacks, let me say that I loathe penning articles like this; loathe writing about myself or in the
first person, because a reporter should report the news, not be the news. Yet I grudgingly make this exception because, ironically,
it happens to be newsworthy. To cut to the chase, it concerns Anglo-American financier Bill Browder and the Sergei Magnitsky affair.
I, like others in the news business I'd venture to guess, feel led astray by Browder.
This is no excuse. I didn't do my due diligence, and take full responsibility for erroneous information printed under my name.
For that, I apologize to readers. I refer to two articles of mine published in a Cypriot publication, dated December 25, 2015 and
January 6, 2016.
Browder's basic story, as he has told it time and again, goes like this: in June 2007, Russian police officers raided the Moscow
offices of Browder's firm Hermitage, confiscating company seals, certificates of incorporation, and computers.
Browder says the owners and directors of Hermitage-owned companies were subsequently changed, using these seized documents. Corrupt
courts were used to create fake debts for these companies, which allowed for the taxes they had previously paid to the Russian Treasury
to be refunded to what were now re-registered companies. The funds stolen from the Russian state were then laundered through banks
and shell companies.
The scheme is said to have been planned earlier in Cyprus by Russian law enforcement and tax officials in cahoots with criminal
elements.
All this was supposedly discovered by Magnitsky, whom Browder had tasked with investigating what happened. When Magnitsky reported
the fraud, some of the nefarious characters involved had him arrested and jailed. He refused to retract, and died while in pre-trial
detention.
In my first article, I wrote: "Magnitsky, a 37-year-old Russian accountant, died in jail in 2009 after he exposed huge tax embezzlement
"
False . Contrary to the above story that has been rehashed countless times, Magnitsky did not expose any tax fraud, did not blow
the whistle.
The interrogation
reports show that Magnitsky had in fact been summoned by Russian authorities as a witness to an already ongoing investigation
into Hermitage. Nor he did he accuse Russian investigators Karpov and/or Kuznetsov of committing the $230 million treasury fraud,
as Browder claims.
Magnitsky did not disclose the theft. He first mentioned it in testimony in October 2008. But it had already been reported
in the New York Times
on July 24, 2008. In reality, the whistleblower was a certain Rimma Starova. She worked for one of the implicated shell companies
and, having read in the papers that authorities were investigating, went to police to give testimony in April 2008 – six months before
Magnitsky spoke of the scam for the first time (see
here
and here
).
Why, then, did I report that about Magnitsky? Because at the time my sole source for the story was Team Browder, who had reached
out to the Cyprus Mail and with whom I communicated via email. I was provided with 'information', flow charts and so on. All looking
very professional and compelling.
At the time of the first article, I knew next to nothing about the Magnitsky/Browder affair. I had to go through media reports
to get the gist, and then get up to speed with Browder's latest claims that a Cypriot law firm, which counted the Hermitage Fund
among its clients, had just been 'raided' by Cypriot police. The article had to be written and delivered on the same day. In retrospect
I should have asked for more time – a lot more time – and Devil take the deadlines.
For the second article, I conversed briefly on the phone with the soft-spoken Browder himself, who handed down the gospel
on the Magnitsky affair. Under the time constraints, and trusting that my sources could at least be relied upon for basic information
which they presented as facts, I went along with it. I was played. But let's be clear: I let myself down too.
In the ensuing weeks and months, I didn't follow up on the story as my gut told me something was wrong: villains and malign actors
operating in a Wild West Russia, and at the centre of it all, a heroic Magnitsky who paid with his life – the kind of script that
Hollywood execs would kill for.
Subsequently I mentally filed away the Browder story, while being aware it was in the news.
But the real red pill was a documentary by Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, which came to my attention a few weeks ago.
Titled 'The Magnitsky Act – Behind The Scenes', it does a magisterial job of depicting how the director initially took Browder's
story on faith, only to end up questioning everything. The docudrama dissects, disassembles and dismantles Browder's narrative, as
Nekrasov – by no means a Putin apologist – delves deeper down into the rabbit hole.
The director had set out to make a poignant film about Magnitsky's tragedy, but became increasingly troubled as the facts he uncovered
didn't stack up with Browder's account, he claims.
The 'aha' moment arrives when Nekrasov appears to show solid proof that Magnitsky blew no whistle.
Not only that, but in his
depositions
– the first one dating to 2006, well before Hermitage's offices were raided – Magnitsky did not accuse any police officers of being
part of the 'theft' of Browder's companies and the subsequent alleged $230m tax rebate fraud.
The point can't be stressed enough, as this very claim is the lynchpin of Browder's account. In his bestseller Red Notice,
Browder alleges that Magnitsky was arrested because he exposed two corrupt police officers, and that he was jailed and tortured because
he wouldn't retract.
We are meant to take Browder's word for it.
It gets worse for Nekrasov, as he goes on to discover that Magnitsky was no lawyer. He did not have a lawyer's license. Rather,
he was an accountant/auditor who worked for Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan. Yet every chance he gets, Browder still refers to Magnitsky
as 'a lawyer' or 'my lawyer'.
The clincher comes late in the film, with footage from Browder's April 15, 2015 deposition in a US federal court, in the Prevezon
case. The case, brought by the US Justice Department at Browder's instigation, targeted a Russian national who Browder said had received
$1.9m of the $230m tax fraud.
In the deposition, Browder is asked if Magnitsky had a law degree in Russia. "I'm not aware that he did," he replies.
The full deposition, some six hours long, is (still) available on
Youtube . As penance for past transgressions, I watched
it in its entirety. While refraining from using adjectives to describe it, I shall simply cite some examples and let readers decide
on Browder's credibility. Browder seems to suffer an almost total memory blackout as a lawyer begins firing questions at him. He
cannot recall, or does not know, where he or his team got the information concerning the alleged illicit transfer of funds from Hermitage-owned
companies.
This is despite the fact that the now-famous Powerpoint presentations – hosted on so many 'anti-corruption' websites and recited
by 'human rights' NGOs – were prepared by Browder's own team.
Nor does he recall where, or how, he and his team obtained information on the amounts of the 'stolen' funds funnelled into companies.
When it's pointed out that in any case this information would be privileged – banking secrecy and so forth – Browder appears to be
at a loss.
According to Team Browder, in 2007 the 'Klyuev gang' together with Russian interior ministry officials travelled to Cyprus,
ostensibly to set up the tax rebate scam using shell companies. But in his deposition, the Anglo-American businessman cannot remember,
or does not know, how his team obtained the travel information of the conspirators.
He can't explain how they acquired the flight records and dates, doesn't have any documentation at hand, and isn't aware if any
such documentation exists.
Browder claims his 'Justice for Magnitsky' campaign, which among other things has led to US sanctions on Russian persons, is all
about vindicating the young man. Were that true, one would have expected Browder to go out of his way to aid Magnitsky in his hour
of need.
The deposition does not bear that out.
Lawyer: "Did anyone coordinate on your behalf with Firestone Duncan about the defence of Mr Magnitsky?"
Browder: "I don't know. I don't remember."
Going back to Nekrasov's film, a standout segment is where the filmmaker looks at a briefing document prepared by Team Browder
concerning the June 2007 raid by Russian police officers. In it, Browder claims the cops beat up Victor Poryugin, a lawyer with the
firm.
The lawyer was then "hospitalized for two weeks," according to Browder's presentation, which includes a photo of the beaten-up
lawyer. Except, it turns out the man pictured is not Poryugin at all. Rather, the photo is actually of Jim Zwerg, an American human
rights activist beaten up during a street protest in 1961 (see
here and here ).
Nekrasov sits down with German politician Marieluise Beck. She was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
(Pace), which compiled a report that made Magnitsky a cause celebre.
You can see Beck's jaw drop when Nekrasov informs her that Magnitsky did not report the fraud, that he was in fact under investigation.
It transpires that Pace, as well as human rights activists, were getting their information from one source – Browder. Later, the
Council of Europe's Andreas Gross admits on camera that their entire investigation into the Magnitsky affair was based on Browder's
info and that they relied on translations of Russian documents provided by Browder's team because, as Gross puts it, "I don't speak
Russian myself."
That hit home – I, too, had been fed information from a single source, not bothering to verify it. I, too, initially went with
the assumption that because Russia is said to be a land of endemic corruption, then Browder's story sounded plausible if not entirely
credible.
For me, the takeaway is this gem from Nekrasov's narration:
"I was regularly overcome by deep unease. Was I defending a system that killed Magnitsky, even if I'd found no proof that he'd
been murdered?"
Bull's-eye. Nekrasov has arrived at a crossroads, the moment where one's mettle is tested: do I pursue the facts wherever they
may lead, even if they take me out of my comfort zone? What is more important: the truth, or the narrative? Nekrasov chose the former.
As do I.
Like with everything else, specific allegations must be assessed independently of one's general opinion of the Russian state.
They are two distinct issues. Say Browder never existed; does that make Russia a paradise?
I suspect Team Browder may scrub me from their mailing list; one can live with that.
oncemore1 , 6 minutes ago
Soros and Browder are the same tribe. FULLSTOP.
Slipstream , 6 minutes ago
Wow. That's a big **** up. But at least this guy is a journalist with ethics. He got it
wrong and has said so, to set the record straight. This should be a case taught in every
journalism school in the world. Unfortunately, I don't see the Magnitsky Act being repealed
any time soon.
Usura , 8 minutes ago
Bill Browder is a lying ***
Thordoom , 12 minutes ago
Andrei Nekrasov now has webpage dedicated to The Magnitsky Act Behind the Scenes.
I watched the documentary too. The depositions of Browder were devastating to any notion
of him as truth-teller. And yet, he managed to dupe politicians and media around the
world.
Thordoom , 33 minutes ago
The only good thing Yeltsin did in his miserable life was to say " **** you " to Bill
Clinton in the end when he found out how they wanted to set him up with that 7 billion of IMF
money they stolen in order to put Boris Berezovsky in the charge of Russia as a president for
hire and stole anything that was not welded down. Yeltsin knowing that the only way for
Russia to survive was to put Vladimir Putin in charge to clense the unclean filth that
infested Russia in the 90s
resistedliving , 52 minutes ago
classic agitprop.
Don't trust Browder and his self-interests much but trust this guy less.
Browser knows he'll never see that money again and has spent his own funds on his one man
mission
Thordoom , 40 minutes ago
Stupid moron he is spending Knohorkovsky's money and HSBC bank money. Half of the UK and
US government officials and intl officials and Harward boys are deeply involved in this
looting of Russian people in the 90s.
RationalLuddite , 31 minutes ago
Classic Reverse blockade lie by you Restedliving. Good luck moving the middle on Browder .
He's just not that bright in lying so I suppose your Talmudic exegesis honed Accusatory
Inversion is worth a try.
Please keep it up. Seriously. "Agitprop"😄😄😄😄
You are like a Browder red-pill dispenser with every incoherent mendacious utterance.
Thank you mate :*
WTFUD , 29 minutes ago
Bruiser Browser Browder, ex light-heavyweight champion of La-La Potemkin Village,
Ninnyapolis, USA.
Shouldn't Fakebook be banning the US Government for a plethora of Fake News? Then again
it's a nice fit for these 2 entities, a cosy relationship.
The Paucity of Hope , 54 minutes ago
Nekrasov's movie has been disappeared, but was excellent. Also, look at The Forecaster,
about Martin Armstrong. It talks about Hermatage Capital and was blocked in the US and
Switzerland for several years.
Ahmeexnal , 57 minutes ago
Browder must hang!
chunga , 38 minutes ago
Not a single person in the US gov will even acknowledge this. None. Not one.
At the same time the US domestic affairs revolve around unsubstantiated stories of SC
nominee penis wagging, special prosecutors investigating **** actress affairs/bribery with
POTUS, FBI, DOJ off the rails, while at the same time asserting a moral authority to sanction
and/or attack other countries as though it's an obligation or entitlement.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
-- The Empire Strikes Back
Since Vladimir Putin brought up Bill Browder's name in Helsinki, events have escalated to a
fever pitch. Russia is under extreme attack the U.S./European financial and political
establishment.
Danske's report on these allegations are due on Wednesday.
No matter what they say, however, the die has been cast.
Danske is being targeted for termination by the U.S. and possible takeover by the European
Central Bank.
There's precedent for this but let me lay out some background first.
The Oldest
Trick
Browder's complaint says the money laundered is in connection with the reason why he was
thrown out of Russia and the $230 million in stolen tax money which Browder's cause
célèbre , the death of accountant Sergei Magnitsky, hangs on.
That crusade got the Magnitsky Act passed not only in the U.S. but all across the West, with
versions on the books in Canada, Australia the EU and other places.
Danske's shares have been gutted in the wake of the accusation.
The U.S. is now investigating this complaint and that shouldn't come as much of a shock.
The Treasury Department can issue whatever findings it wants, and then respond by starving
Danske of dollars, known as the "Death Blow" option the threat of which was plastered
all over the pages of the Wall St. Journal on Friday.
Note this article isn't behind the Journal's pay-wall. They want everyone to see this.
Browder filed complaints both in Demmark and in Estonia, and the Estonian government was
only too happy to oblige him.
The Devil Played
To see the whole picture I have to go back a littler further.
Back in March, Latvian bank, ABLV, was targeted in a similar manner, accused of laundering
money. Within a week the ECB moved in to take control of the bank even though it wasn't in
danger of failing.
It was an odd move, where the ECB exercised an extreme response utilizing its broader powers
given to it after the 2008 financial crisis, like it did with Spain's Banco Popular in
2017.
Why? The U.S. was looking for ways to cut off Russia from the European banking system. And
the ECB did its dirty work.
I wrote about this
back in May in relation to the Treasury demanding all U.S. investors divest themselves of
Russian debt within thirty days.
It threw the ruble and Russian debt markets into turmoil since Russian companies bought a lot
of euro-denominated debt after the Ruble Crisis of 2014, having been shut off from dollars.
ABLV was a conduit for many Russian entities to keep access to Europe's banks, having been
grandfathered in as clients when the Baltics entered the Euro-zone.
So, now a replay of ABLV's seizure is playing out through Browder's money laundering
complaint against Danske.
Was Convincing Everyone
The goal of this lawsuit is two-fold.
The first is to undermine the faith in the Danish banking system. Dutch giant ING is also
facing huge AML fines.
This is a direct attack on the EU banking system to being it under even more stringent
government control.
The second goal, however, is far more important. As I said, the U.S. is desperate to cut
money flow between the European Union and Russia, not just to stop the construction of
Nordstream 2, but to keep Russia's markets weak having to scramble for euros to make coupon
payments and create a roll-over nightmare.
Turkey is facing this now, Russia went through it in 2014/15.
So, attacking a major bank like Danske for consorting with dirty Russians and using Mr.
Human Rights Champion Browder to file the complaint is pure power politics to keep the EU
itself from seeking rapprochement with Russia.
Anti-Money Laundering laws are tyrannical and vaguely worded. And with the Magnitsky Act and
its follow-up, CAATSA, in place, they help support defining money laundering to include
anything the U.S. and the EU deem as supporting 'human rights violations.'
Seeing the trap yet?
Now all of it can be linked through simple accusation regardless of the facts. The bank gets
gutted, investors and depositors get nervous, the ECB then steps in and there goes another
tendril between Russia and Europe doing business.
And that ties into Browder's minions in the European Parliament, all in the pay of Open
Society Foundation, issued a threat of invoking Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty to Cyprus over
assisting Russia investigate Browder's financial dealings there.
Why? Violations of Mr. Browder's human rights because, well, Russia!
What's becoming more obvious to me as the days pass is that Browder is an obvious asset of
the U.S. financial and political oligarchy, if not U.S. Intelligence. They use his humanitarian
bona fides to visit untold misery on millions of people simply to:
1) cover up their malfeasance in Russia
2) wage hybrid war on anyone willing to stand up to their machinations.
He Didn't Exist
Because when looking at this situation rationally, how does this guy get to run around
accusing banks of anything and mobilize governments into actions which have massive
ramifications for the global financial system unless he's intimately connected with the very
people that operate the top of that system?
How does this no-name guy in the mid-1990's, fresh 'off the boat' as it were, convince
someone to give him $25 million in CASH to go around Russia buying up privatization vouchers at
less than pennies on the dollar?
It simply doesn't pass a basic sniff test.
Danske is the biggest bank in Denmark and one of the oldest in Europe. The message should be
clear.
If they can be gotten to this way, anyone can.
Just looking at the list of people named in the Magnitsky Act, a list given to Congress by
Browder and copied verbatim without investigation, and CAATSA as being 'friends of Vladimir'
it's obvious that the target isn't Putin himself for his human rights transgressions but anyone
in Russia with enough capital to maintain a business bigger than a chain of laundromats in
Rostov-on-Don.
Honestly, even some in the U.S. financial press said it looked like they just went through
the Moscow phone book.
But, here the rub. In The Davos Crowd's single-minded drive to destroy Russia, which has
been going on now for close to two generations in various ways, they are willing to undermine
the very institutions on which a great deal of their power rests.
The more Browder gets defended by people punching far above his weight, the more obvious it
is that there is something wrong with his story. Undermining the reputation of the biggest bank
in Denmark is a 'playing-for-keeps' moment.
But, it's one that can and will have serious repercussions over time.
It undermines the validity of government institutions, exposing corruption that proves we
live in a world ruled by men, not laws. That the U.S. and EU are fundamentally no different in
their leadership than banana republics.
And that's bad for currency and debt markets as capital always flows to where it is treated
best.
But, it's one that can and will have serious repercussions over time. The seizure of ABLV
and 2017's liquidation of Spain's Banco Popular were rightly described by Martin Armstrong as
defining moments where no one in their right mind would invest in a European banks if there was
the possibility of losing all of your capital due to a change in the political winds
overnight.
Using the European Parliament to censure Cyprus via Article 7 over one man's financial
privacy, which no one is guaranteed in this world today thanks to these same AML and KYC laws,
reeks of cronyism and corruption of the highest degree.
If you want to know what a catalyst for the collapse of the European banking system looks
like, it may well be what happens this week if Danske tries to fight the spider's web laid down
by Bill Browder and his friends in high places.
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hanekhw , 1 minute ago
Browder, the Clintons, Soros and the EU were made for each other weren't they? They've
been screwing us publicly for what, over two generations? And without a condom! We've gotten
how many FTDs (financially transmitted diseases) from these people? They never unzip their
flys.
geno-econ , 1 hour ago
According to Browder, Putin is worth over $100 Billion most of it stashed away in foreign
banks through intermediates and relatives. If true, it will bring down Putin and many western
banks. Perhaps a Red Swan is about to take off exposing an unsustainable .financial system
and corrupt political enterprise on both sides of the divide sur to cause chaos. Ironically,
Putin who represents Nationalism in Russia is under attack by Globalists accusing Putin of
Capitalistic Greed utilizing western banks Suicidal !
hanekhw , 16 minutes ago
Browder, the Clintons, Soros and the EU were made for each other weren't they? They've
been screwing us publicly for what, over two generations? And without a condom! We've gotten
how many FTDs (financially transmitted diseases) from these people? They never unzip their
flys.
zeroboris , 24 minutes ago
They use his humanitarian bona fides
Browder's bona fides? LOL
monad , 8 minutes ago
Minion (((Browder))) snitches on his masters. Nowhere to hide.
Vanilla_ISIS , 18 minutes ago
Someone should just kill this dude. Browder has certainly earned it.
roadhazard , 14 minutes ago
But what about the money laundering.
Panic Mode , 15 minutes ago
You better run. Your buddy McCain is gone and see who else will fight for you.
pndr4495 , 42 minutes ago
Somehow - Mnuchkin's desire to sell his Park Ave. apartment fits into this tale of
intrigue and bullshit.
markar , 47 minutes ago
Send this guy Browder a polonium cocktail. It's on me.
TahoeBilly2012 , 1 hour ago
((Browder)) ??
Clogheen , 37 minutes ago
Yes. Did you really need to ask?
geno-econ , 1 hour ago
According to Browder, Putin is worth over $100 Billion most of it stashed away in foreign
banks through intermediates and relatives. If true, it will bring down Putin and many western
banks. Perhaps a Red Swan is about to take off exposing an unsustainable .financial system
and corrupt political enterprise on both sides of the divide sur to cause chaos. Ironically,
Putin who represents Nationalism in Russia is under attack by Globalists accusing Putin of
Capitalistic Greed utilizing western banks Suicidal !
Max Cynical , 1 hour ago
I watch the banned documentary...The Magnitsky Act - Behind the Scenes.
Only the slimiest rats get into the club of "Can Do No Wrong" and these types of gigs.
Thaxter , 1 hour ago
This documentary is first class, a really absorbing look into the mind of the sociopath
Browder, a pathological, absolutely shameless liar and a very stupid and weak person. To
understand the influence that this insignificant invertebrate yields, look to his father,
Earl Russell Browder, who was the leader of the Communist Party in the United States during
the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s.
blindfaith , 22 minutes ago
Look no further than our own political circus to see that mighty hands pull the strings.
Like all strings, they will fray and break...eventually.
Jim in MN , 1 hour ago
Yes well the Big Question for us now is the degree to which the President is in control of
any of this.
Recall, dear ZH fighters, how we worked out a sound strategy for the Trump Administration
in the early days. Key aspects were to leave the generals and the bankers alone for a couple
of years. This would allow immigration, trade, health care and deregulation including tax
reform to form the early core wins, along with Supreme Court nominees of course.
Lo, cometh the Deep State and its frantic attempts to both save and conceal itself.
One key tentacle was to rouse the intelligence community into an active enemy of the
POTUS. This partially fouled up the 'leave the generals alone' strategy.
Another is to try to force war with the emergent Eurasian hegemony comprised of China and
Russia. This is seen all across the 'hinterland' of Russia.
The USA has no vital strategic interests in Eurasia at this juncture of history. Everyone
should be clear on that.
The USA's logical and sane policy stance is to support peace, free and fair trade, and
stable democracy, including border controls and the rule of law through LEADING BY
EXAMPLE.
So for Trump to continue to allow the financial sector Deep State traitors to operate
against a peaceful Eurasia is becoming increasingly intolerable.
Where to from here?
BandGap , 1 hour ago
Keep opening it up to scrutiny.
This article opened my eyes, I did not fully understand why Russia was all over Browder
except the stealing aspect, but bigger yet, why he was being protected by the EU/US.
No wonder Putin wants to work with the Donno. Taking Browder out and exposing this
manipulation works for both sides.
LA_Goldbug , 40 minutes ago
If Browder is a surprise to you then look at Khodorkovsky (there is more of these types
from he came from).
Because when looking at this situation rationally, how does this guy get to run around
accusing banks of anything and mobilize governments into actions which have massive
ramifications for the global financial system unless he's intimately connected with the very
people that operate the top of that system?"
Exactly. He was sent by the Anglo-Zionist Tribe otherwise he would be a nobody.
JacquesdeMolay , 1 hour ago
Also, a very good book on the topic: "suppressed and banned by the CIA's supplier, Amazon,
The Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax is a highly intelligent, frank and entertaining
take-down of one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the US public and the world
– The Magnitsky Act. Krainer's study of Bill Browder's book and actions is a riveting,
unflinching expose of what might end up being pivotal in revealing one of this decade's big
hoaxes."
The west going on attack mode against Cyprus to protect Browder. Cyprus is cooperating
with Putin on his financial dealings which all flowed through Cyprus. Lots of skeletons there
that implicate many more important people than Browder
Real reason for western elite hatred of Russia is that it has destroyed neo con dreams of
full spectrum dominance in military affairs. Doubt US would have invaded Iraq in 2003 if
Russian military was as strong then as it us today.
In all areas held by jihadis the most difficult issue was how to blow them up and not the
civilians they were holding hostage. The Syrian and Russian strategy has been from the start
to let the jihadis do their thing, wait, never escalate but negotiate, so as to avoid
civilian casualties. This strategy has worked to win the war, and seems to be the same one
they're following in Idlib. In contrast to previous hawkish threats by FUKUS and Nato, the
propaganda mills are churning out much milder fare than previously. The Israelis have started
admitting they were supporting '12' terror groups in Syria, and French ex foreign minister of
defense, now 'minister for Europe and foreign affairs' Jean-Yves Le Drian, has declared that
Nato has lost the war, but Assad has not 'won the peace'. Assad and Putin have learnt the
lesson long ago, that they cannot negotiate with terrorists like Le Drian, and are better off
negotiating with Erdogan, AlQaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Making Russia 'The Enemy'
December 15, 2016
•
156
Comments
Save
Exclusive:
Despite conflicting
accounts about who leaked the Democratic emails, the frenzy over an alleged Russian role is driving the U.S. deeper into
a costly and dangerous New Cold War, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as
fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex's transitioning from the "war on terror"
to a more lucrative "new cold war" – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the
neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.
By hyping the Russian "threat," the neocons and their
liberal-hawk sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news media, can guarantee bigger military budgets from
Congress. The hype also sets in motion a blocking maneuver to impinge on any significant change in direction for U.S.
foreign policy under Trump.
Wintery scene at Red Square in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Some Democrats even hope to stop Trump from ascending to the
White House by having the Central Intelligence Agency, in effect, lobby the electors in the Electoral College with scary
tales about Russia trying to fix the election for Trump.
The electors meet on Dec. 19 when they will formally cast their
votes, supposedly reflecting the judgments of each state's voters, but conceivably individual electors could switch
their ballots from Trump to Hillary Clinton or someone else.
On Thursday, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. joined the call
for electors to flip,
writing
:
"The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton's popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason
to blow up the system."
That Democrats would want the CIA, which is forbidden to
operate domestically in part because of its historic role in influencing elections in other countries, to play a similar
role in the United States shows how desperate the Democratic Party has become.
And, even though The New York Times and other big news outlets
are
reporting
as flat fact
that Russia hacked the Democratic email accounts and gave the information to WikiLeaks, former British
Ambassador Craig Murray, a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the London Daily Mail that
he
personally received the email data
from a "disgusted" Democrat.
Murray said he flew from London to Washington for a clandestine
handoff from one of the email sources in September, receiving the package in a wooded area near American University.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray
"Neither of [the leaks, from the Democratic National Committee
or Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] came from the Russians," Murray said, adding: "the source had legal access to
the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks."
Murray said the insider felt "disgust at the corruption of the
Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders." Murray added that his
meeting was with an intermediary for the Democratic leaker, not the leaker directly.
[
Update:
Murray
subsequently said his contact with the intermediary at American University was not for the purpose of obtaining a batch
of the purloined emails, as the Daily Mail reported, since WikiLeaks already had them. He said the Mail simply added
that detail to the story, but Murray declined to explain why he had the meeting at A.U. with the whistleblower or an
associate.]
If Murray's story is true, it raises several alternative
scenarios: that the U.S. intelligence community's claims about a Russian hack are false; that Russians hacked the
Democrats' emails for their own intelligence gathering without giving the material to WikiLeaks; or that Murray was
deceived about the identity of the original leaker.
But the uncertainty creates the possibility that the Democrats
are using a dubious CIA assessment to reverse the outcome of an American presidential election, in effect, making the
CIA party to a preemptive domestic "regime change."
Delayed Autopsy
All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party's
self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in normally Democratic strongholds, such as
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for
pre-selecting a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the public's resistance to this
establishment choice, Democrats have pointed fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for briefly
reviving Clinton's email investigation, to third-party candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral
College which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote – and now to the Russians.
FBI Director James Comey
While there may be some validity to these various complaints,
the excessive frenzy that has surrounded the still-unproven claims that the Russian government surreptitiously tilted
the election in Trump's favor creates an especially dangerous dynamic.
On one level, it has led Democrats to support Orwellian/
McCarthyistic concepts, such as
establishing
"black lists" for Internet sites
that question Official Washington's "conventional wisdom" and thus are deemed
purveyors of "Russian propaganda" or "fake news."
On another level, it cements the Democratic Party as America's
preeminent "war party," favoring an escalating New Cold War with Russia by ratcheting up economic sanctions against
Moscow, and even seeking military challenges to Russia in conflict zones such as Syria and Ukraine.
One of the most dangerous aspects of a prospective Hillary
Clinton presidency was that she would have appointed neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland and her husband, Project for the New American Century co-founder Robert Kagan, to high-level foreign
policy positions.
Though that risk may have passed assuming Clinton's Electoral
College defeat on Monday, Democrats now are excitedly joining the bash-Russia movement, making it harder to envision how
the party can transition back into its more recent role as the "peace party" (at least relative to the extremely hawkish
Republicans).
Trading Places
The potential trading places of the two parties in that regard
– with Trump favoring geopolitical détente and the Democrats beating the drums for more military confrontations – augurs
poorly for the Democrats regaining their political footing anytime soon.
Red Square in Moscow with a winter festival to the left and the Kremlin to the right, on Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by
Robert Parry)
If Democratic leaders press ahead, in alliance with
neoconservative Republicans, on demands for escalating the New Cold War with Russia, they could precipitate a party
split between Democratic hawks and doves, a schism that likely would have occurred if Clinton had been elected but now
may happen anyway, albeit without the benefit of the party holding the White House.
The first test of this emerging Democratic-neocon alliance may
come over Trump's choice for Secretary of State, Exxon-Mobil's chief executive Rex Tillerson, who doesn't exhibit the
visceral hatred of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Democrats are encouraging.
As an international business executive, Tillerson appears to
share Trump's real-politik take on the world, the idea that doing business with rivals makes more sense than conspiring
to force "regime change" after "regime change."
Over the past several decades, the "regime change" approach has
been embraced by both neocons and liberal interventionists and has been implemented by both Republican and Democratic
administrations. Sometimes, it's done through war and other times through "color revolutions" – always under the
idealistic guise of "democracy promotion" or "protecting human rights."
But the problem with this neo-imperialist strategy has been
that it has failed miserably to improve the lives of the people living in the "regime-changed" countries. Instead, it
has spread chaos across wide swaths of the globe and has now even destabilized Europe.
Yet, the solution, as envisioned by the neocons and their
liberal-hawk understudies, is simply to force more "regime change" medicine down the throats of the world's population.
The new "great" idea is to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia by making its economy scream and by funding as many
anti-Putin elements as possible to create the nucleus for a "color revolution" in Moscow.
To justify that risky scheme, there has been a broad expansion
of anti-Russian propaganda now being funded with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money as well as being pushed
by government officials giving off-the-record briefings to mainstream media outlets.
However, as with earlier "regime change" plans, the neocons and
liberal hawks never think through the scenario to the end. They always assume that everything is going to work out fine
and some well-dressed "opposition leader" who has been to their think-tank conferences will simply ascend to the top
job.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S.
Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Remember, in Iraq, it was going to be Ahmed Chalabi who was
beloved in Official Washington but broadly rejected by the Iraqi people. In Libya, there has been a parade of
U.S.-approved "unity" leaders who have failed to pull that country together.
In Ukraine, Nuland's choice – Arseniy "Yats is the guy"
Yatsenyuk – resigned amid broad public disapproval earlier this year after pushing through harsh cuts in social
programs, even as the U.S.-backed regime officials in Kiev
continued
to plunder Ukraine's treasury
and misappropriate Western economic aid.
Nuclear-Armed Destabilization
But the notion of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia is even
more hare-brained than those other fiascos. The neocon/liberal-hawk assumption is that Russians – pushed to the brink of
starvation by crippling Western sanctions – will overthrow Putin and install a new version of Boris Yeltsin who would
then let U.S. financial advisers return with their neoliberal "shock therapy" of the 1990s and again exploit Russia's
vast resources.
Indeed, it was the Yeltsin era and its Western-beloved "shock
therapy" that created the desperate conditions before the rise of Putin with his autocratic nationalism, which, for all
its faults, has dramatically improved the lives of most Russians.
Bright lights on Red Square, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
So, the more likely result from the neocon/liberal-hawk "regime
change" plans for Moscow would be the emergence of someone even more nationalistic – and likely far less stable – than
Putin, who is regarded even by his critics as cold and calculating.
The prospect of an extreme Russian nationalist getting his or
her hands on the Kremlin's nuclear codes should send chills up and down the spines of every American, indeed every human
being on the planet. But it is the course that key national Democrats appear to be on with their increasingly hysterical
comments about Russia.
The Democratic National Committee
issued
a statement
on Wednesday accusing Trump of giving Russia "an early holiday gift that smells like a payoff. It's
rather easy to connect the dots. Russia meddled in the U.S. election in order to benefit Trump and now he's repaying
Vladimir Putin by nominating Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state."
Besides delaying a desperately needed autopsy on why Democrats
did so badly in an election against the also-widely-disliked Donald Trump, the new blame-Russia gambit threatens to hurt
the Democrats and their preferred policies in another way.
If Democrats vote in bloc against Tillerson or other Trump
foreign-policy nominees – demanding that he appoint people acceptable to the neocons and the liberal hawks – Trump might
well be pushed deeper into the arms of right-wing Republicans, giving them more on domestic issues to solidify their
support on his foreign-policy goals.
That could end up redounding against the Democrats as they
watch important social programs gutted in exchange for their own dubious Democratic alliance with the neocons.
Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have
courted factions of the neocons, apparently thinking they are influential because they dominate many mainstream op-ed
pages and Washington think tanks. In 1993, as a thank-you gift to the neocon editors of The New Republic for endorsing
him, Clinton appointed neocon ideologue James Woolsey as head of the CIA, one of Clinton's more disastrous personnel
decisions.
But the truth appears to be that the neocons have much less
influence across the U.S. electoral map than the Clintons think. Arguably, their pandering to a clique of Washington
insiders who are viewed as warmongers by many peace-oriented Democrats may even represent a net negative when it comes
to winning votes.
I've communicated with a number of traditional Democrats who
didn't vote for Hillary Clinton because they
feared
she would pursue a dangerous neocon foreign policy
. Obviously, that's not a scientific survey, but the anecdotal
evidence suggests that Clinton's neocon connections could have been another drag on her campaign.
Assessing Russia
I also undertook a limited personal test regarding whether
Russia is the police state that U.S. propaganda depicts, a country yearning to break free from the harsh grip of
Vladimir Putin (although he registers 80 or so percent approval in polls).
Couple walking along the Kremlin wall, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
During my trip last week to Europe, which included stops in
Brussels and Copenhagen, I decided to take a side trip to Moscow, which I had never visited before. What I encountered
was an impressive, surprisingly (to me at least) Westernized city with plenty of American and European franchises,
including the ubiquitous McDonald's and Starbucks. (Russians serve the Starbucks gingerbread latte with a small ginger
cookie.)
Though senior Russian officials proved unwilling to meet with
me, an American reporter, at this time of tensions, Russia had little appearance of a harshly repressive society. In my
years covering U.S. policies in El Salvador in the 1980s and Haiti in the 1990s, I have experienced what police states
look and feel like, where death squads dump bodies in the streets. That was not what I sensed in Moscow, just a modern
city with people bustling about their business under early December snowfalls.
The police presence in Red Square near the Kremlin was not even
as heavy-handed as it is near the government buildings of Washington. Instead, there was a pre-Christmas festive air to
the brightly lit Red Square, featuring a large skating rink surrounded by small stands selling hot chocolate, toys, warm
clothing and other goods.
Granted, my time and contact with Russians were limited – since
I don't speak Russian and most of them don't speak English – but I was struck by the contrast between the grim images
created by Western media and the Russia that I saw.
It reminded me of how President Ronald Reagan depicted
Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a "totalitarian dungeon" with a militarized state ready to march on Texas, but what I
found when I traveled to Managua was a third-world country still recovering from an earthquake and with a weak security
structure despite the Contra war that Reagan had unleashed against Nicaragua.
In other words, "
perception
management
" remains the guiding principle of how the U.S. government deals with the American people, scaring us with
exaggerated tales of foreign threats and then manipulating our fears and our misperceptions.
As dangerous as that can be when we're talking about Nicaragua
or Iraq or Libya, the risks are exponentially higher regarding Russia. If the American people are stampeded into a New
Cold War based more on myths than reality, the minimal cost could be the trillions of dollars diverted from domestic
needs into the Military Industrial Complex. The far-greater cost could be some miscalculation by either side that could
end life on the planet.
So, as the Democrats chart their future, they need to decide if
they want to leapfrog the Republicans as America's "war party" or whether they want to pull back from the escalation of
tensions with Russia and start addressing the pressing needs of the American people.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry
broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
America's
Stolen Narrative,
either in
print
here
or as an e-book (from
Amazon
and
barnesandnoble.com
).
When I think about what the Neocons have done to the Mid
East with their goal to change regimes that we do not approve of it makes me shudder. I wonder why there are not
protesters in the streets like there was in Vietnam Nam. Why isn't there more news agencies protesting our actions?
Why isn't George Bush being tried for war crimes by world or US courts? Trump talks about building up our military. I
hope this will not lead to more conflicts and an increase in our national debt. Why can't there be a larger effort to
print the truth about Putin and Russia? Keep up your efforts to spread the truth. Thank God that Hillary was not
elected.
Refreshing article among all the post Trump election
hysterical propaganda. Particularly telling for me because I have been one of those lured in thinking that a regime
change in Irak could not be worse than what was happening, Kurdes being gased by the hundred of thousand, Israel
being attacked with incentives given by Saddam to terrorists, and soon the French giving him access to their nuclear
program, plus naturally the WMDs . I know now that it was wrong, and that we have enough domestic problems to fix
before trying to interfere into foreign complex cultural grounds.
Yet I think that the biggest element that can explain Clinton's defeat is the massive demographic miscalculation the
Democrats have been making for decades. They came up with this crazy strategy of dividing the American People into
more and more competing minorities, prying electorally on real and invented specialty oppressions, pretending that
only them could champion the oppressed in exchange for their votes. Doing so, they did not see that they were
collaterally creating a class of oppressors, who they would depict, on and on, as bigots, uneducated, bigots and the
soon-to-be-electorally-irrelevant white class.
This strategy backlashed, in a revolt of these "whites", and more importantly showed that what they wanted to
consider as a separate voting class, the "hispanics" voted like "whites" Because they feel and are white!
I was not surprised by this brutal correction of what was only a narrative supporting a populist electoral strategy.
I live in Florida, immersed in these "hispanics", but overall because I am European, I saw from there beginning the
artificiality of the stratagem. Try in Europe to call the Spanish and Portuguese people "hispanic, or to enroll the
Greeks, the Corsican, the Italian in a non white minority, Not only people would laugh, but they would call you a
racist.
Joe L.
,
December 18, 2016 at 8:34 pm
Oh and here is a link to the article in the Daily Mail UK
that Ex-British ambassador, who is now a WikiLeaks operative, claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails – they
were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic whistleblowers:
What worries me so tremendously is the simplistic barbarism
of these attacks on Russia: pure jaded propaganda, which, sadly and unbelievably enough, too many people are too
eager to swallow.
Rob
,
December 17, 2016 at 1:39 pm
The surest sign that the NYT and the rest of the MSM are in
the bag with regard to the "blame Russia" campaign is their failure even to mention (at least to my knowledge) Craig
Murray's claim that he received the DNC info from a leaker inside the organization. This claim may or not be true,
but it is at least worth reporting and considering as a possible explanation for how Wikileaks came to possess the
material. That said, the manner in which Wikileaks released the information so as to maximize damage to the Clinton
campaign makes me wonder about the mental health of Julian Assange. Four years of confinement to a room can mess with
your mind.
Not only the story Craig Murray but how about the story
of Podesta having willingly surrendered his password to a (the) hacker. If the contents of a hack are true, what's
the hullabaloo all about.
Professor T
,
December 17, 2016 at 11:30 am
Thanks for this article. I never believed this crap about
the Russians hacking the election. The U.S. Election process is a sham which disenfranchises voters across the board.
I believe that both parties have their hands in these elections right down to the Board of Elections and electoral
colleges in each of these states. When Bernie Sanders ran in NY, I believe the Demorcratic Party and the Board of
Elections especially in NYC made it hard for him to get elected. All of a sudden in Brooklyn registered voters were
not found, like 125,000 voters . Really? NY was a state also named with Southern states in the 60's as a state that
disenfranchised voters. I am not surprised. I am not a fan of Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton. They definitely have
not improved the lives of African Americans or any other Americans. Only the lives of those within their inner
circle. They are exploiters to the highest degree. She lost because Americans rejected her and her ideals. They said
enough. We don't need another Clinton in the White House to do Part 2 of how to disenfranchise and destabilize
American people. I am not a Trump fan either, but if he won the election fair and scare I can't argue with that. The
Democratic and Republican parties are not in touch with the American people. The election process needs to be
reformed where if you don't have money, you don' t have influence. They are corrupt on both sides. It is pay for play
and I am sure that is not how the forefathers intended this to be or maybe it was .. Time to clean house and that is
on both sides. Whether they are White, Black, or any other persuasion, they are corrupt. Rome is Burning!!
R. Rivera
,
December 16, 2016 at 6:09 pm
Russia may have tried to influence the election, it might
be a frame job, or it might be a collaborator in this election. It does not matter. I suspect the election really was
rigged ( the fbi's comey did his part ) but it was rigged in favor of trump
When I see someone pointing and yelling "crook!" as trump
did, I always suspect the yeller (trump) is the one causing the problem. Remember gingrich complaining about
clinton's morality and pointing the finger with disgust? He should have resigned since he was cheating on mrs.
gingrich AND kept it a secret while on his moral crusade. I have not been wrong yet when I see this behavior.
The cia with a suspected history of interring with other
nations is complaining about russia's interference? We must be in trouble.
This was not an election. It was a coup to elect the new
puppet president trump. We need to expose the puppeteers.
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 5:46 pm
Obama today: basically all the messes, conflicts, disputes,
wars and so on that he has created in the world, and the reason Hillary wasn't given "her turn," are OUR fault
because we can't accept the lies he promulgates on the mainstream media and we insist on going to alternate sources.
And, of course, extrapolating that logic will justify commiting an act of war against Russia, which he promises to
do.
How can we get this guy outta there before he blows up the
planet? Trump must take to the airwaves to defend himself against the accusations or possibly be removed in a coup
being orchestrated by this sullen hater. This is spiraling downhill fast and, from the comments on internet forums,
war fever is in the air, proving Obama is more dangerous than any "fake news" outlet.
Michael K.
,
December 16, 2016 at 4:29 pm
There is an uncomfortable truth about those who led the Old
Bolsheviks and their b;loody terrors, who looted Russia under Yeltsin, and who leads the neoconservative core of the
anti-Russia pundits:
They were and are disproportionately Jewish, but we are not
supposed to note it, lest this curious FACT "offend" someone who is offended by . the truth.
So, we can't talk about a major [though not necessarily
predominant] element of who is leading the anti-Russian rhetoric in DC and media so let's pretend it isn't playing a
role here.
Why are we so concerned (as per Pres. Obama's press
conference this morning) about the unproved possibility of a foreign power's (like Russia, for example) influence
(if true, it was positive) on our election, when Israel, through AIPAC and the American Jewish Communuty, etal.,
ALREADY HAS a far greater influence (especially being negative) on our elections. Another example of an egregious
double-standard being applied to Israel. In fact, Israel is just sort of a co-partner here in the U.S.. Why is a
foreign-born, Israeli dual-national, former Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fisher, the 2nd man at the
Federal Reserve?Why were we pretending that Jonathon Pollard was a spy? What is the average percentage of votes in
the Congress on legislation relating to Israel? To which country do we give more Foreign Aid than any other
country even though "Aid" denotes, not connotes, that the country is "needy". To which country did we just sign a
$38 billion (10-year) Charity package, which purports to be Military, but is highly fungible, meaning that can be
used for the financing of settlements or whatever the f**k they want to use it for, like, haredim welfare. Bottom
line:President Obama and all the Neo-Con Russia bashers are first class hypocrites, trying to exorcize (or
exercise) an historic grudge against the Russian Tsars. Why is this country being pushed into wars that do not
concern us, but rather a country with a wall around it that wishes to expand its borders, because our Congressmen
and President are owned by them?
Brilliant article and some brilliant comments. We live now
in a very small world and if you can't see your connection to your neighbour wherever and whoever that may be you are
not awake. I drive a car so I have to think about that and notwithstanding the necessity of that I have to think
about the bigger picture and maybe next year it should be an electric car , or no car . This whole fabrication about
the Russians simply isn't washing with us common people, so the perception management of not just the Democrats , but
politicians in general is so wide of the mark after Trump and Brexit they just don't know what to do. They thought
they had it all wrapped up and then along came the Internet ..
sanford sklansky
,
December 16, 2016 at 3:15 pm
A good article and maybe demonizing Russia for the wrong
reasons. But lets not forget that Putin is running a kleptocracy. There is no freedom of speech. Certainly no paper
that can speak out against him or the Russian government. The anti gay laws are terrible. You were only in Russia for
a short time. I don't know if you can gauge much just from walking around Red Square. And while there didn't appear
to be a big police presence I am guessing it was there and you were unaware. I am assuming that your passport says
you are a reporter. No doubt some one was probably watching where you were going and who you might be talking to.
James lake
,
December 17, 2016 at 3:25 pm
Wow this is the arrogant way of thinking that is at the
root of world problems
What has their form of govt got to do with you.???
The Russian people have shown over the years that they don't take any nonsense and if the feel their govt is not
working for them they will make themselves heard.
K. Geebee
,
December 16, 2016 at 3:05 pm
Is this article a joke? So this guys walks around Moscow
for a day speaking no Russian and is able to 'deduce' that Russia is like any Western democracy, with Putin its
misunderstood, magnanimous ruler. And this allows him to claim to know better than Russian dissenters or Western
journalists who actually speak Russian and understand its propaganda. No wonder this site was listed as a Russian
stooge. And all the commenters praising his acumen (he went to a Russian starbucks, wow!) is even funnier
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 4:00 pm
You assholes from Langley here taking names or
something? Go tell your sycophantic acting boss Michael Morell that he's not funny, he's psychotic.
Josh Laudermilk
,
December 17, 2016 at 4:18 am
@Realist,
Michael Morell was another shadowy figure that was
insistent that Hillary Clinton deserves to be anointed POTUS and leader of "the Free World" (only the USA is
free, not Finland, Sweden, Netherlands or anywhere else knows what 'democracy' really is). Did you know that
Mike Morell actually said we should be killing Russians in Ukraine? He openly said that. When I heard him say
that, as opposed to something I would have said, like "I want Russia to join NATO. I want to have joint
military operations with Russia. I want to have a joint counter-terrorist command. We can and should be
fighting Wahhabi terrorists together."
Mr. Morell openly approves of murdering Russians
wholesale, whenever they are found outside the borders of their country (which Mike Morell wishes would recede
even further, to shrink Russia as much as possible). There were no consequences for his genocidal and violent
hate speech, which I would expect from a Salafist minister, not a former Acting Director of the nation's
premier 'intelligence' agency. The word intelligence being used in the loosest manner as all possible.
Realist, whoever you are, why should I or anyone
trust the CIA about this past election? Seriously, the CIA is the master at electoral rigging, psychological
warfare, deception, counter-operations, and murder. For decades, the CIA rigged the elections of Japan so that
the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP being the CIA approved polity in Japan) would win ever single time. And the
LDP has ruled the county almost uninterruptedly, with an exception when, for a short time, the opposition party
(the Democratic Party) had a majority before being brought down by corruption scandals.
Or what about all the election rigging that the CIA
performed in Italy during the 1950ies? I could go on, but the CIA has a long history of "hacking" elections and
controlling the polity of other nations, through rigging, murder and coups.
Realist
,
December 17, 2016 at 4:22 pm
That's why I mentioned Morell rather than Brennan.
You caught my drift. Good.
Jerry Falkenstein
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:29 pm
Just wondering, Is the world better off now or changed for
the better since the a-holes started the war with Iraq?
Drew Hunkins
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:47 pm
It's just so bananas, it's hard to put into words how so
much of the mainstream press is lapping up and disseminating the drivel that "Putin/Russian gov't hacked the election
to tilt it to Trump!" The hysteria is strikingly similar to what went on in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq war
debacle. Repetition is hardening into orthodoxy in some quarters and smart liberals should know better than to give
these insane charges the veneer of credibility.
It's crucial to note that what's been going on over the
last month or so is that there's a serious battle being waged amongst our ruling class behind the scenes (sometimes
referred to as the "Deep State"). From what I can make of it, on one side sits Trump, Big Oil and elements of the FBI
versus virtually all of the establishment mass media and press, DNC insiders, much of the CIA, and elements of the
Zionist power configuration and Saudi terror network who want war on Iran – not market driven empire building with
Iran which is what Tillerson's likely to propose. Of course another element of the Zionist power configuration is
quite pleased that Trump's appointing Palestinian land grabbers too.
This internecine battle being waged between our elites is
incredibly fascinating to witness. Of course that it has the potential to spiral out of control is undoubtedly
worrisome and means true progressives and lefties have their work cut out for them over the coming months and years.
Josh Stern
,
December 16, 2016 at 2:22 pm
Deep State is true – two sides in the Deep State is not
true. Is the FBI really opposite to the CIA – no, the FBI is the CIA security force. It has never prosecuted any
CIA related "crime" except for whistleblower leaks. Why doesn't Trump "side" make the point that the news story in
the leaks was a fraudulent – and probably criminal – sabotaging of Sanders' campaign, which the DNC is hoping its
members will forget about? That is very damaging to the DNC why are all the Republicans so quiet about it?
War/security state money benefits from war or heightened
readiness for war. It is constantly looking for boogeyman threats to justify more spending on the security state.
No matter that US produces over 95% of the world's weapons. No matter that US defense budget is greater than next
7 states combined. We need more of that $$$ security. Lot of threats don't you know. Russia – it is alleged
without proof – might sneak in and tell us about how corrupt our 2 political parties are. Can't have that.
President Obama is just caving in all over the place like a
blob of jello (no excuses for mixing metaphors here when the issue is so egregious)-too many instances to even
itemize here, let alone comment on. One incident, though, I remember seems to symbolize his lamentable state of mind:
when he pulled up to the welcoming (some welcome) stand in Beijing several months ago. Surprise: no red carpet like
the other Heads of State. A deliberate slight? Absolutely. How did he react. Like a President of the United States?
Absolutely not! He dropped the stairs that AF One carries in its nose for just such occasions and sortied as if
nothing had happened. In fact, what had happened is that he had sloughed off the insult like a Black man because he
couldn't do anything about it, when he should have sat tight until a red carper appeared, or left, and the United
States had suffered a huge hit to its prestige. Childish? I don't think so. If he had stayed put, that red carpet
would have appeared. So the problem is that Barack Obama does not represent the people he purports to, because he
cannot identify with them. Bottom line: this country cannot have another President from a minority group. let alone a
disadvantaged one. We have now had our Black president, just like we had our Black mayor of NYC. It won't happen
again, but it's good that it happened once to show why it won't work, and hopefully will put a brake on the
multicultural hype. We would wager that the Jews would never be so stupid as to allow one of theirs to be our
President.
I would like to know many posters on this site support
this racist rant. If you do support it please post your support of it along with any other minorities you hate.
Consider this recent statement by Obama concerning
"hacking": 'We need to take action and we will at a time and place of our choosing'
It just does not come more completely brainless than this.
And, given his powerful position, more irresponsible.
Take revenge?
For what?
For someone's assertion, unsupported by a scrap of proof?
An assertion by one political appointee at CIA who is not
supported by any of the sister intelligence agencies or any physical evidence whatsoever? Even the otherwise pathetic
John Kerry has backed off confirming this rubbish.
An assertion whose obvious motive is to get back at the
winning candidate, someone you don't like?
This sick man, Obama – a failure in virtually everything he
has attempted as President from domestic policy to foreign relations, and a man who has killed hundreds of thousands
of innocents abroad, too – is also trying to get back at the government which thwarted his bad intentions in Syria
and in Ukraine.
That government embarrassed him before the entire world in
his pursuit of ill-considered policies.
Of course, he is trying to get back at Trump because Obama
knows Trump is going to quickly extinguish most of what he has done, his sad little pile of stuff, his so-called
legacy.
Well, here's Obama's real legacy, making threats and
calling names, threatening innocent people with an abuse of power. Of course, I think we can all agree that while
profoundly stupid, this behavior of Obama seems almost elevated compared to his construction and oversight of an
entire machinery for extrajudicial killing in many lands.
I am beginning to think Obama has gone mad, just adding to
all the other deficiencies of his character and personality. Can he not see how ridiculous he is making charges and
threats like this? Apparently not, which is a strong indicator of irrationality.
Here is a 2016 version of drunken old Senator Joe McCarthy
waving handfuls of blank papers he calls lists and threatening what he calls traitors in the American government.
Only the 2016 version sits in the Oval Office, and he has access to the nuclear launch codes.
This is deeply concerning behavior from a man in such a
position.
And if the mainline press were not totally biased towards
the war party of the neocons and its defeated candidate, the most corrupt and vicious person ever to run for
President, it would be saying so, not giving credibility to blubbering insanity by covering it as though it were
sound speech.
The latest breathlessly broadcast news from CNN, BBC and
all over print media this morning and without one shred of proof presented I might add) is that Putin himself signed
off on the interference in the American Presidential election.
This was to be expected following the defeat of the CIA
funded, trained and armed Terrorists in Syria. to attempt to lay the blame on anything else is to attribute the
ability of the American Government and it´s multitude of intelligence agencies with an attention span that is longer
than a single news cycle. Every setback must be met immediately with a deluge of hysterical propaganda against
someone in a foreign country, the current enemy du jour being President Putin.
In short, the !/10 of 1% Elites in the US did not get the
coronation of the President they wanted. Now they are more than willing to take the country to the very brink of
nuclear war to make sure that the electorate gets back in line and marches to the Elite´s tune. For sure they will
not risk the Hamptons in a nuclear war, but will push the envelope right to it´s breaking point. The great unwashed
in the USA has risen and now must be pushed back into their former prostate position, and begging for handouts from
their criminal Elite. For the Elites, their worse fear has been realized.
Drew Hunkins
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:41 am
Mr. Kuhn, you make incredibly astute points.
I can't believe this wave of propaganda we're witnessing. And millions of my fellow American citizens will lap all
this up.
Thank you, Vladimir Putin for having helped defeat Hillary
Clinton and installed Donald Trump in the White House, and, by the way, congratulations, for having had the
effrontery to protect your own national security and taken back Crimea from the Neo-Con State Department-backed
coup-plotters. We support you, our Christian brothers. Please continue with your sensible policies.
The Real American People
AG
,
December 16, 2016 at 10:44 am
Thank you, Robert and Consortium News. As a Russian born,
now Russian-American citizen, I am left aghast by the self-serving incitement of the media. Your reporting is a an
island of reason and reassurance for me, as I watch New York Times, NPR and the rest tie up my homeland to the
whipping post.
I return to Russia nearly every other year to both my rural
hometown and metropolitan Moscow. Moscow is the only place in the world where I was served a $9 cup of coffee. Russia
is and has been flourishing for decades. For a long time, Russians were interested in the United States and
appreciated the western model of capitalism. Various civil groups have been organizing exchanges between the two
countries with great fervor. From ballet schools in New York City to forestry crews on Lake Baikal, Russians were
eager for a warmer and open relationship with the United States.
There is a Russia beyond Putin that few dare to speak of.
It is the country I know. It is the country where school children put on monthly plays and begin to recite poetry in
first grade. It is the country where women receive generous government sponsored child-rearing subsidies to stay home
longer. It is a country where those mothers then mourn, and have been mourning, the tens of millions of soldiers who
never came home during the World Wars as well the modern, bloody political games with neighboring Chechnya, Ukraine
and now, Syria.
Russians are, too, spoon-fed typical nationalist
propaganda. Many, including myself, are now wondering about the US and its intentions. Many didn't like the impact of
sanctions on the price of groceries and gas. Russians don't understand why America all of a sudden hates them so
much. Many mothers are scared. They don't want another world war.
Is this all in the name of democracy and human rights? As
someone who works with homeless youth and adults in rural New England, I've got a lot to say about that.
Thanks again, Robert.
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:15 am
I can see how you would be confused by the actions of
your new country against your native land. It was unconscionable how Obama's state department set Ukrainians
against Russians in a coup meant to expand NATO and the EU, to snatch the naval base at Sevastopol away from
Russia, and to station missiles pointed at Moscow only a few hundred miles away. The deadly putsch, the fire
bombings of Odessa and the rocket attacks on the Donbass from Kiev were all totally uncalled for simply because
Yanukovich decided that Putin had offered a better financial deal than did the EU and the IMF. But America is very
proficient at demonizing any leader or government they want out of the way. I'm surprised you haven't come to hate
America for persecuting your people. I know that I hate what we do to numerous other countries, and I hate
heartless bastards like Obama and Clinton who make it all happen without the slightest compunctions. America owes
Russia a big apology for what we have been doing to that country, but, knowing Americans, never expect one. We are
the most self-righteous, "persecuted," paranoid, entitled, loud-mouthed, arrogant people on the planet but far
from exceptional. The people who are exceptional are those whom we tread on and yet prevail.
Bill Bodden
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:45 pm
It is the country where school children put on monthly
plays and begin to recite poetry in first grade.
How about the teachers? Do they carry guns to school so
they can have a shootout with some crackpot having easy access to guns? Or, is this another area where Russia lags
blissfully behind the US?
Josh Laudermilk
,
December 16, 2016 at 9:55 am
To my fellow Americans,
I am begging you, ALL of you, whatever your political
stripe, whatever your social status, whoever you are: Female, Black, Native American, Jewish, Gay,
Transsexual/Transgender (and fuck yeah, I support all minorities and all peoples, including race, sex and gender).
Whoever the fuck you are; DO NOT fall for this Russophobic, Anti-Russian bullshit. I beg of you. This is a concerted
effort by the West to demonize Russia and paint Vlad Putin as a James Bond-esque villain. They want you to swallow
this shit up whole, so you will be distracted from the fact that your overseers (the Powers That Be, the political
and financial elite) continue to blight your lives as they exploit you and you languish in suffering.
Russia is not to blame. Vlad Putin, whatever one makes of
him, is not to blame. And look, I don't like Putin for a variety of reasons. He has continued the Corporatocracy set
up by Boris Yeltsin and 'the Family'. He continues to support a particularly cruel form of capitalism. He also
supports what could be called Eastern Orthodox fundamentalism. He conflates homosexuality with
pedophilia/hebephilia/ephebophilia. But we should not go to war with Russia or make an enemy out of Russia. Vlad
Putin is not to blame for Western aggression.
Don't allow our leaders to sell this message. Tell them, we
aren't buying and we are not going to creep into a New Cold War, let alone support sending the sons and daughters of
other people to their deaths in a hypothetical war with Russia.
President Barack Obama is a fucking failure, the failure of
all failures, as are his cohorts including Hillary Clinton. President Barack Obama's legacy is not reforming
healthcare, assassinating Osama bin Laden, trade deals or ending the occupation of the Republic of Iraq. No, that's
not what his legacy will be, regardless of how many Nobel Prizes he nets during and after his presidency. Nope, his
legacy will be the eternal expansion of drone warfare. Barack Obama's legacy is drones. Creating a narrative about
Russia (and specifically Vlad Putin) is a distraction, a real red herring, to draw attention away from President
Obama's truly (and epically) sinister legacy. It also draws attention away from the fact that 51% of our country is
in poverty, and the global situation is even more grim.
The West has gone absolutely batshit over the impulses of
change, blaming everything on Russia. It is an understatement to say that Russia (and Vlad Putin, specifically) are
the scapegoat of the West. If I slip on a banana peel, I can blame it on Putin and the political elites, the Powers
That Be, will reinforce my accusation and applaud me for saying it.
Russia has been blamed for Hillary Clinton's loss of the US
election, Russia is blamed for the Brexit vote, Russia is blamed for the German election. The German authorities are
saying that the reason Angela Merkel had a less than stellar performance in the recent federal elections is because
of Russia. Do you have a toothache? If you do, it's Russia. Vlad Putin, we are told, has control over the "free
elections" of the world.
This is hysteria, it's mental illness on a global scale.
When rulers and their ruling parties or factions suffer any loss, in the polls or in popularity, it's Vlad Putin's
fault, so we are told. They are hammering this universal "it's Russia's fault" meme as the new State sponsored
ideology. Anyone who even doubts it in the least aspect is considered treasonous.
I shouldn't have to tell you, Russia did not hack the US
election for Donald Trump. Russia did not hack the UK election for Brexit. Russia did not hack German voting machines
so that Angela Merkel's total percentage would be less than projected.
The truth is much less like a Cold War dream fever dream.
Yet our society controllers are trying to create the "justification" for a New Cold War and the latest Red Scare. All
this nonsense about Russians rigging the election, from the very people who scoffed at and heavily criticized Herr
Trump for suggesting an election could be rigged, something the Democrats said was "impossible", including El
Presidente Barack Obama. The anti-Russian craze is truly terrifying to me.
Remember what President Barack Obama said around the time
that Jill Stein began working feverishly to throw the election for Hillary Clinton (someone she pretended to
despise)? He said there was no evidence of election tampering and that he had confidence in the integrity of the
election results.
A few weeks later, because he's a lying son of a bitch, he
completely contradicts himself and reinforces the idea of Russian interference and hacking in the election.
Obama is a LIAR!
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 10:20 am
Another piece of news (to me, at any rate): Obama just
allowed the continuation of economic sanctions against Iran recently passed overwhelmingly in both houses of
congress to become law. Ending the sanctions was supposed to be our part of the treaty with Iran for their promise
never to develop nuclear weapons. This obviously reneges on that agreement and proves to Iran that America's word
is worth shit. Yes, the congress had plenty of votes to over ride any veto that Obama may have placed upon the
bill, but the craven snake should have at least gone through the motions to show Iran that HIS personal word was
sincere, even if his country was duplicitous. Instead he walked away from partners in a deal that took years to
craft because of some mindless spiteful pressure from congress at the very end of his term. The man will fight
with no one except Putin and Russia (who are easy targets in Russophobic America) because he has no principles and
no courage. The sooner he slinks off into the shadows the better. Get out of the people's house, you rat. This
makes me as angry as the revenge he has just vowed against Russia for purportedly "hacking the election," in spite
of zero evidence.
Josh Laudermilk
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:01 pm
@Realist,
Thanks for letting me know about this. It doesn't
surprise me at all. The situation is taking a turn for the worst. Have you seen the news of President Barack
Obama promising to take "action" against Russia? It hurts me that the United States is so unbelievably hostile
and belligerent. We should be allies with Russia, it's a great country and a great people. If I were POTUS, I
would actively be courting the Russian people (not just their administration or President), reaching out and
appealing to them. I would even love to have Russia join NATO. I see Russia as a friend and I'm speaking as an
American citizen. I cannot understand why so many Americans are obsessed with casting Russia as the eternal
villain. I can only surmise that it is a core tenant of 'neoconservatism' that an enemy must always exist to
explain away the costly and ever growing military-industrial complex.
There was no Russian hack. Hillary Clinton will blame
everyone but herself for losing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She is so corrupt. President Barack Obama
is so corrupt. They claim Vladimir Putin and his cabinet are corrupt, they claim that Russia is a "mafia state"
and Putin is "the Godfather" of this "mafia state". Those saying this, at the highest levels, are the most
corrupt in all the world. I think the Democratic Party is one of the most corrupt parties in the world today,
perhaps even in all of history.
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 4:27 pm
Yes, Josh, as I reported from Antiwar.com last
night, Obama is planning a strike, a cyberattack, literally an act of war against Russia based on unfounded
allegations.
"U.S. intelligence officials believe that Putin
*may* (emphasis mine) have directly ordered the hack, according to NBC. On Thursday, NBC reported that
government sources said that the Obama administration decided against responding to Russia before the
election for fear of a cyber-war. The White House also did not want to appear to be intervening in the
election and believed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win."
This is just so much BS. He kills people as part
of his routine and he didn't want to "appear to be intervening in the election" because he though Hillary
would win. In other words, he didn't think something that *may* not have happened at all was worth starting
a world war over. Since Hillary lost (without proof that it was due to ANY hackers, let alone "Putin's"
hackers) now it's suddenly okay to threaten an act of war.
I hope that Russia does not underestimate the
treachery of this street punk and have their finger on their own button to retaliate against yet more naked
American aggression. This is a straightforward threat of major violence, the least that Russia should be
doing is taking the case to the United Nations. If Obama does this, you can kiss the amenities of
civilisation goodbye, including electricity and the internet if he does something insanely rash like
crashing Russia's power grid, which will be avenged, maybe via an EMP over the entire East Coast.
eric
,
December 19, 2016 at 4:53 am
Russia want to kick our terrorist out of Kosovo
twenty years ago now Russia kicked our terrorists out Aelopo . You can't blame our president for being mad
he wanted our head choppers to win . They didn't and we can't do anything about it .
Russia did not hack German voting machines so that
Angela Merkel's total percentage would be less than projected.
But the US National Security Agency tapped into her
personal phone, one of countless similar incidents completely ignored by the talking heads and print hacks
demonizing Putin and Russia.
Paul Fretheim
,
December 16, 2016 at 9:52 am
I wanted to add a few more things about bring in Russia
last year. The young man who was my guide in Moscow was openly gay and lives with his partner in an apartment they
share in one of the famous Stalinscraper buildings in central Moscow. He found the idea that there was oppression of
gays completely inaccurate. He said their may be discrimination in remote rural areas, but certainly not in the
cities. We talked openly about this in a cafe not far from the Russian History Museum on Red Square, which is the
gailly illuminated building in one of the photos you shared.
I was in St. Petersburg for one week. My hotel was just two
blocks from Palace Square on Nevsky Prospect. I did not see a single homeless person the entire time I was there. I
saw police only a time or two, and I walked around a lot. The police walk in pairs. They do not have guns, but each
just has one small walkie talkie on their belt, in strict contrast to American cops who look like they just walked
out of a Star Wars movie.
I did see one older woman on Nevsky selling mittens she had
knitted from a cardboard box.
Joe Tedesky
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:03 am
Hillary could lose a lot of support if the truth about
Russian gays ever came out here is a link to a report that gives statistics and talks about the gay situation in
Russia.
Russia does not sell marriage liciense to gay couples
So the U.S says that oppression . I think we voted marriage was between one man and one women but that was
oppression
here and made illegal Even California voted the same way Russia has it Really no human rights in Russia .
Sounds pretty bad no human rights just terrrible
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 9:46 am
Obama has totally lost his mind. I just read this on the
Antiwar.com site. Speaking on NPR, he blamed Putin personally and totally for "hacking the American election" and
vows a "retaliatory strike," which the article claimed may be a complete knock-out of Russia's electrical grid.
Excerpt from story: "Irrespective of the lack of evidence
and despite nebulous motives, however, President Obama did vow that the US would carry out some form of retaliatory
move against Russia, saying he would do so 'at a time and place of our own choosing.' "
This hateful maniac is threatening to start World War 3,
while at the same time trying to prevent the president-elect from taking office using baseless allegations of hacking
to fuel a coup. What mechanism does the constitution provide for stopping a madman? The coup to slip Hillary into
office is bad enough, but this threat of an attack on a sovereign nuclear power without extensive justification
beyond his personal animus towards Putin, including irrefutable public documentation of all charges, is simply beyond
all reason, it is naked barbarism. This man needs to be medicated and put in restraints while crazy Joe Biden serves
out the last month of his term, and if Biden persists in the madness, we move on to Paul Ryan.
Remember when Obama and the whore went off by themselves
for a day or two? Did you wonder what they were plotting? Now you know!
Bill Bodden
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:30 pm
I caught something a little while ago when I was
half-listening to CNN. Apparently, Putin or some Russian official told Obama to put up some evidence or shut up. A
little dose of straight talk in a program otherwise devoted to speculation and insinuation.
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 8:46 pm
Here's one report of the very real, rather annoyed
response.
Apparently, many high level officials in the Russian
government are speaking out publicly on the matter, including Putin's Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov,
Russian Foreign Ministery spokesperson Maria Zakharova, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. All call it
an outrageous accusation and put up or shut up with regard to the non-existent evidence.
It's amazing what Obama thinks he can slip past world
observers. The American people? They're used to being lied to and never seem to catch on, which is what Obama
and Clinton hope results in an overturned election–regardless of the motives they profess (just wanting to know
the truth, yeah sure!). Based on comments dropped all over the internet, it looks like Obama's lies are gaining
wide currency (except here), even on comic strip forums. Just gratuitous Russian bashing all over the place.
How dare they steal our election!!! Never the more pertinent, "just how did they expect that longshot to
succeed?" Or, "I'll believe it when I see the evidence, not just a proclamation."
RedApple
,
December 16, 2016 at 7:27 am
I am of a Eastern European background who has grown up in
the west. I saw the country I was born in destroyed by the US and my nephews nearly killed b bombs outside the areas
CNN reported. I have lived with the lies the west spinned about the Balkans for 20 years. It broke my father and he
never really go over it. In all the years that followed I never hated and thought my daughter not to hate. Now I see
the same being to done to Russia. The people of eastern europe have not forgotten and this time its is really far
worse. The hatred that has been festering in eastern Europe against the EU and the US is dangerous. Has the US become
so blind. This could easily become very dangerous and I hope articles such as this one will help the people of
America understand why this Russia bashing has to stop..
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 10:38 am
Yes, it was Hillary's husband who bombed your homeland
as he took NATO out for a test spin after converting what was meant to be solely a defensive alliance against the
Soviet Union (which no longer existed) into a useful new tool of American military aggression all over the globe.
Maybe he thought that Serbo-Croatian sounded or was spelled a lot like Russian. Dubya totally confused Afghanistan
and Iraq with the extinct Soviet Union, and Obomber (with Hillary riding shotgun) must have thought that Libya,
Syria and Yemen were surely populated by Soviets. I think the great peace-maker (Nobel Prize and all that) droned
Pakistan and Somalia without the help of NATO but, you know, if the godfather asks a favor, those countries had
better do what they are told. It's how we role: I think the Cosa Nostra is our model.
Bill Bodden
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:24 pm
During that time NATO came close to triggering a war
with Russia. Russian forces moved into an area to protect some Slavs. US General Wesley Clark ordered British
General Sir Michael Jackson to oppose the Russians. Jackson refused saying he was not about to start a war with
Russia.
Bankrupt Greek
,
December 16, 2016 at 7:00 am
The Clinton family is by far the most hated US politician
family in the Balkan Region. (with the Bush one coming close second)
Clintons completely destabilized the South East
Mediterranean creating a whole vacuum of Islamic extremism, failed states and botched bilateral relations. Bill
Clinton completely destroyed the Greek Foreign policy by putting pro-Israel governments in the Greek leadership and
evaporating 40 years of excellent relations with the Arab Countries which were receiving a lot of our exports in
exchange for oil deals and shipping benefits (Egypt letting Greek ships pass through Suez without customs).
I sincerely hope something changes cause atm US has
completely lost the trust of the world imho .
Josh Stern
,
December 16, 2016 at 6:46 am
"If Murray's story is true, it raises several alternative
scenarios: that the U.S. intelligence community's claims about a Russian hack are false; that Russians hacked the
Democrats' emails for their own intelligence gathering without giving the material to WikiLeaks; or that Murray was
deceived about the identity of the original leaker."
A 4th possible scenario is that it benefits Putin to play
the Iron Sheik character alongside the CIA's Hulk Hogan In other words, promoting conflict and raising the statist
security profile benefits Putin in Russia for the same reasons you notice that it benefits the CIA & Pentagon in the
US, so they play along together .."Oh that is great fun game we having with phony American wrestlers". I mean, why
exactly are the US & Russia both supporting the incendiary destruction of Syria? In 2010+ it is no longer strategic
to begin with & there will be nothing left of it by the time they both get through. But lots of arms
makers/contractors/etc. moved product,. and political foes were sidelined. In the Ukraine, the CIA staged a coup in
2013-14 and Putin got a little piece too. Iran got money and nuclear fuel, and Putin got some biz there too. It looks
like a thriving partnership.
Michael Morrissey
,
December 16, 2016 at 6:00 am
Question for all of you lawyers and (ex?) insiders: Is not
what the CIA has done here not only reprehensible (etc.) but illegal? I hope the first swamp Trump drains is Langley,
and all its tributaries like the NYT and WaPo.
Akech
,
December 16, 2016 at 5:18 am
How come these super intelligent findings on Russians
hacking DNC and John Podesta e-mails were not applicable to Hillary's private server ?
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 3:44 am
I never fail to be amazed by the treachery of Hillary
Clinton. Being a merciful person, a few days ago I was relieved when Donald Trump admitted that his threats to
prosecute Hillary for numerous crimes were just so much campaign rhetoric. Nobody likes to see an infirm old lady
locked up for the rest of her life. But the way her supporters from both parties have been going after Trump's hide
by making very serious but baseless allegations against Putin and then conflating them with Trump is truly vicious
and the epitome of attempted self-aggrandizement at the expense of the country's well-being. Assuming Trump is
allowed to take the oath of office in the aftermath of these broad spectrum attacks through elected politicians,
federal appointees and the media, I would suggest he change his plans for Hillary, Bill and whomever else (John
McCain, John Brennen and Michael Morrel, for starters) has been involved in this attempted coup. Seriously, they are
attacking the next head of state, if not to remove him then to emasculate him as a leader. Isn't it the old saying
that if you attack the king you must kill him or forfeit your own life? Hillary is apparently going for broke. She
deserves the gallows.
Joe Tedesky
,
December 16, 2016 at 10:57 am
If ever there was a way to measure bad Hillary just flew
past Richard Nixon at supersonic speed.
Winston
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:00 am
Murray more reliable and a real truth teller. He's not a
careerist. He has ethics.
The envoy who said too much
One minute he was Our Man in Tashkent, the next he was a major embarrassment for the Foreign Office. Craig Murray,
ambassador to Uzbekistan, talks to Nick Paton Walsh about his turbulent year
The envoy who said too much
One minute he was Our Man in Tashkent, the next he was a major embarrassment for the Foreign Office. Craig Murray,
ambassador to Uzbekistan, talks to Nick Paton Walsh about his turbulent year
Mr Perry don't fall for the establishment diatribe. "putin
autocratic style and all its faults" . Follow up ur statements with verifiable facts . Or else u r just part of the
modern journalistic problem of western fake news. Still i concur with the majority of ur article. The Russian
federation is run just like the west. It is a federated state and is a capitalist economy. Has a federal bank has
democratically elected officials at the DUMA . Putin resuscitated Russia, and has brought some needed law and order .
Post USSR russia resembled the US during the mob years of the 20 and 30's. Now their is a citizenry who take pride
and responsibility of their civic duty, crime has been reduced and graft and corruption being hit on from all levels
of russian society.
Realist
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:53 pm
Exceptionally well written exposé of the madness permeating
most of the factions wielding clout in this country by a professional journalist par excellence. An equally
perceptive addendum from businessman Gary Hare. If more people were aware of the described realities, perhaps we'd
stop digging our own graves, or at least slow down to question our actions.
Paul Fretheim
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:49 pm
Robert I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg about one year
ago. You should visit St. Petersbug. While Moscow is nice and drastically changed from when I was there 30 years ago,
St. Petersburg, where Putin spent years as deputy mayor, is even nicer. My guide and chauffer could not understand
why the US wanted to try and hurt them with sanctions. They agreed that they liked and respected President Putin and
that they could never be influenced by the "silly" sanctions that "might raise the price if tomatoes ten kopecks."
Kalen
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:21 pm
Rare but needed voice of sanity in this world of
McCarthyite hysteria. Will electors hear this voice and understand that by "flipping" their votes they a liable for
participating in a form coup d'etat i.e. letting rough government security agency, CIA and their secret unsupported
by facts accusations to change the outcome of the however undemocratic and flawed electoral system we have, a system
that gave us Trump inadvertently or not, with huge contribution from Hillary's unquenched hubris and disregard for
American economic reality.
Mahatma
,
December 15, 2016 at 10:20 pm
Placing nuclear weapons on the border of Russia is not "the
new cold war" get over it and stop with this misleading, at best, phrase. This is not 1955. The circumstances are
different now, this is about US demand for Global Full Spectrum Domination – Project 2020. There is nothing cold
about it except the cold calculations of nuclear war. The Pentagon talks of low yield half ton nuclear weapons being
"usable".
If the hawks gain control, war with Russia and China are
inevitable in the coming decade. The Imperial US will not stop I doubt Trump can stop them.
David F
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:21 am
"If the hawks gain control, war with Russia and China
are inevitable in the coming decade. The Imperial US will not stop I doubt Trump can stop them."
I believe that there are certainly people who want this,
and who also believe that it could be won. a
I also believe that there are enough rational (I use
that term loosely) senior members of the military who realize that it could not be won, and therefore, likely it
wont happen.
maricia
,
December 15, 2016 at 10:04 pm
Look up Eva Bartlett [Canadian journalist] -- she
spoke[12/9/16]. at the UN Press conference concerning Syria-Sovereignty and Peace.There also were 3 other speakers
there -- all were very interesting to listen to. TRUTH WAS SPOKEN about Allepo. The corporate news media, bombards you
with nothing but lies on a daily basis, just like they did about WMDs
Taras77
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:24 pm
Ms Bartlett is one savvy and brave lady!
b.grand
,
December 16, 2016 at 4:24 am
Mainstream Media lies about Syria exposed by Canadian
journalist Eva Bartlett
See the outstanding Off Guardian website for an article
about BuzzFeed's attempted smear job of her.
lizzie
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:55 pm
Also this woman in the linked video below -- incredibly
brave, actual witness to the fall of takfiri and mercenary forces' occupation of E. Aleppo. SAA and Russian
helpers are humanitarian heroes -- but listen to the MSM line spewing from the guy from The Hill -- and the
UNdiplomat, Samantha Power, should be drawn and quartered for her totally irrational spewing of hate and lies at
the UN the other day.
One reason the MSM has come to literally hate Trump is
his determination to talk around them using Tweets and other "social media" mongering. He knows that becoming
President might render him a captive of enemies and is, no doubt, taking steps to prevent that. Interesting that
he is not moving his wife and young son into the White House.
Looks like the 6 majors no longer control all the
messaging anymore, and many of their "talking heads" really do take it personally -- you can tell it in their
voices as they spew out their daily "talking points." Nora O'Donnell (CBS) was literally spewing lies and hate
(from both her mouth and her eyes) for Dr. Assad this very morning!
I believe this is going to end badly. The corrupt
establishment are terrified that Donald Trump will "drain the swamp" and expose years of malfeasance. That is why the
propaganda pushers in the corporate media are in a raging frenzy against Trump. I will be surprised if he is allowed
to become President. The war criminals have opened the gates of hell around the world. Nuclear war could be
perpetrated by the present lunatics running the corrupt system. Read more at link below:
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/12/the-war-criminals-that-opened-gates-of.html
Taras77
,
December 15, 2016 at 9:53 pm
Remarkable comments for a remarkable article-thanks, Mr
Parry.
Johnson is former CIA and rails at Brennan for taking down
the reputation if that were possible.
On the plus side, we have the lack of support from Clapper.
We have the failure to show up to brief congressional committee on the "hack." We have the Intelligence Professionals
(of which Johnson is one) completely shredding any assertion that the information was hacked. We have Craig Murray
stating that he knows who did the leak, and Wikileaks denying any input from the Russians. I am waiting for more info
to come out from disaffected CIA or former CIA. The FBI and Comey are deadfast set against any evidence of a hack.
But on the other hand, we have the brain dead MSM and neo
con handlers ready to continue to do the bidding of the elite, deep state, establishment or whatever. And we have the
profile in courage sitting in the white house equally ready to the bidding of the elite and the bidding of the neo
cons.
I see the justified concern in the comments above. To cap
this rambling comment, I do not know nor does anyone else how this will come out but at a minimum, trump will have a
difficult 4 years. To me, it absolutely criminal the mis-characterization of Russia and even more criminal, not
allowing anyone to take that first major step in restoring a working relationship with Russia.
If trump is able to accomplish just one thing, for me it
would be a major plus: stop the neo cons and stand up to their continuing attempts at infestation of major govt
positions, think tanks, political sychophants,
Bob Van Noy
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:27 pm
Excellent link Taras77. Thanks
Evangelista
,
December 15, 2016 at 9:42 pm
Sometimes things backfire; sometimes badly, sometimes
hilariously
It is reported that some 40 electoral electors have signed
on to demand official (hoped to be reliable) information about the allegations of "Russian", "Russian!", 'Russian',
Russian, and now "Vladimir Putin's Personal!" "hacking" of, no longer computers, but "The U.S. Election!". The number
might be still rising.
Of the known ones, who signed on a letter, most are
Democratic electors.
Outraged Neo-Cons and an at least "fellow-traveler" Harvard
Attorney have been pushing a "Hamiltonian Interpretation", claiming that this interpretations makes it 'OK' for
electors to violate the contract of their agreements with their states and state-party's to vote for the candidate
winning the presidential race in their state [Presidents, as the electoral college system indicates, are elected by
the states of the United States (or the majority of the states' electors) to be 'President of the United States',
rather than 'President of the People of the United States'].
I find myself, from these given facts and analysis of them
and the situation, perceiving that there seem to be more Democratic Electors listening to, and hearing, the Siren
voices of the "Hamiltonian Interpretation Loreleis, and suspecting that there may be more Democratic electors giving
consideration to switching their votes than Republican electors.
Imagine a "landslide" for Trump in the Electoral College.
Imagine the potential effects:
Imagine the already hyperventilating going into overdrive
Imagine the Hilaryatti, already prostrate and in counseling, having to deal with No, I am getting into the
impossible, beyond the unlikely
Pablo Diablo
,
December 15, 2016 at 9:36 pm
The Electoral College should nominate Bernie Sanders for
President. He leads in all the polls and would be the best thing for The United States of America.
Jessejean
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:52 pm
O Pablo–that is totally Diablo! And I completely agree.
Go Bern.
John
,
December 15, 2016 at 8:54 pm
The drama triangle is the oldest play in the book .Google
"drama triangle" .The question is who are the money players .who would benefit from a world wide socialist system I
know we have the jewish scumbag George Soros betting against anything that makes him more wealthy. I will travel 1000
miles to piss on his grave His time is up very soon !! The question remains unanswered who would have benefited
monetarily under the hag Hillary .Follow that money line to the mother load or continue to use fake news (another
Zionist tactic) toward OZ .Do you people have a strategy for your own salvation ??? I'm thinking no
Clyates
,
December 15, 2016 at 8:12 pm
Parry, Are you the only real journalist left in this
country? Thank you for always telling the truth. I'm donating immediately.
Em
,
December 15, 2016 at 7:54 pm
I think many are missing the real underpinning of the Fake
News propaganda assault and the Russia hysteria. The rhetoric is all coming from the Clinton media support system
otherwise known as the MSM. The rhetoric coming from the Trump transition is anything but cold war. I think what the
progressive media are failing to recognise or perhaps just don't want to talk about, is that the MIC is in the middle
of it's own civil war. I think it's fairly certain, reading between the lines in the articles a few weeks ago, that
General Rogers at best deliberately ignored the DNC hack, and almost certainly had a direct hand in Comey's decision
to drop the metaphorical grenade on the Clinton campaign in the final week, which many, including myself believe
really cost her the election in the end. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think, as Steve Pieczenik stated (and
who knows what side that guy is on if you read his bio) there really was a counter coup. My guess is that apart from
Rogers, Kelly, Flynn, Mattis and maybe McChrystal were the larger part of it.
What's really interesting is that all of these guys (apart
from McChrystal) made their way up the ranks from the bottom; their daddies weren't admirals or senators; they all
saw front line action and have continued to join their troops at the front. I've listened to their interviews, NOT
the Fox News soundbites, but extended interviews on YouTube and none of them are bloodthirsty hotheads. Mattis is
particularly impressive in terms of his breadth of knowledge with a number of talks to right wing think tanks online.
I would highly recommend Flynn's long interviews on Al Jazeera and RT. I think it's interesting Flynn is under fire
today for undermining the CIA especially having listened to his interviews, which are surprisingly candid. Flynn
expressly warned against those in Washington who advocate continuous war. He also showed contempt for drone warfare,
like many in the military, probably because the CIA are calling the shots, literally, whilst the military leaders
have to take the fall for their mess ups, just like in the military prisons. These generals have all made statements
against torture, and talk (at least) impressively about women's rights and the scourge of trafficking, including
human trafficking; and while they use typically measured language, it seems apparent they are under no illusions as
to Administration's collusion in what most people would categorize Organized Crime.
When you actually listen to them, it is clear these
old-school generals want an "end game", specifically the end for them is the fall of theocracy, a goal which Putin
would undoubtedly share. Russia only supports Iran for geostrategic, not ideological reasons, especially since
everyone is aware Iran is still playing the same old despicable duplicitous games with the CIA that started under
Reagan. I think they're counting on if Iran falls, all the Sunni theocracies who essentially hold the rest of the
Islamic world will fall into line and secularize. So if the generals remain in power I think that's where they're
going. Their other aim is to split Russia from China, which probably won't be difficult because China wont share
their technology with anyone, and they are leaping way ahead of the rest of the world with alternative energy, and
Russia has never trusted China historically, and vice versa. Russia has a lot more in common with the US than anyone
cares to admit openly. Russia for these guys makes far more sense as a first line frenemy than Europe or China,
Europe being far too social democratic, and China being too autocratic. These generals aren't infected with the
generations old Slavophobia that seethes out of Westminster and their American aristocousins.
This policy shift would drive CIA/MI6 "business interests"
(their raison d'etre) into the ground, especially since Rogers seems to be breaking up the NSA and who knows what
that means for the lucrative privatized end of the cyberwar community. Jobs for Russian hackers? You laugh but Dulles
was happy to bring in the Nazis after the war. That, in my opinion is what's behind the current media meltdown. It's
obvious that the CIA/MI6 are blatantly weaponizing the MSM and using Russia to attack the Trump transition at a level
never seen before because the CIA heads are seriously under threat for the first time since the 60s. Rumours abound
that Trump is going to be deemed unfit for office before the inauguration, in which case, bunker down. Don't get me
wrong however: I don't think Trump's generals are nice guys, and I'm not advocating for them. Although they have all
expressed a desire to move to alternative energy, they want to ramp up domestic fossil fuels in the "short-term" as a
way to bury the power of the Saudis, and undoubtedly they will start a war with Iran, two reasons to be scared as
hell, because that means either conscription or "tactical" "mini" nukes. The alternative is CIA continuous proxy wars
and "Global Initiative" organized crime/trafficking, weapons of mass migration, and no difference over climate
change, except the utter insanity of Brennan's geoengineering strategy (see his C-SPAN CFR speech) which makes the
new CIA chief look reasonable by comparison. That's how fucked-up things are – Pompeo is the preferable choice.
"We the people" therefore continue to be between a rock and
a hard place, i.e. we're screwed either way. But those regular folk seeking to topple Trump should be careful what
they wish for, and people need to wake up to what's going on. If the CIA is intent on another coup before January,
there really would be a massive crackdown in this country. No commission could cover it up, so it would mean the end
of free speech and the Internet as we know it. The last nail in the coffin.
Realist
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:14 am
Hmmm. Hope you're wrong about most of that stuff in your
last two paragraphs. The rest hangs together like it might be plausible.
When do they count those damned electoral votes that are
cast four days from now? That might be the last day of our republic as we have known it for 228 years. If there's
a coup, there will be blood.
lizzie
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:06 pm
Here is the schedule as published in the Federal
Register:
It seems to me that Russia and China have finally
understood that they are either going to stand together against America or fall separately.
Your premise implies that 1) Americans can be trusted,
which is demonstrably false, and 2) the Russians are stupid enough to believe #1 is true.
No way Russia abandons its allies to make friends with
us. For to do so would be suicidal.
eric
,
December 19, 2016 at 3:36 am
your wrong Russia and China are together We shot a
missile into the Chinese Embassy and killed a few Chinese in Yugoslavia Bill Clinton apologized and said this was
a accident . However when George Tenet testified before congress that we picked out the Chinese Embassy for a
target China knew Bill Clinton had lied to them
Yeltsin had promised Milosevic that Russian troops will come in with NATO forces and protect the Orthodox
Christians in Kosovo . So Milosevic agreed to end the war and bring his troops home . But when Russian troops
landed U.S. general Wesley Clark issued orders to shoot the Russian soldiers The British troops refused the order
but the Russians were unable to protect the Christians This failure in
Yugoslavia brought down the whole Yeltsin government in Russia and Solzhenitsyn install Putin to lead Russia .
This is the kind of mistakes a stupid super makes Both Russia and China were unable to save the only non NATO
European country that they felt treated them on a friendly bases With the enemies Russia and China learned they
have they decided they better stick a lot closer together . Since this time Russia has tried to strengthen China
any way they can . And I don't know but I think China will reciprocate and act the same way towards their friend
Russia . China told us only a few years ago they have not forgotten or forgiven what happened to them in
Yugoslavia .You are right Russia should be a natural friend with the United States the two most Christian
countries in the world .But these are the kind of mistakes it is impossible to forgive and forget . I don't think
it is possible for the United States or any NATO country to get between Russia and China . They both know what
happened to Yugoslavia . And they don't intend for that to happen to them ..
AriusArmenian
,
December 15, 2016 at 7:47 pm
Amazing.
We have the choice of a 50/50 chance of bigger war with Trump, or a near 100% bigger war with Hillary and US elites
want the latter.
They are using the CIA to attempt a coup to overthrow a US national election.
The US looks like the biggest banana republic in history.
With the MSM carrying water for the elites I feel like the future in the US is hopeless.
While the US will keep killing more millions.
My last hope is that the Eurasian powers will stop the US cold.
Jerry Falkenstein
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:20 pm
"They are using the CIA to attempt a coup to overthrow a
US national election."
"The US looks like the biggest banana republic in history."
"With the MSM carrying water for the elites I feel like the future in the US is hopeless."
The Democratic Party (and those who are connected to the
establishment) may desperately need to do an autopsy on their election loss but the people are desperate to rid
themselves of these two wings (Republican and Democratic) of the same vile bird of prey (Upton Sinclair).
Brendan
,
December 15, 2016 at 6:44 pm
Achtung, all Aryan women! Beware of Russian-backed Arab
rape-gangs!
Gustav Gressel from the George Soros-funded European
Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) warns of the possibility that Russia might encourage refugees to carry out sex
attacks in Germany in order to influence the federal election there next year.
"What would happen, for example, if a similar event to [the
mass sex attacks on New Year's Eve] in Cologne were repeated at a summer festival before the election? How would
Merkel stand then? What would be the consequence for the Bundestag election? Of course, this is an extreme example,
but it is within the range of possibility," he said.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/12/13/think-tank-warns-russia-sex-mobs-germans/
Gressel refers to the attacks in Cologne on New Year's Eve
last year as an example of what the Russians might organise. However, it turns out that there was a lot of
misreporting of those attacks.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/05/hamb-n05.html
Admiral Harry Harris, commander of US Pacific Command,
used a speech in Sydney yesterday to warn that the United States was ready to confront China over its activities
in the South China Sea. Under the Obama administration, the South China Sea has been transformed into a volatile
flashpoint for war between China and the US. Harris's remarks make clear that those dangers will only rise under a
Trump administration.
Harris has been one of the most strident advocates of
aggressively challenging China in the South China Sea. In March last year, he claimed that China's land
reclamation activities in the Spratly Islands were "creating a great wall of sand" for military purposes. His
comments were the opening shot of an escalating US campaign to demand Beijing cease those activities and to
justify the US military build-up in the region.
This Admiral Harris has been making the news lately. At a
speech at Pearl Harbor he took the opportunity to dump on Colin Kaepernick, and the Pentagon gleefully touted this
until somebody remembered that the US Navy had a dreadful race record during WW2. When I checked into this
hyper-heroic Admiral, I learned he was one of the commanders at Guantánamo. When three of his victims "died suddenly
and violently" this gold-dripping jackass declared that the dead people had engaged in "an act of asymmetrical
warfare waged against us".
There is no telling what Trump is going to do, but if he
encourages this crap, all his election promises about not getting into needless wars will be for nothing.
Your posts are always good and reflect good thinking
skills. It never hurts to look at both sides of a situation. A lot of the posters on this site haven't examined
what this country is in for with a Trump presidency. Hope SS isn't their only means of retirement. I hope they all
have a good health plan. We have to cut taxes for a lot of the war mongers. What was it that Pogo said? "We have
met the enemy and he is us.
F. G. Sanford
,
December 15, 2016 at 6:24 pm
Could the election hysteria get any weirder, or the "deep
state" any more desperate? Probably. But, what would it take? How about a fake alien invasion? If pale cadaverish
white men with crew-cuts, black suits and homberg hats start showing up in your neighborhood wearing horn-rim
Ray-Bans, don't automatically assume they're really the "Men in Black". They might correspond to Carl Schmitt's
"different and alien", but take my advice. Look for dandruff. It's a dead giveaway for fake aliens.
Great article, Mr. Parry!
Joe Tedesky
,
December 16, 2016 at 2:17 am
"pale cadaverish white men with crew-cuts, black suits
and homberg hats start showing up in your neighborhood wearing horn-rim Ray-Bans, don't automatically assume
they're really the "Men in Black"
I'll tell right now if these guys show up at my house
I'm inviting them in, setting up my drums, (I hope they brought a sax and keyboard) and we are jamming .if
everything goes down the way I hope, me and my Men in Black will have a soon to be released hit album for sale on
iTunes.
Abe
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:42 pm
I'm expecting Putin to show up at my house with zombie
Hitler riding a T-Rex.
John Kerry did visit Antarctica during the presidential
election.
If we count all the illegal aliens that voted for hillary
then yes, she did win the popular vote. The " recount " has exposed massive fraud that benefited hillary in Michigan
and other places . The e-mails were leaked not hacked. RIP Seth Rich. All one has to do is look at Trump rallys vs
hillary rallys. There is no way hillary won the popular vote.
By calling the Electoral College archaic is simply wrong. It avoids mob rule by giving equal voice to all the country
not just LA, DC,Chicago, San Fran, Seattle , NYC and Miami and south Texas.
Ol' Hippy
,
December 15, 2016 at 6:01 pm
As I've said before Russia is not really an enemy of the US
unless provoked into hostilities be inept government officials. The one main thing about Trump is his softer stance
of Russia and Putin. Hopefully this will hold up as I'm sick and tired of hostilities created by the neocon
establishment and all their warmongering actions. It's kind of like the anti-war movement during the 'Nam; give peace
a chance. I just hope Trump can stand up to all the hawks in Washington, we'll see. However the anti-Russian
propaganda may be tough to over come and end up escalating into a cold or even a hot war which we'll lose because
Putin is well ready for an attack. I wish for peace which has always been my stance. I just hope reason and sanity
rules out over provoked hostilities. But the odds are probably against this dream of mine and others for sure.
Bill Bodden
,
December 15, 2016 at 5:54 pm
For some reason this mendacity-laced Russia bashing brings
to mind the yellow journalism promoting the war against Spain after the sinking of the USS Maine.
The chaos that is currently evolving should come as no
surprise when we consider the sizable number of people who considered that the two candidates representing the
Democratic and Republican parties for president were equally atrocious if for different reasons. That is one of the
consequences of voting the perceived lesser evil from two corrupt parties. The evils became progressively more so
with each quadrennial charade. The American people are responsible in part for this ominous predicament which may
mean an enlightened resolution to this conflict is highly unlikely.
Just wondering why doesn't Craig Murray release the name of
the "Dem" leaker. Wouldn't that settle the Russian hacking story and stop the guessing. All other leakers usually
reveal their name.
backwardsevolution
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:49 am
Daniel – I believe Craig Murray said that he was given
the documents by an intermediary, on behalf of someone else. One leaker was probably Seth Rich, the murdered DNC
staffer. Julian Assange offered a $20,000.00 reward for information re Seth Rich's death. Why would Assange do
this if Seth Rich hadn't had something to do with the leaks?
"Re supposed Russian hacking, Karl Denninger (who does
know his Internet technology), has a post entitled "So It WAS NOT Hacking". Karl quotes the Daily Mail in U.K. and
Craig Murray's involvement:
"Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan
and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails.
He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources.
The leakers' motivation was 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the 'tilting of the primary
election playing field against Bernie Sanders.
Murray says: 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks'."
There was no hacking. There was instead a disguntled
Democrat operative who had access to the data, dumped it, and turned it over.
This is a guy who (1) claims to have met the actual
source, (2) received the actual data and (3) got the data because the person who took it was*****ed off that the
Democrats stole the nomination from Sanders.
The "Russian" claim just went up in smoke."
Then Karl (who is not a fellow who is into conspiracy
theories at all) says:
"PPS: Was his name "Seth Rich"? Because if so then every
single person supporting the "hack" narrative, repeating it or cheering it on is in fact cheering on murder and it
is my sincere wish to each of you, collectively and individually, that you burn eternally in Hell for your open
and outrageous support of both corruption and murder."
If it was Seth Rich why isn't Assange giving the
$20,000 to Craig Murray? I am sure you remember Vince Foster. Who was the person that had him Killed? Oh by the
way Craig Murray was relieved of his British post. Not quite sure why.
Bill Bodden
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:13 pm
Oh by the way Craig Murray was relieved of his
British post. Not quite sure why.
Briefly, he was outspoken in criticizing torture
in Uzbekistan. Do an internet search for "ambassador craig murray uzbekistan" for more information.
backwardsevolution
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:20 pm
Daniel Foley – I believe the $20,000.00 reward was
for information on who was responsible for Seth Rich's murder, you know, hopefully to catch the killer.
Craig Murray is a pretty credible person. Google him.
exiled off mainstreet
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:43 pm
Knowing the nature of the yankee legal and political
system, it would be death or imprisonment for the leaker. That is why the intermediary was necessary, and,
knowing these facts, that is why the democrats are cynically blaming Russia and revealing their true nature as
having evolved into gangster-fascism since the DLC-Clinton hostile takeover of 1990 or so.
It is possible the Murray stuff is disinfo intended to
discredit Wikileaks which as you may know, has a perfect record of accuracy. I would stick only with what Assange
says, for now.
With Israel Russia relations now quite good, have to wonder
why Israel first US neo cons hate Putin and Russia so much.
Brad Owen
,
December 16, 2016 at 1:11 pm
The Israel First US neocons hate Putin and Russia so
much because they are just puppets in an Imperial Play. The string-holders are much higher up in the pyramidal
hierarchy of World Dominion. The entire Zion Project is the creation of Cecil Rhodes' RoundTable Group in the late
19th century. It, along with SME (Synarchist Movement for Empire) intends to secure World Empire for "Eurogarchs",
ancient Imperial families (some with old Roman roots, many with Holy Roman Empire roots) and their Managerial
Elite in the banks and corporations (this is the essence of fascism; simply the modern version of old ancient
Empire, which, like war, is also a racket, with imperialists being highly-polished racketeers). The RoundTable
Group had as its' primary goal the re-capture of its' "Rogue Colony" USA through its' Wall Street asset (mission
accomplished), gradually defeating all tendencies towards a Constitutional Republic (lethal ideas for racketeering
Empires). The primary relationship to be blocked at all costs is friendship with Russia ("the big one that got
away"). India got to share colonial status with the same Imperial Masters as do we (City-of-London). China had
opium wars foisted upon them by the same Imperial Masters (C-of-L), AND haven't yet wised up to the booby trap
that is Hong Kong (C-of-L's eastern asset like Wall Street is its' western asset. Ahh but there lies Russia,
always befriending and defending revolutionary/republican USA since the days of Catherine the Great (ever wonder
WHY Russia sold us Alaska?). The day that Russia and USA become firm friends and allies is the day that Empire
dies and THAT is why Israel First (C-of-L), US (C-of-L-via-Wall Street asset) neocons hate Putin and Russia so
much they simply must, to keep Empire alive.
P.S. Israel-Russia relations are so good BECAUSE they know which way the "geopolitical winds" are blowing.
eric
,
December 19, 2016 at 1:58 am
Well that day is going to officially take place in
about thirty days or so you should be very happy ps unless some thing big happens in the next thirty days or so
Gary Hare
,
December 15, 2016 at 5:18 pm
I have had seventeen years working at local executive level
for two large US Corporations – IBM and Raytheon. I was CEO of a small start-up living in the US for two years. So I
have had plenty of opportunity to observe the US psyche close up.
It has been my experience that too many US citizens exist
under this "perception management" syndrome that the USA is exceptional, is always right and good, and is the only
model for how a society should function. I have always been able to work with people who are ignorant. You merely
have to educate them properly. I can work with people who are arrogant. You only have to put into their minds
concepts that they mistakenly think they originated. But I have always found it impossible to work with people who
are both ignorant, and arrogant.
The "perception management" tool you highlight produces
business and political elites who are both alarmingly ignorant (of other viewpoints) and extremely arrogant (I am a
US citizen – ergo, I must be right). How else could it be possible for a voter to be given the choice between two
such flawed characters to lead their country, and sadly to exercise so much influence over the rest of the world? And
does this not reveal the gross shortcomings of the field they beat to contend for this top job? And the party
apparatus that put them forward?
Trump is clearly arrogant. I can only hope he is also not
ignorant. The flaws in US policies are so easy to see, that he does not need "insider briefings" to appreciate them.
But who among the elites are sufficiently impervious to "perception management" to be able to implement sensible
policies, even if Trump is able to articulate them?
It seems to me that the US is on the verge of dying from
the virus of believing its own propaganda.
Like you, I recently spent nearly two weeks in Russia, but
only in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So admittedly, my experience is skewed. I was surprised by the number of young
people who spoke English, and who admired Putin for the simple reason that Putin can explain to them the rationale
for his policies, and can demonstrate success in most of them. He typifies leadership. The US tendency to want to
vilify Putin is counter-productive, slanderous, transparently unfounded and obviously childish. Sensible people do
not take it seriously. But who in the US political elite is sensible?
Stephen Sivonda
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:46 pm
Gary Hare . well spoken and a real joy to read. When I
look at a web site that has comments, after reading what the article is about I usually start to read comments .
There are such a variety of comments for almost any subject, but more often then not the comments devolve into
worthless drivel Once that happens I leave although if I read say 20 comments that would be a lot. There is much
to be learned by reading intelligent comments , and the followers of Consortium News make it a place to learn.
Enels
,
December 16, 2016 at 3:56 am
Seldom in history/herstory, could there be a place so
self deluded. (whatever that means ) But no, it isn't funny, The BS about the Russians hacking to skew the
election promoted by the loosers/Democrats, (I was one once), is awful.
Americans are in a strange place now. If Trump goes hard
against SS, and medicare, and unions, oh boy!
eric
,
December 19, 2016 at 1:50 am
I don't expect Trump to go against social security
and medicare although I have heard a lot of republicans claim they have too because the money will be gone .. I
sure don't like to hear this coming from republicans Reagan a great republican increased the social security
contribution so he could cut the top income tax rate . there by shifting the burden from the wealthy people to
the poorer people This made him a great republican . I think Trump realizes he was elected by the working
people and will work for us . But he a republican and that scares me a little . I'am expecting medi care for
everybody and this time the republicans will vote for it I just hope the democrats vote for it too . . This is
the program Hillary wanted for many years . I don't think Trump is a typical republican . I can not think of
anything that controls costs better than medicare for everyone . The healthcare industry will fight medicare
for every one but bogus billing has no place in healthcare .. When I say medicare for everyone I mean everyone
I mean congress and all government employees every one .
Bob Van Noy
,
December 15, 2016 at 5:18 pm
It's truly maddening having ones perception managed. Thank
you Robert Parry for helping us resist such management with the only weapons we have and that is our experience and
ability to decipher what we read. These are frustrating times because powerful special interest forces are at war
with each other and it becomes nearly impossible to discern fact from fiction. Fortunately we have your reputation
for reporting factually to guide us through this unbelievably dishonest period of our democratic experience.
There is a good exchange between Professor Stephen Cohen
and Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch on Democracy Now at the following link. I would encourage those not familiar
with these observers to look up their history and judge their statements for yourselves
I spent 3 weeks in Russia and was amazed by what I saw.
Sanctions are a joke. Russians have just simply replaced Western goods with their own, which in many cases are of
better quality. The only shortages I noticed were of American crap. Two things stood out about Moscow and St.
Petersburg vs. New York City where I live: 1) everything was so clean and spotless, hardly any graffiti; and 2) how
clean and efficient (and cheap) their subway system was relative to NYC. Some of their stations look like museums,
spotless and no rats. Also, trains that run on time and no delays due to "sick passengers" or "train traffic ahead"
and free wifi everywhere including trains and not just on select stations. Russia isn't perfect of course, but it is
far far far from being the dungeon depicted in the US media. On the contrary Moscow and St. Petersburg are in many
ways better places to live than New York.
Geoffrey de Galles
,
December 16, 2016 at 5:48 am
Hear, hear -- I, for one, know exactly what you mean. My
wife and I are western Europeans (Germany / UK) who, beginning in the early 1970s, ended up spending half our
lives in the very heart of Manhattan. That was great, as far as it went. But then in 2002, upon returning home
from almost a month spent in Russia with my elderly father (who, as a UK Russophile, had visited the USSR + Russia
by then well over a score of times, beginning as a seaman during WWII), I felt compelled to admit to my dear Frau
that, had things only been a lot different back in the '60s & 70s (viz., the Cold War!), we'd have done much
better for ourselves to have headed east, rather than to have ever gone west. After all, Russia has true culture
and -- in its own unique way -- just the kind of fine taste that one encounters in, say, Italy, France, or Spain.
Moreover, the common folk are so very much more 'honest-to-goodness' and 'for real' than, typically, one finds in
the west. -- – Those who have never visited Russia and are consequently clueless about its current cultural ambience
might do well to go check out on YouTube the some two dozen postings of the Moscow girlie-trio, YOUNG ADULTS. A
few of their videos indicate their (understandable enough) roots in and devotion to Russian musical traditions;
but, for the most part, their repertoire attests to their pro-active reverence for modern western (US + UK) music
(featuring their astonishing covers of recent classics from the likes of, e.g., the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
Pharrell Williams, the Black Eyed Peas, Beyonce, and Amy Whitehouse). Improbably and extraordinarily, almost
always the YOUNG ADULTS manage to exhume and tease out the real music buried and entombed in the often raucous and
vulgar renditions of the chosen songs' originators (!!!); but, in any case, the tender-loving-musical-care that
they invest in everything they do attests to their respect and reverence for western music, and even the very
culture that has begotten it. -- – Oh that the United States and Europe would similarly partake of, share in,
regenerate and propagate that essential magnanimity of the great Russian people. -- And thanks again Randy for your
post.
Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat
and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back
towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were one of the greatest leaders
that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy,
recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely
and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided
over a country of which the human rights record is considerably better than that of the United States and in which
civil rights are improving, and who richly deserves the steady support of 65% – currently at a Ukraine-related high
of 83% – of the population that he possesses. It is my understanding that the reality is closer to the second
scenario than the first – and I may note that I say this as someone with no ethnic, financial, professional or
political ties to Russia whatsoever. It follows that I am not a Russian expert – but nor am I, on the other hand,
parti pris. I am a friendly, distanced observer of the country.
Let me start by explaining the history of my connection to
the country. .
Michael Morrissey
,
December 16, 2016 at 5:52 am
Thank you, hyperbola, for this link. Didn't know about
Off-Guardian. Every major newspaper needs a dedicated "Off" site. The NYT used to have "Lies of Our Times" but it
folded after a couple of years and was never big enough to keep up with the propaganda pouring out of the Giant
Wurlitzer. Times are different now, with the internet. I would love to see at least one Off site for every "news"
outlet, and even though it would be impossible to do that for tv and radio, having the "paper record" consistently
deconstructed would be a huge step forward.
Jerry Falkenstein
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:41 am
"Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous
autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia
ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism."
Who said that? I never thought that. Did the neocons say that? I was thinking lately that probably Stalin wasn't
really as bad as I was brought up to believe. In fact I hardly believe anything our government says anymore.
Abe
,
December 17, 2016 at 6:41 pm
"Deconstructing Russophobia" is a superb account from
British academic Catherine Brown. As always, thanks to OffGuardian.
You seem like a smart man but Putin was not the ruler
for 6 of those 14 years . Medvedev was and he also was a good leader like you described Putin might be . It was
Medvedev that said No when Georgia attack south Ossettia . It was Medvedev that showed the world the bear was back
. Ever since we attacked Yugoslavia and fired a missile into the Chinese Embassy accidently on purpose than issued
orders for NATO to shoot Russian soldiers because they will try to protect Christians . Ever since these stupid
power mistakes Russia and China have had our number . They are together and looking for chance to get even .
Humiliate us like we did them , They have been working together for 17 years with this goal in mind . Now they are
in Syria with their new weapons doing what they want to and humiliating us . I say good they are finishing the war
we started and are doing what we should have done congradulations Russia and Putin and thank you very much
The Artist formerly known as young man
,
December 15, 2016 at 4:49 pm
Apparently Churchill once said: "History will be kind to
me, for I intend to write it". The American version of this quote? – History will be kind to us, for we intend to
repeat it.
That pretty much sums up the current drive for starting
Cold War 2 by the Americans (They were responsible for starting the first one too, by the way). Their way of thinking
is – Cold War 1 took care of the Soviet Union, so hopefully Cold War 2 will take care of Russia. Not so fast amigos.
Americans repeat history not because they didn't learn
something from it, but because they draw wrong conclusions from it. Just because they "won" the Cold War 1, it
doesn't mean that they should expect to "win" a second one too. The stakes are much different now. It's much easier
to give up on ideology than it is to give up on the place where you live.
Or maybe the Americans decided to tweak a little bit
another saying: "Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result". I
actually think that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results is equally insane.
Circumstances change, you know, the world is not an isolated laboratory where you can eliminate external factors. The
experiment might fail this time. But don't listen to me, go about your business.
Dwight
,
December 15, 2016 at 4:48 pm
The Union for Concerned Scientists has joined in this
hysteria in a press release about Trump's appointment of Exxon CEO Tillerson as Secretary of State. UCS President Ken
Kimmell states: "This position calls for someone able to put national security and the well-being of Americans first
and foremost. But Tillerson's close ties to President Putin and Russian oligarchs call into question his ability to
deal firmly with Russia, which attempted to disrupt U.S. elections according to U.S. intelligence agencies."
The main concern Kimmell raises in the press release is
climate change, and I can certainly understand an environmental group being concerned about an oil exec as Secretary
of State with climate negotiations in his portfolio. However, a new Cold War is the last thing we need if we want
reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and détente with Russia could enable cooperation on climate change. Decades
of inaction ago, Robert Redford called this "Greenhouse Glasnost" in his book of that name with articles by U.S. and
Soviet climate scientists.
UCS also works on risks of nuclear power and nuclear
weapons, which are related concerns on which we international cooperation not a new arms race and more proxy wars.
I learned about the UCS press release in an email from a
local environment group which repeated the gratuitous attack on Russia in seeking donations. It is sad to see this
meme spreading among people that should be thinking deeper about the implications of détente versus cold war.
Rob
,
December 17, 2016 at 1:30 pm
Human caused warming of the climate is the ultimate
danger facing the planet, and it is entirely appropriate for those who recognize this fact to be alarmed that our
next Secretary of State will be a person whose entire career has been devoted to extracting fossil fuels from the
earth and burning them. Moreover, there is strong evidence that Tillerson and Exxon were well aware of the
deleterious effects of greenhouse gases, even as they were minimizing those risks to the public. This is the basis
for the "Exxon knew" campaign, which is getting little attention in the press (unsurprisingly.)
Which raises the obvious question: Could Donald Trump
not have found someone other than a climate change denying, fossil fuel extracting corporate titan to run the
State Department and lower tensions with Russia? Of course he could have, but he didn't, because Trump himself
does not accept the reality of global warming. Thus we should not be surprised by his appointment of Tillerson to
State or oil industry tool Greg Pruitt to the EPA. Trump's motto might as well be "screw the planet."
This article was so over needed. While the content within
won't make it to any MSM report (until, perhaps, months/years down the road), I was sure -- as an adamant progressive
with cyber security background -- to post it to every social media outlet I use and send to email chains where it's me
vs a bunch of "liberal-hawk" friends.
I can understand/deal with one absurd, hawkish and out of
touch/reality party. But, to have both in the same boat, is really, REALLY scary stuff. The stuff that makes a Trump
presidency alone seem like a walk in the park.
James lake
,
December 15, 2016 at 4:38 pm
Interesting article. Clinton, and her echo chamber in the
media with all this Russia bashing really are tone deaf.
She misjudged the voter and showed no sense of their concerns.
They were thinking about jobs and health and other concerns, her only policy was more war.
If Trump can stop the neo cons that in itself will be a
great achievement for America and the world.
Jessejean
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:00 pm
But first Rachel Mddow has to destroy her credibility by
hysterically pushing the 3rd way, corporate dem, neoliberal Cold War, CIA driven excuses for losing power to a
discredited Rethuglican party over the last 16years.
eric
,
December 19, 2016 at 12:31 am
Trump did stop the establishment of both political
parties and that was the neocons too Than he tripped the pope when we learned the Vatican had a wall around it too
. Now his only trouble is the FBI and the CIA and they heading for the dust bin of political history unless they
can shoot him first .
Patricia Guerrero
,
December 15, 2016 at 4:13 pm
Thank you for this. Its difficult to sort out sometimes the
twists and turns of politics. as a dem/dove who is appalled at what our foreign policies have been, although I don't
like trump, I thought an easing of cold war hostilities with Russia was a good thing. Now I know why. I only voted
for Clinton because I thought it was the only way to help further Sanders agenda. I cannot forget that she grinned as
she stood behind her husband when he signed the bill that killed Glass Steagal or her support for the first Iraqi
invasion and continuing hawkishness. I don't despise her like some do but I could never really warm up to her.
Sanders is very authentic; when asked about human rights for Palestine he was the only politician that at least said
they were entitled; all Clinton could repeat was "precautions must be taken". With HRC she came across as espousing
policies to win votes, not that she was passionate or even honest about them.
Stephen Sivonda
,
December 15, 2016 at 11:00 pm
Patricia Guerrero It's good to read that someone is
beginning to develop an awareness of what passes for our Govt. today. It is somewhat complicated as there are many
layers of that are only interested in their wallets and how far up the power food chain they can go. I've tried in
vain to describe to several friends some of the reasons why certain events happen and use the analogy of a "Big
Puzzle" . It's my version of critical thinking. Once one starts to look at past and current events (those being
pieces of the puzzle) , then things begin to connect and take shape .as similar to filling in the voids in the
puzzle. Your mentioning of HRC standing behind Bill Clinton and grinning jumped out at me .as a person who is on
track to seeing what a morass of evil we have for Govt. and the political machinations by the DC insiders. God
save the Republic.
exiled off mainstreet
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:39 pm
Unfortunately Sanders has jumped the shark supporting
this effort aimed at demonizing Russia to overturn the election results. It proves he was either weak, a fraud, or
both, unfortunately. This will damage the democratic brand long-term, although if Tulsi Gabbard becomes a
candidate it may be a way out of the trap.
Zachary Smith
,
December 15, 2016 at 4:08 pm
The Moon of Alabama site has a new post about the motives
of this latest "stuff".
My only quibble with it is that he neglected to mention
other people who would prefer President Hillary or President Pence.
Abe
,
December 15, 2016 at 3:47 pm
German political theorist Carl Schmitt defined the content
of politics as opposition to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own
interests. The "other" or the "stranger" is defined as an "enemy"
For Schmitt, the political is not an autonomous domain
equivalent to any other domain, such as the economic, but instead is the "existential" basis that would determine any
other domain should it reach the point of politics.
Schmitt defined the enemy as whoever is "in a specially
intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are
possible."
For Schmitt, such an "existential" enemy need not even be
based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political
entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.
Leo Strauss, a follower of political Zionist Vladimir
Jabotinsky, had a position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin. Strauss wrote to Schmitt in 1932 and
summarized Schmitt's political theology thus: "[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But
dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every
association of men is necessarily a separation from other men – the political thus understood is not the constitutive
principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state"
With a letter of recommendation from Schmitt, Strauss
received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to begin work, in France, on a study of Hobbes. Schmitt went on
to become an influential figure in the new Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.
In the late 1930s, as Hitler's Reich was expanding in
Europe, Schmitt developed his concept of "Grossraum", literally "great-space". The term has a sense of a "sphere" of
influence, and "geopolitical space" may be closer to the meaning.
Schmitt intended the Grossraum concept to grasp an area or
region that goes beyond a single state (that is, a specific territory), to comprehend much larger scale spatial
orderings, complexes or arrangements.
After World War II, Schmitt considered the United States to
be the only political entity capable of resolving what he regarded as the crisis of global order.
Indirectly influenced by Schmitt's concept of the
political, twenty-first century American Superpower "exceptionalism" has no space in its Grossraum concept for a
"Eurasia".
The very enunciation of a "Eurasian" political sphere by
Russia and China is regarded by American Superpower as a "terrorist" act. All those associated with such "lunacy" are
viewed as geopolitical "enemies" to be annihilated by any means possible.
You said, "In the late 1930s, as Hitler's Reich was
expanding in Europe, Schmitt developed his concept of "Grossraum", literally "great-space". The term has a sense
of a "sphere" of influence, and "geopolitical space" may be closer to the meaning."
This is the story of America. From the Revolution to Expansionism and then on to Manifest Destiny and our winning
position in both World Wars, America has always been about creating geographic space, political space and recently
even in Outer Space.
The Star Wars or Space Defense Initiative proposed by
Reagan was an attempt to create Space Superiority in Outer Space. They even have a branch of the Air force called
Space Command.
http://www.afspc.af.mil/
.
The Mission statement for Space Command defines Space Superiority as the freedom of the United States to defend
itself from attack in Outer Space as well as the freedom to attack any target from Outer Space. The targets might
be other orbital craft in Outer Space such as satellites or any land based target. Space Superiority is perhaps
the ultimate vision of domination. The freedom from attack in Outer Space and the freedom to attack from Outer
Space on any land or space based target will mean an escalation of space based weapons which are banned by
international treaties like international treaties on Antarctica which declare Antarctica to be free of
politically motivated land grabs by any Nation.
I can only imagine what will happen when they find oil
under the ice covered Continent once all the ice melts.
What we need is a rational government that is concerned
with this inevitable clash of capitalistic goals and the environment.
I think our military is actually concerned about these
inevitable outcomes if we continue to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. The Navy and the Air force have
been actively seeking alternatives to a fossil fueled military but they have been blocked at every turn.
What we really need is a revolutionary fuel source like
Fusion to save the day. It might be right around the corner. The military is investing heavily in it. They see the
destabilization of the economic and geographic regions of the World due to climactic change as threats to our
National Security.
Fission is also realistically possible as an
alternative. But political intransigence has stifled progress on that front. Watch "Pandora's Promise" which is a
documentary by ex-antinuclear activists. I'll sum it up in an epitaph for humanity which reads "They were most
afraid of what could have saved them and they were unafraid of what killed them".
One fact is clear. The future stability of World
governments and their populations depends on abundant energy. There is no other single driver of prosperity and
stability than affordable abundant energy. It was the driver for the rural electrification program under FDR. Back
then they understood this equation and mounted massive public spending to make it happen. The recent rise of
southern state populations can be attributed to the development of Air Conditioning which made these regions
habitable in the Summer months. Thus was born an economic expansion which drove our former Cotton Belt into a new
industrial giant.
Some visionaries have laid plans for a solar based
economy which would utilize massive banks of lithium batteries to break the old myth that electricity cannot be
stored. Elon Musk is one of those visionaries. Entire cities could be powered at night by batteries.
The global crisis in energy supply is being driven by
the same folks who imposed unfair tariffs on goods before the Revolution. They would like none other than to hold
us hostage in an oil economy which very well might kill us all.
Modern developments in photo-voltaic cells have resulted
in a continuous manufacturing process which utilizes plasma deposition of a multi layered dielectric film onto a
substrate such as rolls of steel sheet which results in and amorphous coating capable of rivaling monocrystalline
cells. The result is a process which resembles the revolution Gutenberg started with his "printing press". Instead
of growing Silicon Crystals and doping them with rare elements, the plasma deposition process uses a continuous
sheet of a substrate passed through an interlock chamber into a high vacuum chamber where various materials are
deposited as a plasma onto the substrate in a continuous fashion to produce a finished product which can be cut up
into tiles for low cost and installed on roofs to generate electricity. The difference in this technology is akin
to a scribe hand copying books verses a Xerox machine doing the same thing. It is the same difference between the
time Bibles were the property of the Church and to be caught in possession of one was a capital offense and modern
times where paperboys deliver newspapers for cents on the dollar.
Whether it is a Fusion or Fission or Solar or even a
tidal based form of unlimited energy, one thing is clear. These technologies are real. They exist. To the extent
that we drive our planet into a mass extinction by burning fossil fuels or we transition to clean energy which is
abundant and practically free will determine whether we end up holed up in a cave with our guns ready to shoot
anyone crossing our sights or whether we transition into an economy where energy is essentially free.
The new administration is increasingly looking like it
wants to live in the cage. A cage determined by a global economy based on oil and fossil fuels.
If Donald Trump really wants to create jobs he would be
well advised to divest himself from fossil fuels and take a turn toward the future as envisioned by leaders like
Elon Musk. The Army did not make their move lightly on the Dakota Access pipeline. They have a duty to defend us
from security threats. They take that responsibility seriously. We would be wise to listen to them.
I know that all of the corporate people interested in
preserving their economic investments in fossil fuels have to take a deep breath and submerge themselves into the
unknown waters of a non-oil based business model. But they need to see the vision. They need to know that their
future success depends on it. They need to act quickly and pour their profits int the many available means to
provide an energy rich future where many things are possible and opportunity abounds.
There are two kinds of people or for that matter two
kinds of corporations or governments. There are those that hold onto old business plans and defend them at all
costs believing their old business models will save them and there are those who see opportunity where others see
only risk. It is those individuals, companies or governments which see the opportunities for continued growth
utilizing new technology who will succeed. Those who are paralyzed by old business models and old paradigms will
fall to the wayside.
We don't want the USA to be one of the losers. If Donald
Trump wants to be the "more jobs" president he will embrace new technology and not appoint members of the old
guard as the stewards of America's future.
It is not a matter for debate. The fields of technology
will continue to open up potentials for a more stable and economically rich future. These things are real and they
are up for grabs. Whoever grabs them first will be the winner. Whoever refuses to grab them will be the loser.
This is an ask. Donald Trump can do it. He is an
outsider and not involved in the business of government. Many of his ideas are fresh and hold great promise. Some
of his appointment show he might be being blindsided. He should council himself with the members of our National
Security Team who want to see a secure future and distance himself from those who want to preserve the old guard.
David F
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:04 am
This sort of advocacy for some technological fix that
allows us to go on living in the same, or greater, fashion than we are now, is part of the problem.
We live in a finite space, with finite resources,
time to start acting like it.
Abe
,
December 16, 2016 at 6:41 pm
CitizenOne, your comment is right on topic if the
topic is fake news.
"Pandora's Promise" is a pro-nuclear industry
propaganda film. The new pro-nuke missionaries are promoting nuclear material as some kind of savior of the
global environment when it is precisely the opposite.
Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and their oligarch chums
can blast off to go colonize Mars with Trump, Clinton, and all their wannabe cabinet appointees.
We'll keep our money and finally build a grid that
fully integrates clean energy from abundant renewable resources like solar and wind.
Joe Levantine
,
December 17, 2016 at 3:57 am
@ Citizen One
Your comments are very insightful since you commented on the most important issue that is at the core of
international conflict.
However, if history is any guide, your hopes will unfortunately be nothing more than wishful thinking. The case
for my pessimism is none other than the great Nicholas Tesla. Tesla, who by Einstein's reckoning is the
greatest scientific mind that has ever been was wasted by the powers that be because he was on the verge of
discovering free and clean energy. He did emulate thunder in his lab. His quest was to harness the electricity
in the ionosphere and channel it for human use through a central tower. His research on plasma was way ahead of
his time. His reward was an assassination attempt by the energy cabal who were hell bent on keeping their
monopoly power through the fossil fuel business. When Tesla's lab went on fire, it was U.S. Government agents
who stormed into his lab and confiscated all of his files, thereby putting a sad end to history's greatest
mind. The silence of history books about Tesla speaks volumes about the matrix controllers' animosity to this
unique man.
To expect from Donald Trump to be a selfless hero is stretching reality over the limit. His presidency did save
the world another round of in the White House for the Clinton ghouls. Yet, his potential for reforms is very
much restrained since his ascendancy to power came through the ballot box and not through a real revolution.
Leibniz16
,
December 18, 2016 at 1:00 am
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was conceived
by Lyndon LaRouche and his associates was conceived as a strategic flank to prevent those in both the American
and Soviet spheres, of launching a "First Strike" thermonuclear attack which was the increasing danger at the
time, to which with Obama is a threat as great as ever. Furthermore it was a strategy of helping both the U.S
and Soviets out of the economic collapse, which is still occurring, through what would be a cooperative
"Science Driver" approach, that would be working on areas of plasma physics and other areas of concerns
relevant to a entire revolution of energy production.
It was LaRouche and associates that published a
magazine called Fusion, working on advanced nuclear technologies to help
revolutionize mankind's potential, and break out from the control of the financial oligarchy.
Presently we at the verge of a complete energy
revolution through the discoveries of Randy Mills and his Brilliant Light Power Company that has a verified
demonstration of a novel understanding of the hydrogen atom, whereby the electron orbit is dropped to a lower
spin state, releasing vast amounts of energy.
Brad Owen
,
December 18, 2016 at 10:46 am
Well said, citizen one. It all really does boil down
to abundant energy, and energy flux density, as Lyndon Larouche says. We wil advance onward through denser
energy flux production. It's what people DO, as naturally as lions hunt and birds fly; technological
advancements is what people do, from chipped flint stone tools to fusion-powered space flight to Mars in a
weeks time, and beyond that stage too. In this NEXT round of technological advancement, China, India, and
Russia will be leading the way, as it is THEY who are now the World leaders. I'm confident we'll break free of
the Imperial Straitjacket that has been affixed upon us by other powers in opposition to our Constitution and
republican principles (i.e. Patriots, NOT the Tory-Loyalists-to-Empire-and-"Crowns", that still infest our
nation, doing the bidding of ancient Imperial family lines, seeking to "capture" us and make us their
simple-minded beasts-of-burden).
CitizenOne
,
December 18, 2016 at 11:42 pm
In reply to to Abe. France is not Fake News. They
generate 80% of their electricity from Nuclear Fission. Modern reactor designs are safe. There is a word for
it, failsafe. Westinghouse invented the spring to close air to open brake and we were all not afraid of
runaway trains anymore. Technological advances and really any technological problem is usually a very simple
solution like the air brake but now in modern times simple solutions to problems are drowned by politics.
That is the thing that makes technology fail fail. The technological solutions are usually sound but where
we need them we need to put off the politics live with the occasional unintended consequences and let the
inventors course correct rather than condemning failure and halting all progress. Where would we be if,
after the first Mercury Rocket blew up, we threw water on space adventure calling it a doomed technology?
Luckily that did not happen.
In response to David F:
I suppose then we should all be living in a cave
painting the walls with mystical creatures since technological solutions are doomed to failure. Are you
living in a cave? I don't think so. Perhaps you are or should be since you eschew any form of technology,
live in a finite fixed environment and are prepared to be a victim of circumstance. That is some kind of
crazy world view.
In response to Brad Owen:
I completely agree. Abundant energy is the key to
our future growth. Indeed it is what people DO. I also agree that that it is unfortunately what other
nations are doing way ahead of us. If we do not get on the bandwagon and decide that the future is all about
abundant energy then we will become the losers in the technology front. As I laid it out, the technological
means to transform our world into whatever we want it to be are already here. They have been developed and
even more are being developed which have the potential to power a bright future like the invention of
electric power grids which power industry, economies and enable commerce.
It is time for science and technology to be
applied to the problems we face developing new means of energy production that are all around us from solar
to battery technology to fusion, biofuels, nuclear fission using safe technology, wind, tidal and even
really challenging technologies but if we are not investing in it, then it means we are not investing in any
new energy sources.
The history of past inventions was not made by
those that said the technology was a fools errand. The inventions were made by visionaries who had the
stamina to endure all of those folks who poo pooed the new technology and eventually prevailed.
It is really not a matter of if but when we will
enter a new age of abundant energy. Energy drives everything and it also is the most important factor for
peace. Abundant energy establishes the wealth of nations more than money. Without it, money is worthless
since it cannot be used to purchase the motive driver for creation of goods and services.
The history of the Industrial revolution was
driven by energy. Abundant energy.
The Sun fuses ten million tons of hydrogen every
second and it will last for ten billion years. How is that for a clue that life on Earth depends on abundant
energy. If we were able to fuse even just one ton of hydrogen every second in the production of electricity
we would power the entire planet. If we could just convert one percent of the solar energy impinging on our
tiny dot of a planet circling around the huge nuclear furnace of the Sun we would power the entire global
electricity requirements for a long time to come.
These are the visions we need to be occupied by.
Not visions of impending doom or hopelessness.
What we need now is an energy race. An energy race
to create a new economy which is driven by safe energy. Photosynthetic cells which are like photovoltaic
cells consume atmospheric Carbon Dioxide using solar energy to produce Carbon Monoxide and Oxygen. The CO
can be used as a feed stock to produce hydrocarbons which can be synthesized into synthetic fuels which
create a carbon cycle which is entirely atmospheric. If we want to reduce atmospheric CO2 we can just pump
the fuels back into the ground or use them to produce durable products like cement which can be used for
construction.
I know that this might seem like a pipe dream and
perhaps it is. It will not be a pipe dream when we feel the full effects of global warming. Then there will
be a market for these products.
The politics will reverse as people seek products
that enable them to survive. It is what people do. It is what life does. It seeks to preserve itself.
Technology will offer appealing alternatives which are even more economical than current energy platforms.
It will make economic sense to adopt them.
It made economical sense to adopt our current
energy platform and the new energy platforms will make just as much economic sense.
We are already seeing this transition from Coal to
Natural Gas driven by the technology of fracking which is cleaner than coal and is now more economically
advantageous. Coal is not dying because of government regulations. It is dying because there are cheaper
alternatives. Win Win for the environment and the consumers of energy and the producers of it.
But the fracking revolution is just the first wave
in new technologies to harvest ever more abundant and cleaner safer forms of energy.
This is not wishful thinking. It has happened with
fracking and it will continue to happen with other forms of energy over and over.
Those that see the potential opportunities will
become the future energy barons.
I would ask only that we would see the movements
by other nations as a shot across the bow that we better get to work. We don't want to be left behind in the
energy bonanza just around the corner.
It is a gold mine out there for the companies that
develop the next generation of massive abundant energy sources. They will gain great wealth. They will be
viewed like Edison or Fermi. Prometheus unchained.
Do not listen to the hysterical mob. Instead
listen to the visionaries who will all get very wealthy with new technological inventions.
It is the way it has always been and so it will be
in the future. We never go back. We never force a halt to the current way we do things. We just invent
better ways of doing it that make more economic sense and make the old ways obsolete.
Perhaps some might advocate we all return to the
caves where we hid from the cold of winter in our elk skin coats huddling over a campfire and drawing
pictures of the food we wanted to eat but did not have as we sucked the marrow out of dry bones but I think
that is not a future I want to see.
I would rather offer to sell the cavemen guns and
ammunition and snowmobiles and portable propane heaters with sofas and furniture for their caves instead.
And you know what? They would be lined up around the cave entrance to buy them.
Think about it.
Abe
,
December 21, 2016 at 3:25 pm
Citizen One, your news about nuclear power in
France is fake.
Power generation is down and wholesale power
prices are rising due to numerous safety and integrity issues that plague Électricité de France SA's
(EDF's) nuclear reactor fleet. Carbon segregation in critical nuclear plant components like the steel
pressure vessel can weaken the vessel's structure and breach safety regulations, potentially leading to
catastrophic events.
Nobody is stopping free energy development I 'am from
Missouri Free energy will come from free enterprise not government subsidies .. We will have new development
and new and better ideas but show me don't tell me . Scams are scams wether the come from crooks or the
government and they often are the same thing .
Ragnar Ragnarsson
,
December 15, 2016 at 3:25 pm
Thank you for being the voice of reason and truth teller
that you are Mr. Parry. I sincerely hope the domestic coup in progress fails miserably and that Trump is able to
pursue peace. I am so sick of Neo-cons and what they've done to the world.
Thank you Mr. Parry for shining the spotlight on the
vitally important topics that you do to keep us informed in depth. As one who tries to see the world through the
lens of parity between nation states, I wonder what you (or other qualified folks) could tell us about the efforts
we Americans have made and are currently making to influence influence, and very likely undermine, the stability
of Russia and President Putin. My guess is we are not without serious complicity in doing the same things as we
now accuse the Russians of doing to us, but of course much of this would be classified. I suspect the more holier
than thou we are, the more committed we are to destabilizing the so-called "enemy" of Russia (despite our measured
provocations to precipitate their alleged aggression(s). Thank you again, have a great holiday season.
Speaking of our "holier-than-thou" attitude, let me
relate a personal story that relieved me of this attitude a long time ago. Re cently , I have been vindicated
as regards any doubts that I might have had about that change of attitude.
During the relatively early years of the Cold War
(1956-59), you know, just before the Chinese split with the Soviets in 1960, the Berlin Wall went up in 1961,
and Gary Powers was shot down, igniting the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it was my job as a Naval Pilot to fly
up and down the Far Eastern coastline (12-mile limit) of the Soviet Union (you know, Kamchatka Peninsula)
looking for trouble. Didn't find much, except the frequent Mig-17 flying my wingtips, who might have been
wondering what we were doing there BUZZING THEIR SHIPS. No problem, they didn't shoot me down, for which I am
grateful. But I did wonder what WE would have done if THEY had been flying so closely up and down OUR
California coast.The American public never heard about these "intrusions" in the Russian "space". Nor did the
Russians publicize them for the obvious reason (embarrassment?).
Come 2016 and OUR ships are cruising around in the
Baltic not far from the suburbs of St. Petersburg, when Russian jets come looking for trouble(?) buzzing OUR
ships.. And there erupted a hypocritical hue and cry from the DOD, etal. to match the usual black pot and black
kettle stories that we hear so often from our powers that be. Not only are we doing the same to them (buzzing
their ships once, or we would have heard about them the other times) that we have been doing to them for 70
year, though not on our California or New York coastline, but in their back yard. This is hypocrisy on
steroids. This is deeply embarrassing to me.personally. Are we that desperate? Who really are these people who
are stirring the pot so vigorously?
EyesWideOpen
,
December 16, 2016 at 4:50 pm
"Who really are these people who are stirring the
pot so vigorously?"
I assume yours is a rhetorical question.
The pot I am referring to is the context in
which everything bad is blamed on Russia. In this case, we can buzz, they can't. If they do it, it's
publicized. If we do it, it's not.
Yes, I guess that it was a rhetorical question
with the implication that the answer should be obvious. All you have to do is read the papers, and it
should be obvious who wants to litigate (gossip) this issue to death.
Minnesota Mary
,
December 18, 2016 at 4:31 pm
Thank you for your testimony! America's government
is so hypocritical. Our news media is so dishonest in what it filters and chooses to tell the American
people. Lies abound, and it is nearly impossible for most people to sort through them.
Correction to my reply: "Not only have WE been doing
the same to THEM for almost 70 years right off THEIR coastline, NOT OURS, but WE have complained when THEY did
this ONCE to us IN THEIR BACKYARD."
eric
,
December 18, 2016 at 10:50 pm
I guess we funded many ngos to destabilize Russia .
So many that Russia has forced many U.S.aid groups to move out of Russia by the end of this year . We funded
the Pussy riot girls that did things in the Churches in Russia that would have brought the girls to the insane
asylum if they did these deeds in Churches in the USA In Russia the girls got prison sentences So our
journalists could write stories about how oppressive Russia .is to people loving freedom . Russia does not
allow gay marriage another terrible oppression and black mark on freedom in Russia .. Russia has built more
Christian churches than any other country in Europe under Putin's kGB leadership . Putin is not Satan . The
Russian people are proud with him as their leader it is only us that wants to get rid of him .
Adele Roof
,
December 15, 2016 at 6:11 pm
Thank you for this thoughtful, well-informed post. You
are right -- many Democrats, and I was one, did not vote for Clinton because she was a war monger. I also felt, that
as a woman, she would have to go out of her way to prove that she was as tough as any male.
She obviously learned nothing from her disastrous vote
for the war in Iraq, because she influenced Obama to take out Qaddafi. If it were not for her lust for war, I
probably would have held my nose and voted for her. And while I did not vote for Trump, I actually breathed a sigh
of relief when he won, thinking that he wouldn't take us into war with Russia.
To date, there's no proof that the Russians were
involved in hacking/leaking this information. But if this is causing such a stir as to have some want to overturn
the results of the presidential election, then, by rights, to be morally consistent, they should also push for
going back to the Democratic primaries and redoing them as well. Clearly this hacked/leaked information shows that
the Democrats interfered with the election of Sanders. That would be most fair, don't you think?
exiled off mainstreet
,
December 16, 2016 at 12:36 pm
Parry's article is again excellent. The lamestream
democrats are jumping the fascist shark and putting our future at risk. I also am a lifelong democrat who
couldn't support the harpy because of her obvious hawkishness and status as a war criminal based on her
architecture of the Libya destruction. I also think her need to prove herself as tough as any man colors her
dangerous political views. I also agree that the fact it was proven that she is a proven war criminal and they
gamed the primaries against Sanders should eliminate any support for overturning the election on any basis
absent the fact that any success in this endeavour would lead to civil unrest and that what they are demanding,
confrontation with Russia, is a threat to our future. Hopefully former peace types still taken in by the
klinton koolaid will wake up and restore the Democratic party away from its present incarnation as a fascist
militarist threat to our survival.
Good idea Adele, New election, given all the crap
Jill Stein found in the very limited recount effort she was allowed to conduct. The election process is putrid
rotten! Let er and Gary Johnson into the debates this time around as well.
eric
,
December 18, 2016 at 11:05 pm
yes but I'am hoping you made a wise choice . Trump
may not be a old fashion vote no on every thing republican I'am expecting good reasonable priced healthcare
covering everybody and not costing employers so much they won't hire any one . That alone might bring back a
lot of jobs . I voted with you and now I think we have a better future . Of course we could be friends with
Russia . Russia is not communist anymore . They are the most Christian country in Europe and we are the most
Christian country in the world . We should be natural friends
Jerry Falkenstein
,
December 16, 2016 at 11:11 am
2 comments
Dmitry Orlov cluborlov.blogspot.com
Dmitri Orlov cluborlov.blogspot.com
With all the compost being forwarded in cyber space it's
refreshing to occasionally read something that's spot on the money. An article that actually contains real value
or what one might call nourishment for the brain. Every so often I'll read a post that's near perfection and I
just did. It's by Dmitry Orlov and titled "The Power of "Nyet". My expressed thanks go out for Dmitrys permission
to repost this exceptional piece of commentary.
The Power of "Nyet" Author Dmitry Orlov, Club Orlov
Blogpost
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Kerry Putin lavrov The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the
power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their
wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not
immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn't produce the
intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance
an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn't work,
they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late
a new dynamic has emerged.
In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the
phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this:
the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation.
Russia says "Nyet." The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing
campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia's nuclear deterrent. The answer remains "Nyet." One could perhaps
imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: "Based on the evidence before
us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn't work; let's try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals." And
then everybody else would slap their heads and say, "Wow! That's brilliant! Why didn't we think of that?" But
instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable.
And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing
spectacle.
eric
,
December 18, 2016 at 11:44 pm
You have got the whole story down right .accept China
is standing along side of Russia . They have been ever since we humiliated both of them in Yugoslavia . Now
both of them have developed a lot of new weapons and Russia is in Syria with their new planes and missiles 300
and 400 . Putin has told us we can talk about changes that we could maybe make . But the NWO has already
decided everything they don't want to consider any changes . Not for us , Not for Christians , not for Jews ,
not for Muslims , not for Russians and not for any Chinamen either . They have already made all the orders and
rules . Russia said Nyet in Georgia and now Russia is saying Nyet in Syria too . The Russian people are totally
behind their government and proud of Putin .The American people have finally caught on they are not proud of
what the NWO has been doing they have discarded their NWO government And have selected a new government that is
going take power in thirty days . Trump has said he will deal with Russia and China on a equal basis .We are
facing a very dangerous thirty days the NWO may do anything during this period to stay in power and implement
all the orders they already decided .
"Ditto" to that and Mr. Parry, thank you for the
pictures!
Fran Macadam
,
December 17, 2016 at 5:58 am
Robert Parry, a voice of sanity amidst the McCarthyist
hysteria. How ironic this time around the most extreme purveyors of the paranoid style in politics are
once-liberal Democrats.
Andy
,
December 19, 2016 at 1:28 am
Great article. I'm glad I found this site since it has
become clear that I can't trust the MSM. Even 60 Minutes has become a tool of Washington.
Andy
,
December 19, 2016 at 1:40 am
In Obama's news/press conference on Friday, he said some
very unprofessional things about Russia: "they don't produce anything besides oil and gas " and "they aren't
innovative". (By not innovative does he mean they don't make fake stories like how the Russians hacked the DNC?)
This isn't the kind of thing our President should be saying about foreign countries, especially large ones like
Russia. Where does he got off saying this at a news conference? I'm losing respect for Obama by the day. I voted
for him and after suffering 8 years of Bush he was the savior at the time. But his shine has tarnished.
1) You pay your taxes
2) You pay your employees
3) There will be no asset stripping
Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia. From
1995–2006 his company, Hermitage Capital Management, siphoned untold billions of
dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts while paying no taxes and cheating workers of
wages and pensions.
Putin put an end to US and UK backed shysters stealing Russia blind. Is it any wonder the
western oligarchs hate him with such a passion?
Back in the (Great) Game: The Revenge of Eurasian Land Powers August 29, 2018 •
34 Comments
What is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on the mood swings of the Goddess of
the Market. No wonder an effect of Eurasia integration will be a death blow to Bretton Woods
and "democratic" neoliberalism, says Pepe Escobar.
Get ready for a major geopolitical chessboard rumble: from now on, every butterfly
fluttering its wings and setting off a tornado directly connects to the battle between Eurasia
integration and Western sanctions as foreign policy.
It is the paradigm shift of China's New Silk Roads versus America's Our Way or the Highway.
We used to be under the illusion that history had ended. How did it come to this?
Hop in for some essential time travel. For centuries the Ancient Silk Road, run by mobile
nomads, established the competitiveness standard for land-based trade connectivity; a web of
trade routes linking Eurasia to the – dominant – Chinese market.
In the early 15 th century, based on the tributary system, China had already
established a Maritime Silk Road along the Indian Ocean all the way to the east coast of
Africa, led by the legendary Admiral Zheng He. Yet it didn't take much for imperial Beijing to
conclude that China was self-sufficient enough – and that emphasis should be placed on
land-based operations.
Deprived of a trade connection via a land corridor between Europe and China, Europeans went
all-out for their own maritime silk roads. We are all familiar with the spectacular result:
half a millennium of Western dominance.
Until quite recently the latest chapters of this Brave New World were conceptualized by the
Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman trio.
The Heartland of the World
Mackinder
Halford
Mackinder 's 1904 Heartland Theory – a product of the imperial Russia-Britain New
Great Game – codified the supreme Anglo, and then Anglo-American, fear of a new emerging
land power able to reconnect Eurasia to the detriment of maritime powers.
Nicholas
Spykman 's 1942 Rimland Theory advocated that mobile maritime powers, such as the UK and
the U.S., should aim for strategic offshore balancing. The key was to control the maritime
edges of Eurasia -- that is, Western Europe, the Middle East and East Asia -- against any
possible Eurasia unifier. When you don't need to maintain a large Eurasia land-based army, you
exercise control by dominating trade routes along the Eurasian periphery.
Even before Mackinder and Spykman, U.S. Navy Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan had come up in the
1890s with his Influence of Sea Power Upon History – whereby the "island" U.S.
should establish itself as a seaworthy giant, modeled on the British empire, to maintain a
balance of power in Europe and Asia.
It was all about containing the maritime edges of Eurasia.
In fact, we lived in a mix of Heartland and Rimland. In 1952, then Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles adopted the concept of an "island chain" (then expanded to three chains)
alongside Japan, Australia and the Philippines to encircle and contain both China and the USSR
in the Pacific. (Note the Trump administration's attempt at revival via the Quad–
U.S., Japan, Australia and India).
George Kennan, the architect of containing the USSR, was drunk on Spykman, while, in a
parallel track, as late as 1988, President Ronald Reagan's speechwriters were still drunk on
Mackinder. Referring to U.S. competitors as having a shot at dominating the Eurasian landmass,
Reagan gave away the plot: "We fought two world wars to prevent this from occurring," he
said.
Eurasia integration and connectivity is taking on many forms. The China-driven New Silk
Roads, also known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union
(EAEU); the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); the International North-South
Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and myriad other mechanisms, are now leading us to a whole new
game.
How delightful that the very concept of Eurasian "connectivity" actually comes from a 2007
World Bank report about competitiveness in global supply chains.
Also delightful is how the late Zbigniew "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski was "inspired" by
Mackinder after the fall of the USSR – advocating the partition of a then weak Russia
into three separate regions; European, Siberian and Far Eastern.
All Nodes Covered
At the height of the unipolar moment, history did seem to have "ended." Both the western and
eastern peripheries of Eurasia were under tight Western control – in Germany and Japan,
the two critical nodes in Europe and East Asia. There was also that extra node in the southern
periphery of Eurasia, namely the energy-wealthy Middle East.
Washington had encouraged the development of a multilateral European Union that might
eventually rival the U.S. in some tech domains, but most of all would enable the U.S. to
contain Russia by proxy.
China was only a delocalized, low-cost manufacture base for the expansion of Western
capitalism. Japan was not only for all practical purposes still occupied, but also
instrumentalized via the Asian Development Bank (ADB), whose message was: We fund your projects
only if you are politically correct.
The primary aim, once again, was to prevent any possible convergence of European and East
Asian powers as rivals to the US.
The confluence between communism and the Cold War had been essential to prevent Eurasia
integration. Washington configured a sort of benign tributary system – borrowing from
imperial China – designed to ensure perpetual unipolarity. It was duly maintained by a
formidable military, diplomatic, economic, and covert apparatus, with a star role for the
Chalmers Johnson-defined Empire of Bases encircling, containing and dominating Eurasia.
Compare this recent idyllic past with Brzezinski's – and Henry Kissinger's –
worst nightmare: what could be defined today as the "revenge of history".
That features the Russia-China strategic partnership, from energy to trade: interpolating
Russia-China geo-economics; the concerted drive to bypass the U.S. dollar; the AIIB and the
BRICS's New Development Bank involved in infrastructure financing; the tech upgrade inbuilt in
Made in China
2025 ; the push towards an alternative banking clearance mechanism (a new SWIFT); massive
stockpiling of gold reserves; and the expanded politico-economic role of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO).
As Glenn Diesen formulates in his brilliant book,
Russia's Geo-economic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia , "the foundations of an Eurasian
core can create a gravitational pull to draw the rimland towards the centre."
If the complex, long-term, multi-vector process of Eurasia integration could be resumed by
just one formula, it would be something like this: the heartland progressively integrating; the
rimlands mired in myriad battlefields and the power of the hegemon irretrievably dissolving.
Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman to the rescue? It's not enough.
Divide and Rule, Revisited
The Oracle still speaks.
The same applies for the preeminent post-mod Delphic Oracle, also known as Henry Kissinger,
simultaneously adorned by hagiography gold and despised as a war criminal.
Before the Trump inauguration, there was much debate in Washington about how Kissinger might
engineer – for Trump – a "pivot to Russia" that he had envisioned 45 years ago.
This is how I framed the shadow play a t the
time.
In the end, it's always about variations of Divide and Rule – as in splitting Russia
from China and vice-versa. In theory, Kissinger advised Trump to "rebalance" towards Russia to
oppose the irresistible Chinese ascension. It won't happen, not only because of the strength of
the Russia-China strategic partnership, but because across the Beltway, neocons and
humanitarian imperialists ganged up to veto it.
Brzezinski's perpetual Cold War mindset still lords over a fuzzy mix of the Wolfowitz
Doctrine and the Clash of Civilizations. The Russophobic Wolfowitz Doctrine – still fully
classified – is code for Russia as the perennial top existential threat to the U.S. The
Clash, for its part, codifies another variant of Cold War 2.0: East (as in China) vs. West.
Kissinger is trying some rebalancing/hedging
himself, noting that the mistake the West (and NATO) is making "is to think that there is a
sort of historic evolution that will march across Eurasia – and not to understand that
somewhere on that march it will encounter something very different to a Westphalian entity."
Both Eurasianist Russia and civilization-state China are already on post-Westphalian mode.
The redesign goes deep. It includes a key treaty signed in 2001, only a few
weeks before 9/11, stressing that both nations renounce any territorial designs on one
another's territory. This happens to concern, crucially, the Primorsky Territory in the Russian
Far East along the Amur River, which was ruled by the Ming and Qing empires.
Moreover, Russia and China commit never to do deals with any third party, or allow a third
country to use its territory to harm the other's sovereignty, security and territorial
integrity.
So much for turning Russia against China. Instead, what will develop 24/7 are variations of
U.S. military and economic containment against Russia, China and Iran – the key nodes of
Eurasia integration – in a geo-strategic spectrum. It will include intersections of
heartland and rimland across Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and the South China Sea. That will
proceed in parallel to the Fed
weaponizing the U.S. dollar at will.
Heraclitus Defies Voltaire
Voltaire
Alastair Crooke took a great
shot at deconstructing why Western global elites are terrified of the Russian
conceptualization of Eurasia. It's because "they 'scent' a stealth reversion to the old,
pre-Socratic values: for the Ancients the very notion of 'man', in that way, did not exist.
There were only men: Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Syrians, and so on. This stands in obvious
opposition to universal, cosmopolitan 'man'."
So it's Heraclitus versus Voltaire – even as "humanism" as we inherited it from the
Enlightenment, is de facto over. Whatever is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on
the irascible mood swings of the Goddess of the Market. No wonder one of the side effects of
progressive Eurasia integration will be not only a death blow to Bretton Woods but also to
"democratic" neoliberalism.
What we have now is also a remastered version of sea power versus land powers. Relentless
Russophobia is paired with supreme fear of a Russia-Germany rapprochement – as Bismarck
wanted, and as Putin
and Merkel recently hinted at. The supreme nightmare for the U.S. is in fact a truly
Eurasian Beijing-Berlin-Moscow partnership.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has not even begun; according to the official Beijing
timetable, we're still in the planning phase. Implementation starts next year. The horizon is
2039.
(Wellcome Library, London.)
This is China playing a long-distance game of go on steroids, incrementally making
the best strategic decisions (allowing for margins of error, of course) to render the opponent
powerless as he does not even realize he is under attack.
The New Silk Roads were launched by Xi Jinping five years ago, in Astana (the Silk Road
Economic Belt) and Jakarta (the Maritime Silk Road). It took Washington almost half a decade to
come up with a response. And that amounts to an avalanche of sanctions and tariffs. Not good
enough.
Russia for its part was forced to publicly announce a show of mesmerizing
weaponry to dissuade the proverbial War Party adventurers probably for good – while
heralding Moscow's role as co-driver of a brand new game.
Were the European peninsula of Asia to fully integrate before mid-century – via
high-speed rail, fiber optics, pipelines – into the heart of massive, sprawling Eurasia,
it's game over. No wonder Exceptionalistan elites are starting to get the feeling of a silk
rope drawn ever so softly, squeezing their gentle throats.
Pepe Escobar is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times . His latest book is
2030 . Follow him on Facebook .
Ron Craven aka Ronzig the Wizard , August 30, 2018 at 1:20 am
Isn't it ironic; the people of the Western world, at least those of us who even have a
clue of what's happening, are reduced to praying for Russia and China to save us from our own
elite leaders WHO SEEK TO REDUCE ALL OF US TO ABSOLUTE SLAVERY? I thank God that Putin is a
political genius who surpasses anything the West can put forward. And China the definition of
inscrutable has quietly allowed us to finance their takeover of the complete Western economic
system which is breathing its last breaths as our leaders wonder what happened.
I have a friend who has a masters degree in business and economics yet he has no clue of what
is happening right before his eyes yet I who barely squeezed through grade 12 foresaw this a
decade ago. It's pathetic that the most powerful people in the world are sp blinded by greed
and dogma that they can't recognize the writing on the wall.
Tom Kath , August 29, 2018 at 7:56 pm
The reference to the pre Socratic "men" as compared to "Man" is significant. – It is
inherent in the concept of "Globalism", "Hegemony", and "One God".
Dunderhead, I am not with the global warming/climate change folks at all! I am with folks
who believe that we all must limit consuming and must learn to make do with less, not be
greedy, live more simply. Climate change will always happen, that is basic geology,
astronomy, science shows that. I am saying that, we are now seeing major shifts and I am with
those who say our Sun is the major player. We have millions of landfills on earth, plastic
and polllutants choking oceans and killing marine life. I consider these "carbon peddlers"
just another form of disinformation and very misinformed, it's political hype for the masses,
but we have serious consequences for future generations that are real due to our capitalistic
overconsumption and nearly 8 billion on Earth. I think China has awareness of that to some
extent, but the competitive pressure from the Western genesis of capitalistic consumption is
huge. For my personal choices, I am working to keep my plastic usage to a minimum. There is
evidence that we are in the midst of an electromagnetic polar shift right now, we are seeing
an intensification of number of earthquakes right now, and the last few years we have
witnessed extreme catastrophic earth events. It is Earth itself doing this, and it may be
coming from the mantle, or even the core. I used to be support staff for earth scientists in
Boston and I learned a lot, took geology courses.
Joe Wallace , August 29, 2018 at 11:57 pm
Jessika:
"I am with folks who believe that we all must limit consuming and must learn to make do
with less, not be greedy, live more simply."
I'm with you on that. We in the U.S. and Canada live in immensely wealthy societies,
despite the wage stagnation that afflicts those in the middle class and below. It might be
making a virtue of necessity, but many of us can live relatively comfortable lives by
luxuriating in adequacy, a privilege not accorded those in the developing world.
jose , August 29, 2018 at 6:52 pm
Mr. Escobar is correct to assert that "integration will be a death blow to Bretton Woods
and "democratic" neoliberalism" If one internalized this basic premise, it is easy to
comprehend why Western elites throw a monkey wrench at every possible opportunity of Asia and
Europe integrating. They fail to realize that all things must come to an end because their
minds are closed to this very real possibility. Paraphrasing minister and speaker john mason
"Nothing dies quicker than a new idea in a closed mind" Their days are numbered and they know
it.
jose , August 29, 2018 at 6:37 pm
What I concluded from this article was that Western elites cannot stop what is coming. It
is a very natural process that Europe and Asia integrate at some point. Western elites can
only postpone the inevitable with their wars and tariffs. In other words, the idea of
integration has been maturing long enough and there is no turning back. Quoting Victor Hugo
Les Miserables "No army can stop an idea whose time has come"
Dunderhead , August 29, 2018 at 6:36 pm
First off, Pepe you rock, you are the coolest and probably most interesting journalists
out right now. Couple of comments however, what looks like Genius from the Chinese is just
strategic common sense though you're right the Chinese do know how to play the long game.
Speaking of which I really don't believe that they are going to be as benevolent a hegemon as
Pepe is suggesting, they're not particularly good about respecting African opportunities for
employment on some of their various projects in that region. All that being said I think the
new Silk Road project is a fantastic idea and can only wish that that if these any sense left
in these incompetent criminals running our government, they could figure out the long-term
opportunities for cooperating with the Chinese, the arms manufacturers do not always have to
produce arms, guns into plowshares as it were. Anyway Great to see your article and
consortium, I've got to catch up with your stuff at Asia Times, Thanks.
Always fun to read Pepe Escobar, why i look at Asia Times online daily as well as Eurasia
Futures and South China Morning Post. The Asians play the long game while the impatient West,
especially US, play only the short gotta-have-it-NOW game. The bellicose bully bombing
Machiavellian neocons with their hardening of arteries in the brain can't conceive of
cooperation. There is one other surprise prime mover in this mix often overlooked, and that
is Gaia or Mother Earth. At least it seems that Xi Jinping and the Chinese have made
reference to environmental concerns with the BRI, which is more than can be said for the
Western neocolonialists in their bombing for "democracy".
At a recent meeting with a top advisor of Assad in Syria, a Lebanese paper reported that
the US negotiators said they would withdraw if Syria would give them a cut of the oil! Wow,
what gall! Assad would not agree, wonder what's next? This is the way they work, as Pepe
said, "My way or the highway", gangster diplomacy. There is no honor among thieves.
Dunderhead , August 29, 2018 at 6:48 pm
Jessica, There is obviously more carbon in the atmosphere, I don't think that is debatable
but the technology to actually do something about this has been around for 45 years orso, the
fact that they don't do anything about it, means to me this furor over climate change is just
another government scam like overpopulation, anyway specific technologies: thorium based
fission and long-term carbon sequestration, these are easy things to look up. I don't believe
I know everything about this topic but it's even real debatable that wait now the climate is
optimum in the sense that a slightly warmer climate all around gives longer growing seasons
and makes it also less expensive to heat one's home. So to ask the question, why do you
believe global warming is such a problem more than just general pollution?
irina , August 29, 2018 at 10:16 pm
Yes, here in the continental subarctic (Interior Alaska) we are looking forward to a
longer
growing season and less heating expense. BUT what we are seeing is simply more variable
weather, making it harder to grow anything in an already challenging climate. Also, for
some
reason (go figure) weeds are more adaptive to higher CO2 levels than food crops. Meaning
the weeds thrive even better than ever, while the food crops grow at about the same rate
as
always, only more choked out by weeds than ever. Other problems include new (to us) bugs
and plant diseases as they move North, drier droughts and heavier rains (this was
predicted)
and skewed seasons with much later springs and somewhat later falls. (Not great, as our
really sunny season is spring, not fall).
Many areas of the planet may end up having such unpredictable year-to-year weather
that
annual agriculture, upon which most of the global population depends, becomes untenable.
Professor , August 29, 2018 at 5:24 pm
I've been reading Pepe's stuff for a few years now.I like it. He is good at, Macro/ big
picture stuff. He's great on Pipelinestan issues as well. But I think he picks and chooses
his ideas a little too freely at times .The result can be more like a collage at times than a
Picasso. We are pushing real hard right now on Russia, China and Iran. Eurasian Integration
Projects are clearly a threat to American dominance especially since we are undermining the
dollar through unilateral sanctions and other tricks everywhere, up and down the line. This
should be of great concern to our allies but they are already on board behind whatever
decisions Our Government makes. They really don't don't have anywhere to go. Germany and
Japan are totally integrated with our economy and Germany has been the biggest beneficiary in
terms of economic and fiscal policy of NATO's march eastward. They love it and they'll buy
Russia's gas too. No problem. We won't stop them. I believe Trump's strategy is less
aggressive than Clinton's would have been. There really isn't much of a choice. One thing I
would add, Big Picture: China did not build the Great Wall as a tourist attraction. It was to
keep out barbarians/foreigners, After the Boxer Rebellion they kicked out foreigners. Mao
kicked out foreigners. They are fine with themselves, A guy I know who spends a lot of time
in China and knows many very well, socially, says that the Chinese think the next 1000 years
belong to them. . Forget a Project for a New Chinese Century, They expect the New Silk Road
to deliver the goods big time and forever. They need Russian Gas to pull it off. They also
like 5th and 6th generation Russian weapons but so apparently do everyone else.
Paul by the way, a couple of weeks back I revisited a post and sore your comment, thanks I
think you made some valid points, I particularly thought it was encouraging of meaningful
opposition to corporations having the rights of individuals, and your analogy about the
regulation of the telephone companys back in the day, on the other hand, in an age of mass
communication incorporate state propaganda the fact that more Americans cannot find it in
their hearts to feel for the plight of Palestinians simply because they are ignorant of the
fax in the matter is testimony to censorship has always been with us. I personally had no
knowledge of the Liberty incident until about three months ago and I am a relatively avid
reader, this discovery is due to independent journalism who support themselves directly
through patrion or readit and probably other platforms, I think this is becoming normal, in
certain ways this is a fortunate time to be alive. Anyway thanks again!
The legitimate grievance against the United States is that it has overplayed its hand,
throwing sanctions to anyone not adhering to its rules. The power we have over the world
banking system created a Putin who rose to challenge our unipolar world. For the sake of the
world, and the United States, it is to be hoped that we can be made to climb down and join
the rest of the world as real equals.
Escobar mention the principle of Westphalian sovereignty which is part of the UN Charter:
: maybe it should be read aloud on the floor of a joint session of Congress and tweeted to
our President. Maybe sent to our networks and newspapers. We created the UN Charter, we
should abide by it
Mary V , August 29, 2018 at 12:35 pm
This is a fantastic read. I am wondering why the links to the Asia Times pieces don't
display correctly – hmmm – maybe it's the new censorship.
I like to think that American Exceptionalism is nearing its end, but I don't hold out hope
it will happen soon enough. It appears they are doubling-down on the jingoism of late. Then
again, that's what desperation looks like.
Jeff Harrison , August 29, 2018 at 12:18 pm
Pepe is always able to get you thinking
A major difference between the US and China is that the US tries to influence with heavy
handed threats and coercion while the Chinese use flattery and assistance to help you see
things their way. Russia under Putin acts like China but his predecessors were more of the
heavy handed variety. In the end though American hubris and insufferability (from the last
four presidents) has driven Russia and China together in a way that economic systems
(communism) never could. The US is the past. We have frittered away so much of our wealth and
international goodwill chasing phantom fears that were all well past their use by date
decades ago. We have spent ourselves into penury. Not just because we have $22T in debt, but
more importantly because we no longer have the economic engine to generate enough wealth to
support $22T in debt and counting. Yeah, go ahead and print more money. Every dollar will be
worth less and less.
Mary V , August 29, 2018 at 12:37 pm
Not to mention the gorilla in the room, the trillions of dollars going into our
over-extended military, which doesn't get us anything but the reputation as global terrorists
and bullies. :(
bobzz , August 29, 2018 at 4:28 pm
Well, I had a comment here, agreeing and enlarging on Jeff's, but it it gone. I've never
had that happen before on CN. If CN did not do it, who did? Just asking.
A Johnson , August 29, 2018 at 4:33 pm
It's not 'we' that did all that, plenty of 'us' have been screaming for decades about
foreign deaths, wars for profit, and looting of treasure BY the insiders. The elites did it,
including buying the propaganda. 'We' always get stuck with their bill. I'd like a few necks
stretched.
This would all be fine if we were still dealing with Mandarins and Tzars but we are not
and it is hard to escape from the fear that having watched Baron Rothschild build a new
Kingdom quite close to China, that we are simply watching the construction of ever more
'private' Unions, which will, of course, be run by hidden controllers.
"No wonder Exceptionalistan elites are starting to get the feeling of a silk rope drawn
ever so softly, squeezing their gentle throats." – Thank you for that closing Pepe. I
needed that very satisfying visual.
Groucho , August 29, 2018 at 11:41 am
Another excellent article from Escobar. I always appreciate his ability to summarize the
huge geopolitical transformation that is under way. I also find the response of Western
elites to be remarkable. Rather than work toward accommodation and cooperation they will
bankrupt themselves in a futile attempt to maintain hegemony. Galbraith was correct when he
said that those in power will bring about their total destruction rather than give up any
part of their advantage.
Mary V , August 29, 2018 at 12:38 pm
I love the Galbraith sentiment – perfect.
Mark Thomason , August 29, 2018 at 11:13 am
A very long railway cannot support continental-scale trade and integration. That requires
what does it now, 100,000-ton container ships in constant flow. It is a question of volume
first, and of cost per container second. Ships are so far ahead it is absurd to compare.
China is developing the necessary commercial ports to use for this. That is the only real
challenge, if there is one. That means the sea, the rim, for both the continent and its
rivals. China's real progress is on that.
However, the US and allies are the other end of that sea route. It can't be maintained
except by some level of cooperation. There can be no great game, not combined with the
integration of world trade. That is a neocon fantasy, they promote as cover for their schemes
to dominate with US state power to gain private profit.
TomG , August 29, 2018 at 10:44 am
While the Chinese plan then implement for a long term infrastructure strategy for
interconnected markets, we skip the planning piece and go instead for yet another drone base
in yet another foreign country. Our long term strategy is apparently to blow up what ever the
Chinese-Russia-Euro alliance builds. This has certainly been our expression of 'defending our
national interests'–the Kissinger-Brzezinski doctrine of endlessly repeating stupidity
until we are completely bankrupt as a nation. When the global corporations abandon the USA
for more vibrant and inherently stable infrastructure the USA empire can retire into its
apparent destiny as the model for late 21st century failed states.
I hope I'm not expected to share Mr. Escobar's article with others. While I think
important points were made and one can link easily to more information, I did think my eyes
were going to glaze over with all the jargon and post-Westphalian modal references. Which is
to say I might well have missed his most salient points. I'm not intellectual enough to know
for sure. :-)
John V. Walsh , August 29, 2018 at 2:19 pm
TomG, You make an excellent point.
Indeed the Chinese agree as seen from this opinion piece in Global Times: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1117108.shtml
The money quote is:
"Considering that sea transportation is comparatively cheap and safe, China must attach great
importance to the construction of the south route of the Silk Road, that is, to connect the
CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor) with the Silk Road Economic Belt, and to make
supporting the economic and social development of Pakistan as the top priority of the Silk
Road strategy."
"There are pros and cons to the development gap between eastern and western China. On the one
hand, it poses a serious challenge to the government's efforts to support the development of
Xinjiang and Tibet and to eliminate poverty. On the other, it sustains China's demographic
dividend and provides a historical opportunity for the "second reform and opening up." The
vast central and western regions have got their advantages in terms of labor cost, land
supply and natural resources. Therefore, on the basis of access to the Indian Ocean and
China-Pakistan Railway, the Kashgar special economic zone, and other western towns are
expected to become "inland ports" connecting the oceans, thus re-creating the Shenzhen
miracle and becoming the engine of China's second great opening up and development."
In sum the land route goes from the Kashgar region of Xian in China through Pakistan to
the Indian Ocean. In this way China becomes a two-ocean power in a way. But it is a long way
to Kashgar from the rest of China even the western part and another long haul through
Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Can this work?
On the other hand, although transport via a land route across all of Eurasia by train is
more expensive than by rail, rail is quicker and not as prohibitively expensive as air
transport. Will it all work?
I believe MacKinder saw rail transport as the vehicle of Eurasian integration and felt
that the trans-Siberian railway was the first attempt at it, if memory serves. Was he
right?
In general the Belt and Road must not only be a good idea, it must make sense
economically. Does it? Hope so because it holds out hope for the development of the Asian
interior, including western China and for spreading China's successful poverty alleviation
and development model across Asia and even into Africa. Not to mention it spells the end of
the unipolar world which is becoming a worse nightmare every day.
Bob Van Noy , August 29, 2018 at 9:58 am
Geopolitics is endlessly fascinating as we see here again with thanks to Pepe Escobar. Now
we hear of yet another geo-arrangement from Glenn Diesen. I havn't read Mr. Diesen's book but
I don't doubt that he offers up many insights for would be World Managers. Those managers,
both in the past, and those yet to advise, have generally caused much serious chaos to the
general populations affected by their thoughts, neither Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew
Brzezinski have done America much good for their theories. I'm convinced that the American
People are not now and never were, interested in any concept of Empire. We've been Marketed
or Propagandized into a coordinated responses, usually an inappropriate ones. This time we
actually have an opportunity to re-evaluate our recent lost history and rebuild better more
appropriately eco-friendly local economies and to become a better World Neighbor or Partner
as the Diplomats say.
" we actually have an opportunity to re-evaluate our recent lost history and rebuild
better more appropriately eco-friendly local economies and to become a better World Neighbor
"
Oh, how my hope lies in doing just this!
One thing I've observed again and again living beside the Amish, they are kind to those of
us 'outside their community' and will help if any help is needed. Kindness and neighborliness
go hand in hand–and they us show it can be done.
John V. Walsh , August 29, 2018 at 2:32 pm
TomG,
Another good thought.
BUT the future is no longer in our hands – it is in the hands of the Eurasian powers,
China, Russia, Iran AND India. They have to do something new for humanity that goes beyond
the old imperial ways to look at the world. Escobar AND Kissinger are both fond of citing
Zheng He as evidence that genuine Empire as oppose to border disputes is not in the Chinese
culture – or in their DNA as Xi puts it.
The best we can do here in the US is to make sure that the US ruling Elite does not blow us
all up, the Samson option, as it tries to come to terms with the new realities. That means
supporting all peaceful overtures to Russia and China. One example is the recent Helsinki
Summit which deserves our support and had the approval of a majority of Americans. So did the
idea of a follow-up. Unfortunately amongst organized progressives there was nary a word of
praise or support with very few exceptions, one of them being CodePink which is much to be
commended. Otherwise Trump Derangement Syndrome prevailed. And so we drift toward
oblivion.
mike k , August 29, 2018 at 9:14 am
Heading off the Samson option by the wounded hegemon US Empire will be a major concern for
all global players from now on. As well as factoring in the inevitable collapse of industrial
civilization. There is not any way for all this to end well in sight at this time. Human
extinction seems by far the most likely outcome for us. Too bad – we have probably
screwed up our world, and ourselves, beyond the possibility of recovery.
Sally Snyder , August 29, 2018 at 7:30 am
Here is a more detailed look at how both Russia and China are putting a mechanism in place
that will allow them to work around future trade problems with the United States:
The sanctions and tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration against Russia and China
will become increasingly ineffective as the old unipolar global order continues to fade
away.
Most of US Russiagate charges are projection. Russiagate is a color
revolution of the block of neoliberals and neocons to depose Trump. They are
afraid of too many skeletons in the closet to allow Trump to finish his
term. And for a right reason. Trump is unpredictable and he at one moment
can turn on them and start revealing unpleasant truth about Bush II and
Obama.
But rumors about the demise of the US neoliberal empire are slightly
exaggerated ;-). Without providing an alternative model to neoliberalism and
without ethnological superiority China does not stand a chance.
Notable quotes:
"... Through endless repetition, allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia. ..."
"... Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures & keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance & hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth! ..."
"... Their claim to One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than 100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology development system (DARPA) ..."
"... other Nations may reach a saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the realization that this crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped, once & for all time! ..."
It was around 1898, when America first starting thinking it was the center of the universe.
In that year the U.S. intervened in Cuba's war for independence and proceeded to take over
parts of the decrepit Spanish Empire, from Latin America to the Philippines. Shortly before, in
1893, the U.S. overthrew the Queen of Hawaii on behalf of U.S.-backed sugar and pineapple
plantation owners.
That led to a long history of political interference in other countries, in the form of
destabilization, coups and invasions. Once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a narrative was
fostered to justify expanding NATO to Russia's borders.
In the last four years, anti-Russian propaganda has reached a fever pitch: lies about
Russia's "expansionism" in Ukraine; hype about Russia's "meddling" in the U.S. elections,
creating an existential "threat to democracy;" unproven allegations of Russia using chemical
weapons to poison the Skripals in London. Experts are trotted out on major media to further the
narrative without hard evidence. Together with think-tanks, the American and British media run
these stories daily with almost no counter news or opinions. Through endless repetition,
allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these
unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White
House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy
White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in his 2017 book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious
Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, writes that the West's psycho-social pathology
about Russia dates back over 1,000 years to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox
and Roman churches. The U.S. is a relative newcomer to this, but seeks perhaps its biggest
role.
" More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history," Mettan
says.
Myth of Russian Expansionism
The astute University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer exposed how the West provoked
the Ukraine crisis in his 2014 Foreign Affairs article,
"Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin."
But the American foreign policy establishment and media remain committed to the suppression of
facts about the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and the resulting escalating tensions with Russia.
Ignoring or fabricating evidence, the U.S. and NATO persist in
lying that Russia has expansionist goals in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria. Russia is helping
ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine who are resisting the coup, Crimea (which had been part
of Russia since 1783 and transferred by the Soviets to Ukraine in 1954) held a referendum in
2014 in which the public voted to rejoin Russia. The Syrian government invited Russia in to
help fight Western and Gulf-backed jihadists trying to violently overthrow the government, as
even then Secretary of State John Kerry admitted .
Another scholar, Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University
of Kent, writes in his latest book, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order, that the
Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russia and the West, differences
that are not just a replay of the "Cold War."
Simply put, under the banner of the indispensable "liberal world order," neo-conservative
warriors and "democracy"-spreading-"humanitarian-interventionists"
are promoting the Russophobia "reality" to justify American hegemony.
Ditching Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn : Ditched when he turned on America. (Wikimedia Commons)
One of the greatest illustrations of the centuries-old Russophobia, says Mettan in his 2017
book, is the case of Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
" During the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn," Mettan wrote.
"For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch
of anti-Soviet dissidence," but only when he criticized his communist Russia. But after moving
to the U.S., when Solzhenitsyn showed a preference for privacy "rather than attending
anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves."
And when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and spoke out against Russian 'westernizers' and
liberals who denied Russian interests, he was labeled "an outdated, senile writer," though he
had not changed his fundamental views on freedom.
After the mid-July, Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, there were countless mass media delusions
and hysteria against U.S.-Russia ties, reminiscent of the Hearst newspaper empire's propaganda
that whipped up a frenzy to support the empire-building war against Spain in 1898. Professor
Stephen Kinzer vividly described the unsuccessful battle by prestigious anti-imperialists
against the power of the Hearst propaganda in his latest book, The True Flag:Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire."
Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed
U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia.
Do we have enough good sense left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau: "Let us
settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion,
and prejudice till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."
Or, as I thought when I visited Galileo's house that day in the Florentine hills: the world
does not revolve around America.
Jean Ranc is a retired psychologist/research associate at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Wonderful observations that challenge the complete and utter madness of our times here in
the U.S., and the West in general. The inquisitorial "accusations" leveled against Putin and
Russia by the West bear no more resemblance to "reality" than the lunatic accusations that
the Holy Inquisition leveled against "witches," "heretics" and "non-believers" for centuries
as it used terror to consolidate power. Given the ever more shrill and painfully persistent
nature of these ongoing nonsense anti-Russian accusations – it would appear more and
more of us in the West are falling into the category of – "non-believers."
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:45 pm
A very good post Gary. The West is decadent and corrupt.Whatever high moral grounds the
West once held, I am afraid they are either forgotten or totally gone.
Delightful piece to read, great comments as usual. I can only add that the neocolonialists
who don't want to give up leading the US over the edge, as mike says "into the abyss", will
be forced to change their ways, well stated by Babylon and others. The tragedy of what they
have done by their narcissistic, egoistic, delusional misleading, is that they have wrecked
the lives of millions worldwide. But of course, that is the story of deluded conquerors until
they meet their own end. I welcome the sun setting on the "American Century"; a sharp reset
awaits us all but we should welcome it.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Jessika: the saddest part in all this is that they still continue to wreck and decimate
lives worldwide. It is like a cancer eating and obliterating every thing in their path. A
very incisive post.
The cancer is psychopathy! These people have no conscience or empathy. They are liars and
manipulators. They treat people like objects to be used and abused. Until America admits that
we've had a substantial percentage of psychopathic leaders and mentality, from the Puritans
forward, we will never recover from the psychological, social, economic, political, legal,
religious destruction this ilk has forced upon the rest of us. It took me deep research and
therapy to discover that psychopaths project themselves onto the rest of us and then claim we
are somehow damaged, flawed or have sinful human nature. The problem has always been the
psychopaths among us (1%) who have created hierarchies and placed themselves atop them. They
have bamboozled most of us with their lies but as we wake up to their games, we can kick them
out of power and we can create a country of the 99% with conscience and empathy rather than a
country of slaveowners and deluded "Israelites" who believed they had the right to exploit,
enslave, kill
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:36 am
It's not sad, it's what's deathcult tyrants & dying Empires do, they take as many
victims as they can, once they realise the end is nigh! It's a mass shooter mentality &
it's disgraceful!
JR , August 28, 2018 at 9:14 pm
HI Jessika,
I tried to find you while I was still living in NH as I got the idea you live there as well.
I had lived in the Dartmouth area in the 70's but the brutal winters were too much! this time
around so I returned to my home base here in Chapel Hill. If you'd like to be in touch, you
can reach me at my old-but-still-good Santa Fe address: [email protected]
mike k , August 28, 2018 at 5:37 pm
American egotism is legendary. It is the defining mark of the breed. Ignorant know-it-alls
lead us confidently into the abyss.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:53 pm
Mike: If American leaders that are in control of the country have studied history of any
empire, they would come to the realization that empires do not last forever. The illogical
part is that empire's life expectancy has been more or less the same worldwide. And like an
opened book the end is closing in and they know it.
Realist , August 28, 2018 at 5:00 pm
Excellent bit of necessary truth-telling. Too bad it won't be read in most of America, not
because the people would reject its premise, but because their keepers just won't let them
see it in the highly manipulated mass media.
America has repeatedly become what it most professes to hate: first an onerous empire like
Spain, then a pack of fascists like Nazi Germany, and now totalitarian tyrants like the
Soviets. Welcome to the truth, the one NOT fabricated by Rove's inheritors of empire.
Babyl-on , August 28, 2018 at 4:32 pm
This thought is so important to understand if you are to make any sense of the new
multi-polar world which does not revolve around the failing Western empire.
China's Belt and Road is a catalyst but China will benefit only through the
interconnection of the entire Eurasian land mass – sooner than you think, high-speed
trains will cross the steppes. That is the new world the Enlightenment era is dead the
Eurasian era is opening. Eurasia will trade most naturally with Africa and it will prosper
because The US Empire is the last of the Enlightenment white European empires.
When you consider the integration of the great Eurasian land mass for the first time is
history (the ancient Silk Road writ large) it's easy to forget about a US over there
separated by all that water from the thriving markets.
Those oceans which protected the center of power from attack now are a big disadvantage in
trade.
We are witnessing the end of the Enlightenment and the end of Empire which it spawned.
China is not imperial, Russia is not imperial – no country today seeks empire but
the US and they are failing in every way. Western Liberal Democracy also died with the
Enlightenment, new forms of governance and culture will develop, the sky really is the limit,
now that the old dead Enlightenment is moving out of the way.
It would be a brighter future if not for that pesky climate.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:51 am
Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures &
keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance &
hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth!
Russia
& China are the future with the one belt, one road initiative & America is being left
in the rear view mirror & is on the path to total oblivion thanks to its warmongering
ways! The end of this corrupt American Empire can't come soon enough for people who want to
live in peace!
Egocentrism isn't just a Donald Trump thing, it's an American thing. America's
never-ending RussiaGate narrative is a classic example of psychological projection. It can't
be US who has the problem, it must be THEM who has the problem. Time to own it.
paraphrasing J. Pilger -- America should leave the rest of the world
alone -- leave it alone
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:15 am
Yes, I second what Mr Pilger stated & I will add a few more requests? "Leave the
World" alone! Stop your Warmongering interference in other Countries affairs! Immediately
stop all your murderous Wars, Coups & Financial & Economic terrorism such as
weaponising the dollar & Trade sanctions to illegally punish other Nations! Abide by
International Laws & the U.N. charter! Remove your 800 bases from around the World &
stick to your own backyard! Stop being the Worlds Policeman because no one asked you to
perform this role! Look after your own people first & stop wasting trillions of dollars
on the pointless & stupid Military Industrial Complex! Ban Campaign lobbyists & big
money from Politics! Jail all corrupt Corporates & thieving Bankers, Politicians &
seize their assets! These are a few things for a start! There are many more things you could
do more numerous to name here, but the main thing is LEAVE THE WORLD ALONE! We are sick to
death of this American Empire!
Sally Snyder , August 28, 2018 at 2:28 pm
Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from
Washington:
Less than half of Americans believe that Russia's interference in the 2016 election made a
difference to the final outcome and nearly six in ten Americans believe that it is important
that Washington continue to improve relations with Moscow.
Jeff Harrison , August 28, 2018 at 2:25 pm
When you get to the end of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes of dense,
erudite prose which details the failings of a decadent society, Gibbon lets you in on a
secret. The Roman Empire was militarily defeated. Not all at once, mind. But militarily
defeated nonetheless. Consider what that means for the US.
RnM , August 28, 2018 at 9:27 pm
Rome became a victim of its success, being overstretched beyond their war technology
(horses, shields, swords and siege machines.)
My inability and unwillingness to predict the end of the rise of The Empire of "We the
People" and its brand of War Technologies, is due to my close perspective and life-long
Bernaiseian (?sp) brainwashing by the mass media, which, thankfully, has, since 2016, been
dealt a blow to the mask on their (the corporate media's) Totalitarian nature.
Their claim to
One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than
100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology
development system (DARPA). So, in the American attempt to surpass the Romans, the Empire of
We the People (as a Totalitarian dystopia) may well be thwarted by the spread of open
information. I hope so. The alternative might be very difficult to defeat.
Jeff, if you enjoyed Gibbons, I think you would really enjoy Michael Parenti's, "The
Assassination of Julius Caesar". There are so many parallels between the late Roman Republic
and today's America. Michael got his PhD in political science and history from Yale and
writes "people's history". He argues convincingly that Caesar was assassinated -- - not for
being an egomaniac and dictator -- - but because he stood up against the most elite in the
senate by seeking reforms that would benefit the masses. He actually argues that Gibbons
wrote as a historian from the priviledged class and therefore never condemned the senate for
exploiting the masses.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:34 am
Yes, what it means,& if History is anything to go by, that other Nations may reach a
saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the
realization that this
crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped,
once & for all time!
The Roman Empire never saw the Barbarian hordes such as the
Visigoth's, Huns & Vandals coming until it was to late! Will the American Empire see
there downfall coming? 9/11 proved the arrogant American Empire couldn't even see that event
coming, due to their own hubris & complacency!
Magnitsky story is the textbook, perfect illustration of the level
of control of CIA over media. Almost everything in official story is a lie,
still it is never challenged.
A perfectly good article, I'm sure, but why diffuse ourselves [and engender feelings of
fear and hopelessness as you express] when a strategic pressure point has presented?
Johnstone makes no mention of Bill Browder. Nor do the [100, so far] commenters.
BILL BROWDER is a key figure in the anti-Trump, anti-Russia hysteria. The notorious Trump
Tower meeting was about the Magnitsky Act, a fabrication by Browder to hide his financial
crimes. Browder "testified" in the Senate expressly to demonize Putin. Browder's contacts in
the IC, the Jewish Lobby, and the fawning media have enabled his propaganda assault this
week. He's appeared -- unchallenged, virtually unquestioned -- on countless talk shows. But
he's been running scared at the mention of interrogation by Russians. There are huge holes in
his story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case. The truth will bring him down!
And perhaps his Deep State supporters, along with him.
Ask your Senators if they've heard/read Browder's 2015 deposition in the Prevezon
case. (See comment 161 under The Untouchable Mr. Browder? by Israel Shamir for
links.)
Research links to primary sources on #Browdergate -
...BTW, have you seen "THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES" that Phil Giraldi
posted today? Debunking anti-Russian criminal sociopaths like Bill Browder will go a long way
to improving relations. Not to mention easing pressure on the unfortunate Trump.
Full research primary links available here, including Browder's 2015 deposition in the
U.S. vs. Prevezon Holdings case. Every Senator who voted to support Browder should see this.
[Any who already have, double shame!]
"... However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's (banned) investigative documentary, the unfortunate Magnitsky was neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate medical treatment. The case was hyped up as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian charges against himself. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S. citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds. ..."
"... So, the Fixer in Chief could have said to the worried Browder, "No problem. All that we need to do is make your case a politically motivated case. Then they can't touch you." Winer's clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. The treaty doesn't apply to a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated. ..."
"... Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied heavily to get Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, which also repeated its defense of Khodorkovsky himself. This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" is not even noticed, while U.S. authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls. ..."
"... The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs. ..."
"... U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those Russians are "unipolar" like themselves, like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world sought by the State Department and George Soros. Indeed, the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans – all those who come to Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America. ..."
As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works for
Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest of APCO's many
clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered in Guernsey. The trust
tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch got out of Russia before he was
jailed. Corbiere money was spent to lobby both for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovky after
his arrest in Russia) and for the Magnitsky Act (more later). Margery Kraus, APCO's president
and CEO, is a member of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's son Pavel's Institute of Modern Russia, devoted
to "promoting democratic values" – in other words, to building political opposition to
Vladimir Putin.
In 2009 Jonathan Winer went back to the State Department where he was given a distinguished
service award for having somehow rescued thousands of stranded members of the Muhahedin-e Khalq
from their bases in Iraq they were trying to overthrow the Iranian government. The MeK, once
officially recognized as a terrorist organization by the State Department, has become a pet
instrument in U.S. and Israeli regime change operations directed at Iran.
However, it was Winer's extracurricular activities at State that finally brought him into
the public spotlight early this year – or rather, the spotlight of the House Intelligence
Committee, whose chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal) named him as
one of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier" which accused Trump of illicit
financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia.
By Winer's own account, he had been friends with former British intelligence agent
Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled Steele
reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence agents, to Victoria
Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, and top Russian experts. These included the infamous
"Steele dossier". In September 2016, Winer's old friend Sidney Blumenthal – a
particularly close advisor to Hillary Clinton – gave him notes written by a more
mysterious Clinton insider named Cody Shearer, repeating the salacious attacks.
All this dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media before being
revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration, used to stimulate the "Russiagate"
investigation by Robert Mueller. The dossier has been discredited but the investigation goes on
and on.
So, it is all right to take seriously information allegedly obtained from "Russian agents"
and spread it around, so long as it can damage Trump. As with so much else in Washington,
double standards are the rule.
Jonathan Winer and the Magnitsky Act
Jonathan Winer played a major role in Congressional adoption of the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule
of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure that effectively ended
post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington and Moscow. This act was based on a
highly contentious version of the November 16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei
Leonidovich Magnitsky, as told to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder (grandson of Earl
Browder, head of the Communist Party USA 1934-1945). According to Browder, Magnitsky was a
lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.
However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov's
(banned) investigative documentary, the unfortunate Magnitsky was neither a human rights
crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an accountant jailed for his role in
Browder's business dealings, who died of natural causes as a result of inadequate medical
treatment. The case was hyped up as a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit
Russian charges against himself.
In any case
The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a
much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and
later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his U.S.
citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to
extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds.
It was Jonathan Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament.
, "When Browder consulted me, [ ] I suggested creating a new law to impose economic and
travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand corruption. Browder decided this
could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky. He initiated a campaign that led to the
enactment of the Magnitsky Act. Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts,
including Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom."
Russian authorities are still trying to pursue their case against Browder. In his press
conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump, Vladimir Putin suggested allowing U.S.
authorities to question the Russians named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing
Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and
former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul. Putin observed that such an exchange was
possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999,
back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.
But the naïve Russians did not measure the craftiness of American lawyers.
As Winer wrote, "Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the U.S. attorney
general to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a criminal case. But
there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general can provide no such assistance in a
politically motivated case." (My emphasis.)
"I know this", he wrote, "because I was among those who helped put it there. Back in 1999,
when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the senior State Department official
managing U.S.-Russia law-enforcement relations."
So, the Fixer in Chief could have said to the worried Browder, "No problem. All that we
need to do is make your case a politically motivated case. Then they can't touch you." Winer's
clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. The treaty doesn't apply to a case if it is politically
motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically motivated.
In a July 15, 2016, complaint to the Justice Department, Browder's Heritage Capital
Management accused both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA; adopted in 19938 with Nazis in mind). Among the
"lobbyists" cited was the late Ron Dellums (falsely identified in the complaint as a "former
Republican congressman").
The Heritage Capital Management brief declared that: "While lawyers representing foreign
principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the attorney does not try to
influence policy at the behest of his client." However, by disseminating anti-Magnitsky
material to Congress, any Russian lawyer was "clearly trying to influence policy" was therefore
in violation of FARA filing requirements."
Catch-22 all over again.
Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied heavily to get Congress to pass
the Magnitsky Act, which also repeated its defense of Khodorkovsky himself. This type of
"Russian interference intended to influence policy" is not even noticed, while U.S. authorities
scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.
Conclusion
The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia.
Russia's position, as Vladimir Putin made clear in his historic speech at the 2007 Munich
security conference, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their
own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on
principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to allow this.
The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on
principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers
itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its
affairs.
So, if Russians were trying to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, they would not be trying
to change the U.S. system but to prevent it from trying to change their own. Russian leaders
clearly are sufficiently cultivated to realize that historic processes do not depend on some
childish trick played on somebody's computer.
U.S. policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly willing to
allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those Russians are
"unipolar" like themselves, like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely the same unipolar world
sought by the State Department and George Soros. Indeed, the American empire depends on such
interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Russians, Cubans – all those who come to
Washington to try to get U.S. power to settle old scores or overthrow the government in the
country they came from. All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by
America.
Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it helps turn public
opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy, serves U.S. interests
including the military-industrial complex, helps break down national borders (except those of
the United States and Israel) and puts money in appropriate pockets in the halls of
Congress.
"... The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are ready to leap off the cliff. ..."
"... For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of institutional power – by creation of a myth ..."
"... So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal. ..."
"... Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else? ..."
"... In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon! ..."
"... The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility – and perhaps this one too. ..."
"... This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction. ..."
"... In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery you have to be alive. ..."
"... Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real base of support. ..."
"... It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot footsoldiers, screaming in mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about them. ..."
"... Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990 describes how the USA weapons industry skillfully prevents that spending on useless weapons deminishes. The history of the later Roman empire, the army in control. ..."
Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin
meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of
mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and
most of its copycat European subsidiaries. The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are
ready to leap off the cliff.
For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of
power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of
institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd
behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a
story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.
Donald Trump was elected by Russia ?
On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections
in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to
leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most
voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn't need to try to "undermine our democracy". It would
mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be
knocked over by a tweet.
Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the
notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against
poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other
influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some
for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating
millions of Americans as "deplorables" because they didn't fit into her identity politics
constituencies.
The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of
evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so
much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi,
the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the
hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus,
perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.
When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on
Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much
more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those
"revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working
against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.
So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning
the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.
But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of
accusations of "treason" when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to
normalize relations with Russia.
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the
American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. They
have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in
the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign
intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the
implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to
themselves.
The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.
Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small
repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even
brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of
US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting
with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?
But for the mainstream media, "the story" at the Helsinki summit, even the only
story, was Trump's reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our
democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a
yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in
advance.
Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the "big
stories" on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few
exceptions. To get the job, one must have important "sources", meaning government spokesmen who
are willing to tell you what "the story" is, often without being identified. Once they know
what "the story" is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an
escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: "The President has betrayed our great country
to the Russian enemy. Treason!"
This demented chorus on "Russian hacking" prevented mainstream media from even doing their
job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find
analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting. For
example, "the Moon of Alabama" site offers
an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy , which sounds infinitely more
plausible than "the story". In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a
reverse version of Kissinger's strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus
avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United
States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon
their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump's
policy, unlike the caterwauling we've been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.
Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of
agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it's got to be a zero sum game, winner
take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.
They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project,
no strategy. Just hate Trump.
He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been
assassinated yet.
It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home
for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo,
murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the
destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless
countries by government-financed "non-governmental organizations" (the National Endowment of
Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the
world's greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children. But the diplomatic
Russians know how to be polite.
Still, if Trump actually makes a "deal", there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor
Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else's
expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All
Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.
Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in
marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the
two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:
"We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to
Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to
work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work
jointly."
In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence
of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of
Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have
much choice.
On another subject, Trump said that "our militaries" get along with the Russians "better
than our politicians". This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow
neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.
In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from
Israel and the Pentagon!
The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility –
and perhaps this one too.
"Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open
new pathways toward peace and stability in our world" Trump declared "I would rather take a
political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."
That is more than his political enemies can claim.
This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable
power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure
continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction.
In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You
can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery
you have to be alive. If only they die, it would be a great service to the humanity.
Unfortunately, the way things go, they might take us all with them.
This mass hysteria over a country hostile to both democracy and gay rights (it's hard to
tell which one is worse) has been seen in the west before. It's very reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq war in 2003. I mean what's next? Are they
gonna accuse Russia of having WMD's too?
They are pretty good at providing false evidence of WMD's, I wouldn't be surprised if they
stage another presentation of evidence of Russian WMD's at UN, complete with satellite images
of mobile trucks equipped with Uranium enrichment technology and all that.
That Nikki Halley can be quite persuasive, you know. I just hope that the world doesn't
buy that BS again. Russia having WMD's? That's preposterous. They tricked us the last time, I
hope that the people have learned their lesson – not to trust them anymore.
Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too
just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous
financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real
base of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known
than Evan McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the
YouTube videos of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos
.
On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen
Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of
support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various
offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents
"populists" or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who
shout "give Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations.
Diana Johnstone is not alone. Others on the alt-Left are starting to wake up, too. This is
Joaquín Flores:
People are seeing through dishonesty, and the old language traps are used up and done
for. If reconquista is the goal, then we need to have an honest conversation about that. If
there's a Latino nation with self determination in the south-west US, or rights 'back' to
the south-west US, then let's speak of it in such terms. Because then we'd be looking at a
Euro-American nation also. Now of course there's issues of interpenetrated peoples, and
identities we carry in our minds in diverse urban centers. But the point here is that we
have to have an honest discourse, and stop hiding reconquista sentiments under the rubric
of 'human rights'. Because European-Americans don't have right of return to Europe, so the
left is promoting what will ultimately be a race war, full scale, if they don't chill the
fuck out and back off this disingenuous approach to policy-wonkism on immigration.
The paradigmatic question today is, how is wealth made, and where does wealth come from?
What is the balance of trade and debts, and how is that is no longer manageable? The US
empire and NATO is no longer manageable. Trump is unwinding NATO. That can't be a bad
thing.
I hear you, and I sympathize, but this is not mass dementia. The oligarchy that runs the United States was worried that Donald Trump might actually
(!!) take some consideration for the national interest of the people of the United States of
America. That will never do.
This is not irrational. The screaming, the hysteria, this is the utterly rational,
breathtakingly brutal reaction of a ruling elite that has the moral sense of a reptile. And
it's working. All of Trump's campaign promises to stop wasting trillions on pointless winless
foreign wars of choice, and instead spend that on our own country? Gone. And so much else
besides.
It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot footsoldiers, screaming in
mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff
Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about
them.
In my view, at the moment the deed is done. The president signed onto the report
acknowledged the he accepts the report has even gone as far to say, he blames Pres. Putin
Another backtrack, just muddies the waters, and mat be acceptable because no one wants to
accept the real consequences of a president who has repudiated the one state president he
most desired to make a deal with -- the jig is up.
Whether kabuki theater or real gamesmanship –
A threshold has been crossed and uncrossing it is going to be tricky and in my further
humiliation for the wh. The analysis here mattered before the president agreed with the
report. But when he did, this analysis, becomes moot. Having a chit chat about de-escalating
nuclear tensions is quaint in light of the president acknowledging that russia has in fact
undermined the US democratic process. This is a serious charge and no amount of changing the
subject, crying foul, or pretending it was all a big misunderstanding is going to change
that.
I think it would have been prudent for the president to hold fire in Helsinki and read the
report and then responded . He did make any of those choices. It matters not how exposed the
establishment in wanton eagerness to have their way, wh has embraced the matter. it is on
record and . . . oh well. I see merit in maintaining his original position of disbelief --
however, the president did a complete about face -- and there is no question of that or the
implications.
Hillary lost the election when she could not walk. she lost a shoe, she was shown in the
van, and shoe was thrown after her. And that was arranged by Russians.
Having a title "Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment" and approaching this effort as
"mass insanity","demented chorus" etc. is simply delusional. They know exactly what they are doing and, it appears, they are doing it well.
The are able to create their own reality.
What puzzles me a bit isn't "them" or their servants (media etc.).
It's people in general. They appear to be buying that manufactured reality with ease. In this
era of instant communications it's .sobering.
This constant shitting on "them" and their servants is fine and dandy but feels as just a
feel good exercise.
Perhaps some effort could be spared in trying to analyze and explain common people approach
to all this. The buying, hook and sinker, that manufacture.
Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how false
all that is. And, yet, here we are.
The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online can't,
for SOME reason, figure all that out.
Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general.
In my opinion, no dementia.
Too many careers and institutions are built on continuing hostility towards Russia.
First ECB President Duisenberg's ph d thesis had as title 'The economic consequences of
peace', something like that, his conclusion was that demilitarisation was possible
economically, when controlled sensibly.
Did anyone read 'The Iron Mountain Report', I never quite knew what to make of it, but it
also is about if demilitarisation is possible.
Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990
describes how the USA weapons industry skillfully prevents that spending on useless weapons
deminishes.
The history of the later Roman empire, the army in control.
The Russians are by nature cautious. They are a conglomerate of individuals, many of whom
remember times when they would be sent by communist tyrants to a gulag for Wrongthink. Of
course they're cautious.
How Hillary Clinton could even run for presidency after the murder of Moammer Gaddafi and
Libya destruction, in any decent civilisation and society.
That's planetary shame and the most important question, not DNC hack or anything else, which
just trace in wrong direction.
So, Trump should grow some balls and arrest not just her but Barack Obama as well on the
same charges, as war criminals as they are, and prove that he really deserves to be
trusted.
And sacrifice himself in the process if needed as that would do any honest true US president,
and he knew what to expect from such position from the start.
It's not TV reality show, as still it is.
All he cares about is his ego and popularity, and he is loosing both.
Israel lobby finally see that they put their money in the wrong bank.
I intend to believe more that West, namely USA and UK the most, keeps them more hostage in
uncertainty for decades than in some Jewish conspiracy.
Also, I also believe that only Russia can guaranty Israel security and peace in the
region.
In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the
influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising
influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he
does not have much choice.
Saudi Arabia spent 40 billion dollars helping Saddam's Iraq in its war against Iran, the
cost of US efforts in the Syria civil war have largely been met by the Saudis. The coming
attack on Iran will be as much to please the Saudis as to lock Israel into West Bank Arab
expulsion mode. The Israel Lobby will is not pushing Donald Trump, they are playing catch up
with him. Trump has already shown with the Jerusalem recognition that he is encouraging
Israel in unilateral courses of action.
No, I agree with the assessment in this article and its title: the establishment is
dangerously detached from reality right now. Our stagnant and locked-down political culture
in the West allowed the "elite" to develop a false sense of security and and certainty. They
thought they had things pretty much figured out a few years ago but now they're genuinely
panicked.
Looking to this circus from Russia, to those insane speaches, insulting caricatures in
MSM, I understand the huge amount of rotteness of Western society, mainly its high top part,
but not only. Even here in comments (not in this particularly article) the percentage of
trolls and brainwashed idiots exceeds all I could've imagined. So I stopped writing here
– no sense, I believe that something can change only after the dramatic changes in
US/West society and that is possible only after a big war/revolution.
So, I'm afraid our future is vague
I think you are right. Over the last four years I have been amazed again and again at how
broken the political culture of the West has become. It's only outsiders and newcomers to
politics who give me hope. I'm thinking of people like Trump or the new governments in Italy
and Austria.
Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how
false all that is. And, yet, here we are.
The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online
can't, for SOME reason, figure all that out.
Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general. Not holding my breath.
I fully agree with this sentiment. The only reason the evil bastards who control our
society can get away with their treachery is because most of the American people are out to
lunch on the most important issues of our time. If the sheeple were to take responsibility to
inform themselves of what is happening today they would be able to see the lies they are
being constantly exposed to as just that–lies. And then, they could put down the beer
and turn off the damn sports channel and get angry at what has happened to their country.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for ignorant people to remain
ignorant.
Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general
Ma-a-ate! Let me give you a quick refresher on "1984:"
1st, the inner party – that's my ccc @ 25.
2nd, the outer party – that's Ike's MI-complex, which I expand to:
The US rogue regime = US-M/I/C/4a†-plex, with dog-wagging-tail, its illegitimate
sprog the Zionist/Israeli rogue regime + Js = I/J/Z-plex, all components rife with
corruption.
a = academic = econ, psy, leg et al.; 4 = MSM+PFBCs, † = churches
add a few significant stragglers like $ = banksters & ¿ = spies
We can add the -plexes to their main 'allied criminal regimes' and get FUKUSIL.
3rd, the proles in the book are the proles in real life.
4th, 'hate sessions' are mediated by the US/Z-MMH = corrupt&venal Media (aka press,
radio + TV, incl. PFBCs = publicly financed broadcasters), Madison Ave., Hollywood etc..
5th, as well as "All politicians lie!" [thanks, but "No, thanks!" to JWHoward], most
politicians are a) ccc-puppets and b) traitors to us, we the people and our countries.
Fazit: Even if most proles really were switched-on = fully and fairly informed, their
votes would still mean nothing since there is a disconnect [my 5th.] Unless you are thinking
'pitch-forks and tumbrels,' there's nothing effective that we, the people can do.
"1984″ is pretty-well exactly our reality, and here is a bit of proof:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who *manipulate* this unseen
mechanism of society *constitute an invisible government* which is the true ruling power of
our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our
democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
There is a lie in there, surrounding "must cooperate" – it's simply not true –
but worse, worst: " an invisible government ." The latter is what is termed 'deep
state' tyranny; the foul, un-elected and criminal puppet-string manipulators (part of the
1%) – again, the ccc.
The lie-cloud they choke the sheople's minds with is deliberately 'spiced' with
scientifically designed psychological propaganda, and that's what does the majority of
dumbing-down damage.
Ta ra! The Bernays haze. Choke on that.
PS Q: Is there any hope at all? A: Apart from hope being hopeless policy, there *could* be
a solution, whereby a big enough proportion of the 1%, a decent portion [should such a thing
exist] could call a halt to the ccc and its murder-most-foul depredations.
Yup. Furthermore, CIA is organized crime and organized crime is CIA. CIA recruits and runs
agents in favored criminal syndicates in every illicit trade: drugs, child sexual
trafficking, arms, fraud, bustouts, extortion, money laundering. Their purpose is not to
interdict the trade but to control it. CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up
their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK. CIA protects its
criminal proteges with their chartered impunity. They call off law enforcement with the magic
words national security or 'sources and methods.' If the plan gets exposed, CIA's criminal
cutouts insulate the agency from exposure.
RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime
until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple.
Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher
Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government.
Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA
handlers without the other agency's knowledge.
Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power.
Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're
enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949.
This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite
which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in
the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation"
associations.
Don't know if the Cabal controls the Homeland but it certainly seems to exert a great deal
of its influence and it also becomes apparent that the Crowd has a long history with the
Russians as well thus given that, the whole thing appears to be a three ring circus created
to avoid being, in all honesty, noticed by the dumbed down bozos who are shouting loudest in
the bleachers in time it won't amount to a bag of beans!
I wonder, were her "speaking fees" from AIPAC and Saudis also arranged by the Russians?
Those pesky Russians are everywhere, like Christian God. Did you check under your bed
lately?
I think you are mistaken trying to rationalize the behavior of the political class and
their puppet masters. I believe the real driver are not antidepressants, but an obscene
greed, which is so blinding that it made MIC profiteers forget that to enjoy the fruits of
their thievery they have to be alive.
Thank you, Michael, for your very interesting perspective. Considering all the factors, it
appears most likely that Trump's apparent groveling was simply the deference an
underdeveloped country like the US owes to a strategically-invulnerable great power with
superior governance.
Trump probably concluded that he and America have much to learn from Russia's
categorically superior human rights performance in all the most comprehensive categories,
especially in comparison with US bad-faith evasion of a disgracefully derelict subset of
the core conventions, and failures prompting multiple urgent follow-on inquiries:
The summit was a mission civilizatrice for Russia. Trump doubtless knows that the whole
world has seen the facts exhaustively documented above by preeminent human rights experts and
independent civil society organizations. A bit of humility on Trump's part might help to
restore lost US world standing.
Which of the treaty bodies' conclusions and recommendation do you think would do most to
mitigate the international disgrace of the USA?
The psychology of the mass of Americans with it's self-righteousness and self-centerdness
is really amazing. Just in the last seventeen years the US has invaded or otherwise attacked
numerous countries and has caused millions of people to die, become miserable refugees,
become orphans and all other manner of evil. Not least of all has been it's creation and
patronage of ISIS, one of the most heinous groups in history. Yet Americans have this massive
blind spot to the war criminality of all this that their country has committed against the
peace of the world. Instead they're being stampeded into some irrational Russia-phobia. It's
the US that's been on the march everywhere, labeling those countries that resist it's
aggression as being aggressors for being willing to defend themselves. It's all
upside-down.
(BTW, is this scenario really so far-fetched? After all, Russia did nothing but complain
to the UN when the US angels of death destroyed both Iraq and Libya. Could not the same
fate soon await Iran?)
You're omitting Syria. It should be pretty obvious that the Russians and the Chinese
aren't going to sit back and allow Uncle Scam to destroy Iran when they wouldn't allow it to
happen to a much less important country like Syria.
TDS is a convenient shorthand for this form of disconnect from reality. That said it is
absolutely fascinating to see and puzzle over this geopolitical tectonic event. The old
narrative is crumbling, with the result that people like Lauri are fighting desperately to
preserve their "sanity", dependent as it is on their tribal submission to the old order and
its old narrative (its timeworn lies).
"Science advances one funeral at a time."
Max Planck
By which he means that people persist in believing in those "truths" (their belief system)
they have held for a lifetime. Only when they die out will a new, revised belief system
replaced the old. The same in geopolitics as in science.
Assad still is there.
The USA was unable to remove Assad, how would they destroy Iran ?
The USA has no idea of what Iran built deep in the rocks.
Trump screaming in capitals on Twitter against Iran, sign of weakness, in my opinion.
American dementia is not new. It is current but after the false flags of almost all of our
(US) wars going back as far as the Barbary Pirates, Americans have thrived on being the good
guys in an evil world. We are SO GOOD, and the world thinks we are perfect and want to be
part of US so much, that any other thought is treasonous.
The fact that getting along with Russia is necessary to NOT create armageddon, is
irrelevant to the typical citizen because no matter how wrong, we are blessed and perfect in
the eyes of the gawd we pretend to believe in.
Now, now, don't underestimate the Donald! The man has razor sharp brains, is an
accomplished mover/rouser of people, and I imagine has oodles of strategic abilities. Look at
the facts, hard facts, not at perceptions. No man made tons of legitimate, legal money
without possessing some qualities of genius. Never in US history has an outsider come in,
overturned the political establishment, taken on the whole pack of media-hyenas, won the
election capitalising on the weakness of all his opponents, then tried to do what he said he
would do. Who could have imagined that seemingly simple-minded tweets, in simple vocabulary,
would be used to beat down the collective might of the massed media? His tweets scored over
their collective shrieks and howls! The power of simplicity, no?
This guy is complex, clever,
and a very astute strategist. He puts on the rude, crude and buffoonish show to get peoples'
attention – and he did get that, did he not? That is called strategy and real
smarts.
UWell, we here in Russia know all this (about Browder) for quite a time. What new did you
find? It's just one story in long list of those written and spoken for western idiots like
Scripals, MH17, chemicals in Syria and WMD in Iraq, Russian meddling in f-n US elections and so on.
Eat it all dummies.
"... What started as small moments of defiance a few years ago are turning into full-throated shouts of opposition as the US pushes its leverage in financial markets to step on the necks of anyone who doesn't toe the line. ..."
"... What we are seeing is the culmination of a long-term plan by global elites to tighten the financial noose around the world through overlapping trade and tariff structures and weaponizing the dollar's position at the center of global financial interdependence. ..."
"... So, everyday another round of sanctions makes the case against continuing to do business with the US stronger. Everyday another global player speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and makes contingency plans for a world without the dollar at the center of it all. ..."
"... Maas openly accused the US of weaponizing the dollar and disrupting the very foundations of global trade, which is correct, to achieve its goals of regime change in Turkey and Iran. Maas mainly tied this to Trump's pulling out of the JCPOA but the reality is far bigger than this. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act and its progenitors around the world are a major evolution in the US's ability to bring financial pain to anyone who it disapproves of. Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws also into this framework. ..."
What started as small moments of defiance a few years ago are turning into full-throated
shouts of opposition as the US pushes its leverage in financial markets to step on the necks of
anyone who doesn't toe the line.
And Trump feeds off this by casting everyone as a leach who has been sucking off the US's
breast for decades. It doesn't matter the issue, to Trump US economic fragility is a hammer and
every trade and military partner a nail to be bashed over the head to pay their way.
What we are seeing is the culmination of a long-term plan by global elites to tighten
the financial noose around the world through overlapping trade and tariff structures and
weaponizing the dollar's position at the center of global financial interdependence.
Trump is against that in principle, but not against the US maintaining as much of the empire
as possible.
So, everyday another round of sanctions makes the case against continuing to do business
with the US stronger. Everyday another global player speaks with Russian President Vladimir
Putin and makes contingency plans for a world without the dollar at the center of it
all.
The latest major one was with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This meeting wasn't expected
to provide anything concrete, only vague assurances that projects like the Nordstream 2
pipeline goes through.
But, no breakthroughs on Crimea or Ukraine were expected nor delivered. It was, however, an
opportunity for both Putin and Merkel to be humanized in the European media. Between Putin's
attending Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl's wedding as well as the garden party photo
op background for their talk, this meeting between them was a bit of a 'charm tour' to assist
Merkel in the polls while expanding on Putin's humanity post World Cup and Helsinki.
That said, however, the statement by Merkel's Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, about the need
for a new financial payment system which bypasses the US-dominated SWIFT system was the big
bombshell.
Maas openly accused the US of weaponizing the dollar and disrupting the very foundations
of global trade, which is correct, to achieve its goals of regime change in Turkey and Iran.
Maas mainly tied this to Trump's pulling out of the JCPOA but the reality is far bigger than
this.
The Magnitsky Act and its progenitors around the world are a major evolution in the US's
ability to bring financial pain to anyone who it disapproves of. Know Your Customer (KYC) and
Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws also into this framework.
While KYC and AML laws can at least have the appearance of validity in attempting to stop
illegal activity, targeted sanctioning is simply Orwellian.
It politicizes any and all economic activity the world over. Just look at the recent reasons
for these sanctions – unproven allegations of chemical weapons usage and electioneering.
Recent actions by the US have driven this point home to its 'allies' with stunning clarity.
Why do you think Putin brought up Bill Browder's name at the Helsinki press conference? He
knows that Browder's story is a lie and it's a lie that has been used as the foundation for the
type of political repression we're seeing today.
The US is blocking the simplest of transactions in the dollar now, claiming that any use of
the dollar is a global privilege which it can revoke at a whim. Aside from the immorality of
this, that somehow dollars you traded goods or services for on the open market are still
somehow the property of the U.S to claw back whenever it is politically convenient, this
undermines the validity of the dollar as a rational medium of exchange for trade.
This is why after the first round of sanctions over the reunification with Crimea Putin
ordered the development of a national electronic payment system. He rightly understood that
Russia needed a means by which to conduct business that was independent of US political
meddling.
So, to me, if Heiko Maas is serious about the threat posed by continued use of the dollar in
EU trade, he should look to Putin for guidance on building a system separate from SWIFT.
Moreover, Maas' statement didn't go out to the world without Merkel's approval. This tells
me that this was likely the major topic of conversation between her and Putin over the weekend.
Because a payment system that skirts the dollar is one the US can't control.
It took the Russians longer than they should have to develop MIR. Putin complained about how
slow things went because too many within the Bank of Russia and the financial community could
be thought of as fifth columnists for the West.
It's also why development of the crypto-ruble and Russia's policy on cryptocurrencies has
been so slow. It took Putin publicly ordering the work done by a certain time to get these
tasks completed. In the end, it shouldn't take the EU long to spin up a SWIFT-compliant
internal alternative. It is, after all, just code.
And that's why so many of the US's former satraps are now flexing their geopolitical muscle.
The incentives aren't there anymore to keep quiet and go along. Alternatives exist and will be
utilized.
I don't expect the EU brass to do much about this issue, the threat may be all that is
needed to call Trump's bluff. But, if in the near future you see an announcement of MIR being
accepted somewhere in the EU don't be surprised.
Because what used to be a node of political stability and investor comfort is now a tool of
chaos and abuse. And abusing your customers is never a winning business model in the long run.
Customers of the dollar will remind the US of that before this is over.
"... The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since Browder had given up his US citizenship in order to avoid paying US taxes, he had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other financial misdeeds. ..."
"... Russian authorities are still trying to pursue their case against Browder. In his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump, Vladimir Putin suggested allowing US authorities to question the Russians named in the Mueller indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend. ..."
"... In a July 15, 2016, complaint to the Justice Department, Browder's Heritage Capital Management accused both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA; adopted in 19938 with Nazis in mind). Among the "lobbyists" cited was the late Ron Dellums (falsely identified in the complaint as a "former Republican congressman"). ..."
"... The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar Russia. Russia's position, as Vladimir Putin made clear in his historic speech at the 2007 Munich security conference, is to allow countries to enjoy national sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is against interference in other countries' politics on principle. It would naturally prefer an American government willing to allow this. ..."
"... The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic" system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs ..."
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was ostensibly a
conflict between two ideologies, two socio-economic systems.
All that seems to be over. The day of a new socialism may dawn unexpectedly,
but today capitalism rules the world. Now the United States and Russia are engaged
in a no-holds-barred fight between capitalists. At first glance, it may seem
to be a classic clash between rival capitalists. And yet, once again an ideological
conflict is emerging, one which divides capitalists themselves, even in Russia
and in the United States itself. It is the conflict between globalists and sovereignists,
between a unipolar and a multipolar world. The conflict will not be confined
to the two main nuclear powers.
The defeat of communism was brutally announced in a certain "capitalist manifesto"
dating from the early 1990s that proclaimed: "Our guiding light is Profit, acquired
in a strictly legal way. Our Lord is His Majesty, Money, for it is only He who
can lead us to wealth as the norm in life."
The
authors of this bold tract were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who went on to become
the richest man in Russia, before spending ten years in a Russian jail, and
his business partner at the time, Leonid Nevzlin, who has since retired comfortably
to Israel.
Loans For Shares
Those were the good old days in the 1990s when the Clinton administration
was propping up Yeltsin as he let Russia be ripped off by the joint efforts
of such ambitious well-placed Russians and their Western sponsors, notably using
the "loans for shares" trick.
In a 2012 Vanity Fair
article on her hero, Khodorkovsky, the vehemently anti-Putin journalist
Masha Gessen frankly summed up how this worked:
The new oligarchs -- a dozen men who had begun to exercise the power that
money brought -- concocted a scheme. They would lend the government money,
which it badly needed, and in return the government would put up as collateral
blocks of stock amounting to a controlling interest in the major state-owned
companies. When the government defaulted, as both the oligarchs and the
government knew it would, the oligarchs would take them over. By this maneuver
the Yeltsin administration privatized oil, gas, minerals, and other enterprises
without parliamentary approval.
This worked so well that from his position in the Communist youth organization,
Khodorkovsky used his connections to get control of Russia's petroleum company
Yukos and become the richest oligarch in Russia, worth some $15 billion, of
which he still controls a chunk despite his years in jail (2003-2013). His arrest
made him a hero of democracy in the United States, where he had many friends,
especially those business partners who were helping him sell pieces of Yukos
to Chevron and Exxon. Khodorkovsky, a charming and generous young man, easily
convinced his American partners that he was Russia's number one champion of
democracy and the rule of law, especially of those laws which allow domestic
capital to flee to foreign banks and foreign capital to take control of Russian
resources.
Vladimir Putin didn't see it that way. Without restoring socialism, he dispossessed
Khodorkovsky of Yukos and essentially transformed the oil and gas industry from
the "open society" model tolerated by Yeltsin to a national capitalist industry.
Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were accused of having stolen all
the oil that Yukos had produced in the years 1998 to 2003, tried, convicted
and sentenced to 14 years of prison each. This shift ruined US plans, already
underway, to "balkanize" Russia between its many provinces, thereby allowing
Western capital to pursue its capture of the Russian economy.
The dispossession of Khodorkovsky was certainly a major milestone in the
conflict between President Putin and Washington. On November 18, 2005, the Senate
unanimously adopted
resolution 322 introduced by Joe Biden denouncing the treatment of the Khodorkovsky
and Lebedev as politically motivated.
Who Influences Whom?
Now let's take a look at the history of Russian influence in the United States.
It is obvious that a Russian who can get the Senate to adopt a resolution in
his favor has a certain influence. But when the "deep state" growls about Russian
influence, it isn't talking about Khodorkovsky. It's talking about a joking
response Trump made to a reporter's snide question during the presidential campaign.
In a variation of the classic "when did you stop beating your wife?" the reporter
asked if he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to "stay out" of
the election.
Since a stupid question does not deserve a serious answer, Trump said he
had "nothing to do with Putin" before adding, "Russia, if you're listening,
I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you
will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."
Aha! Went the Trump haters. This proves it! Irony is almost as unwelcome
in American politics as honesty.
When President Trump
revoked his security clearance earlier this month, former CIA chef John
Brennan got his chance to spew out his hatred in the complacent pages of the
New York Times.
Someone supposed to be smart enough to head an intelligence agency actually
took Trump's joking invitation as a genuine request. "By issuing such a statement,"
Brennan wrote, "Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect
intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his
followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent."
The Russians, Brennan declared, "troll political, business, and cultural
waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in
the hands of their Russian puppet masters."
Which Russians do that? And who are those "individuals"?
'The Fixer in Chief'
To understand the way Washington works, nothing is more instructive than
to examine the career of lawyer Jonathan M. Winer, who proudly repeats that
in early 2017, the head of the Carnegie Endowment Bill Burns introduced him
as "the Fixer in Chief". Winer has long been unknown to the general public,
but this may soon change.
Let's see what the fixer has fixed.
Under the presidency of fellow Yalie Bill Clinton, Winer served as the State
Department's first Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Law Enforcement,
from 1994-1999. One may question the selectivity of Bill Clinton's concern for
international law enforcement, which certainly did not cover violating international
law by bombing defenseless countries. In any case, in 1999, Winer was awarded
for "virtually unprecedented achievements". Later we shall examine one of those
important achievements.
At the end of the Clinton administration, from 2008 to 2013, the Fixer in
Chief worked as high up consultant at one of the world's most powerful PR and
lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. This is how the Washington revolving door functions:
after a few years in government finding out how things work, one then goes into
highly paid "consultancy" to sell this insider information and influential contacts
to private clients.
APCO got off to a big start some thirty years ago
lobbying
for Philip Morris and the tobacco industry in general.
In 2002, APCO launched something called the "Friends of Science" to promote
skepticism concerning the harmful effects of smoking. In 1993, the campaign
described its goals and objectives "encouraging the public to question – from
the grassroots up – the validity of scientific studies."
While Winer was at APCO, one of its major activities was hyping the Clinton
Global Initiative, an international networking platform promoting the Clinton
Foundation. APCO president and CEO Margery Kraus explained that the consultancy
was there to "help other CGI members garner interest for the causes they are
addressing, demonstrate their success and highlight the wide-ranging achievements
of CGI as a whole." Considering that only five percent of Clinton Foundation
turnover went to donations, they needed all the PR they could get.
Significantly, donations to the Clinton Global Initiative have dried up since
Hillary lost the presidential election. According to the
Observer : "Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling
the organization's clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather
than its philanthropic work."
This helps explain Hillary Clinton's panic when she lost in 2016. How in
the world can she ever reward her multi-million-dollar donors with the favors
they expected?
As well as the tobacco industry and the Clinton Foundation, APCO also works
for Khodorkovsky. To be precise, according to public listings, the fourth biggest
of APCO's many clients is the Corbiere Trust, owned by Khodorkovsky and registered
in Guernsey. The trust tends and distributes some of the billions that the oligarch
got out of Russia before he was jailed. Corbiere money was spent to lobby both
for Resolution 322 (supporting Khodorkovky after his arrest in Russia) and for
the Magnitsky Act (more later). Margery Kraus, APCO's president and CEO, is
a member of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's son Pavel's Institute of Modern Russia, devoted
to "promoting democratic values" – in other words, to building political opposition
to Vladimir Putin.
In 2009 Jonathan Winer went back to the State Department where he was given
a distinguished service award for having somehow rescued thousands of stranded
members of the Muhahedin-e Khalq from their bases in Iraq they were trying to
overthrow the Iranian government. The MeK, once officially recognized as a terrorist
organization by the State Department, has become a pet instrument in US and
Israeli regime change operations directed at Iran.
However, it was Winer's extracurricular activities at State that finally
brought him into the public spotlight early this year – or rather, the spotlight
of the House Intelligence Committee, whose chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal) named
him as one of a network promoting the notorious "Steele Dossier" which accused
Trump of illicit financial dealing and compromising sexual activities in Russia.
By Winer's
own account , he had been friends with former British intelligence agent
Christopher Steele since his days at APCO. Back at State, he regularly channeled
Steele reports, ostensibly drawn from contacts with friendly Russian intelligence
agents, to Victoria Nuland, in charge of Russian affairs, and top Russian experts.
These included the infamous "Steele dossier". In September 2016, Winer's old
friend Sidney Blumenthal – a particularly close advisor to Hillary Clinton –
gave him notes written by a more mysterious Clinton insider named Cody Shearer,
repeating the salacious attacks.
All this dirt was spread through government agencies and mainstream media
before being revealed publicly just before Trump's inauguration, used to stimulate
the "Russiagate" investigation by Robert Mueller. The dossier has been discredited
but the investigation goes on and on.
So, it is all right to take seriously information allegedly obtained from
"Russian agents" and spread it around, so long as it can damage Trump. As with
so much else in Washington, double standards are the rule.
Jonathan Winer and the Magnitsky Act
Jonathan Winer played a major role in Congressional adoption of the "Sergei
Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012" (the Magnitsky Act), a measure
that effectively ended post-Cold War hopes for normal relations between Washington
and Moscow. This act was based on a highly contentious version of the November
16, 2009 death in prison of accountant Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky, as told
to Congress by hedge fund manager Bill Browder (grandson of Earl Browder, head
of the Communist Party USA 1934-1945). According to Browder, Magnitsky was a
lawyer beaten to death in prison as a result of his crusade for human rights.
However, as convincingly established by dissident Russian film-maker Andrei
Nekrasov's (banned) investigative documentary, the unfortunate Magnitsky was
neither a human rights crusader, nor a lawyer, nor beaten to death. He was an
accountant jailed for his role in Browder's business dealings, who died of natural
causes as a result of inadequate medical treatment. The case was hyped up as
a major human rights drama by Browder in order to discredit Russian charges
against himself.
In any case, by adopting a law punishing Magnitsky's alleged persecutors,
the US Congress acted as a supreme court judging internal Russian legal issues.
The Magnitsky Act also condemns legal prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Browder, on a much smaller scale, also made a fortune ripping off Russians during
the Yeltsin years, and later got into trouble with Russian tax collectors. Since
Browder had given up his US citizenship in order to avoid paying US taxes, he
had reason to fear Russian efforts to extradite him for tax evasion and other
financial misdeeds.
It was Jonathan Winer who found a solution to Browder's predicament.
When Browder consulted me, [ ] I suggested creating a new law to impose
economic and travel sanctions on human-rights violators involved in grand
corruption. Browder decided this could secure a measure of justice for Magnitsky.
He initiated a campaign that led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act.
Soon other countries enacted their own Magnitsky Acts, including Canada,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and most recently, the United Kingdom.
Russian authorities are still trying to pursue their case against Browder. In
his press conference following the Helsinki meeting with Trump, Vladimir Putin
suggested allowing US authorities to question the Russians named in the Mueller
indictment in exchange for allowing Russian officials to question individuals
involved in the Browder case, including Winer and former US ambassador to Moscow
Michael McFaul. Putin observed that such an exchange was possible under the
Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty signed between the two countries in 1999, back
in the Yeltsin days when America was posing as Russia's best friend.
But the naïve Russians did not measure the craftiness of American lawyers.
As Winer wrote:
"Under that treaty, Russia's procurator general can ask the US attorney
general to arrange for Americans to be ordered to testify to assist in a
criminal case. But there is a fundamental exception: The attorney general
can provide no such assistance in a politically motivated case ." (My emphasis.)
"I know this", he wrote, "because I was among those who helped put it there.
Back in 1999, when we were negotiating the agreement with Russia, I was the
senior State Department official managing US-Russia law-enforcement relations."
So, the Fixer in Chief could have said to the worried Browder, "No problem.
All that we need to do is make your case a politically motivated case. Then
they can't touch you."
Winer's clever treaty is a perfect Catch-22. The treaty doesn't apply to
a case if it is politically motivated, and if it is Russian, it must be politically
motivated.
In a July 15, 2016, complaint to the Justice Department, Browder's Heritage
Capital Management accused both American and Russian opponents of the Magnitsky
Act of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA; adopted in 19938
with Nazis in mind). Among the "lobbyists" cited was the late Ron Dellums (falsely
identified in the complaint as a "former Republican congressman").
The Heritage Capital Management brief declared that: "While lawyers representing
foreign principals are exempt from filing under FARA, this is only true if the
attorney does not try to influence policy at the behest of his client." However,
by disseminating anti-Magnitsky material to Congress, any Russian lawyer was
"clearly trying to influence policy" was therefore in violation of FARA filing
requirements."
Catch-22 all over again.
Needless to say, Khodorkovsky's Corbiere Trust lobbied heavily to get Congress
to pass the Magnitsky Act, which also repeated its defense of Khodorkovsky himself.
This type of "Russian interference intended to influence policy" is not even
noticed, while US authorities scour cyberspace for evidence of trolls.
Conclusion
The basic ideological conflict here is between Unipolar America and Multipolar
Russia. Russia's position, as Vladimir Putin made clear in his historic speech
at the 2007 Munich security conference, is to allow countries to enjoy national
sovereignty and develop in their own way. The current Russian government is
against interference in other countries' politics on principle. It would naturally
prefer an American government willing to allow this.
The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other
countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single "democratic"
system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country
should have and how it should run its affairs .
So, if Russians were trying to interfere in US domestic politics, they would
not be trying to change the US system but to prevent it from trying to change
their own. Russian leaders clearly are sufficiently cultivated to realize that
historic processes do not depend on some childish trick played on somebody's
computer.
US policy-makers practice interference every day. And they are perfectly
willing to allow Russians to interfere in American politics – so long as those
Russians are "unipolar" like themselves, like Khodorkovsky, who aspire to precisely
the same unipolar world sought by the State Department and George Soros. Indeed,
the American empire depends on such interference from Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians,
Russians, Cubans – all those who come to Washington to try to get US power to
settle old scores or overthrow the government in the country they came from.
All those are perfectly welcome to lobby for a world ruled by America.
Russian interference in American politics is totally welcome so long as it
helps turn public opinion against "multipolar" Putin, glorifies American democracy,
serves US interests including the military-industrial complex, helps break down
national borders (except those of the United States and Israel) and puts money
in appropriate pockets in the halls of Congress.
"... With respect to the Browder-Magnitsky Act legislation scandal, people might consider that ongoing, colossal, bombshell story in light of the mentioned 18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy: ..."
"... The fact that Magnitsky Act legislation is founded on a massive concoction of lies is unacceptable and, far more importantly, increasingly dangerous and destructive to international relations with each passing day of the coverup. It is of paramount importance that humanity learns the full truth about the Browder-Magnitsky laws scandal – and NOW. ..."
"... Yes, the Magnitsky Act legislation is a crock, isn't it? And the sad thing is that these congressmen know it, but, as Peter Phillips said, they go along because it's all part of controlling the world in favor of these transnational corporations. We just think our votes count! How stupid are we? ..."
With respect to the Browder-Magnitsky Act legislation scandal, people might consider
that ongoing, colossal, bombshell story in light of the mentioned 18 U.S. Code § 2384
– Seditious conspiracy:
".. or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United
States,"
If moral force is deemed a correct legal interpretation, the growing number of men and women
becoming aware of the scandal, in the United States particularly and around the Earth
generally, could face 20 years of imprisonment. Of course, "by force" in the clause is meant as
kinetic or physical force, so people demanding the profoundly consequential truth about
Browder-Magnitsky have nothing in to worry about.
Political reality in America reveals that the two-party system is mythical, but actually
that Americans are experiencing a one-party structure serving members of the transnational
capitalist class – named and described in the recently published book "Giants: The Global
Power Elites" by Sonoma State (CA) Professor Peter Phillips (co-founder of Project Censored
with Mickey Huff).
Confirmation is found in the unanimous -- total silence over the historic magnitude
Browder-Magnitsky scandal of John Brennan(D), Gina Haspell(R), Loretta Lynch(D), Jeff
Sessions(R), Ben Cardin(D), John McCain(R), all 535 U.S. elected representatives(D, R and I),
Hillary Clinton(D), Mike Pompeo(R), Joseph Biden(D), Mike Pence(R), Barack Obama(D), Donald
Trump(R)
The fact that Magnitsky Act legislation is founded on a massive concoction of lies is
unacceptable and, far more importantly, increasingly dangerous and destructive to international
relations with each passing day of the coverup. It is of paramount importance that humanity
learns the full truth about the Browder-Magnitsky laws scandal – and NOW.
Replybackwardsevolution , August 17, 2018 at 3:36 am
Jerry – I saw a Youtube video by Professor Peter Phillips a few months back where he
outlined the concentration of wealth by these transnational corporations. It was a very good
video, and he's right – something definitely needs to be done about these people. They
are going to either kill us with war or kill us by ruining the planet. It's like they're
addicted to greed and cannot help themselves, almost like a drug addict. We'll have to stop
them.
Yes, the Magnitsky Act legislation is a crock, isn't it? And the sad thing is that
these congressmen know it, but, as Peter Phillips said, they go along because it's all part
of controlling the world in favor of these transnational corporations. We just think our
votes count! How stupid are we?
I don't know where it's all going to end, but we'd better start fighting back before these
addicts take us all out.
Great insight: "Browder who helped facilitate the looting before he was kicked out of Russia and the
Magnitsky Act are all part of the efforts to seize or at least contain as much of the loot as
possible and keep it from Russia"
Notable quotes:
"... Russians hold as much as one trillion in USD assets outside Russia that were stolen from Russia in the 90's and number far greater if including all of the FSU. The stimulus to the global and US economy was enormous and created asset bubbles until the great collapse in 2008. The current bubble was due to quantitative easing of central banks as the flows from Russia and FSU dried up. ..."
"... Much of this was held in tax havens and then moved to the US after cleaning via shelf companies. Trumps empire was rebuilt with Russian oligarchs/mafia money as real estate was a favorite investment for money launderers ..."
"... Browder who helped facilitate the looting before he was kicked out of Russia and the Magnitsky Act are all part of the efforts to seize or at least contain as much of the loot as possible and keep it from Russia ..."
Russians hold as much as one trillion in USD assets outside Russia that were stolen from Russia
in the 90's and number far greater if including all of the FSU. The stimulus to the global and
US economy was enormous and created asset bubbles until the great collapse in 2008. The current
bubble was due to quantitative easing of central banks as the flows from Russia and FSU dried
up.
Much of this was held in tax havens and then moved to the US after cleaning via shelf
companies. Trumps empire was rebuilt with Russian oligarchs/mafia money as real estate was a
favorite investment for money launderers
During the Ukrainian conflict Putin began an amnesty program asking oligarchs to repatriate
these assets by waiving penalties and taxes. He restarted it at the end of last year, hence the
need to expand the list of assets to be seized before they fly the coop.
Trump may know where a lot of these assets are parked. Perhaps he had been a good informant
of the FBI/CIA like his partner Felix Sater
Browder who helped facilitate the looting before he was kicked out of Russia and the
Magnitsky Act are all part of the efforts to seize or at least contain as much of the loot as
possible and keep it from Russia
MAGNITSKIY MOVIE. An authorised
version is available on Vimeo here. I urge you to watch it: not only
does it complete destroy Browder's case, it is an interesting detective process as the
film-maker gradually perceives the inconsistencies and manipulations. Browder's story has been
extremely important at setting up the anti-Russia dancing mania : if it's a lie, then what?
'Bill Browder Should Be in Jail' Says Philip Giraldi, Widely Respected Pundit and Retired
CIA Officer The Browder story keeps getting more and more airplay, and it is not
complimentary to him. Patrick Fleming 10 min ago | 29
13 Giraldi, one of
the most popular writers on the conservative Unz.com , is one of the superstars of the alt-media landscape. He has
been outspoken about the pernicious effects of Israel and wealthy pro-Israeli American Jews on
American politics. You can see many of his articles on RI here .
This was from a radio interview with Lee Stranahan, formerly of Breitbart, now with Sputnik,
the Russian state-owned news agency.
You can listen to the whole thing here. Key quotes below:
"He's basically been the one who appears on the networks, appears before Congress," "
"He is someone that they've [US officials] decided has to be the spokesperson in terms of
what's going on in Russia, and yet he has a hidden agenda as a potential criminal."
"I think the story is growing; I'm seeing more and more references to Browder in a
negative way."
"The problem is that we have to get this at a level where Browder is doing his damage, and
that's in the mainstream media, places like The New York Times, and also to have some people
in Congress begin to speak up and say, 'Hey, what about the Magnitsky Act and everything that
we did to provoke a crisis with Russia based on what Browder was telling us?'".
"Once you understand that, you realize that Browder, if anything, should be in jail."
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It is not necessary to notify Russia Insider . Licensed Creative Commons
"... When Germany starts up talking again about 'negotiating from a position of strength', it should be slapped down as if it had said 'lebensraum'. ..."
"... Washington wants it, because Washington sees the world as existing to support the comfort and entertainment of Americans, but America cannot do it on its own, so von der Leyen is just doing America's bidding with the tough talk – the whole barnyard of European political elites needs to be cleaned out before there can be any hope of better relations, as they are all committed Atlanticists. ..."
"... But when NATO speaks of 'dealing from a position of strength', it means 'you know what will happen if your offer is not as expected'. In the NATO lexicon, there is no such situation as both sides dealing from a position of strength. ..."
Lovin' it: the recent call by the German Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, to engage in
dialogue with Moscow only from a "position of unity and strength," Shoigu reminded his
counterpart that, while Russia seeks peace, it will not tolerate being coerced.
"After everything Germany has done to our country, I think, they should not talk on the
issue for another two hundred years," Shoigu said. "Ask your grandparents about their
experience of talking to Russia from the position of strength. They will probably be able to
tell you."
Exactly; it seems it was almost instantly impolite to remind the Germans of their Nazi past,
along with their aspiration to achieve their goals through military force. When Germany
starts up talking again about 'negotiating from a position of strength', it should be slapped
down as if it had said 'lebensraum'.
The EU has to know that it is not frightening Russia
with tough talk, and so it may as well cut it out. Russia by itself would squash the EU like
a bug if they could not go running to Uncle Sam, and NATO as a whole would have a tough time
with China and Russia – it's hard to say who would win, because military victory
depends on a lot of things and you can't plan for them all, but the scale of global
casualties would be so horrific it would be difficult to call any outcome 'victory'.
Washington wants it, because Washington sees the world as existing to support the comfort and
entertainment of Americans, but America cannot do it on its own, so von der Leyen is just
doing America's bidding with the tough talk – the whole barnyard of European political
elites needs to be cleaned out before there can be any hope of better relations, as they are
all committed Atlanticists.
If I were Shoigu, although I cannot fault his actual response, I would have said, "I see
nothing constructive will be accomplished here today, so I will leave you to it, for I have
drills to conduct and work to do. I'll see you next time".
There's nothing wrong in dealing from a position of strength so long as you are prepared
to be reasonable; it merely signifies that you do not have to accept any terms that are
offered. But when NATO speaks of 'dealing from a position of strength', it means 'you know
what will happen if your offer is not as expected'. In the NATO lexicon, there is no such
situation as both sides dealing from a position of strength.
In 2015, Bill Browder published Red Notice – purportedly a true story about his
experience in Russia between 1996 and 2005. Upon closer scrutiny however, his story doesn't
add up and demonstrably fails to stand up in a court of law. Nonetheless, on the dubious
strength of that story, Browder has been able to lobby the U.S. Congress to pass the
Magnitsky Act in 2012 which needlessly damaged the relations between the U.S. and Russia.
Where he failed in courts of law, however, his campaign of relentless demonization of Russia
and of Vladimir Putin has been successful in the court of public opinion in the West. As
humanity finds itself on the precipice of yet another great war, what we need are bridges of
mutual understanding and constructive engagement, not demonization.
" and so Putin immediately issued orders for him to be sadistically murdered "
What an amazing consistency in supporting the Browder/Steele line "Putin did it." Which is
understandable, considering the efforts and investment made into the MSM memes. You made a
very strong impression that the presstituting MSM is your main source of information.
Here are some excerpts from the honest sources.
"Poisoned Russian spy was close to Christopher Steele consultant:"
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/poisoned-russian-spy-close-steele-consultant-report-article-1.3862516
"Jonathan Winer was not only a point man for the Steele "dossier" at the State Department in
2016 (and Steele dossiers of yore), he was also a father of the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Yes,
longtime Senate staffer Winer is the "old friend" Browder credits with envisioning the
legislative strategy that culminated in passage of the law. (More recently, Winer is serving
as Browder's bulldog-lawyer -- story here.)
"Cardin knew there were problems with Browder's story about Magnitsky's death and yet brought
him into Congress to testify to secure the vote. That's suborning perjury:" https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-04/magnitsky-trio-pushes-war-russia-new-sanctions
"Litvinenko's circle also included Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Goldfarb, Vyacheslav
Zharko, and Akhmed Zakayev, most of whom have received asylum in the U.K. In the 1990s, Boris
Berezovsky worked with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and George Soros' International Science
Foundation which was headed by Alexander Goldfarb for almost ten years. He was also involved
in money laundering millions of dollars through the Bank of New York and the Republic
Bank of New York which was owned by Bill Browder's now deceased partner, Edmond
Safra:" https://jimmysllama.com/2018/05/07/11191/
– Is not interesting, how so many Browder's connections met an untimely death yet
Browder the Scoundrel is well supported and protected by the "deciders." -- See the fate of a
DOCUMENTARY about Browder, Magnitsky, and a bloody trail of the dead former employees of
Browder whom he used for his very profitable if criminal enterprise.
Alexander Perepelichny" was the key witness who could potentially destroy the scam with
highest political stakes on Magnitsky dossier. As Browder responds with "I do not recall" and
"I do not know" on any substantial inquiry in the court, the US judiciary could be very
interested in hearing Perepelichny. This menace to Magnitsky Act was eliminated one week
before the bill passed the US House: on Nov 10, 2012 Alexander Perepelichny was found dead
outside his mansion in London."
Political War! Washington Goes Full Retard on the Russia Hoax
by David
Stockman Posted on
August 08, 2018 August 7, 2018 It's hard to identify anything that's more uncoupled from
reality than the Donald's Trade War and reckless Fiscal Debauch. Together they will soon
monkey-hammer today's delirious Wall Street revilers and send main street's aging and anemic
recovery back into the drink.
Except, except. When it comes to unreality, Trump's crackpot economics is actually more
than rivaled by the full retard Russophobia of the MSM, the Dems and the nomenclatura of
Imperial Washington.
In fact, their groupthink mania about the alleged Russian attack on American democracy is
so devoid of fact, logic, context, proportion and self-awareness as to give the Donald's
tweet storms an aura of sanity by comparison.
Their endless obsession with the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian nobody by
the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya proves the point. She was actually in New York doing god's
work, as it were, defending a Russian company against hokey money-laundering charges related
to the abominable Magnitsky Act and its contemptible promoter, Bill Browder.
The latter had pulled off an epic multi-billion swindle during the wild west days of
post-Soviet Russia and was essentially chased from the country in 2005 by Putin for hundreds
of millions in tax evasion. Thereafter he turned the murky prison death of his accountant,
Sergei Magnitsky, who was also charged with massive tax evasion, into a revenge crusade
against Putin.
That resulted in a huge lobbying campaign subsidized by Browder's illicit billions and
spearheaded by the Senate's most bloodthirsty trio of warmongers – Senators McCain,
Graham and Cardin – to enact the 2012 Magnitsky Act.
The latter, of course, is the very excrescence of Imperial Washington's arrogant meddling
in the internal affairs of other countries. It imposes sweeping sanctions on Russians (and
other foreigners) deemed complicit in Magnitsky's death in a Russian jail and for other
alleged human rights violations in Russia and elsewhere.
Needless to say, imperial pretense doesn't get any more sanctimonious than this. Deep
State apparatchiks in the US Treasury Department get to try Russian citizens in absentia and
without due process for vaguely worded crimes under American law that were allegedly
committed in Russia, and then to seize their property and persons when involved in any act of
global commerce where Washington can browbeat local satrapies and "allies" into
cooperation!
Only in an imperial capital steeped in self-conferred entitlement to function as global
hegemon would such a preposterous extraterritorial arrangement be even thinkable. After all,
what happens to Russians in Russian prisons is absolutely none of Washington's business
– nor by any stretch of the imagination does it pose any threat whatsoever to America's
homeland security.
So the irony of the Trump Tower nothingburger is that the alleged Russian agent was here
fighting Washington's meddling in Russia , not hooking up with Trump's campaign
to further a Kremlin plot to attack American democracy.
You could properly call this a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but Imperial
Washington and its shills among the ranks of Dem politicians and megaphones in the MSM
wouldn't get the joke in the slightest. That's because Washington is in the business of
meddling in the domestic affairs of virtually every country in the world – friend, foe
and also-ran – on a massive scale never before imagined in human history.
That's what the hideously excessive $75 billion budget of the so-called
17-agency "intelligence community" (IC) gets you. To wit, a backdoor into every access point
and traffic exchange node on the entire global internet, and from there the ability to hack,
surveil, exfiltrate or corrupt the communications of any government, political party,
business or private citizen virtually anywhere on the planet.
And, no, this isn't being done for the noble purpose of rooting-out the terrorist needles
in the global haystack of communications and Internet traffic. It's done because the IC has
the resources to do it and because it has invested itself with endless missions of global
hegemony.
These self-serving missions, in turn, justify its existence, keep the politicians of
Washington well stocked in scary bedtime stories and, most important of all, ensure that the
fiscal gravy train remains loaded to the gills and that the gilded prosperity of the beltway
never falters.
Indeed, if Washington were looking for corporate pen name it would be Meddling "R" Us. And
we speak here not merely of its vast and secretive spy apparatus, but also of its completely
visible everyday intrusions in the affairs of other countries via the billions that are
channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy and the vast NGO network funded by the
State Department, DOD and other organs of the national security complex.
The $750 million per year Board For International Broadcasting, for example,
is purely in the propaganda business; and despite the Cold War's end 27 years ago, still
carries out relentless "agit prop" in Russia and among the reincarnated states of the old
Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of
America.
For example, here is a Voice of America tweet from this morning falsely charging Russia
with the occupation of the former Soviet state of Georgia.
In fact, Russia came to the aid of the Russian-speaking population of the breakaway
province of South Ossetia in 2008; the latter felt imperiled by the grandiose pretensions of
the corrupt Saakashvili government in Tbilisi, which had unilaterally launched an
indiscriminate military assault on the major cities of the province.
Moreover, even an EU commission investigation came to that conclusion way back in 2009
shortly after the events that the inhabitants of South Ossetia feared would lead to a
genocidal invasion by Georgia's military.
An investigation into last year's Russia-Georgia war delivered a damning indictment of
President Mikheil Saakashvili today, accusing Tbilisi of launching an indiscriminate
artillery barrage on the city of Tskhinvali that started the war.
In more than 1,000 pages of analysis, documentation and witness statements, the most
exhaustive inquiry into the five-day conflict dismissed Georgian claims that the artillery
attack was in response to a Russian invasion
The EU-commissioned report, by a fact-finding mission of more than 20 political,
military, human rights and international law experts led by the Swiss diplomat, Heidi
Tagliavini, was unveiled in Brussels today after nine months of work.
Flatly dismissing Saakashvili's version, the report said: "There was no ongoing
armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation Georgian claims of a
large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive
could not be substantiated
The point is, whatever the rights and wrongs of the statelets and provinces attempting to
sort themselves out after the fall of the Soviet Union, this was all happening on Russia's
doorsteps and was none of Washington business even at the time. But wasting taxpayer money 10
years later by siding with the revanchist claims of the Georgian government is just plain
ludicrous.
It's also emblematic of why the Imperial City is so clueless about the rank hypocrisy
implicit in the Russian meddling hoax. Believing that America is the Indispensable Nation and
that Washington operates by its own hegemonic rules, they are now Shocked, Shocked! to find
that the victims of their blatant intrusions might actually endeavor to fight back.
Even then, the Russophobes have been frantically making a mountain out of a molehill. We
investigated the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, for example, and found that it was
actually the hobby horse of a mid-sized Oligarch. The latter had been minding his own
business trolling the Russian Internet, as the oligarchs of that country are wont to do
– until the US sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 became the occasion for Washington's
relentless vilification of Russia and Putin.
Accordingly, this particular Russian patriot hired a few dozen students at $3-4 per hour
who mostly spoke English as a third-language. Operating on 12-hour shifts, they randomly
trolled Facebook and other US based social media, posting crude and sometimes incoherent
political messages from virtually all points on the compass – messages that were
instantly lost in the great sea of social media trivia and mendacity.
Still, there is no evidence that this two-bit hobby farm was an instrument of Kremlin
policy or that its tiny $2 million budget could hold a candle to the $200
million per year round-the-clock propaganda of Voice of America, and multiples
thereof by the other Washington propaganda venues.
In any event, turning the Trump Tower meeting into evidence of Russian meddling and
collusion actually gives the old saw about turning a molehill into a mountain an altogether
new meaning. That is to say, on any given evening Anderson Cooper will be interviewing a
lathered-up ex-general or ex-spook admonishing that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually a
nefarious Russian "cut out" sent by Putin to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
Really?
We have no brief for Vlad Putin, but one thing we are quite sure of is that he is anything
but stupid. So would he really send a secret agent to Trump Tower – who neither speaks
nor writes a word of English and has been to America only once – in order to plot a
surreptitious attempt to manipulate the American election?
The fact is, the meeting happened because Veselnitskaya wanted to reach the Trump campaign
in behalf of her anti-Magnitsky Act agenda, and to do so used the good offices of what
appears to be the Russian Justin Bieber!
Specifically, the offer came to Don Trump Jr. via a London-based PR flack named Rob
Goldstone, a music publicist who knew the Trumps through the Miss Universe pageant that was
held in Moscow in 2013. Goldstone didn't know his head from a hole in the ground when it
comes to international affairs or Russian politics, but he did represent the Russian pop
singer Emin Agalarov, whose father was also a Trump- style real estate developer and had been
involved in the 2013 pageant.
Said the London PR flack in an email to Don Jr:
"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting .The
Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered
to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would
incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your
father .( this is) "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
And a very big so what!
For one thing, the last "Crown prosecutor of Russia" was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in
1917, suggesting Goldstone's grasp of the contemporary Russian government was well less than
rudimentary.
Secondly, there was neither a crime nor national security issue involved when a campaign
seeks to dig-up dirt from foreign nationals. The crime is when they pay for it, and do not
report the expenditure to the Federal Elections Commission.
Of course, that's exactly what Hillary Clinton's campaign did with its multi-million
funding of the Trump Dossier, generated by foreign national Christopher Steele and
intermediated to the FBI and other IC agencies by Fusion GPS.
And that gets us to the mind-boggling silliness of the whole Trump Tower affair.
Self-evidently, the dirt on Hillary suggestion was a come-on so that Veselnitskaya (through
her Russian translator) could make a pitch against the Magnitsky Act; and to point out that
after 33,000 Russian babies had been adopted by Americans before its enactment, that avenue
of adoption had been stopped cold when the Kremlin found it necessary to retaliate.
Don's Jr. emails to his secretary from the meeting long ago proved that he immediately
recognized Natalia's bait and switch operation, and that he wanted to be summoned to the
phone so he could end what he saw was a complete waste of the campaign's time.
But here's the joker in the woodpile. Its seem that Glenn Simpson, proprietor of Fusion
GPs, had also been hired by Veselnitskaya Russian clients to make a case in Washington
against the Magnitsky Act, and to also dig up dirt on the scoundrel behind it: Bill
Browder.
More fantastically yet, Natalia had meet with Simpson both before and after the
Trump Tower meeting apparently to be coached by him on her anti-Magnitsky pitch to
the Trump campaign.
So if Veselnitskaya was part of a Russian collusion conspiracy, then so was the Glenn
Simpson, the midwife of the Trump Dossier!
It doesn't get any crazier than that – meaning that the Donald could not be more
correct about this entire farce:
This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged
Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is
totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace
to USA!
In truth, the only basis for Natalia Veselnitskaya's alleged Putin ties was through
Russia's prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika.
And exactly why was Chaika interested in making American contacts?
Why, because he was pursuing one Bill Browder, fugitive from Russian justice and the
driving force behind the abominable Magnitsky Act – an instrument of meddling in the
domestic affairs of foreign countries like no other. As one report described it:
Chaika's foray into American politics began in earnest in April 2016. That is when his
office gave Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and three other US representatives a
confidential letter detailing American investor Bill Browder's "illegal scheme of buying up
Gazprom shares without permission of the Government of Russia" between 1999 and 2006, one
month after Rohrabacher returned from Moscow.
As it happened, Veselnitskaya had apparently brought a memo to the Trump Tower meeting
that contained many of the same talking points as one written by Chaika's office two months
earlier.
There you have it.
At the heart of the Russian collusion hoax and the wellspring of the current Russophobia
is nothing more than a half-baked effort by Russians to tell their side of the Magnitsky
story, and to expose the real villain in the piece – a monumentally greedy hedge fund
operator who had stolen the Russian people blind and then conveniently gave up his American
citizenship so that he would neither do time in a Russian jail or pay taxes in America.
Spoiler Alert for next part: When both economic policy and politics have gone full retard
in the Imperial City is there anything which could possibly go wrong – that might
pollute the punch bowl on Wall Street?
If half of what I have come to understand about the Curious Case of Bill Browder is true,
then the "Magnitsky Trio" of Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Ben Cardin are guilty of
espionage, at a minimum.
Why? Because they know that Browder's story about Sergei Magnitsky is a lie. And that means
that when you tie in the Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Skripal poisoning
and the rest of this mess, these men are consorting with foreign governments and agencies
against the sitting President.
As Lee Stranahan pointed out recently on Fault Lines, Cardin invited Browder to testify to
Congress in 2017 to push through last year's sanctions bill, a more stringent version of the
expiring Magnitsky Act of 2011, which has since been used to ratchet up pressure on Russia.
I'd read it a few times, because it's about as murky as The Swamp gets. And, still my eyes
glaze over.
The Magnitsky Act and its sequel have been used to support aggressive policy actions by the
U.S. against Russia and destroy the relationship between the world's most prominent militaries
and nuclear powers.
The new bill is said to want to put 'crushing sanctions' on Russia to make 'Putin feel the
heat.' In effect, what this bill wants to do is force President Trump to enforce sanctions
against
the entire Russian state for attempting to do business anywhere in the world.
The new financial penalties would target political figures, oligarchs, family members and
others that "facilitate illicit and corrupt activities" on behalf of Putin.
It would also impose new sanctions on transactions tied to investments in state-owned
energy projects, transactions tied to new Russian debt, and people with the capacity or
ability to support or carry out a "malicious" cyber act.
In addition, if it wasn't clear enough already, that he's no friend of the President, Graham
is trying to tie the President's hands on NATO withdrawal, requiring a two-thirds majority.
Now, why would Graham be worried about that, unless it was something the President was
seriously considering? This is similar to last year's sanctions bill requiring a similar
majority for the President to end the original sanctions placed on Russia in 2014 over the
reunification with Crimea.
And behind it all stands Bill Browder.
Because it has been Browder's one-man campaign to influence members of Congress, the EU and
public opinion the world over against Putin and Russia for the past 10 years over Magnitsky's
death.
Browder's story is the only one we see in the news. And it's never questioned, even though
it has. He continually moves to block films and articles critical of him from seeing
distribution.
Browder is the epicenter around which the insane push for war with Russia revolves as
everyone involved in the attempt to take over Russia in 1999 continues to try and cover their
collective posteriors posterities.
And it is Browder, along with Republic National Bank chief Edmond Safra, who were involved
together in the pillaging of Russia in the 1990's. Browder's firm hired Magintsky as an
accountant (because that's what he was) to assist in the money laundering Heritage Capital was
involved in.
The attempted take over of Russia failed because Yeltsin saw the setup which led him to
appoint Putin as his Deputy Prime Minister.
There was $7 billion that was wired through Bank of New York which involved money stolen
from the IMF loans to Russia. The attempt to takeover Russia by blackmail was set in motion.
As soon as that wire was done, that is when Republic National Bank ran to the Department of
Justice to say it was money-laundering. I believe this started the crisis and Yeltsin was
blackmailed to step down and appoint Boris A. Berezovsky as the head of Russia.
Clearly, Republic National Bank was involved with the US government for they were sending
also skids of $100 bills to Russia. It was written up and called the
Money Plane . Yeltsin then turned to Putin realizing that he had been set up. This is how
Putin became the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia on August 9th, 1999 until August 16th,
1999 when he became the 33rd Prime Minister and heir apparent of Yeltsin.
So, now why, all of a sudden, do we need even stronger sanctions on Russia, ones that would
create untold dislocation in financial markets around the world?
Look at the timeline today and see what's happening.
Earlier this year Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts 13 people associated with
Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll farm, for influencing the 2016 election.
Then Mueller indicts twelve members of Russian intelligence to sabotage the upcoming
summit between Trump and Putin while the Russia Hacked Muh Election narrative was
flagging.
Three days later President Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. There a Putin let
the world know that he would assist Robert Mueller's investigation if in return the U.S.
would assist Russia in returning Bill Browder, who was tried and convicted in absentia for
tax evasion.
All of a sudden Browder's story is all over the alternative press. Browder is all over
U.S. television.
Earlier this week Facebook comes out, after horrific earnings, to tell everyone that IRA
was still at it, though being ever so sneaky, trying to influence the mid-terms by engaging
Democrats and anti-Trumpers to organize... In that release, Facebook let it be known it was
working with the political arm of NATO, The Atlantic Council, to ferret out these dastardly
Russian agents.
And now we have a brand-new shiny sanctions bill intended to keep any rapprochement between
the U.S. and Russia from occurring.
Why is that? What's got them so scared of relations with Russia improving?
Maybe, just maybe, because Putin has all of these people dead to rights and he's informed
Trump of what the real story behind all of this is.
That at its core is a group of very bad people who attempted to steal trillions but only got
away with billions and still have their sights set on destroying Russia for their own
needs.
And Lindsay Graham is their mouthpiece. (all puns intended)
That all of U.S. foreign policy is built on a lie.
That our relationship with Russia was purposefully trashed for the most venal of reasons,
for people like Bill Browder to not only steal billions but then have the chutzpah to steal the
$230 million he would have paid in taxes on those stolen billions.
And the only way to ensure none of those lies are exposed is for Trump to be unable to
change any of it by forcing him to openly side with the Russian President over members of his
own political party.
The proposed sanctions by the Graham bill are so insane that even the Treasury department
thinks they are a bad idea. But, at this point there is nothing Graham won't do for his
owners.
Because they are desperate they will push for open warfare with Russia to push Putin from
power, which is not possible. All of this is nothing more than a sad attempt to hold onto power
long enough to oust Trump from the White House and keep things as horrible as they currently
are.
Because no one gives up power willingly. And the more they are proven to be frauds the more
they will scream for war.
I should also mention Putin's treatment of certain Jewish oligarchs who have attempted
to influence Western policies toward Russia (e.g., Mikhail Khodorkovsky). A truly stunning
moment in the Trump-Putin presser (all but ignored in the MSM) was Putin saying that Bill
Browder and his associates had illegally earned $1.5 billion in Russia ("the way the money
was earned was illegal") without paying taxes either to Russia or the United States where
the money was transferred. And that he and his associates had contributed $400 million to
Hillary Clinton's campaign. While the charges back and forth are impossible for me to
evaluate, Browder's firm, Hermitage Capital Management, has been involved in other
accusations of fraud. Browder was the main force promoting the Magnitsky Act, signed by
President Obama in 2012, that barred Russian officials said to be involved in the death of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Browder associate, from entering the U.S. or using the U.S. banking
system.
Here the point is that American neocons have been in the forefront of hostility over
Putin's treatment of Jewish oligarchs, taking the view that Browder et al. are completely
innocent victims of Russian evil. Along with Russian foreign policy, Putin's actions toward
the oligarchs is one factor in neocon and hence some factions of the GOP toward Russia.
It's no surprise that they are now eagerly joining the hate-Trump chorus throughout the
American establishment.
"William Felix "Bill" Browder was born into a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois.
Browder's paternal grandfather was Earl Browder , who was born in Kansas in
1891. [1] He was a
radical and had lived in the Soviet Union for several years from 1927 and married Raisa
Berkman, a Jewish Russian woman, while living there. [1]
After his return to the United States in 1931, [1] Earl Browder
became the leader of the Communist Party USA , and ran for
U.S. president in 1936 and 1940. [13]
After World War II, Earl Browder lost favor with Moscow and was expelled from the American
Communist party . [1]
Remove all jew supremacists from all positions of power, no matter how small-NOW!
Get It, Read It:
"A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind" Stephon Mitford Goodson
Great film that takes you from Browder the poor defrauded good guy with a hero lawyer
Magnitsky, to a bad guy with Magnitsky the long employed accountant who made none of the
assertions injected into the Russian -English translations that no one reviewed. But why is
this film banned in the West? (/s)
Not only is Steele part of this shady group but there are ties with Alexander Litvinenko,
Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Perepelichny (who all meet thier untimely deaths) around Bill
Browder (directly/indirectly)"
As Browder responds with "I do not recall" and "I do not know" on any substantial
inquiry in the court, the US judiciary could be very interested in hearing Perepelichny.
This menace to Magnitsky Act was eliminated one week before the bill passed the US House:
on Nov 10, 2012 Alexander Perepelichny was found dead outside his mansion in London. The
police investigation did not bring any tangible result but the theory of "Russian mafia"
involved was timely injected into the international media. One month later Magnitsky Act
was signed by president Obama
McCain hand carried the Steele Dossier to Comey. McCain was in Canada when MI6 operative
Sir Andrew Wood enlisted McCain. Then McCain took the bait, no he was working to take Trump
out.
He tried to get out of it in his new book, The Restless Wave.
I've watched McCain for years, I believe he has brain damage from the Vietnam War.
I can understand repealing Jackson-Vanik because it pertained to how U. S. deals with
"non-market economies." Free market mechanisms were introduced in Russia and China since the
1970s so there needed to be changes. However, if there's government corruption in other
nation states, how does this rate an act of Congress? Why repeal the law that required annual
reviews of trade relations and replace it with normalization of trade only to sanction
foreign government officials that have never even had a trial? What about all the financial
misdeeds, money laundering, abuse of the banking system that can be traced to Browder, the
congressional instigator? How does Graham, McCain and Cardin benefit by derailing relations
with Russia over ONE GUY's WORD with a dicey past?
Law
In June 2012, the United
States House Committee on Foreign Affairs reported to the House a bill called the Sergei
Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 (H.R. 4405). The main intention of the law
was to punish Russian officials who were thought to be responsible for the death of Sergei
Magnitsky by prohibiting their entrance to the United States and their use of its banking
system. The legislation was taken up by a Senate panel the next week,
sponsored by Senator Ben
Cardin , and cited in a broader review of the mounting tensions in the international
relationship.
In November 2012, provisions of the Magnitsky bill were attached to a House bill (H.R.
6156) normalizing trade with Russia (i.e., repealing the Jackson–Vanik
amendment ) and Moldova . On December 6, 2012, the U.S. Senate
passed the House version of the law, 92-4. The law was signed by President Barack Obama on December 14, 2012.
In 2016, Congress enacted the Global Magnitsky Act which allows the US Government to
sanction foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the
world.
In 16 November 2009, tax specialist lawyer Sergey Magnitsky died in Matrosskaya
Tishina prison (Moscow). Immediately, the US Press claimed that he had been in possession of
information concerning a State scandal, and had been tortured by the " régime ".
The
Magnitsky Act
The death of Magnitsky shut down the legal procedures that had been launched against him by the
Russian Minister of Justice. Billionaire William ("Bill") Browder declared in Washington that the
tax expert possessed proof that Russian Power had stolen 3 billion dollars from him. Despite
lobbying by Goldman Sachs, the US Congress believed it had clarified the affair, and in 2012
adopted a law sanctioning the Russian personalities suspected of having murdered the lawyer.
Goldman Sachs, which did not believe the information forwarded by the parliamentarians, hired the
lobbying firm Duberstein Group in an attempt to block the vote on the law [
1
].
On this model, in 2016, the Congress extended the "
Magnitsky Act
" to the whole world,
requesting the President to implement sanctions against all people and all states which violate
individual property. Presidents Obama and Trump obeyed, placing about twenty personalities on the
list, including the President of the Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
These two laws were aimed at giving back to the United States the role it had assumed during the
Cold War as defender of individual property, even though they had no communist rival.
The two versions of the " Magnitsky affair "
As for the Russian State Duma, it responded to its US counterpart by forbidding the adoption of
Russian children by US families, and by denouncing the responsibility of US personalities in the
legalisation of torture (the Dima Yakovlev Law, from the name of the Russian child adopted in the
USA who died as a result of negligence by the parents). President Putin applied this text in 2013,
also forbidding ex-US Vice President Dick Cheney access to Russian territory.
The " Magnitsky affair " could have ended there. It seems to be independent of the "
Khodorkovsky affair ", exploited by NATO in order to accuse Russia of interference in Western
democracies by way of disinformation or " fake news " [
2
].
However, the Russian Prosecutor General contests the narrative presented by William Browder to the
US Congress.
According to William Browder, his company Hermitage Capital invested in Russia, particularly in
Gazprom. He allegedly discovered signs of irregular practices and attempted to warn the Kremlin.
However, his resident's visa was then cancelled. Then his Russian companies were allegedly robbed
by Lieutenant-Colonel Artem Kuznetsov, a civil servant from the Financial Brigade of the Russian
Ministry of the Interior. Kuznetsov apparently seized the property documents during a search, then
used them to register a new owner. Lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who apparently blew the whistle on the
embezzlement, was arrested, tortured and finally died in prison. In the end, Lieutenant-Colonel
Artem Kuznetsov and " godfather " Dmitry Klyuev were allegedly able to deposit the 3 billion stolen
dollars in a Cypriot bank. This is a classic case of theft by the Russian mafia with the help of
the Kremlin [
3
].
This narrative inspired the seventh season of the Showtime TV series,
Homeland
.
On the contrary, according to Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, William Browder illegally
acquired 133 million shares in Gazprom on behalf of the Ziff brothers, via various straw men. Not
only did Browder avoid paying 150 million dollars in taxes, but the acquisition of part of this
crown jewel of the Russian economy is in itself illegal. Furthermore, his financial advisor, Sergey
Magnitsky, who had developed another scam for the same Browder, was arrested and died of a heart
attack in prison [
4
].
It is obviously impossible to tell the truth from the lies in these two versions. However, it is
now recognised that Sergey Magnitsky was not a lawyer working freelance, but was employed by
William Browder's companies. He was not investigating embezzlement, but was tasked by Browder
with the creation of financial structures which would avoid him having to pay taxes in Russia.
For example, the two men imagined remunerating mentally handicapped people as front men in order to
benefit from their tax exempt status. Browder had much experience with tax evasion – which is why
he lived for ten years in Russia with a simple tourist visa, then abandoned his US citizenship and
became a British citizen.
These last elements prove William Browder wrong, and are compatible with Prosecutor Chaika's
accusations. In these conditions, it seems at the least imprudent for the US Congress to have
adopted the
Magnitsky Act
, unless of course the operation was aimed not at defending
individual property, but at hurting Russia [
5
].
A leader of the Russian opposition paid by Browder
Alongside the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Browder abundantly finances the work of a
young lawyer, Alexeï Navalny. Thanks to the help of US ambassador Michael McFaul, the young man
pursued his studies in the USA at Yale in 2010. He created an Anti-Corruption Foundation in order
to promote Browden's version and accuse Putin's administration.
Having become a leader of the political opposition, Navalny and his Foundation directed a first
documentary accusing the family of Prosecutor Chaika of corruption. But although the video is
convincing at first look, it presents no proof of the facts it relates.
Simultaneously, Navalny ordered a second documentary from a Russian film director and member of
the opposition about the " Magnitsky affair ". But this journalist turned against his employer
during the investigation, which was finally broadcast by Russian public television.
Thereafter, William Browder engaged an ex-agent of MI6 in Moscow (1990-93), Christopher Steele,
and the ex-US ambassador to Moscow (2012-14), Michael McFaul.
It so happens that it was Christopher Steele who, in 2006 – while he was with MI6 – accused
President Vladimir Putin of having ordered the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium. In
2016, he also worked – freelance this time – for the US Democratic Party. That was when he wrote
the famous dossier accusing candidate Donald Trump of being under the threat of blackmail by the
Russian secret services [
6
]
; an unwarranted charge which has just resurfaced after the bilateral Summit in Helsinki. We find
Steele once again, in 2018, involved in the Novitchok poisoning of Sergueï Skripal – as a "
consultant " for MI6, he of course accused the inevitable Vladimir Putin.
The Russian riposte
During the US Presidential campaign of 2016, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika attempted to
influence a member of Congress who was open to Russian thinking, Dana Rohrabacher (Republican,
California). He sent her a note concerning his version of the Browder-Magnitsky affair. Russian
lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met the son and son-in-law of candidate Donald Trump at Trump Tower,
in order to inform them that a part of Browder's dirty money was being used to finance the
candidacy of Hillary Clinton [
7
].
Thereafter, William Browder became the main source of the enquiry run by Special Prosecutor
Robert Mueller about possible Russian interference in " US Democracy ". A long time before he
became the Director the FBI, Mueller – who officially has no link to the CIA – had been responsible
for the enquiry on the Lockerbie attack, which he attributed to Mouammar Kadhafi. Let's remember
that Libya never recognised that it was implicated in this affair, although it accepted to pay a
compensation to the victims. Above all, Scottish Justice established the fact that fragments of the
detonator found on site were placed there by the CIA in order to accuse Libya. Mueller used the
meeting of Trump's team with Natalia Veselnitskaya as " proof " of the subordination of Donald
Trump to the Russian Intelligence services.
In the USA, Natalia Veselnitskaya represents the interests of several of Browder's Russian
victims. She also acted in 2014 on behalf of one of the companies that Browder accused of being
connected to " godfather " Dmitry Klyuev. She also raised the question about the manner in which an
agent of Homeland Security, Todd Hyman, had transmitted a trial document without proceeding with
the usual verifications.
There will be no moment of truth
During the US-Russia summit in Helsinki, President Vladimir Putin proposed that his US
counterpart allow US investigators to question those Russian civil servants suspected of
interference in the US Presidential campaign, on the condition that Russian investigators would
also be allowed to question suspects in the USA. Donald Trump is reserving his answer.
However, when the office of Prosecutor Yury Chaika transmitted the list of witnesses to be
questioned, Washington panicked. Not only did Chaika ask to question British subjects William
Browder and Christopher Steele if they should travel in the United States, but also ambassador
Michael McFaul, lawyer Jonathan Winer, researcher David J. Kramer, and finally, agent Todd Hyman.
Jonathan Winer was in charge of the Lockerbie dossier at the State Department during the 1990's.
He is a personal friend of Christopher Steele, and transmitted his reports to the neo-conservatives
for a decade [
8
].
During Bush Jr.'s first term, David J. Kramer played an important role in the management of the
propaganda system for the State Department as well as looking after the stay-behind agents in
Eastern Europe and in Russia. After having worked in various think tanks, he became the president
of Freedom House, and campaigned on the " Magnitsky affair ". He is today a researcher at the
McCain Institute.
Although, so far, nothing enables us to tell which of the Browder and Chaika versions is
accurate, the truth will soon emerge. It is possible that Russian interference may be no more than
fake news, but US interference (by introduction into the crown piece of the Russian economy as well
as via Alexeï Navalny) may in fact be a reality.
In the context of' Washington's unanimous anti-Russian stand, President Trump declines Vladimir
Putin's proposition.
Thierry Meyssan
[
4
]
Note from Yury Chaika Office to Dana Rohrabacher, June 2016.
[
5
]
"
Intouchable, Mr. Browder ?
", par
Israël Shamir, Traduction Maria Poumier,
Entre la plume et l'enclume
(France),
The Unz
Review
(USA),
Réseau Voltaire
, 22 juin 2016.
n 16 November 2009, tax specialist lawyer Sergey Magnitsky died in Matrosskaya
Tishina prison (Moscow). Immediately, the US Press claimed that he had been in possession of
information concerning a State scandal, and had been tortured by the " régime ".
The
Magnitsky Act
The death of Magnitsky shut down the legal procedures that had been launched against him by the
Russian Minister of Justice. Billionaire William ("Bill") Browder declared in Washington that the
tax expert possessed proof that Russian Power had stolen 3 billion dollars from him. Despite
lobbying by Goldman Sachs, the US Congress believed it had clarified the affair, and in 2012
adopted a law sanctioning the Russian personalities suspected of having murdered the lawyer.
Goldman Sachs, which did not believe the information forwarded by the parliamentarians, hired the
lobbying firm Duberstein Group in an attempt to block the vote on the law [
1
].
On this model, in 2016, the Congress extended the "
Magnitsky Act
" to the whole world,
requesting the President to implement sanctions against all people and all states which violate
individual property. Presidents Obama and Trump obeyed, placing about twenty personalities on the
list, including the President of the Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
These two laws were aimed at giving back to the United States the role it had assumed during the
Cold War as defender of individual property, even though they had no communist rival.
The two versions of the " Magnitsky affair "
As for the Russian State Duma, it responded to its US counterpart by forbidding the adoption of
Russian children by US families, and by denouncing the responsibility of US personalities in the
legalisation of torture (the Dima Yakovlev Law, from the name of the Russian child adopted in the
USA who died as a result of negligence by the parents). President Putin applied this text in 2013,
also forbidding ex-US Vice President Dick Cheney access to Russian territory.
The " Magnitsky affair " could have ended there. It seems to be independent of the "
Khodorkovsky affair ", exploited by NATO in order to accuse Russia of interference in Western
democracies by way of disinformation or " fake news " [
2
].
However, the Russian Prosecutor General contests the narrative presented by Wiliam Browder to the
US Congress.
According to William Browder, his company Hermitage Capital invested in Russia, particularly in
Gazprom. He allegedly discovered signs of irregular practices and attempted to warn the Kremlin.
However, his resident's visa was then cancelled. Then his Russian companies were allegedly robbed
by Lieutenant-Colonel Artem Kuznetsov, a civil servant from the Financial Brigade of the Russian
Ministry of the Interior. Kuznetsov apparently seized the property documents during a search, then
used them to register a new owner. Lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who apparently blew the whistle on the
embezzlement, was arrested, tortured and finally died in prison. In the end, Lieutenant-Colonel
Artem Kuznetsov and " godfather " Dmitry Klyuev were allegedly able to deposit the 3 billion stolen
dollars in a Cypriot bank. This is a classic case of theft by the Russian mafia with the help of
the Kremlin [
3
].
This narrative inspired the seventh season of the Showtime TV series,
Homeland
.
On the contrary, according to Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, William Browder illegally
acquired 133 million shares in Gazprom on behalf of the Ziff brothers, via various straw men. Not
only did Browder avoid paying 150 million dollars in taxes, but the acquisition of part of this
crown jewel of the Russian economy is in itself illegal. Furthermore, his financial advisor, Sergey
Magnitsky, who had developed another scam for the same Browder, was arrested and died of a heart
attack in prison [
4
].
It is obviously impossible to tell the truth from the lies in these two versions. However, it is
now recognised that Sergey Magnitsky was not a lawyer working freelance, but was employed by
William Browder's companies. He was not investigating embezzlement, but was tasked by Browder
with the creation of financial structures which would avoid him having to pay taxes in Russia.
For example, the two men imagined remunerating mentally handicapped people as front men in order to
benefit from their tax exempt status. Browder had much experience with tax evasion – which is why
he lived for ten years in Russia with a simple tourist visa, then abandoned his US citizenship and
became a British citizen.
These last elements prove William Browder wrong, and are compatible with Prosecutor Chaika's
accusations. In these conditions, it seems at the least imprudent for the US Congress to have
adopted the
Magnitsky Act
, unless of course the operation was aimed not at defending
individual property, but at hurting Russia [
5
].
A leader of the Russian opposition paid by Browder
Alongside the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Browder abundantly finances the work of a
young lawyer, Alexeï Navalny. Thanks to the help of US ambassador Michael McFaul, the young man
pursued his studies in the USA at Yale in 2010. He created an Anti-Corruption Foundation in order
to promote Browden's version and accuse Putin's administration.
Having become a leader of the political opposition, Navalny and his Foundation directed a first
documentary accusing the family of Prosecutor Chaika of corruption. But although the video is
convincing at first look, it presents no proof of the facts it relates.
Simultaneously, Navalny ordered a second documentary from a Russian film director and member of
the opposition about the " Magnitsky affair ". But this journalist turned against his employer
during the investigation, which was finally broadcast by Russian public television.
Thereafter, William Browder engaged an ex-agent of MI6 in Moscow (1990-93), Christopher Steele,
and the ex-US ambassador to Moscow (2012-14), Michael McFaul.
It so happens that it was Christopher Steele who, in 2006 – while he was with MI6 – accused
President Vladimir Putin of having ordered the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium. In
2016, he also worked – freelance this time – for the US Democratic Party. That was when he wrote
the famous dossier accusing candidate Donald Trump of being under the threat of blackmail by the
Russian secret services [
6
]
; an unwarranted charge which has just resurfaced after the bilateral Summit in Helsinki. We find
Steele once again, in 2018, involved in the Novitchok poisoning of Sergueï Skripal – as a "
consultant " for MI6, he of course accused the inevitable Vladimir Putin.
The Russian riposte
During the US Presidential campaign of 2016, Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika attempted to
influence a member of Congress who was open to Russian thinking, Dana Rohrabacher (Republican,
California). He sent her a note concerning his version of the Browder-Magnitsky affair. Russian
lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met the son and son-in-law of candidate Donald Trump at Trump Tower,
in order to inform them that a part of Browder's dirty money was being used to finance the
candidacy of Hillary Clinton [
7
].
Thereafter, William Browder became the main source of the enquiry run by Special Prosecutor
Robert Mueller about possible Russian interference in " US Democracy ". A long time before he
became the Director the FBI, Mueller – who officially has no link to the CIA – had been responsible
for the enquiry on the Lockerbie attack, which he attributed to Mouammar Kadhafi. Let's remember
that Libya never recognised that it was implicated in this affair, although it accepted to pay a
compensation to the victims. Above all, Scottish Justice established the fact that fragments of the
detonator found on site were placed there by the CIA in order to accuse Libya. Mueller used the
meeting of Trump's team with Natalia Veselnitskaya as " proof " of the subordination of Donald
Trump to the Russian Intelligence services.
In the USA, Natalia Veselnitskaya represents the interests of several of Browder's Russian
victims. She also acted in 2014 on behalf of one of the companies that Browder accused of being
connected to " godfather " Dmitry Klyuev. She also raised the question about the manner in which an
agent of Homeland Security, Todd Hyman, had transmitted a trial document without proceeding with
the usual verifications.
There will be no moment of truth
During the US-Russia summit in Helsinki, President Vladimir Putin proposed that his US
counterpart allow US investigators to question those Russian civil servants suspected of
interference in the US Presidential campaign, on the condition that Russian investigators would
also be allowed to question suspects in the USA. Donald Trump is reserving his answer.
However, when the office of Prosecutor Yury Chaika transmitted the list of witnesses to be
questioned, Washington panicked. Not only did Chaika ask to question British subjects William
Browder and Christopher Steele if they should travel in the United States, but also ambassador
Michael McFaul, lawyer Jonathan Winer, researcher David J. Kramer, and finally, agent Todd Hyman.
Jonathan Winer was in charge of the Lockerbie dossier at the State Department during the 1990's.
He is a personal friend of Christopher Steele, and transmitted his reports to the neo-conservatives
for a decade [
8
].
During Bush Jr.'s first term, David J. Kramer played an important role in the management of the
propaganda system for the State Department as well as looking after the stay-behind agents in
Eastern Europe and in Russia. After having worked in various think tanks, he became the president
of Freedom House, and campaigned on the " Magnitsky affair ". He is today a researcher at the
McCain Institute.
Although, so far, nothing enables us to tell which of the Browder and Chaika versions is
accurate, the truth will soon emerge. It is possible that Russian interference may be no more than
fake news, but US interference (by introduction into the crown piece of the Russian economy as well
as via Alexeï Navalny) may in fact be a reality.
In the context of' Washington's unanimous anti-Russian stand, President Trump declines Vladimir
Putin's proposition.
Thierry Meyssan
[
4
]
Note from Yury Chaika Office to Dana Rohrabacher, June 2016.
[
5
]
"
Intouchable, Mr. Browder ?
", par
Israël Shamir, Traduction Maria Poumier,
Entre la plume et l'enclume
(France),
The Unz
Review
(USA),
Réseau Voltaire
, 22 juin 2016.
If half of what I have come to understand about the Curious Case of Bill Browder is true,
then the "Magnitsky Trio" of Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and Ben Cardin are guilty of
espionage, at a minimum.
Why? Because they know that Browder's story about Sergei Magnitsky is a lie. And that means
that when you tie in the Trump Dossier, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Skripal poisoning
and the rest of this mess, these men are consorting with foreign governments and agencies
against the sitting President.
As Lee Stranahan pointed out recently on Fault Lines, Cardin invited Browder to testify to
Congress in 2017 to push through last year's sanctions bill, a more stringent version of the
expiring Magnitsky Act of 2011, which has since been used to ratchet up pressure on Russia.
I'd read it a few times, because it's about as murky as The Swamp gets. And, still my eyes
glaze over.
The Magnitsky Act and its sequel have been used to support aggressive policy actions by the
U.S. against Russia and destroy the relationship between the world's most prominent militaries
and nuclear powers.
The new bill is said to want to put 'crushing sanctions' on Russia to make 'Putin feel the
heat.' In effect, what this bill wants to do is force President Trump to enforce sanctions
against
the entire Russian state for attempting to do business anywhere in the world.
The new financial penalties would target political figures, oligarchs, family members and
others that "facilitate illicit and corrupt activities" on behalf of Putin.
It would also impose new sanctions on transactions tied to investments in state-owned
energy projects, transactions tied to new Russian debt, and people with the capacity or
ability to support or carry out a "malicious" cyber act.
In addition, if it wasn't clear enough already, that he's no friend of the President, Graham
is trying to tie the President's hands on NATO withdrawal, requiring a two-thirds majority.
Now, why would Graham be worried about that, unless it was something the President was
seriously considering? This is similar to last year's sanctions bill requiring a similar
majority for the President to end the original sanctions placed on Russia in 2014 over the
reunification with Crimea.
And behind it all stands Bill Browder.
Because it has been Browder's one-man campaign to influence members of Congress, the EU and
public opinion the world over against Putin and Russia for the past 10 years over Magnitsky's
death.
Browder's story is the only one we see in the news. And it's never questioned, even though
it has. He continually moves to block films and articles critical of him from seeing
distribution.
Browder is the epicenter around which the insane push for war with Russia revolves as
everyone involved in the attempt to take over Russia in 1999 continues to try and cover their
collective posteriors posterities.
And it is Browder, along with Republic National Bank chief Edmond Safra, who were involved
together in the pillaging of Russia in the 1990's. Browder's firm hired Magintsky as an
accountant (because that's what he was) to assist in the money laundering Heritage Capital was
involved in.
The attempted take over of Russia failed because Yeltsin saw the setup which led him to
appoint Putin as his Deputy Prime Minister.
There was $7 billion that was wired through Bank of New York which involved money stolen
from the IMF loans to Russia. The attempt to takeover Russia by blackmail was set in motion.
As soon as that wire was done, that is when Republic National Bank ran to the Department of
Justice to say it was money-laundering. I believe this started the crisis and Yeltsin was
blackmailed to step down and appoint Boris A. Berezovsky as the head of Russia.
Clearly, Republic National Bank was involved with the US government for they were sending
also skids of $100 bills to Russia. It was written up and called the
Money Plane . Yeltsin then turned to Putin realizing that he had been set up. This is how
Putin became the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia on August 9th, 1999 until August 16th,
1999 when he became the 33rd Prime Minister and heir apparent of Yeltsin.
So, now why, all of a sudden, do we need even stronger sanctions on Russia, ones that would
create untold dislocation in financial markets around the world?
Look at the timeline today and see what's happening.
Earlier this year Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts 13 people associated with
Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll farm, for influencing the 2016 election.
Then Mueller indicts twelve members of Russian intelligence to sabotage the upcoming
summit between Trump and Putin while the Russia Hacked Muh Election narrative was
flagging.
Three days later President Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. There a Putin let
the world know that he would assist Robert Mueller's investigation if in return the U.S.
would assist Russia in returning Bill Browder, who was tried and convicted in absentia for
tax evasion.
All of a sudden Browder's story is all over the alternative press. Browder is all over
U.S. television.
Earlier this week Facebook comes out, after horrific earnings, to tell everyone that IRA
was still at it, though being ever so sneaky, trying to influence the mid-terms by engaging
Democrats and anti-Trumpers to organize... In that release, Facebook let it be known it was
working with the political arm of NATO, The Atlantic Council, to ferret out these dastardly
Russian agents.
And now we have a brand-new shiny sanctions bill intended to keep any rapprochement between
the U.S. and Russia from occurring.
Why is that? What's got them so scared of relations with Russia improving?
Maybe, just maybe, because Putin has all of these people dead to rights and he's informed
Trump of what the real story behind all of this is.
That at its core is a group of very bad people who attempted to steal trillions but only got
away with billions and still have their sights set on destroying Russia for their own
needs.
And Lindsay Graham is their mouthpiece. (all puns intended)
That all of U.S. foreign policy is built on a lie.
That our relationship with Russia was purposefully trashed for the most venal of reasons,
for people like Bill Browder to not only steal billions but then have the chutzpah to steal the
$230 million he would have paid in taxes on those stolen billions.
And the only way to ensure none of those lies are exposed is for Trump to be unable to
change any of it by forcing him to openly side with the Russian President over members of his
own political party.
The proposed sanctions by the Graham bill are so insane that even the Treasury department
thinks they are a bad idea. But, at this point there is nothing Graham won't do for his
owners.
Because they are desperate they will push for open warfare with Russia to push Putin from
power, which is not possible. All of this is nothing more than a sad attempt to hold onto power
long enough to oust Trump from the White House and keep things as horrible as they currently
are.
Because no one gives up power willingly. And the more they are proven to be frauds the more
they will scream for war.
"... if the notion of billions of barrels of proven oil reserves and billions of tons of gold fills your dreams with visions of red-hot cash flow and ice-cold vodka, then Boris Yeltsin just might find some work for you. – Paul Hofheinz , Fortune Magazine, 23 September 1991 [1] ..."
"... the dirty dishonesty of Russia ..."
"... Russia's evil foundation, ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... thousands of Americans went to Russia hoping to help its people attain a better life. The American and Western effort over the last 25 years – to which the United States and Europe devoted billions of dollars – was aimed at helping Russia overcome the horrid legacy of Soviet communism, which left the country on its knees in 1991. The Americans, ..."
"... came for the best of reasons. a generous hand was extended to post-Soviet Russia, offering the best of Western values and know-how. ..."
"... any suspension of debt payments would result in the immediate suspension of urgent food aid and that the ships nearly arrived at the Black Sea ports would turn around. ..."
"... primitive beyond belief ..."
"... parroting the political decisions already decided by the United States ..."
"... The activities of the organization are gussied up in sanctimonious prose about aiding the poor and raising the living standards of the third world. Don't be fooled. These bailouts are really about protecting interests of Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, and Fidelity Investments ..."
"... for inexplicable reasons, ..."
"... harshly worded ..."
"... One cannot really fault the youthful democratic movements for this failure. They were amateurs and innocents with a hazy grasp at best of what they wanted to achieve and no grasp at all of how concretely to achieve it. ..."
"... To be sure, there were unsettling reports of shady dealings during the takeovers, but most observers explained them away as inevitable side effects of such a far-reaching transformation. ..."
"... for the best of reasons ..."
"... Americans, who thought their money was helping a stricken land, have been dishonored; and the Russian people who trusted us are now in debt twice what they were in 1991 and rightly feel themselves betrayed. ..."
"... Alex Krainer is a hedge fund manager and author. His book, banned by Amazon in September 2017 is now available in pdf , kindle , and epub formats at the following link " Grand Deception: Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act and Anti-Russian Sanctions. " Paperback version is now available here . Alex also wrote one book on commodities trading. ..."
The Strangulation of the Russian Economy in the 1990s Was a Deliberate IMF policyAlex Krainer Thu, Aug
2, 2018 | 2,796
64 MORE: History
if the notion of billions of barrels of proven oil reserves and billions of tons of
gold fills your dreams with visions of red-hot cash flow and ice-cold vodka, then Boris
Yeltsin just might find some work for you. – Paul Hofheinz , Fortune Magazine, 23
September 1991
[1]
Shock therapy gave Russia one of the worst and longest economic depressions of the 20th
century, an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe for a peace time crisis, and a criminally
inequitable privatization of public assets. The reasons why things happened this way in Russia
generally aren't well understood in the west. Even among better informed intellectuals, the
failure of shock therapy is often thought to be vaguely related to some sinister flaw in the
Russian society.
It is what Bill Browder characterized as " the dirty dishonesty of Russia ," or "
Russia's evil foundation, " which spawned corruption and criminality of staggering
proportions. In this toxic environment, the sweet fruits of western democracy and capitalism
simply could not grow in spite of the generous benevolence of Russia's western friends.
Such a credulous version of events was never based on any coherent analysis of what
transpired in Russia during the 1990s. Rather, it was based on purposeful perception management
in the Western media. As late as April 2015, Washington Post provided a good example
of this perception management. In an editorial board article, Washington Post informed its
readers that in the 1990s, " thousands of Americans went to Russia hoping to help its
people attain a better life. The American and Western effort over the last 25 years – to
which the United States and Europe devoted billions of dollars – was aimed at helping
Russia overcome the horrid legacy of Soviet communism, which left the country on its knees in
1991. The Americans, " write Washington Post editors, " came for the best of reasons.
a generous hand was extended to post-Soviet Russia, offering the best of Western values and
know-how. "
[2]
Indeed, western role in Russian transition is almost invariably represented as generous
benevolence. While many among Russia's western helpers did come with sincere and honorable
intentions, the whole project, insofar as it was determined by its command and control
structure, was simply a massive, bald-faced criminal enterprise.
IMF's policy dictate
When Jeffrey Sachs drafted his shock therapy recommendations, he estimated that for the
reforms to succeed, Soviet Union would need financial support of about $15 billion per year for
many years. This money was needed for the state to continue administering essential social
services like pensions, health care and food aid for the country's population. But while the
IMF and U.S. government insisted that Moscow abidingly implement the draconian shock therapy
measures, they stubbornly refused to provide the needed financial aid. Sachs also advocated
debt relief for the USSR which, before its collapse in 1991 was already $60 billion behind in
payments to foreign creditors.
When he advised the Bolivian (1985-1986) and Polish (1989-1991) governments in implementing
their own shock therapies, Sachs was able to negotiate a 50% debt write-off for Poland and a
90% write-off for Bolivia. By contrast, Russia would get no debt relief of any kind.
To the contrary, at the G7 summit held in Moscow in November 1991, representatives of the
seven leading western powers insisted that Soviet Union had to continue servicing its external
debts at all cost, even menacing Yegor Gaidar that " any suspension of debt payments would
result in the immediate suspension of urgent food aid and that the ships nearly arrived at the
Black Sea ports would turn around. "
[3] Moscow's endeavor to comply with these payment obligations completely depleted the
government's treasury within only three months' time (by February of 1992).
Sachs later reported that in December of 1991 he held discussions with the IMF urging its
representatives to advance the financial support needed for Russia's transition, but they
insisted that Russia didn't need any such assistance and told him that they had instructed the
G7 accordingly. Sachs found the methodology on which the IMF had based their decision, "
primitive beyond belief ," which led him to assume that the IMF was simply "
parroting the political decisions already decided by the United States ."
He was right, of course: as we now know, US aid policy for Russia was indeed determined by
two key US government agencies: the Treasury Department run by Robert Rubin with Lawrence
Summers in charge of Russian affairs, and the National Security Council.
[4]
To be sure, IMF did advance some loans to Russia during its transition period, but the
amounts in question were too small and came too late to provide any meaningful economic or
social relief. In all, between 1993 and 1999 the IMF lent Russia between $30 and $40 billion, a
far cry from the $15 billion per year that were thought necessary to support her
economic reforms. Furthermore, the bulk of IMF loans were given to the oligarch owned private
banks which used them to fund capital flight, bond market speculation and betting against the
ruble.
[5]
There were further problematic aspects to the IMF loans: in 1995, with hardly any conditions
attached, IMF advanced Russia a $6.7 billion loan through its Systematic Transformation
Facility. Practically the entire $6.7 billion sum was used to finance Yeltsin's military
assault on Chechnya.
[6] That operation was a disaster but domestically it served the purpose of distracting the
public attention from economic problems and political corruption. IMF's very next loan to
Russia was a thinly veiled mission to rescue Yeltsin and his government from Russia's
democracy. Namely the Chechen misadventure cost Yeltsin dearly in the December 1995
parliamentary elections and his party suffered a devastating defeat to the Communists.
The president himself had become deeply unpopular. With his approval ratings languishing
between 4% and 6%,
[7] Yeltsin was in real danger of losing the June 1996 presidential elections, which again
risked reversing Russia's transition and nullifying the privatization of its economy.
To avert this, Yeltsin's cabinet hired a team of American political strategists with ties to
the Clinton administration to advise his election campaign. As the Americans got to work in
March of 1996, one of the first things they realized was that the Russian people were furious
about the government's failure to pay state salaries and pensions for months on end. Washington
got the signal and the IMF took action: it promptly released a $1 billion tranche of its next,
$10.2 billion loan so that Yeltsin could pay all the salaries and pensions his government owed.
The loan served the purpose of improving Yeltsin's unpopularity and making the rigged election
appear a bit less suspect.
IMF approved its largest, $22.6 billion loan to Russia as late as 20thJuly 1998 as its
bankrupt government slid inexorably toward default. The loan served two key purposes: large
part of it was a gift to the oligarchs who helped themselves to the funds to convert their
hoard of rubles into USD.
Within four weeks they bought $6.5 billion and transferred most of it to foreign banks.
[8] Most of the rest of IMF loan was a stealth bailout for western financial institutions
which had some $200 billion worth of loans and investments in Russia. The banks feared the
prospect of Russian default which would leave them with crippling losses. These risks became
even more acute in the aftermath of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis that would engulf
Russia in 1998.
In a testimony before the U.S. Congress, veteran investor Jim Rogers characterized IMF's
assistance to Russia as follows: " The activities of the organization are gussied up in
sanctimonious prose about aiding the poor and raising the living standards of the third world.
Don't be fooled. These bailouts are really about protecting interests of Chase Manhattan, J.P.
Morgan, and Fidelity Investments ."
[9]
In addition to loading Russia up with unproductive debt, IMF also engineered Russia's
hyperinflation and liquidity crisis. After eliminating price controls, IMF obliged Russia to
maintain the ruble as the common currency for all Soviet Union successor states, giving each of
the 15 new countries the incentive to issue ruble credits for their own benefit while fueling
inflation for all others. Sachs reported that he strenuously argued with the IMF against this
measure but " for inexplicable reasons, " he was consistently rebuked.
The result was a one-year delay in the introduction of national currencies for the former
Soviet republics, pushing Russia into hyperinflation and needlessly prolonging its economic
depression. At this same time, the IMF engineered Russia's staggering liquidity crisis that
made it almost impossible for enterprises to pay their suppliers and workers. Under IMF's
dictate, Russian economy struggled along on less than one sixth of the currency required to
operate an economy of its size.
The extent of IMF's iron-fisted control over Russian economy was exemplified in a letter
from the IMF's representative Yusuke Horaguchi to Russia's central bank chairman Sergei Dubinin
. The letter specified the precise schedule of Russia's ruble supply along with " harshly
worded " instructions regarding bank credits, the state budget, energy policy, price
levels, trade tariffs and agricultural policies. Horaguchi's letter even included a warning
that any acts of the parliament contravening the IMF mandates would be vetoed by president
Yeltsin.
[10]
It is clear that shock "therapy" was little more than a relentless, cruel strangulation of
Russia's economy to facilitate looting of her vast industrial and resource wealth .
Nonetheless, most Western-published analyses of this episode tended to treat it as failure of
good intentions. While lamenting the outcomes and certain questionable practices, most analysts
essentially attribute the failure of Russian transition to honest errors, Russia's endemic
corruption, and perhaps inexperience in many of the drama's protagonists.
In New York Review of Books, Robert Cotrell provides a typical example: " One cannot
really fault the youthful democratic movements for this failure. They were amateurs and
innocents with a hazy grasp at best of what they wanted to achieve and no grasp at all of how
concretely to achieve it. "
[11] Goldman Marshall of Harvard and the Council of Foreign Relations wrote: " To be
sure, there were unsettling reports of shady dealings during the takeovers, but most observers
explained them away as inevitable side effects of such a far-reaching transformation.
"
Naturally, Marshall fails to detail how or where he polled these "most observers," but his
message to the readers is unmistakable: move along folks, there's nothing to see here –
especially pay no attention to the fact that many of those thousands of Westerners who came to
Russia " for the best of reasons ," including Bill Browder , Andrei Schleifer and
Jonathan Hay ,
[12] returned from Russia as multi-millionaires. Financial reporter Anne Willamson , who
covered Russia for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal rightly remarked in her
Congressional testimony that, " Americans, who thought their money was helping a stricken
land, have been dishonored; and the Russian people who trusted us are now in debt twice what
they were in 1991 and rightly feel themselves betrayed. "
McFaul lies. and that raises question about his connections to intelligence agencies as
well.
In no way a regular businessman would lobby for Magnitsky act, using false evidence and
blatant lies (for example that Magnitsky was a lawyer; Browder admitted that this is a lie in his
court deposition. This was yet another false flag operation with fingerprints of MI6
It really is peculiar what's happened to these dimwit Dems. I used to listen to Thom
Hartmann and Rachel Maddow when they were on Air America, and their main political positions
were for working people. Now, all they do is partisan politics which they don't seem to
understand benefits only the Deep State war party.
Incidentally, State of the Nation website, http://www.sott.net , has an article by Alex Krainer, who wrote
the book about Bill Browder's crooked dealings in Russia. His book, which was suppressed by
Browder first, i think is "Grand Deception", now available from Red Pill Press for $25 (and
must be selling well because it's being reprinted). I wrote this hastily but you'll see it on
sott.net. Russia's resurgence under Putin is nothing short of astounding.
Also, there is a video on Youtube, "The Rise of Putin and the Fall of the Russian Jewish
Oligarchs", 2 parts. I only saw the beginning showing how the Russian people were given state
vouchers that led to the oligarchs buying them up for their own profit and plunging Russians
into shock therapy disaster instigated by IMF and other US led monetary agencies including
Harvard. This is why it is so incredible how Americans receive political "perception control"
when the truth is exactly opposite of what they are being told. At least more people are
realizing the lies being told about Russia and Putin.
BROWDER MOVIE. A Russian documentary maker believed everything Browder said and started a
film to justify him. As it progressed, he discovered anomalies and came to realise the story
was false.
See here . It is moving around the Net now and it's worth looking for because Browder's
story is a primary founding myth of the Putin hysteria. The film is fatal to Browder's
story.
Much has been made, including in this post, of the excellent organization of Russian
forces and Russian military technology.
I have been re-investigating an open-source relational database system known as PosgreSQL
(variously), and I remember finding perhaps a decade ago a very useful whole text search
feature of this system which I vaguely remember was written by a Russian and, for that
reason, mildly distrusted by me.
Come to find out that the principle developers and maintainers of PostgreSQL are Russian.
OMG. Double OMG, because the reason I chose it in the first place is that it is the best
non-proprietary RDBS out there and today is supported on Google Cloud, AWS, etc.
The US has met an equal or conceivably a superior, case closed. Trump's thoroughly odd
behavior with Putin is just one but a very obvious one example of this. Of course, Trump's
nationalistic blather is creating a "base" of people who believe in the godliness of the US.
They are in for a very serious disappointment.
After the iron curtain fell, there was a big demand for Russian-trained programmers because
they could program in a very efficient and "light" manner that didn't demand too much of the
hardware, if I remember correctly. It's a bit of chicken-and-egg problem, though. Russia,
throughout 20th century, had problem with developing small, effective hardware, so their
programmers learned how to code to take maximum advantage of what they had, with their
technological deficiency in one field giving rise to superiority in another.
Russia has plenty of very skilled, very well-trained folks and their science and math
education is, in a way, more fundamentally and soundly grounded on the foundational stuff
than US (based on my personal interactions anyways). Russian tech ppl should always be viewed
with certain amount of awe and respect...although they are hardly good on everything.
Well said. Soviet university training in "cybernetics" as it was called in the late 1980s
involved two years of programming on blackboards before the students even touched an actual
computer. It gave the students an understanding of how computers works down to the bit
flipping level. Imagine trying to fuzz code in your head.
I recall flowcharting entirely on paper before committing a program to punched cards. I used
to do hex and octal math in my head as part of debugging core dumps. Ah, the glory days.
Honeywell once made a military computer that was 10 bit. That stumped me for a while, as
everything was 8 or 16 bit back then.
That used to be fairly common in the civilian sector (in US) too: computing time was
expensive, so you had to make sure that the stuff worked flawlessly before it was committed.
No opportunity to seeing things go wrong and do things over like much of how things happen
nowadays. Russians, with their hardware limitations/shortages, I imagine must have been much
more thorough than US programmers were back in the old days, and you could only get there by
being very thoroughly grounded n the basics.
"... We should not be shy, we should offer tough resistance. Resistance not even to such statements but rather the danger of our country being split up that arises after them ..."
" We should not be shy, we should offer tough resistance. Resistance not even to such
statements but rather the danger of our country being split up that arises after them ,"
said Kalashnikov. The Russian lawmaker also noted that the call to split up Russia clearly
contradicted earlier assurances from Western nations that they have no intention of capturing
Russian territory and breaking it into parts. He went on to say that it's important for Russia
to counter NATO's aggressive plans and not simply trust assurances from aggressive nations.
According to Russian Defense Ministry reports, the first half of 2018 saw NATO conduct 13
large-scale military exercises – involving more than 40,000 servicemen and 2000 units of
combat hardware – near the bloc's south-western borders. Russia maintained the same
military strength on the " contact line " with NATO, but had to increase their combat
ability through more intensive training and the introduction of new, more effective
weapons.
Last week Russian defense chief Sergey Shoigu told an assembly of senior generals and
officers that NATO countries have never stopped carrying out actions aimed at preventing Russia
from becoming an independent player in international politics and geopolitical competitors to
the nations of the Western military bloc. He also accused NATO of using all spheres of human
activity such as politics, economics and even culture and sports to impose its anti-Russian
agenda on as many people as possible.
"... This silly article is proof, as if more was needed that what passes for Russia scholarship in the US is little more than politicized group-think. ..."
"... Russia has risen from utter economic, political, and societal collapse (gold reserves, factories, military secrets, science labs stripped bare and shipped or brain-drained out of the country; millions of pre-mature deaths; plunging birth rates) to recover, within a mere 20 years, to the point where the population has stabilized and the nation can credibly hold its own again on the world stage. Infrastructure is being rebuilt and modernized, the military has been restructured and re-equipped, pensions and salaries have risen 3 or 4-fold. ..."
"Vladimir Putin rode a counter-wave of anti-Western nationalism to power in Moscow."
Uh, no. Putin came to power at a time when Russia seemed to be falling apart, quite
literally. There was war in Chechnya, open criminal activity on the streets, and clear social
decay. Putin's popularity begins with his address to the nation after the bombing of the
Moscow metro, promising that the government (which he did not then lead) would chase those
responsible down and kill them, even if that meant chasing them into outhouses. The
relationship between the bombing and Putin's rise is so well-known that the conspiracy
theorists who have Jay Nordlinger's ear over at National Review claim that the bombing was a
set up by Putin's pals in the FSB, precisely to bring Putin to power.
My wife is Russian, from the city of Kazan in the Tatar Republic (part of Russia; it's
complicated), and when we were merely pen pals in 2003 she wrote me what it was like. It was
bad, very bad. At one point her entire neighborhood was placed under curfew on account of
open warfare between criminal gangs. And of course when we visit the cemetery today one sees
the striking spike in tombstones whose date of death is at some point in the mid- to late
90's, when it all seemed to be going to pieces and the government didn't even pay its own
employees for half a year.
Today, by contrast, Russians can walk the streets more or less without fear, count on a
paycheck, read in the news how their country has sent yet another capsule of Western
astronauts to the international space station (because Westerners haven't been able to do
that for the better part of a decade, thanks to Bush and Obama), and even find jobs in a
successful tech sector (Kaspersky, JetBrains, Yandex, the list goes on).
But, hey, if you want to fantasize that Putin's rise is thanks to anti-Western sentiment,
you go ahead and do that.
One other comment, if I may. I share the concern most Westerners have about Russia's seizure
of Crimea. But where is our concern about Turkey's 40-plus-year occupation of northern
Cyprus, also sparked by internal political disorder on the island? Why is it alright for a
NATO country to invade another nation and prop up its separatists, expel the inhabitants of a
disfavored ethnic group -- in this case, the Greeks?
Shame on TAC for publishing this garbage. For one, Putin more or less saved Russia as a
sovereign state, it is easy to forget the sorry condition Russia was in at the turn of the
century. Without him, Russia would've most likely been dismembered or simply colonized by the
West and China. He has performed admirably in the face of massive odds. Russia will still
exist in 100 years as the state of the Russian and other native people of its land –
can the same be said of the United States? Russia is slowly climbing its way out of the pit
of despair created by 80 years of Communism, the United States is crawling into the very same
pit.
I am much more concerned that voter roll purges, suppression of the vote, Citizen's United
Dark Money and folks like the Kochs and Addelson are undermining US democracy than the
Russians. As for the aggression of military machines around the world, the US wins hands
down.
Like Fran my inclination was to bail after the first paragraph but I pushed on.
In the first paragraph Mr Desch lays out his position which is well within the bounds of
polite discussion that Russia is a corrupt oligarchy but don't worry because it's an economic
and military basketcase.
Where to start?
1. Corrupt kleptocracy. The Russian oligarchy/ mafia was a biproduct of the
privatization binge that followed the collapse of the USSR. This evolved under the disastrous
Yeltsin aided and abetted by US elites. The case of William Browder is instructive. Putin has
taken significant measures to reassert government control and has greatly improved the lot of
the average Russian.
2. Political freedom. Putin did not inherit a developed liberal democracy. Russia
needs to be judged in the context of its own historical timeline in this regard not compared
to western democracies. Do you prefer Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov? In contrast compare the
state and trajectory of US democratic institutions to, say the 1970s.
3. Human rights. Again the situation in Russia vis a vis human rights needs to be
judged in terms of Russia's history not against Western nations with a long-standing
tradition of human rights and political freedoms. That said, the illusion of political
repression is largely overstated. For example Putin is routinely accused of murdering
journalists but no real proof is ever offered. Instead, the statement is made again in this
article as though it were self evident.
4. Foreign aggression. This is my favorite because it flies in the face of
observable reality to the point of being ridiculous. Russia did not invade Ukraine. It
provided support to ethnic Russians in Ukraine who rebelled after the illegal armed overthrow
of the Russian leaning democratically elected president.That coup was directly supported by
the United States. Far from ratcheting up tensions Russia has consistently pressed for the
implementation of the Minsk accords. Putin is not interested in becoming responsible for the
economic and political basket case which is Ukraine. The "largely bloodless" occupation of
Crimea was actually a referendum in which the citizens of Crimea overwhelmingly supported
annexation to Russia. Again This result makes sense in light of even a basic understanding of
Russian history. Finally, in the case of Georgia Russia engaged after Georgia attacked what
was essentially a Russian protectorate. This was the conclusion reached by an EU
investigation.
Russia's so-called aggressive foreign-policy has been primarily in response to NATOs
continuous push eastward and the perceived need to defend ethnic Russians from corrupt
ultranationalist governments in former republics of the USSR. This is what Putin was talking
about when he called the dissolution of the USSR one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th
century – the fact that, overnight 20 million Russians found themselves living in
foreign countries. It wasn't about longing for a Russian empire.
As for the current state of Russias military capabilities, Mr Desch Would do well to read
Pepe Escobar's recent article in the Asia Times. Russian accomplishments in Syria illustrated
a level of technology and strategic effectiveness that rivals anything the US can do. Name
one other nation – other than the US – that can design and build a world class
6th generation fighter jet or develop its own space program. Even Germany can't do that.
This silly article is proof, as if more was needed that what passes for Russia
scholarship in the US is little more than politicized group-think.
VG1959
"It is in the pursuit of empire that Putin, like Napoleon or Hitler before him, threatens the
stability of Europe and by extension world peace."
Ah! ha!ha! Right.
Like Russia with a population of 150 million persons inhabiting a land mass that stretches
across 9 or 10 time zones, from the Arctic pole to the Black Sea is chafing for "lebensraum"
!?
No, Russia just wants to develop what it already owns. And, trying to do it on the
strength of their own efforts (no overseas colonies filling the coffers), on a GDP as
Winston, above, has pointed out which is smaller than that some US states. They're focussed,
not on grabbing tiny, constipated territories like Estonia. Latvia, and Lithuania (full of
Nazi sympathizers), but on bringing back to life those ancient trade routes which are their
inheritance from the past (the Silk Road, primarily).
Why not just leave them alone and see what they can do? Those who have been relentlessly
picking fault with Russia (and North Korea) might want to put down their megaphones and start
taking notes.
What I mean is: pause for a moment to consider that:
1. Russia has risen from utter economic, political, and societal collapse (gold
reserves, factories, military secrets, science labs stripped bare and shipped or
brain-drained out of the country; millions of pre-mature deaths; plunging birth rates) to
recover, within a mere 20 years, to the point where the population has stabilized and the
nation can credibly hold its own again on the world stage. Infrastructure is being rebuilt
and modernized, the military has been restructured and re-equipped, pensions and salaries
have risen 3 or 4-fold.
2. North Korea, in 1953, had been so destroyed by war that no structures over a single
story were left standing (and American generals were actually barfing into their helmets at
the horror of what had been done to those people). The DPRK authorities, helpless to assist
the population, could only advise to dig shelters underground to survive the winter. Yet, 70
years later, under international sanctions designed to starve those traumatized people into
surrender, North Korea has restored its infrastructure, built modern cities, and developed a
military apparatus able to credibly resist constant threats from abroad.
See: rather than picking nits to find things that are not yet perfectly hunky-dory with
the governing structures/systems in those countries, I'm taking notes!!
Because, I'm convinced that if those people (those nations) were able to do what they've
done with the time and resources they've had to work with, there is absolutely no reason and
no excuse for our rich nations of "the West" to be caught in a nightmare of austerity
budgeting, crumbling infrastructure, collapsing pensions, and spiralling debt.
Funny how the English speaking world SO resisst learning something that could actually do
us a whole lot of good. I don't know who coined the terms "stiffnecked" and "bloodyminded",
but it sure describes us!
"From Moscow's perspective, the events in Kiev in late 2013 and 2014 looked suspiciously like
a Western-backed coup."
Gee, ya think? Kinda reminds one of the 1996 Russian election. But, hey, don't broadcast
this because, after all, too many people might start, er, noticing.
"... So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the hook. ..."
Yes indeed, first Britain, and now Russia has pantsed the US too. In a virtuosic dick
move, they exposed a CIA spook who's implicated not only in Secret Agent Browder's war
propaganda ( http://russiahouse.org/current_news.php?language=eng&id_current=1454
) but in CIA crimes against humanity -- specifically, 'legal pretexts for manifestly illegal
acts."
David Kramer, Tufts/Harvard Political Science/Russian studies, **PNAC** , DoS focal point,
then CIA's famous captive NGO **Freedom House** , and a featherbed job at the McCain
Institute for Freedom, Democracy, and Abandoning Thousands of MIAs in Vietnam to Die Slow
Agonizing Deaths in Penal Camps.
Here he is talking to his co-conspirator Robert Otto, "Only idiots like Kerry think we
have common interests in Syria."
Needless to say, Kramer wouldn't know a human right from a bar of soap. He's a
knuckledragger. CIA sent Kramer to DRL when Alfreda Bikowsky got her tit caught in the
crimes-against-humanity wringer for systematic and widespread torture.
The US was five years late reporting to the Committee Against Torture and got a
mind-boggling eight (8) follow-on inquiries for urgent derogations of non-derogable rights.
So Kramer had to think fast and make up some bullshit why simulated live burial, object rape,
death by dryboard suffocation, and penis-slitting is not torture. Kramer is not the brightest
bulb, but that's not a hard job. During the Bush administration all the delegation did was
say, "The US does not Torture," robotically over and over.
So Kramer is a good example of how CIA runs the State Department. When a CIA vital
interest like impunity comes up, they parachute a mole in to get their criminals off the
hook.
"... "a calculated attempt to harm our campaign and to make people doubt the legacy of Sergey Magnitsky," ..."
"... "This is a core issue about getting points of view into the public domain," ..."
"... I believe Magnitsky died ..."
"... Questions remain, but the fact that he was not killed, as Mr Browder says, by the same people who investigated his case and had a 'motive' to make him silent as a whistleblower – this is totally certain. ..."
"... "The story of Magnitsky turned out to be made-up," ..."
"... "I saw facts that do not add up, that prove that the story of Magnitsky was faked by Browder," ..."
"... "There is no evidence that he [Magnitsky] was killed or even was beaten," ..."
"... "I am a critic of the Russian authorities and I continue to be this critic, but in this particular case, the West made a mistake by adopting the Magnitsky Act and the Magnitsky resolutions, as they are based on a made-up story," ..."
"... "it is not in the interests of the US to remain trammelled by prejudice against Russia." ..."
"... "I thought I was filming about great the whistleblower Magnitsky. But it became my story of coming together basically with a lie, and with a lot of selfishness, and cynicism," ..."
"... "You have become a foot soldier of the propaganda war," ..."
"... "I am ashamed for you, Andrei. You will have to live with that." ..."
"... "I am a critic of the Russian regime and still am. I had a sort of political affiliation to Browder and his friends," ..."
"... "It goes against your ideology and your worldview to say that actually the Russian cops did not kill Magnitsky, the Russian cops didn't steal the money. Russia is still a very corrupt country, but in this case it was different." ..."
Despite
threats of a libel lawsuit, a documentary about the Magnitsky case by a prominent critic of the
Russian government has been shown in Washington. The film rejects the narrative about the case
accepted in the West, on which the US Magnitsky Act is based. The film, titled 'The Magnitsky
Act – Behind the Scenes', was presented to the public for the first time on Monday at the
Newseum, a private museum dedicated to the news industry and freedom of speech in Washington,
DC. The two-hour production is part documentary, part dramatization of the events that surround
the death of Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky six years ago. Read more After Magnitsky: Dead
lawyer's boss Browder and his legal hurdles – now in US
Magnitsky worked as an accountant for US-British investor William F. Browder, who made
millions in Russia during the 1990s, but was later accused of tax evasion and fled the country.
The lawyer was detained by the Russian police as part of a separate fraud investigation and
died in police custody in November 2009.
Browder claimed that Magnitsky had been investigating corrupt police officers and was thrown
into jail and murdered by them. He declared a crusade against what he called endemic corruption
in the Russian government and lobbied across Europe and the US for punishment of the
individuals whom he accused of involvement in Magnitsky's death.
In 2012 the US passed an act named after the Russian lawyer, which imposed sanctions against
40 Russian citizens – a move that Moscow saw as blatantly anti-Russian, and apparently
retaliated against by banning the adoption of Russian orphans by US citizens.
'Story of
coming together with lie, selfishness & cynicism'
Director Andrei Nekrasov struggled for months to have his controversial work shown to the
public. Scheduled screenings in three European venues, including the European Parliament, were
canceled because Browder threatened multimillion-dollar libel lawsuits against producers or
would-be broadcasters of the film.
Browder opposes the film because he believes it to be "a calculated attempt to harm our
campaign and to make people doubt the legacy of Sergey Magnitsky," as he told
euobserver.com back in April.
Newseum was threatened in the same way, but rejected the pressure, saying that publishing
Nekrasov's film was an issue of freedom of speech.
"This is a core issue about getting points of view into the public domain,"
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who moderated the event, told the audience before the
screening.
Nekrasov says he wanted to make a docudrama film about Magnitsky ever since he heard of his
story. He received funding for the project from eight European film foundations and state
broadcasters and got in touch with Browder as part of his work.
But he found inconsistencies in the evidence presented by Browder's campaign to back his
story, saying most of it was circumstantial at best. When he confronted the businessman about
them, he said Browder broke off all contact and started to oppose the film.
The director believes that the narrative of Magnitsky as the brave whistleblower killed by
corrupt Russian cops, as it was accepted in the West, is a scam by Browder, who capitalized on
the lawyer's death to shield himself from all past and future accusations from Russian law
enforcement, which he could claim to be politically motivated.
" I believe Magnitsky died ," Nekrasov told journalists in response to a question
on whether he believed the lawyer was killed or died. " Questions remain, but the fact that
he was not killed, as Mr Browder says, by the same people who investigated his case and had a
'motive' to make him silent as a whistleblower – this is totally certain. "
"The story of Magnitsky turned out to be made-up," Nekrasov told journalists as he
commented on revelations he made during the making of his film. "I saw facts that do not
add up, that prove that the story of Magnitsky was faked by Browder," he added.
Documents show that the evidence presented by Browder as proof that Magnitsky was a
whistleblower was in fact a transcript of Magnitsky's interrogations, which were conducted
before he made his statements, Nekrasov claimed, stressing that police officers had no motive
for killing Magnitsky as he did not expose them.
"There is no evidence that he [Magnitsky] was killed or even was beaten," the film
director told journalists.
"I am a critic of the Russian authorities and I continue to be this critic, but in this
particular case, the West made a mistake by adopting the Magnitsky Act and the Magnitsky
resolutions, as they are based on a made-up story," Nekrasov said, adding that "it is
not in the interests of the US to remain trammelled by prejudice against Russia."
"I thought I was filming about great the whistleblower Magnitsky. But it became my story
of coming together basically with a lie, and with a lot of selfishness, and cynicism,"
Nekrasov told RT in May, when the screening of the film was cancelled at the last moment in
Brussels.
The director's view didn't go well with some of the first viewers of the film, including
Russian opposition politicians and rights activists.
"You have become a foot soldier of the propaganda war," exclaimed Ilya Yashin, a
veteran opposition figure in Russia. "I am ashamed for you, Andrei. You will have to live
with that."
The outcry was perhaps to be expected. Nekrasov himself has been a critic of the Russian
government for years. Some of his earlier works explored alleged involvement of the Kremlin in
very serious issues, including the Chechnya war, the murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko, corruption
in security agencies and others.
His documentaries, both political and otherwise, were praised by critics and won a number of
awards, including the prestigious German Grimme-Preis award. Georgia named him person of the
year 2009 for a film about the 2008 war against Russia.
"I am a critic of the Russian regime and still am. I had a sort of political affiliation
to Browder and his friends," Nekrasov said of his latest film. "It goes against your
ideology and your worldview to say that actually the Russian cops did not kill Magnitsky, the
Russian cops didn't steal the money. Russia is still a very corrupt country, but in this case
it was different."Where to
watchSchedule Subscribe to RT
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I have read Alex Krainer's book. It is a devastating critique of Browder, which exposes him
as the corrupt thug he is. Browder is no more interested in "democratizing" Russia than the
U.S. Deep State is in protecting the integrity of the U.S. election process! That Browder was
the "star witness" for the Congress before it overwhelmingly passed the latest sanctions bill
against Russia shows why it is important that he be exposed.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know something about the networks and
individuals acting to prevent a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia.
At the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President
Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving
potential criminal cases involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators
from Washington and Moscow to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in
indictments prepared by the respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American
nomenklatura was that it was a horrible idea as it would potentially require U.S. officials to
answer questions from Russians about their activities.
Putin argued, not unreasonably, that if Washington wants to extradite and talk to any of the
twelve recently indicted GRU officers the Justice Department has named then reciprocity is in
order for Americans and other identified individuals who are wanted by the Russian authorities
for illegal activity while in Russia. And if Russian officials are fair game, so are American
officials.
"... Included in the documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is a one-page document submitted by Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump's 2016 effort. Manafort was serving in that role on June 9, 2016, when he joined Donald Trump Jr. and campaign adviser Jared Kushner in a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney who had promised incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Those notes, apparently taken on Manafort's phone , are as follows. ..."
"... Offshore -- Cyprus ..."
"... Not invest -- loan ..."
"... Value in Cyprus as inter ..."
"... Active sponsors of RNC ..."
"... Browder hired Joanna Glover ..."
"... Tied into Cheney ..."
"... Russian adoption by American families ..."
"... In the absence of other context, the notes are cryptic and include words that certainly seem to wave red flags. "Offshore," "Illici[t]" -- even an apparent mention of former vice president Richard B. Cheney. ..."
Included in the documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is a
one-page document submitted by Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump's
2016 effort. Manafort was serving in that role on June 9, 2016, when he joined Donald Trump Jr.
and campaign adviser Jared Kushner in a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney who had promised
incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
In the absence of other context, the notes are cryptic and include words that certainly
seem to wave red flags. "Offshore," "Illici[t]" -- even an apparent mention of former vice
president Richard B. Cheney.
"... [ Note by the Saker : for my review of Alex Krainer's book please click here ] ..."
"... "I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is." ― Nancy Farmer, "The House of the Scorpion" ..."
"... Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch. Nay, you may kick it about all day, and it will be round and full at evening. ..."
"... Alex Krainer is a hedge fund manager based in Monaco. His book, "The Killing of William Browder" may still be available in paperback at Book Depository , Barnes&Noble (USA), Amazon.fr , Amazon.co.uk , or ..."
[ Note by the Saker : for my review of Alex Krainer's book please
click here ]
"I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can
lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark
places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is."
― Nancy Farmer, "The House of the Scorpion"
In January 2015 I received a book titled "Red Notice" written by Bill Browder, once a hedge
fund manager running Hermitage Capital the largest foreign-owned hedge fund in Russia. In the
past, my path had crossed with Browder's on two occasions. In 2005, I was invited to his
presentation, only days before he was expelled from Russia. On that occasion Browder surprised
me because he was the first credible person I ever heard speaking positively about Vladimir
Putin. The next time I met Browder was in 2010 during an investment conference in Monaco. This
time he was very anti-Putin. When I received his book, it was recommended to me as an excellent
read.
Through his book, Browder presents himself in glowing colors. By contrast, he portrays
Russia as a sinister, backward tyranny and President Putin as the greediest, most ruthless
tyrant since Genghis Khan. The book's main plot shapes up as an appealing story about the
struggle of good against evil, about a lone maverick (Browder himself), taking on a powerful
network of dangerous criminals and corrupt government officials in selfless pursuit of justice.
It would be a beautiful story – if only it were true.
I was familiar with Parts of Browder's story, so his tale seemed fishy to me. A few days
after reading it I had to re-read it from the beginning. Sure enough, I discovered quite a
number of things that didn't add up which prompted me to do some research of my own. Much about
it bothered me enough that I ended up writing a whole book which I titled "The Killing of
William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder's Dangerous Deception." In August of this year I
finally finished it and self-published it on Amazon.com.
My book's main object is to unmask Browder's brazen and dangerous deception. Beyond this,
I've also sought to put his story into proper context by including a rather detailed account of
the relevant events that led to the collapse of the USSR, Russia's subsequent transition from
Communism to Capitalism and what
17 years of Vladimir Putin's leadership have changed . I've also included a section
discussing the person and character of Vladimir Putin (since Browder relentlessly demonizes
him). The book's last chapter discusses the history of the relations between the U.S. and
Russia from the beginnings of the 19 th century, including the U.S.
Civil War when Russia came to Abraham Lincoln's aid and played the key role in preserving the
Union and what the future relations between the U.S. and Russia might, or should be.
As it turned out, my book was surprisingly well received by its readers and during the first
few weeks it received very encouraging reader reviews (seven five-star and one four-star
review). Unfortunately, by mid-September "The Killing of William Browder" came up on Browder
team's radar and my problems began. It seems that in the free world, the freedom of expression
comes with some restrictions. Exposing Bill Browder is one of them.
On 13 th September, University of Tulsa professor Jeremy Kuzmarov cited some of
the materials from my book in his own Hffington Post article about Bill Browder, titled
"Raising the Curtain on the Browder-Magnitsky Story." I was flattered by that article, but
Huffington Post scrubbed it from their website within hours. A week later, Amazon's publishing
company, CreateSpace "suppressed" my book, purging it from Amazon.com website and from its
Kindle store.
CreateSpace explained that a third party claimed that my book "may contain defamatory
content," and that to resolve the issues I needed to contact Mr. Jonathan M. Winer, Mr.
Browder's legal counsel. Mr. Winer's word was all that was necessary for Amazon to oblige and
remove my book from its bookstore. My protest and subsequent communications with CreateSpace
had no effect and my only venue was to "work" with Browder's lawyers to "resolve the issues."
In other words, I was put in the situation to have Browder censor my book and decide on whether
it could be published or not. At first I rejected idea and refused to contact Mr. Winer
offering instead my book for free to whoever requested a copy. But subsequently I decided to
write to Mr. Winer anyway to find out what, if anything went wrong. So far, I have received no
response.
This is not the first time Bill Browder – and whoever is backing him – has
effectively censored what the Western public may or may not know about his story. In 2016,
Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov made the documentary film, "The Magnitsky Act – Behind
the Scenes."
Over the years, Nekrasov had built a reputation for producing documentaries that were
critical of the Russian government, and with the Magnitsky affair, he initially followed
Browder's narrative of the events and even envisioned Browder as the film's narrator. But his
research into the subject turned up a number of problems with Browder's story. Nekrasov reached
out to him for an explanation, but was unable to get in touch with Browder for several months.
Nekrasov finally tracked down Browder at a book signing event where he tried and failed to get
clarifications from him. Ultimately however, Nekrasov managed to meet with Browder and with the
cameras rolling, he began to lay out his findings. As he did so, Browder became visibly vexed
until at one moment he abruptly interrupted Nekrasov with an accusation that he was spreading
Russian propaganda.
When Nekrasov's film was completed, Browder took aggressive action to block its screenings.
With threats of lawsuits, he prevented an already scheduled screening to a group of Members of
the European Parliament in Brussels. He did the same with another screening in Norway, and even
managed to pressure the Franco-German television network "Arte" to call off the showing of
Nekrasov's film on its channel. In June 2016, Browder tried to force The Newseum in Washington DC to cancel the screening of
Nekrasov's film. Thankfully, The Newseum, whose laudable mission is to promote freedom of
expression and "the five freedoms of the First Amendment to the U.S. Consitution," refused to
be cowed by Browder's intimidation and showed the film to a Washington audience.
No, unfortunately this did not happen. Freedom of expression – which should be
sacrosanct – is dangerously compromised in the west.
Open, civilized societies seek resolution of contentious issues by allowing proponents of
different sides in any dispute to present their respective points of view. An informed, open
debate is by far the best mechanism of conflict resolution because we can only arrive at
constructive solutions to problems by taking different stakeholders' points of view into
consideration. Browder's approach is contrary to that of civilized societies: he seeks to
silence all points of view but his own. He seeks to persuade not by initiating an informed
debate, but by suppressing all debate. This is not the conduct of a truth teller pursuing
elevated objectives like human rights, justice, and truth. Truth does not need such forceful
defense. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, " Truth is tough. It will not break, like a
bubble, at a touch. Nay, you may kick it about all day, and it will be round and full at
evening. " Browder is clearly anxious that his story cannot take any kicking at all.
Meanwhile in the western world, we appear to be at the mercy of lawyered-up elites for what we
are allowed to know and what we are not.
In the end, I have no doubt that truth will prevail and that Bill Browder will lose his
battle to keep his deception going. It is because there's something sacrosanct about truth and
most people will reject a lie once they are aware of it.
This shocking tale of alleged Russian official corruption and brutality drove legislation
that was a major landmark in the descent of U.S.-Russian relations under President Barack
Obama to a level rivaling the worst days of the Cold War.
.But what the film shows is how Nekrasov, as he detected loose ends to the official story,
begins to unravel Browder's fabrication which was designed to conceal his own corporate
responsibility for the criminal theft of the money. As Browder's widely accepted story
collapses, Magnitsky is revealed not to be a whistleblower but a likely abettor to the fraud
who died in prison not from an official assassination but from banal neglect of his medical
condition.
The cinematic qualities of the film are evident. Nekrasov is highly experienced as a maker
of documentaries enjoying a Europe-wide reputation. What sets this work apart from the
"trade" is the honesty and the integrity of the filmmaker as he discovers midway into his
project that key assumptions of his script are faulty and begins an independent investigation
to get at the truth .
The reason nekrasov has a following among European liberal snowflakes is that his
documentaries have had a sarcastic jaded and negative tinge with respect to Russia (even BBC
News has aired his documentaries as recently as 2016). He is rather pessimistic regarding
Russia. That's what makes this revelation that even he (Nekrasov, a darling of the debauch
liberals of the west, and Putin critic) found browder to not be credible. Coming from
Nekrasov, that allegation and documentary would really destroy the battering ram (and useful
fraud) that browder had provided the Western establishment.
Nekrasov is now getting a painful reality check as to how sophisticated the West's
totalitarian nature is: they are not crude like the Chinese who will arrest small time
nobodies for being too honest or critical, the West focusses it's blunt oppression for high
value targets; just as outlined in 1984, the higher up you are and the greater your reach,
the greater the scrutiny and the more blunt the instrument used to keep you in line. One must
admit that the Anglo empire and their hypocrit vassals/covert-competitors in the EU, have
refined this to an art and are far more efficient at it than their poor understudies in CCP
China, or the Soviet Union.
Krainer is right though, the truth is going to prevail and eventually browder will be
exposed (especially when the deep state decides he's too much of an annoying liability
– as times progresses or as the deep state finds browder's agenda and his supporters
getting in the way of the state's own agenda).
There is one thing that no one has clarified: Why was magnitsky allowed to die, why was he
denied medical treatment, who was responsible for that? What are the facts around magnitsky's
death?
Hi RC – a few great point. In Nekrasov's defence, I think I can understand him. I'm
Croatian and if we started discussing Croatia, you'd find me very critical. My inclination
would be to expose negative developments – not because I'm anti-Croatian but becauseI
would want to draw public attention to problems that need to be addressed. To his credit,
when he realized truth was different from what he initially believed, he made a turn to
pursue truth when he could have made the film that would have been far better for his career.
I agree with you that Browder will probably end up thrown under the bus. That's what I'm
afraid of (and the #1 reason for my book's title). But they will try to first make Browder a
household name (crusader for human rights and justice, bla, bla..) with their Hollywood
movie. Then they'll try to make it look like Putin had him killed.
As to why Magnistky died – that's a mystery. It was definitely a massive cock-up on
the part of Russian law enforcement, but there's also the angle that his death was VERY
convenient for Browder and his goodfellas.
I think that Magnitsky was such a pain in the ass ( he made 450 complaints about the
prison-conditions during 358 days in prison, most ofwhich nobody could solve without a much
larger budget) that doctors and staff prefered to not hear or to look the other way when
Magnitsky came into a psychosis. He got into this psychosis after a court case from where he
returned very disappointed. Future looked a lot worse than he had expected.
Parry's article
mentions that he viewed the film on Vimeo, using a password provided by Piraya Film, the
Norwegian production company.
This is a fairly standard way that independent producers shop their films around, looking
for a distribution deal. I.e., a journalist or distributor contacts them, and they are given
a Vimeo link and password for a private, limited-time viewing of the film. Journalists get
this access because their writing helps to promote the film. The simplest distribution deal
would then be through a subscription-based streaming platform. DVDs are more complicated and
usually happen later.
However, in this case, the film is a co-production with four other companies, including
ZDF and ARTE, which are large European networks, and all of whom have been threatened with
litigation, presumably by Browder's lawyers.
In effect, then, the film in its original version has been censored. It is not available,
unless or until somebody pirates it. There are several scammy-looking streaming sites that
claim to have it, but they want your credit card number and they might just have the same
Russian-dubbed version that you can watch for free via the link posted above.
I suspect the version of the film with the Russian voice-over was not done by Piraya Film,
as the production of the sound doesn't seem very high compared to the quality of the
original. This might have been done with authorization of Piraya, but if not, it means
somebody has a illegitimate copy of the film to which they added the Russian voice-over. This
means, they could also post the film in its original form. If they really want to increase
awareness in the West of how the new Cold War is playing out, such a move could help.
Given the legal threats and the fact that few small distribution companies have the
resources to fight legal battles, this might be a situation in which we are waiting for
somebody to pirate the film, somebody who has access to the original, and to distribute it
via a torrent.
I wonder whether Nekrasov himself knows of the level of interest (at least in some quarters)
in seeing the film, and could find a way to make one available somehow. . .
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
The story Browder refuses to tell is far more interesting than the one he wrote for the
book.
I found the book quite easy to put down: I got tired of all the chapters about how he made
so much money following the fall of the Soviet Union. But Norman Pearlstine's statement that
"Browder's business saga meshes well with the story of corruption and murder in Vladimir
Putin's Russia" is more true than he realizes. With the release of Glenn Simpson's 20 hours
of testimony before three Senate committees we now know that there is a great deal of
information Browder failed to disclose. I'll let Simpson tell it:
He was willing to, you know, hand stuff off to the DOJ anonymously in the beginning and
cause them to launch a court case against somebody, but he wasn't interesting in speaking
under oath about, you know, why he did that ... All of this -- his determined effort to avoid
testifying under oath, including running away from subpoenas and changing -- frequently
changing lawyers and making lurid allegations against us, including that, you know, he
thought we were KGB assassins in the parking lot of Aspen, Colorado when we served the
subpoena, all raised questions
in my mind about why he was so determined to not have to answer questions under oath about
things that happened in Russia.
I'll add that, you know, I've done a lot of Russia reporting over the years. I originally
met William Browder back when I was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal when I was doing
stories about corruption in Russia. I think the first time I met him he lectured me about --
I was working on a story about Vladimir Putin corruption and he lectured me about how have
Vladimir Putin was not corrupt and how he was the best thing that ever
happened to Russia.
But returning to the detailed discussion of my work, we investigated William Browder's
business practices in Russia, we began to understand maybe what it was he didn't want to talk
about, and as we looked at that we then began to look at his decision to surrender his
American citizenship in 1998. At that point somewhere in there the Panama papers came out and
we discovered that he had incorporated shell companies offshore in the mid 1990s, in 1995 I
believe it was in the British Virgin Islands, and that at some point his hedge fund's shares
had been transferred to this offshore company. This offshore company was managed -- several
of his offshore companies were managed by the Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca,
which is known now for setting up offshore companies for drug kingpins, narcos, kleptos, you
name it. They were servicing every bad guy around. And I'm familiar with them from other
money laundering and corruption and tax evasion investigations that I've done.I'll note
parenthetically that William Browder talks a lot about the Panama papers and the Russians who
are in the Panama papers without ever mentioning that he's in the Panama papers.
Now, I choose to believe Simpson, who not only chose to submit to 20 hours of Senate
committee but then demand that it be made public, and not Browder, who fled from Simpson in
the parking lot of an Aspen resort, later claiming he thought Simpson was KBG.
This is not a book to be set aside lightly... in the words of Dorothy Parker. It has been
many years since I have read a book this bad. And many more since I finished one this bad. In
recent years I have been more able to simply give up on bad books, ignoring the sunk cost
fallacy that previously drove me to soldier on - perhaps it's an increasing awareness of the
value of time, but nowadays I will bail out when it is clear I've made a big mistake. But
this one was recommended by a friend whose taste I had no reason to doubt so I kept on,
chapter after gruelling chapter, hoping for some epiphany or quality uptick. Let me save you
from the same mistake.
One service this book does render, though, is to remind you, if you need it, that writing
is hard. You may be the world's most fabulous person (well, second most fabulous - the author
of this book is pretty clear about who occupies the top spot) but it don't make you a good
writer, see. So the first important thing to know is that Bill Browder cannot write. He
strings together cliches, name drops, humble brags (and regular brags too) but he can't
write. No matter; perhaps the content can make up for it? I'm sure there are plenty of books
where the content redeems the awful style, such as... well, I'm sure there are plenty. But
the second thing to know going in is that the story is a pretty tedious, linear tale of BB's
triumphs in the world of finance and then, as he calls it, "human rights". The problem, I
think, is that the tone of the book is very smug and, despite the occasional and obviously
cynical self-deprecation, deeply self-satisfied. The author has a real tin ear for his tone,
I think, and it's well illustrated by a very early part of the story. He arrives in Poland in
his first job, charged with the assessment and, hopefully, revival of a failing bus company.
He expresses his deep sorrow and pity for the poor, poor workers and wonders what he can do
to help. Meanwhile, he comes across a class of stocks in Poland that seem to him to be
ridiculously underpriced. Aha! thinks the naive reader - I know where this is going: he will
get the bus company to invest in these stocks ad save the day. But no! It turns out that
these narratives shall not meet: he buys the stocks himself and makes out like a bandit, and
he recommends that the bus company be shut down, throwing all the workers on the street. He
is very, very sorry about the latter, of course, but, on the other hand, he has discovered
his true calling as a value investor! Gaudeamus!
The author seems to have absolutely no appreciation of his role as a functionary in a very
particular social system and it makes all of his carefully laid out social conscience ring
hollow and renders his thoroughly documented tears crocodilian.
Both sides of this story are doing horrible things and the writer thinks what he did was
correct!
This is a story where the writer only criticizes the horrible things the russian goverment
did to him and how some oligarchs steal tax money (as everywhere but blatantly) but fails to
realize that what he did, purchasing people-owned companies at fractions of a penny on the
dollar and knowing it, while taking advantage of the imperfect systems put in place for the
distribution of those companies' wealth to the people of that country, as he perfectly
describes in this book, is also wrong in the first place. He fails to understand he actually
hurt the people of that country when he bought shares at a "steal" price as he writes, he
thinks he is doing the right thing because of his wall street mentality, no rules, prey on
whomever gives an opportunity. Sad, but it's the world we live in today
Browder's story seems like a complete scam. First, he personally profited to the tune of
$2 BN off the backs of the Russian people, taking advantage of inequities in the voucher
system used with the dissolution of the USSR. He never mentions how much he personally made,
as that would have cast too much reality on the sheer vanity, self-aggrandizement, and
sanctimonious rubbish that is the rest of the story. More pointedly, he does not speak to how
his money provided access to the highest levels of government, John McCain, and greased the
wheels of the European legal system. Take for example, his ability to miraculously get two
Interpol Red Notices removed within days of their placement. The Magnitsky case was terrible
but he clearly uses it as a sanctimonious shield to get public sympathy and protection. I
could go on but the bottom line is do not waste your time or money. Browder is one of the bad
guys- at best a delusional narcissist, or more likely a greedy scam artist, pulling the wool
over everyone's eyes.
After finishing Masha Gessen's "Man Without a Face" (insightful) Karen Dawisha's "Putin's
Kleptocracy" (a mind-boggling, devastating indictment of Putin and his cronies), and David
Hoffman's "Billion Dollar Spy" (reads like a thriller novel), I was hoping that Bill
Browder's book would provide some additional depth and an interesting perspective on the
thoroughly corrupt workings of post-Soviet Russia. It does not.
Like Browder, I went to Russia numerous times -- but didn't have an office there as he did
-- during the 90s and did a number of deals there. Unlike Browder, I speak the language and
know Russian business and legal culture quite well. (I'm an average American, born and raised
in Ohio, where I still live, but I do have a Russian wife, whom I met on one of my trips
there in the 1990s.)
Browder is an extremely unsympathetic figure: Although he doesn't admit to it in the book,
he was blinded by greed and arrogance to the point where he viewed his marriage and his son
as of only trivial importance compared to his mission in life to get rich. He went to Russia
to get something for nothing, thinking he was being shrewd. His utter ignorance of Russian
business and Russian culture permeate the book -- his condescending attitude is similar to
that of a British governor-general back in 1940s Iran, when the British role was limited to
exploiting Iran by grabbing its oil for a pittance while speaking contemptuously of the
locals. Browder contemptuously describes Russian attempts to reign him in: "Russians will
gladly -- gleefully even -- sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbor." Yet he is
oblivious to the fact that he himself, without any second thoughts, sacrificed his own family
for the prospect of making just one more deal, just one more deal, and then just one more
deal. American citizenship too was just another expendable in his all-consuming quest for
riches.
Russia in the 1990s was a sea of corruption, intrigue, mafia protection rackets, turf
battles, economic chaos, incompetence, and power grabs. Browder injected himself into it,
completely ignorant of what he was getting into, determined to take advantage. He got
burned.
"Red Notice" doesn't provide any perspective or depth; it isn't even particularly
interesting. Browder's narcisssm and self-justifications permate the book, making it
extremely unpleasant to read.
The author is, inter alia, wanted in Russia for tax fraud and so, obviously, will say
everything he can that is negative about Russia. His background and backers are also very
suspicious, to my mind anyway.
I found the book to be nothing but hype. This was confirmed when I read Alex Krainer's
"The Killing of William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder's Dangerous Deception." This
excellent book - with factual content and well referenced - tears Browder to shreds. As he
deserves to be.
But the sheeple will continue to want to believe this fiction - it suits the current
american meme.
I recommend to turn off the TV ( tel-a-vision or the-lies-on-vision ...
The ' truth ' and the brainwashed herd of the sheeple. The death of the
Anglo-American-Zionist Empire. For those who think for themselves and cares for the others,
here in the USA ( former United States of America, now United Slaves of America ) and
all-over the World, for those of you in the research of ' whatreallyhappened ', I recommend
to turn off the TV ( tel-a-vision or the-lies-on-vision ) and read...R E A D INDEPENDENT
books and watch INDEPENDENT documentaries ! Books like ' The Killing of William Browder:
Deconstructing Bill Browder's Dangerous Deceptions ' - NOT for sale on 'amazon.com' - WHY
???!!!...Documentaries like ' The Magnitsky act: Behind the Scenes ', produced by filmmaker
Andrei Nekrasov ( a fierce critic of President Putin ).
Crook got his chances in Russia ----- HE IS A LIER!!!!
Complete Rubbish! Not only he concealed a lot of facts - he fabricated a lot of them. The
book is complete fiction, Why he doesnt mention that Magnitsky helped Hermitage create
schemes to avoid taxes, crate shell-companies to buy stocks of Gazprom (foreigners can not
buy Gazprom stocks), created shell companies in Cyprus and Kalmikia to pay joke taxes, hired
disabled people to again lower taxes? etc He is a joke
Mr. Browder went to Russian in the early 90s to make quick cash - he did it by buying
stocks from uneducated russians (similar to other russian oligarchs). Story of another greedy
individual who wanted to become a billionaire fast - once he had to pay the price he become
outraged by injustice of the system... XOXOXOXOXOX next time when you, Mr Browder, go to
another developing country with the intention to rob the system be prepared to take the
responsibility and do not whine about it like a little girl. A crook got upset that he didnt
make as much money as he wanted and got kicked out from the country - what a joke.
BTW - the youtube video with Mr. Browder running away from the officer who served him
subpoena is hilarious. If Mr Browder is so ethical and clean why he doesn't want to testify
in court?
This book came highly recommended to me by someone in the hedge fund industry. I was
surprised at how bad it was. I was looking into insight as to how Bill Browder, who once ran
the largest Russian hedge fund, made his fortune, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions
of dollars. Instead the book was a very self serving book which I would identify as 20% self
aggrandizement, self serving, 20% discussion of the arbitrage trades that made him rich, 60%
discussion of the Sergie Magnitsky Act which he worked to pass. The book is full of
contradictions including Browder's moral position and his self righteousness. It makes you
wonder if anyone thought about this book in context of the 2008 financial markets collapse or
did any research on Browder when reading it. Also, why does Browder today actively evade
subpoenas to testify about what happened in American court as shown in Youtube videos?
The book is full of villains on both sides. Browder is the grandson of the former head of
the US communist party. He gave up his US citizenship to become a British citizen in 1997. He
worked for the criminal Robert Maxwell who had misappropriated corporate pension funds to
live a flamboyant lifestyle, then he went to work with Edmond Safra as a partner in Hermitage
Capital. Not only these global speculators but the book includes Mossad and a host of Russian
oligarchs (all financed by Fred Goodwin's Royal Bank of Scotland). Browder's arbitrage was
that Russian companies were severely undervalued because no other investors trusted Russian
corporations and Russian rule of law. Whereas most other investors thought Russian companies
were 100% un-investable, Browder figured many of them were only 50% un-investable and he
invested in that 50% that was investable. After that arbitrage went away, he decided to start
investigating Russian corporations for inside dealing and his activist strategy paid off but
made many enemies. He was warned by numerous other investors that his life and others would
be in danger for this. Everyone he works with leaves wreckage behind until he does the same.
When one of his lawyers who gets less than 1% of coverage in the first half of the book dies
in a Russian prison, he goes all out to try to get revenge on the Russians who he claims made
tax fraud on the Russian government and him by seizing control of companies he owned. Many
questions arise from the book some of which I list below.
(1) Browder's hedge fund is domiciled in Guernsey and Cayman Islands, notorious tax
evasion locales, yet the premise of the second half of the book is to get revenge on corrupt
Russian officials for stealing Russian tax money (his hundreds of millions of dollars)
(2) Browder is drawn to evil people and shady characters (Maxwell, oligarch companies,
mossad, etc) like moths to a flame. Is it force of habit for him to fall into bad situations
with them? Is it the US government's role to spend taxpayer money on exacting revenge for him
on the crooked crowd he deals with? His friends are spoken with in great superlatives, his
enemies despised. It is easy to imagine if you were a friend and became an enemy he would
label you with epithets thus immediately.
(3) Browder becomes a British citizen (but a hedge fund deci or centi millionaire) yet he
easily gets access to John McCain, Joe Lieberman and other US elected officials to get the
Magnitsky act passed. Ultimately the Magnitsky act passes and Russia responds by banning all
US adoptions of Russian children. For all you childless women looking to adopt Russian
babies, thank the egotist Browder for your inability to do so going forward. Were you screwed
in the 2008 financial markets collapse? The system may not work for you but it works for a
global speculator who wants vengeance.
(4) But its worse. Browder goes to war with the Oligarchs who were funded by Royal Bank of
Scotland and who defaulted on their loans from RBS. The UK citizens had to bail out RBS.
Browder tries to utilize the British government to exact vengeance on the very same Oligarchs
the British government is bailing out in some ways.
(5) Browder is the great example of the speculative hedge fund trader of the 90's and 00's
run amok. He is a speculator, he was warned about the risks, he jumps headlong into them and
knows Russia does not have American or British rule of law. But he expects the US and Britain
to jump to his aid for his recklessness and bail him out like the other crooks of the 2008
vintage. EVEN THOUGH HE IS A BRITISH CITIZEN.
(6) Lookup the Wall Street Journal articles or Youtube videos about how the cowardly Browder
runs away from being served by a subpoena and has constantly sought to avoid subpoena's from
the Russians who are countersuing him in US and British court. If he is for rule of law, why
not work his way through the legal systems. Seems like there is another side to the
story.
Hey, guys and gals, the man is a shark. An investment banker. He'd sell his own
grandmother if he thought he's make a profit. And now he's trying to profit by selling his
own story, all teary-eyed about his lawyer and his quest for "justice." Barf. He wants to
expose Kremlin corruption, happily forgetting Wall St. corruption that he hoped would make
HIM millions. He only saw the light when other folks made millions and he got arrested. Kinda
like any low-life Baltimore drug pusher. Please don't buy his line of crack cocaine.
This is a thrilling page-turner of financial and political intrigue. The problem is that
it is much like the pot calling the kettle black. Just about everything of which Browder
accuses the Russian kleptocrats is equaled or excelled by the US robber barons and the
agencies of violence wielded by the US government. Browder also digresses from time to time
into the history of the USSR about which he knows nothing except the propaganda that we have
been fed, most of which originates, ironically enough, from the very oligarchs he so
justifiably criticizes.
Very interesting to hear an insider's experience of Russia privatization and the politics
of the 90's and early 2000s. I enjoyed that part.
That said, I found Browder spent a lot of time tooting his own horn and virtue signaling . He
seemed quite impressed with himself and spends much of the book detailing why you should be
too.
I never thought Putin was a good guy.
I never thought neocon/ deep state John McCain was a good guy. ( Browder does).
I don't think Browder made his gazillions by being a good guy. A lot of ordinary Russians got
ripped off . Browder and a lot of others got rich.
This is a fairly interesting, if pretty unsurprising, story of high-level graft and
corruption in Russia. Yes, Putin and the Russian government are rife with corruption, and the
rules are subject to change on a whim. That should be obvious to anyone who paid any
attention to Russia's preparation for the Sochi Olympics. I'm even inclined to take Browder's
story about the torture and eventual death of Sergei Magnitsky (who he describes as a tax
lawyer, but was actually an accountant) at face value.
But where Browder really grates is with his remarkable lack of self-awareness and
out-of-touch declarations. At one point, for instance, in the run-up to the 1996 elections,
in which there was a chance that the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, would win the
presidency and potentially re-nationalize state companies, Browder said that he could deal
with food shortages, hyperinflation, or any number of terrible conditions, but what he
couldn't stomach was re-nationalization of industry. So, according to this guy, people
starving and their savings evaporating into thin air is tolerable, but the worst thing
imaginable is him losing his gains from fleecing Russian peasants. Solid guy, Browder.
For some background-- when the USSR fell, Russia embarked on a program of "voucher
privatization" where every citizen received vouchers that they could use to bid on the shares
of previously state-owned enterprises. Since Russia has incredible resource wealth, these
were quite valuable. Unfortunately, in a country with no history of any kind of capital
markets, the overwhelming majority of people had no clue what use they could get out of stock
ownership. Immediately after they were issued, you could buy a voucher for a bottle of cheap
vodka. And the people who became the oligarchs, as well as western vultures like Browder, did
just that. Eventually, these shares sold at incredibly low valuations, and investors made a
killing. But what Browder doesn't mention is that these absurdly low valuations almost
certainly came about, in large part, from the fact that investors hate uncertainty. The
possibility that a Zyuganov would come to power and re-nationalize state-owned enterprises
was a real possibility, so plenty of investors stayed on the sidelines. Not Browder-- he
jumped in, and when (surprise!) the Russian government behaved like the Russian government is
wont to do, he acted like he was the victim of the world's worst injustice. Sure, what
happened was in some way unfair. So was all the vultures jumping in to take advantage of
peasants. Browder had no problem ripping off Russian peasants while extolling himself as a
"great capitalist," but, when the Russian government took him in, he complained about the big
bad Russians. It was extremely tiresome.
There were other places where his tone was equally annoying. He spent time talking about
how "sexy" his second wife was/is, how she's "not like those other Russian girls that are
just after money," and how many other people wanted to date her and how awesome he was
because she chose him. Sergei Magnitsky's death is a sad story from a sad place. It's too bad
the person to tell it is such a wildly out of touch hypocrite.
The book was fun to read, like a Marvel comic book. Truly Bill Browder is, according to
Bill Browder, a brilliant man willing to take daring risks where he sees an opportunity for
personal gain. And I have to agree with him. With his inherited genetic intelligence, and
some of the best education money can buy, he made himself enormously rich profiting from
financial transactions that produced nothing of real value. I found this book to be quite
self-congratulatory, written with no embarrassment for taking advantage of a whole
population.
As Browder writes, "I found that to transition from communism to capitalism, the Russian
government had decided to give away most of the state's property to the people. The
government was going about this in a number of ways, but the most interesting was something
called voucher privatization. The government granted one privatization certificate to every
Russian citizen---roughly 150 million people in total -- and taken together these were
exchangeable for 30 % of nearly all Russian companies." "The market price of the vouchers
equaled 3 billion this meant that the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only 10
billion! That was one-sixth the value of Wal-Mart!" "Russia had 24% of the word's natural
gas, 9% of the world's oil, and produced 6.6 % of the world's steel, among many other things.
Yet this incredible trove of resources [owned by ordinary Russian citizens] was trading for a
mere 10 billion! Even more astonishing was that there were no restrictions on who could
purchase these vouchers. I could buy them, anyone could buy them." He recounts, "The Russian
people had no idea what to do with the vouchers when they received them for free from the
state and, in most cases, were happy to trade them for a $7 bottle of vodka or a few slabs of
pork." Mr. Browder took advantage of their ignorance and brought millions of vouchers from
the Russian people for a pittance of their true value. This is something to brag about? It is
not laudable to buy something for a pittance of its real worth, from owners who have no idea
of its true value. It is reprehensible. It was disturbing to me to see no introspection on
the rightness or wrongness of beating someone out of his or her money.
Mr. Browder describes in his Sidanco deal the feeling he has when an opportunity for ungodly
gains presents itself, "I had that tingling, greedy tension in my gut, similar to when I saw
my $2,000 Polish investment multiply by nearly ten times, or when I unearthed the Russian
voucher scheme."
Greed is not a virtue, Mr. Browder. It is a vice.
Reviewer Ian Kaplan wrote:
The second half of the book is about how Putin's gang tried to crush Hermitage Capital and
everyone associated with it."
And, I would add, how Browder's gang is trying to crush Putin.
It makes me think that a large part of Mr. Browder's dogged determination in pushing the
Maginsky Act through Congress, and signed into law, was not so much a humanitarian turn of
the leaf for him, but a strategy to enlist the whole backing of the United States into his
personal war with Putin, who put him out of a lucrative business in Russia.
I was familiar with Hermitage and Browder so it was not "news" to me. I feel Browder makes
himself look good when in reality he was a jerk.
I don't wish him well!
Bill Schaffer
Bill Browder is a shrewd fellow, at least up to a point. He saw an opportunity to make
money after the collapse of Communism in Russia. He moved to Moscow, started a hedge fund,
and succeeded in a big way. He made piles of money in essentially the same way the Russian
oligarchy made it, by purchasing formerly state owned assets at hugely discounted rates.
It all worked beautifully for a while, but clever as he was Browder didn't realize he was
living in a fool's paradise. Rather than remaining cool and quiet while making money, he
publicly accused certain local enterprises of corruption. He did this, rather naively, in a
country notoriously resentful of foreign interference in its affairs. Furthermore, there are
indications that he himself was not above involvement in dodgy dealings, including fudging on
taxes and sneaking funds into tax havens.
Not surprisingly, Browder, away on a trip, was barred from reentering Russia. Authorities
raided his Moscow offices, confiscating files and computers. Although Browder managed to get
his staff out of Russia, a man named Sergei Magnitsky whom Browder calls his lawyer, though
he was apparently only an auditor, chose not to leave. This was a grave error, as poor
Magnitsky became the foil for Russian displeasure with Browder. He was jailed, beaten, denied
medical treatment, and died in prison. Meanwhile, a couple of thugs attached to the KGB,
Russia's secret police, extorted large sums of money from Browder via a complex fraud,
presumably accomplished with the tacit consent of establishment superiors.
Browder used Magnitsky's death to launch a major and eventually successful lobbying
campaign for a U.S. law which came to be known as the Magnitsky Act. The law imposing
sanctions on Russian officials responsible for Magnitsky's death. The Russians retaliated by
placing Browder on the Interpol wanted list and later sentencing him in absentia to nine
years in prison for tax fraud.
"Red Notice" is written in the fashionably breezy and colloquial style seemingly favored
by many professional ghost writers. Not surprisingly, it portrays Browder as a skilled and
principled financier who, prompted by the Magnitsky tragedy, turns himself into a towering
figure in the world of human rights.
There are odd omissions in descriptions of Browder's family life. Divorce from his first
wife is mentioned only in passing; although much ado is made over his meeting his glamorous
Russian second wife, she fades entirely from later portions of the manuscript. "Red Notice"
is a work of considerable interest. However, given the many controversies that hover over
Browder's life and reputation, I believe it wise to view its contents with a generous degree
of skepticism.
Other reviewers have accurately summarized the book, and justly praised Browder's
commitment and courage in seeking a measure of justice for the brutal treatment, leading to
death, of Sergei Magnitsky. My comment will focus on a disquieting subtext babout browder's
activities in setting up and running his hedge fund.
Browder's rise to prominence with his Hermitage Fund followed the classic MBA playbook:
find and exploit undervaluation. Fair enough in a financial world of transparency and
disclosure where "consenting adults" can presumably fend for themselves. But this was not
exactly the environment in Russia in the early 1990s. In its attempted transition from
communism to some form of capitalism, the Russian government granted "privatization
certificates" to the people - one certificate per citizen, about 150 million in total.
Browder found that these certificates, in the aggregate, were exchangeable for about a 30
percent interest in newly privatized Russian companies.
In theory, this should have been a promising financial arrangement for the impoverished
Russian people, particularly given the country's wealth of natural resources and the
p[otential of its energy sector. But after decades of communism, capitalism was a largely
unknown concept in day-to-day practice. Controlling interests were diverted to a
well-connected oligarchical minority, who saw the companies more as ATMs rather than what we
in the West would call modern corporations with appropriate disclosure and governance
standards. Companies were valued at a tiny fraction of comparable Western entities, and the
Russian stock market, such as it was, had little volume and virtually no transparency.
Browder had the insight to realize that the participation certificates were ludicrously
undervalued in relation to the potential net worth of Russian companies. By purchasing large
numbers of these certificates from the essentially clueless Russian citizenry for the
functional equivalent of pennies on the dollar in relation to underlying value, Browder was
able to position his Hermitage Fund to get in on the ground floor of a stock market that was
virtually certain to rise dramatically as the potential of the Russian economy came to be
understood in the Western world.
Depending on one's perspective, this is either an instance of brilliant, if amoral,
take-the-world-as-it-is MBA-ism, or a classic example of a city slicker fleecing the rubes in
a manner that would be much more difficult to pull off in a more sophisticated financial
environment. I lean toward the latter position, and surely am not the only one dazed by the
irony of Browder, grandson of a one-time head of the U.S. Communist Party, so
unapologetically exploiting the ignorance of the Russian populace for capitalist gain.
Browder deserves all the kudos he's received for his work on the Magnitsky matter. But his
Hermitage Fund (and its progeny and imitators) helped give visibility (though not
transparency) and liquidity, as well as an aura of respectability, to the previously
"undernourished" Russian stock market. Browder's investors did well, as did numbers of
average Russians (though not necessarily those who sold the participation certificates).
Principal beneficiaries, however, were the oligarchs and the well-connected favored few, the
value of whose controlling interests soared greatly. In part, Browder was an enabler of the
system he came (rightly) to despise and fight against.
It seems Browder is trying to whitewash his own reputation and the part he played in the
disasterous privitazation of Russian businesses after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He
was an active and avid participant in buying up shares of companies for pennies on the dollar
which helped to impoverish Russians for a generation. In addition his part in the death of
Sergei Magnitsky was shameful. Yes Browder and Magnitsky uncoverd massive fraud but
ultimately Browder decided that the money was more important than his "friend's" life.
Passige of the Magnitsky Law slightly punished the perpetrators but he didn't need to die and
Browder should be ashamed of himself as well.
A must read, regardless of political party of choice. A book that could save America,
literaly
Well written, stringently researched and truly shines a light on the dark dealings of Bill
Browder. Seamlessly disects the chapters of Bill browders book red notice bit by bit.
Everyone should read this book.
Russian
businessman Aleksandr Perepelichny, a key witness in the Sergey Magnitsky case who died in
southern England in November 2012, may have been poisoned, British media reported. Perepelichny
allegedly cooperated with Swiss investigators looking into the death of Sergey Magnitsky and a
$240 million money laundering case, involving Russian officials and organized crime.
Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer, who was held in pre-trial detention in connection with tax
fraud, and died in 2009 due to being denied crucial medical treatment by prison officials.
His death caused an international outcry and led to the passing of the so-called Magnitsky
Act by the US Congress in 2012, which punished a group of Russian state officials and law
enforcers with a US asset freeze and a visa ban over alleged human rights violations.
Shortly before testifying in the Magnitsky case, Perepelichny collapsed and died while jogging near
his home near in Surrey, south of London.
The Surrey police initially found nothing suspicious about the 44-year-old man's death,
saying that there was "no third-party involvement."
However, a pre-inquest hearing Monday has shed light on new facts in the case, which
contradicted the initial conclusions by the police.
A top poisons expert examined a sample of Perepilichny's stomach contents last year and
discovered the presence of a chemical strongly associated with a lethal plant toxin, the
Independent newspaper reported.
Professor Monique Simmonds from Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, told the court that
the substance was extremely rare in nature and could only be obtained from gelsemium, a
poisonous plant also known as "heartbreak grass."
The plant only grows in remote areas in Russia and China, and became known as a poison used
by assassins in the two countries.
However, it isn't used very often. The most recent known use of gelsemium as a poison was
the assassination of Chinese billionaire Huang Guang in 2011.
Lawyers representing the police at Surrey Coroner's Court in Woking acknowledged that the
presence of the chemical "ion" in Perepilichny's system was a "cause for very
serious concern," the Independent reported.
The new finding prompted the judge to reschedule a hearing in Perepilichny's case, due to
begin Monday, until September as to allow more tests to be performed.
According to the Independent, the Surrey police may find themselves in hot water for
negligence if Perepilichny's poisoning is confirmed, as the case would resemble the
high-profile murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko in London in 2006.
Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer, died in hospital after being poisoned with
radioactive Polonium 210, with his death acting as a stumbling block in relations between
Russia and the UK.
A
documentary screening of Andrei Nekrasov's investigation comes to a halt due to
behind-the-scenes schemes of an American billionaire.
Nekrasov (c) in a scene from his new film (Photo: greens-efa.eu)
Originally appeared at Rusplt , translated by
Mona Lita exclusively for SouthFront
Seems like the world has turned upside down. After decades of living under the conditions of
censorship, Russia has generated an unprecedented desire for freedom. Europe, by contrast, is
increasingly resorting to banning facts that are inconvenient for her. Myths that benefit
politicians of the Old World are claimed as truth, while all the rest is, for example, Russian
"propaganda". On this basis the obstacles to Mass Media activities are being fixed, while
access to individual documentaries is being cut off from the viewer. One of these types of
works is a film "the Magnitsky Act – behind the scenes", made by a Russian director
Andrei Nekrasov, which is dedicated to a famous story about tax evasion, which later becomes
the reason for the adoption of the American law with the same name.
Another screening of Nekrasov's film was to be held today, on May 27th as one of the short
films at a festival in Grimstad, Norway [ SF editor: It wasn't screened]. Whether it will
happen or not is not yet clear. The fact is that the film's authors now have a powerful
opponent, an American billionaire and CEO of Hermitage Capital – William Browder, an
author of the Sergei Magnitsky myth and his self-proclaimed political executor. Unhappy with
Nekrasov's investigation, in which a version of an innocent businessman is being refuted,
Browder launched an opposition campaign. He is not hesitating to use a whole arsenal of tools
for this: direct political pressure, defender assaults and prosecution. A Norwegian publication
Dagbladet writes about this.
According to the publication, for the sake of counteracting the film's circulation Browden
held separate meetings with the Storting parliament members – Ingerd Skou from the
"Høyre" Party and Morten Wold from the Progress Party. Both of them are also members of
the Storting delegation in PACE, and this means they have European-scale influence. Moreover,
Browder met with the leader of the Norwegian Party Venstre, Trine Skei Grande. In respect to
Nekrasov's film the policy is set to be very critical, calling it propaganda. "Everyone knows
that Russia is a master at conducting such campaigns", a publication quotes her words. It turns
out she has not seen the film itself but believes in Browder's version.
In addition to politicians' support, Browder – an American with a British passport,
enlisted the sympathy of human rights activists. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee is entirely
on his side. A corresponding meeting took place during the visit of this country's
businessman.
A sacrifice is required for human rights activists to exist. Magnitsky is the suitable
candidate. Death in a Russian prison makes him a desirable target to human rights fanatics. In
case this resource is not enough, Browder prepared a court appeal. "I have hired Norwegian
attorneys. They have been ordered to take up the case", he explained to Dagbladet. Browder
wants to sue not only the film director but also the film festival in Grimstad, if he did not
remove the film from screening.
Right now, the festival organizers are resisting. According to the Executive Director Anita
Svingen, they will refuse the showing of Nekrasov investigation only if the creators themselves
will withdraw the film for legal reasons. Despite Browder's threats to sue the festival, its
organizers invited him to a discussion that will take place after the viewing. They recalled
that it was a Norwegian company that created the film, which guarantees him a sufficient level
of confidence.
It should be noted that funding for Nekrasov's work is also European. The film received
millions of krones from the Nordic Film and TV Fond, the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI), Norsk
Film Institute and the Foundation Fritt Ord ("Free Word"). If those politicians who oppose the
showing are outraged by this circumstance, then the Representative of NFI Mette Taraldsen
reasonably noted that the very "form and task of documentaries is to raise critical questions
and to cover the case from different angles". At the same time he also reminded that Andrei
Nekrasov is one of the most experienced documentarians, and it makes no sense not to trust
him.
Europe is afraid of free speech?
In fact, the Russian director is considered one of the masters in European documentary
films. A partnership with Andrei Tarkovsky, training in Bristol and work on the British
television network allowed him to sustain a professional status. His work has received numerous
awards, including one at the Cannes Film Festival. An important factor in Nekrasov's reputation
is that he is the current Russian president's enemy. Accusations that he "sold out" to the
Kremlin obviously have no ground to stand on. "I used to make films that were quite critical of
Putin, and such allegations hurt me deeply", he said.
When Nekrasov first began shooting the film, he implicitly believed in Browder's version.
After all, all the major Western media consistently wrote and spoke about it with one voice.
The adaptation of the story "about the conspiracy of Russian policemen killing the fighter of
Magnitsky corruption" was assumed. It was only during the process of filming, when the director
was introduced to the documents that he realized he was filming a lie. The version of the story
that Browder circulated has little to do with reality, but rather serves the businessman's
personal interests. This explains the powerful complex program to counter the film's showing
and threats with multi-million dollar lawsuits to anyone involved in its spread. It's just that
Browder's pride was hurt.
The first documents Nekrasov learned of were from Browder's famous site "the Untouchables",
where Magnitsky exposes the corruption of investigators Karpov and Kuznetsov. As it turns out,
there was no exposure. "There was an interrogation, and there was protocol, which shows that
Magnitsky is in the midst of a heavy defensive struggle with the investigation. And he is not
blaming any MIA officers, and doesn't even mention them", writes Nekrasov in his blog on the
website "Echo of Moscow". "Since then (Fall of 2014) my "based on a true story" film began
ripping at the seams. Each day I was more certain that it was based on a lie".
As a result, the director developed his own version of events that was built as a result of
personally studying all sources. According to Nekrasov, Magnitsky was not an auditor but an
accountant who was arrested for tax fraud. He died in prison not because of beatings or other
illegal pressures but as a result of a fatal deterioration of health caused by being confined.
Browder, as a political attack on Russia used his tragic death in retaliation for his expulsion
from the country in 2005 and termination of business. And this is how his interests coincided
the U.S. foreign policy objectives: it is how the "Magnitsky Act" was born, the effect of which
has recently spread globally. The main thing that Nekrasov understood was that Magnitsky was
not murdered and has not pressed charges against the investigators.
It is not surprising that Browder was so ready to actively oppose the showing of Nekrasov's
film. Forces all too powerful are drawn into the story. The previous film showing in the
European Parliament that was scheduled for April 27th, and it too met resistance and was
cancelled. The organizers received a letter with threats from Browder and were unable to
withstand pressure. A member of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala particularly mentioned
this. She called the pressure "sudden and strong". The fact that the premier of this film was
so easily removed from a scheduled screening in the European Parliament shows that the right to
the freedom of speech is offered only to one side", said the film's screening organizer Natalia
Veselnitskaya.
A near future will show how another attack of this unscrupulous billionaire will end. Nekrasov
himself seems to hope for the best, and that the Europeans will still see his honest
investigation and will draw conclusions. "An 'Oscar' is not necessary. But we will see the
idols fall", said the director.
This documentary caused an uproar in Russia when it appeared in April of 2016.
This film was made by the main Russian government news broadcasting company, Rossiya 1.
It alleges that Bill Browder, the legendary American hedge fund manager who from 1995 - 2005
was the largest foreign investor in Russia, controlling billions of $ and a significant share
of Russia's leading companies, was in fact a CIA front.
At one point his funds owned 7% of Gazprom, using what the film argues were illegal schemes
to acquire shares
The film argues that Browder's whole involvement with Russia was a CIA operation to disrupt
Russia politically and economically
It alleges that in 2006, Browder was instructed by the CIA to provide financial support to the
rising opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, and that the two then closely cooperated for the
next 5 years.
As evidence, the film cites hacked CIA email and skype correspondence which it claims fell
into Russian hands during the government upheaval in Kiev in 2014.
When the film appeared, Browder and Navalny charged that the evidence was faked, and Navalny
sued Rossiya 1 for libel. As of the translation of this video, (July 2016), the suit has not
been concluded.
Browder was expelled from Russia in 2006, after which he led a highly successful public
campaign criticizing Russia and Putin. The film argues that the campaign was financed by the
CIA.
The campaign demanded sanctions against Russia for what Browder alleged was the murder of
one of his employees, Sergei Magnitsky, and theft from his companies, by corrupt Russian
officials.
His campaign resulted in the famous "Magnitsky Act" sanctions against Russia, passed by
Congress in 2012.
The film alleges that this cynically misrepresents the facts. It alleges that Magnitsky
ended up in jail for carrying out major fraud for Browder, and that he was on the verge of
testifying against Browder when he died. It cites the hacked CIA mail as evidence that the CIA
managed to orchestrate Magnitsky's death in prison.
The film argues that the only people with a motive for Magnitsky's death were Browder and
the CIA, because his testimony about the tax fraud would have been devastating.
The film includes embarrassing details of tax avoidance schemes used by Browder and
Magnitsky, including hiring barely literate invalids in remote corners of Russia as fake
executives in order to receive tax breaks amounting to 100s of millions of $.
The film then alleges, again citing the hacked CIA correspondence, that in 2010 Browder paid
Navalny $300,000 to conduct a PR campaign in Russia in support of the Magnitsky Act.
This documentary was never aired separately, rather appeared as a segment within the April
13, 2016 episode of the popular Russian political talk show "Spetsialnii Korrespondent"
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAkt...
The episode consisted of an emotional 1.5 hour discussion of the film, with several people
who appeared in the film present https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37GZ3...
(only in Russian)
Of the 10-plus guests, all but one, an American journalist, argued heatedly that Browder had
clearly committed gross financial crimes and agreed with the film.
The comment leading into the beginning of the film is typical of the tone of the talk show,
where the Deputy Chairman of Russia's parliament compares Browder to an "intestinal
tapeworm".
At the conclusion of the film, the talk show guests discussed the film for a further 1.5
hours. About half of the guests were also featured in the film, and they were able to go into
much more detail about their knowledge of the Browder case.
The discussion became very emotional, with some guests shouting about what they alleged are
Browder's crimes.
In April 2016, the head of Russia's powerful Investigative Committee instructed his
subordinates to examine the potential " complicity " of U.S.-born British businessman William
Browder -- once Russia's largest portfolio investor -- in the "murder" of his former employee,
Sergei Magnitsky.
It was a bizarre twist in the saga of Magnitsky, whose 2009 death in a Moscow jail resulted
in a 2012 U.S. law bearing his name that slaps sanctions on Russians deemed to be human rights
abusers. Browder vigorously lobbied for the law, arguing that Magnitsky was tortured and denied
medical treatment for blowing the whistle on a massive tax fraud allegedly involving Russian
law enforcement and tax officials.
Russia, which says Magnitsky's death was a tragedy but denies allegations that he was abused
while in custody, has undertaken an aggressive, multipronged effort in recent years aimed at
discrediting Browder and the narrative underpinning the U.S. Magnitsky Act.
The law was said to be at the
center of a meeting between a Russian lawyer, Donald Trump Jr., and other confidants of
U.S. President Donald Trump at a controversial meeting in New York in June 2016.
Investigative Committee chief Aleksander Bastrykin's call last year to probe allegations of
Browder's possible role in Magnitsky's death was explicitly linked to a documentary on Russian
state TV that alleged a byzantine conspiracy between Browder, British intelligence, and Russian
opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
But for 18 months, it was unclear if this probe had gone anywhere.
According to an October
22 report by The New York Times, however, Russian authorities are indeed pursuing a
possible murder charge against Browder -- and citing evidence that parrots widely mocked claims
presented in the documentary broadcast on Rossia-1 television a day prior to the Investigative
Committee's announcement.
Citing documents obtained from a court docket by a lawyer for Magnitsky's family, the Times
reported that Russian prosecutors allege Browder colluded with a representative of Britain's
MI6 to convince doctors to withhold medical care to "cause the death of S.L. Magnitsky" while
he was in custody.
RFE/RL reached out to Browder, who said he was not immediately able to provide a copy of the
documents in question.
Prosecutors, according to the Times report, also cite alleged intercepts of intelligence
communications and suggest the goal of the purported plot was to start "a significant news
trigger to discredit" Russia.
They also cite claims made in the Rossia-1 documentary, including that Browder was in
cahoots with Navalny in a purported secret operation titled "Quake" -- with Browder supposedly
using the code name "Solomon" and Navalny using the moniker "Freedom."
Clumsy Fakes
The documentary featured scans of alleged secret U.S. and British documents concerning
Browder, Navalny, and Magnitsky that were widely ridiculed as crude fakes based on their clumsy
syntax and grammatical mistakes -- including improper use of English indefinite and definite
articles that often stymie native Russian speakers.
The claims by Russian prosecutors, as reported by the Times, echo one alleged CIA document
from 2009 shown in the Rossia-1 program with the awkward subject line: "Report on the health
status of a Sergei Magnitsky."
The document purports that Browder ("Agent Solomon") "was offered by proxies in the Russian
Federal Penitentiary Service to arrange the termination of any medical services for
Magnitsky...which could lead to his death."
That document is signed by "V. Plame" -- an apparent reference to former CIA covert officer
Valerie Plame, who was exposed by officials in the administration of President Georgia W. Bush
after her husband criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Plame on Twitter called the document, purportedly from 2009, " such nonsense " and noted that
she left the CIA in 2007.
The Russian Investigative Committee did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on The New
York Times report, and officials there could not immediately be reached by telephone.
The report was published just days after Canada on October 19 passed its version of the
Magnitsky Act, a move that Russian President Vladimir Putin called " unconstructive
political games ."
Browder U.S. Travel Blocked?
Browder, meanwhile, is claiming that Russia has placed him on an Interpol list, and that his
U.S. "global entry status" -- which can expedite entry to the
United States -- has been revoked by U.S. officials, The Guardian reported.
Interpol has previously refused to place the investor, whom Russia convicted in absentia on
tax-evasion charges in 2013, on an international wanted list at Moscow's request.
The Guardian reported over the weekend that
Russia had used a loophole allowing governments to place individuals on the Interpol
database unilaterally.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in an e-mailed statement that
Browder's visa waiver had been "manually approved" on October 18, though Browder told the
Associated Press that he had been informed by U.S. authorities of his rejection on October
19.
Browder said on Twitter late on October 23 that his waiver had been " restored " and that he has
"successfully checked into a U.S. flight."
It took place in New York on Feb 3, 2015, when marshals from the U.S. District Court in
Manhattan tried to serve him a subpoena to give evidence as part of the only trial thus far on
US soil proceeding from the Magnitsky Act. (The details of that case can be found
here .) The reason for Mr. Browder's nervous behavior is obvious: his arguments served only
political aims and were intended for cases in which the verdict is known from the beginning.
But none of his claims could stand up to scrutiny by any experienced lawyer once real business
interests were at stake, and this is exactly what happened with Mark Cymrot from BakerHostetler
during Browder's court deposition on Apr 15,
2015.
Returning to Perepelichny, we have to acknowledge that he was a key witness who could
potentially destroy the high-political-stakes scam being conducted with the Magnitsky dossier.
As Browder was responding with " I do not recall " and " I do not know " to
any real question asked him in court, the US judiciary system might have been very interested
in hearing from Perepelichny. This menace to the Magnitsky Act was eliminated one week before
the bill passed the US House: on Nov. 10, 2012 Alexander Perepelichny was found dead outside
his mansion in London. The police investigation did not yield any tangible results, but the
theory of "Russian mafia" involvement was
implanted in the international media at the proper time. One month later the Magnitsky Act
was signed by President Obama
"... When some Washington (politician) was asked why he opposed Trump - He is not part of the Security establishment. "Security establishment" = insider ..."
The common conclusion of my two encounters with Bill Browder was that his intensity and the time he was devoting
now to putting in place anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way comparable to the behavior of a top level
international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play.
One of the clear missions of Russian state television in 2016, the year of elections to the State Duma has been to
discredit Alexei Navalny, the long established blogger, wily critic of the Kremlin and leader of the new
generation 'non-systemic' opposition by exposing him as a fraud in the pay of Russia's Western rivals and
ill-wishers.
Several weeks ago Russian state television broadcast hidden camera recordings of Navalny's first meeting with Carl Bildt, former Swedish premier and foreign minister, best known in this part of the world for leading the Eastern Partnership program aimed at removing former Soviet republics, notably Ukraine, from the Russian sphere of influence.
A
screen shot from the documentary, with what is allegedly a conversation between Browder and Navalny
This past Sunday, the
Vesti nedeli
program, a prime time Sunday evening wrap-up of the week's news
presented by the senior journalist and manager of Russia's informational broadcasting resources, Dmitry Kiselyov,
showed excerpts from a documentary film about Navalny and his mentor, or handler, William F. Browder. (Video
below - in Russian only)
The film, entitled "The Browder Effect," was assembled by the channel's investigative reporter and presenter in his
own right, Yevgeni Popov. The full version of "The Browder Effect" will be aired on Wednesday evening, 13 April on
Russia's flagship network, Pervyi Kanal. However, from the lengthy segments shown on Sunday it is possible to draw
some conclusions about the sensational material it sets out.
Both Vesti 24 and Pervyi Kanal are Russian language stations directed at the domestic audience.
From the standpoint of their management, whatever is sensational about the film has to do with the way it
conclusively details Navalny's recruitment by Bill Browder in 2007 for a program run by Britain's Secret Intelligence
Service, also known as Military Intelligence (MI6), intended to destabilize the Russian government. Navalny came to
the attention of MI6 because Browder determined he was "the most suitable candidate for future political leader"
given his creativity, new media mastery and speaking skills on politics, law and economics.
We then follow Navalny's progress as a foreign-paid trouble-maker engaged in standing up for minority shareholders and exposing corruption in major Russian, partly state-owned companies, meaning that he was busily attacking Vladimir Putin's direct appointees. We are told Navalny was next a useful aid to U.S. authorities in compiling a list of high Russian judicial and penal administrative officials for inclusion in the Magnitsky List on the basis of their alleged involvement in the torture and murder in detention of Browder's erstwhile accountant, Sergei Magnitsky. One document from 2010 indicates Navalny received large sums of money, at one point a $300,000 payment, from his overseas handlers to apply his skills with social media and disseminate a positive spin on American sanctions to Russia's liberals and creative classes. The objective was to undermine popular trust in the courts.
The last documents involving Navalny shown on the Vesti nedeli
program Sunday date from just before
the State Duma elections on 4 December 2011, which were followed by massive street demonstrations against what was
called electoral fraud perpetrated by the ruling party. Notwithstanding the advice from his mentor, Browder, to
stick with his economic warfare on Russian big business and stay out of politics, this was the point when Navalny
went on to emerge as a key leader in the new generation of forces opposed to the Kremlin.
For Western observers, there is nothing sensational in the exposé of Navalny as a paid agent of British intelligence operating under the code name "Freedom." He is a remote personality, has been denounced by some in the West as a Russian nationalist and he is at liberty, not a prisoner of conscience. The truly sensational nature of Yevgeny Popov's film lies elsewhere, in its material on Browder. If Navalny was recruited by Browder, then Popov was obliged to show how it was that the billionaire co-founder and owner of Hermitage Capital, which was at one point the largest foreign portfolio investment company in Russia, could be an agent, code named "Solomon," in the MI6 documents presented on screen.
To answer this question, the film flashes back to 1995, and a Memorandum for the Chief of Secret Intelligence dated 12 July describing the attraction of Browder for his new bosses:
"he is an important figure in
integration of financial structures into the Russian economy. [He] has extensive contacts with [sic] international
banking community and has [sic] wide range of relations with representatives of business communities in the UK,
the USA, Europe, China and India."
This was about the time when Browder was making a transition from highly paid employee heading up the section of private investing in Russia at Salomon Brothers (hence the coy code name, a corruption of Salomon) to setting up his own investment company with seed capital from the elderly Syrian-Jewish-Brazilian banker and entrepreneur Edmond Safra. It was also the time when Browder, a US citizen became a British subject.
And so that we may understand why such talents and contacts could be useful to British (and by extension to American) intelligence, a further flashback to 28 August 1986 shows us a CIA document entitled "Change the Constitutional and Political System in Eastern Europe and the USSR" signed by the agency director Wiliam Casey. Among the specific actions within the scope of this program would be "getting control over financial flows and removing assets from the economies of developed countries."
The narrator explains that even more than 25 years after the disappearance of the USSR, this CIA policy, known as "The Quake" (Drozh', in Russian) remains in effect.
Not content with proving that a billionaire investment fund owner could also be an MI6 operative, the film's producer also saw fit to demolish via documentary proof the entire Browder story about the reasons for his being declared persona non grata in Russia in 2006 as a threat to national security and about the persecution of his loyal retainer Magnitsky at the hands of rapacious Moscow officials plundering the remains of his company.
It emerges from a memorandum to the Director of Central intelligence written on CIA letterhead and dated 20 September 2009 that Browder had discussed with MI6 the deteriorating health of Magnitsky in detention and that he was involved in plans to have the penitentiary service arrange the termination of medical services. The report went on to say that this 'medical error' could lead to Magnitsky's death.
A follow-on interview with one political analyst explains that Browder was the only one who could profit from Magnitsky's demise. We are told his former protégé was about to start talking to prosecution against his employers. Then his death provided the material for the cause célèbre that Browder would ride to nation-wide prominence in the USA and in Europe with the eventual passage of the sanctions on Russia he promoted as the just punishment for corrupt and murderous officials of the Putin regime.
Thus, the collateral damage resulting from Yevgeni Popov's exposé amounts to a devastating attack on the political situation in the United States, where the CIA is shown to have been complicit in setting up the case used to move the American political mood and legislation in a harshly anti-Russian direction via the Magnitsky Act sanctions. Here is a smoking gun of great potential importance for those who care about who is actually controlling the US government if not our elected leaders.
Part of the documentary rests on expert testimony of Russian political analysts. Part rests on skype texts and on telephone conversations intercepted by the Russian intelligence agencies. But the most important material, including the aforementioned 'smoking gun' come from documents in a cache prepared by Kremlin-nemesis Boris Berezovsky in London as he tried to negotiate with Vladimir Putin a possible return to his motherland that would land him in good graces and not in a prison cell.
One sequence in the documentary introduces us to Sergei Sokolov, the former chief of security for Berezovsky who, at his boss's instructions, hid copies of this cache of documents in several locations and eventually brought a set with him to Moscow, where we may assume Russian intelligence officers pored over them. Sokolov is not a new face to viewers of Russian state television. Several months ago he was shown in a documentary examining the death of Berezovsky in one of his London properties. The cache of documents was mentioned then but not described.
This peculiar provenance of the documents means that they should have been subjected to special scrutiny by Mr. Popov's team before presentation to the general public. Considering the possible impact of the content of these documents on US-Russian relations, such caution would be doubly recommended. Regrettably, that appears not to have been the case.
In the information war that has been ongoing and escalating to fever pitch ever since Vladimir Putin made his famous accusatory speech directed against the United States at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, I have examined closely a succession of key documents produced by the American side and its close allies and discovered patent fraud and forgeries.
In
my essay on the article "Containing Russia"
signed but not written by Yulia Tymoshenko and published in
Foreign Affairs magazine in the spring of 2007, I demonstrated how textual analysis could turn up inconsistencies
that give the lie to official attribution.
The same essay pointed out the fraud perpetrated by the German Marshall Fund in the summer of 2008 when it commissioned an open letter denouncing Barack Obama's recently launched policy of re-set which was distributed to and published by The New York Times and other mainstream media as a cri de coeur from Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other Cold War heroes in the struggle against Soviet domination.
Still another essay of mine devoted to the launch of the EU's Eastern Partnership Program at a summit in Prague in May 2009 pointed to the American spelling used in the Southern Corridor papers presented in the concurrent summit on the New Silk Road for energy. While interference by MS Word spellcheck cannot be totally eliminated as an explanation, the greater likelihood was that these ostensibly European documents on a new, anti-Russian energy policy were written in Washington, D.C. See my book Stepping Out of Line, pp. 315 ff.
It is with this background of interest in textual analysis that I have approached the documents presented by the film "The Browder Effect" and at once serious questions arose. In one or two documents, my reservations are at the level of tell-tale signs of Russian speakers' intervention: namely absence of or poor control over the use of articles. In the one memo where this occurs most, it could be just telegraphic style, but it stands out and differs from the other texts. Another document has one specifically Russian turn of speech. More generally, it is disconcerting that memorandums from the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the one memorandum on CIA letterhead are formatted identically. The most recent document, from MI6, the "Report on performing duties under special operation 'Magnitsky list'" is dated 'Jan 23, 2010,' American style; it has the American spelling of "program" and British punctuation. Such mongrel style does not usually exist in nature.
It is impossible to say what is the source of the problems cited. One possibility is that the documents, which are said to have come from the US embassy in London, were copied out by hand and mistakes were made in the transcription. Then they were retyped in a single style. Another possibility is that they are forgeries, pure and simple.
Having called attention to these issues, I hasten to add that the content of the documents as they concern Bill Browder ring true to my understanding of his possible role in the entire Magnitsky case. I say this on the basis of my personal reading of Browder during his two visits to Brussels in 2013 when I saw him and his road show exhibits up close.
In his first visit, at a public seminar on Russian political prisoners held in the European Parliament building on 5 June 2013, Browder brought a collection of spiteful witnesses intent on blackening the reputation of Vladimir Putin and his 'regime.' The seminar, which was sponsored by the neo-Liberal ALDE faction in the Parliament, was scheduled to take place one day after the publication of an Address to Foreign and Interior Ministers of the EU signed by 47 European Parliamentarians pressing on the EU executive the adoption of a law similar to the so-called Magnitsky Act.
Notwithstanding the various particular messages and particular concerns of the diverse panel, united only in its opposition to the Putin regime, the event was called to promote such a Magnitsky bill and those on the podium spoke in unison in its favor, disseminating the (manifestly false) idea that the bill enjoyed broad support within Russia and was only opposed by the regime itself. The entire proceedings were video recorded, presumably for future use in the halls of power by the event's sponsors.
At that event, Browder spoke very little. His task as master of ceremonies was to introduce his assembled witnesses. These included Mikhail Kasyanov, former prime minister and leader of the Parnas Party, together with Boris Nemtsov, the allied party to ALDE in the Russian Federation. A tearful speech was delivered by Pavel Khodorkovsky, son of the then still imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But perhaps the most passionate speech was by the iconic freedom fighter Ludmila Alexeeva, former leading personality in the Moscow Helsinki Group. In her mid-80s but still very active, Alexeeva likened the environment in Russia to 1937, year of the Great Purge.
I wrote up my impressions of Browder's second visit to Brussels that year,
in a November essay
. On that occasion, which was nominally to present a book he financed promoting a Magnitsky
Act for Europe at the Brussels Press Club, Browder once again presented assorted witnesses, including the
particularly odious Vladimir Kara Murza, an unrestrained propagandist against the Putin regime and fellow-traveler
of the Parnas group. What was most revealing was the Q&A session in which Browder dropped his genial mask and
spoke openly about the need to punish by sanctions the million thieves and murderers who run Russia. His stated
objective was regime change.
The common conclusion of my two encounters with Bill Browder was that his intensity and the time he was devoting now to putting in place anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no way comparable to the behavior of a top level international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at the time, Browder was enjoying vast popularity in the USA, was not doing badly in Europe and no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an operative of the intelligence agencies.
Whatever the final verdict may be on the documents presented by the film "The Browder Effect," it raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeni Popov deserves credit for highlighting those questions, even if his documents demand further investigation before we come to definitive answers.
The author is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd. His most recent
book, "Does Russia Have a Future", was published in August 2015.
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
I never liked Browder. His background reminds me too much of Armand Hammer (named after Arm &
Hammer). He had relatives that were jailed in the US as Stalin-era NKVD spies. He renounced his US
citizenship in part, for what the US did to them and the persecution of his father. The apple never
falls far from the tree. Another Berezovsky-type.
After what has happened in Ukraine, regardless of this programme; the Parnas party are going
nowhere, this just adds to the commonly held negative views of people like Navalny and his liberal
gang
Apart from preparing the ground for destabilizing Russia from within, the US is already planning
other Ukraine-like destabilisation of Latvia, in order to further promote a further escalation
of the NATO-Russian relationship up to the moment they want to enforce a Russian response to
violence against the Latvian Russian minority with the use of tactile nuclear weapons which
would then allow a full war-response by NATO. The want to incite a rebellion of that minority,
to which the Latvian government, after first attempts to reconcile, is pressed by Poles and
Ukrainians to react toughly, so that step for step the situation becomes worse – up to the
moment of physical violence against the Russian minority which then would provoke a Russian
reaction for their support.
The plan was figured out by a thinktank for a US-conference
entitled "Rethinking Amageddon – Planning Scenarios for the Second Nuclear Age" on the 12th
February 2016.
According to the plans, worked out their by US-thinktanks, they have sketched their an
elaborate path to a full scale war in scripts available in the net.
While they know that unwilling and (in their eyes) too compromising and de-escalting EU
countries like Germany, Italy, Austria, the Chechs and the Greeks, could be an obstacle, they
have as well started various taskforce for the "information warfare". One which is directed to
make Europe's population swallow the idea of NATO airstrikes against Russia held a conference in
Novermber 2015 in Essen, Germany. Their strategic report can as well be found in the internet.
It shows the direction of NATO propaganda and the determination to abuse all our media for that
purpose:
It's all quite obvious, they do not even hide it. They are so damn sure that the public might
be distracted to the degree of complete disregard to all these plans – although they are
publicly available.
What can we do to prevent their scenario of a full scale Amageddon of Europe?
with all due consideration to potential and likely inevitable LOSSES ..
the RUSSIANS - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - no matter how remotely russian MUST BEGIN PREPARATIONS TO LEAVE -- and start transferring assets, however that goes n the
procedures...
i am talking about REAL ''PICK UP AND START LIFE" AGAIN..it is going to be a painful
process and they will have to sacrifice much of what they have established for generations in
the baltics...IT SHOULD ALSO be noted that the DUMA is about to approve the 1 hectare free ,
no tax for ''every russian citizen and foreigner that wants to establish in Russia for any
business or personal reasons -- EXCEPT to sell to foreigners" anyway.. And at least whatever
the limitations of that -- they DO have something to ''go home to" ..
a dacha, a new house, to build on free land, something...
RATHER THAN WAIT for their possessions to be confiscated, burned, and their lives
miserable BECAUSE they are russian in latvia, and baltics as will SURELY COME because they
are going to be used as ''BAIT" BY NATO/USA BALTICS to provoke russia.
but it is ALSO CLEAR that WORSE will come unless they already do it now. it is better that
whatever 'losses" they have to make for picking up - houses to sell, even at lower prices,
etc...are NOTHING COMPARED to if the USA/NATO/BALTICS
EVENTUALLY will provoke something like what happened in UKRAINE. AND BY LEAVING THEY
REMOVE A VERY, VERY LARGE part of national assets with them TO their true homeland in russia.
and at least -- literally -- BE SAFE.
IT HAS come to that point and the lessons of Ukraine, etc...have already shown they are
RUNNING OUT OF TME and can not rely on HOPE that things will be better and the worst can be
avoided. NOT AT ALL - THE USA ANGLO-AMERICAN regme changers through the baltics are INTENT on
creating a 'vietnam" RIGHT IN THAT AREA.
AND THE RUSSIAN ETHNICS better make their preparations now . bank accounts,
etc...businesses to liquidate -- invest again in russia, simply MAKE their chilldren
understand the critical importance that their very LIVES are at stake FOR BEING RUSSIANS.
AND it partly removes the EXCUSE by the USA/NATO/BALTICS. ''the russians left -- all of them" WHERE IS THIS RUSSIAN EXPANSION YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT? "IF you cross even an inch of russian borders -- your shps SINK, PERIOD".
it HAS TO be that kind of ''red line" now. as the LUNATICS OF the west and baltcs can't
and WON'T stop their lunacy. it is really time for KREMLIN RUSSIA - FORTRESS russia to make
the decisions without further delay , imo. and it has to now include the russian ethnics - they MUST FLEE - just like CRIMEA AND EAST
UKRAINE HAVE DONE -- FROM WESTERN FASCISTS that are impending in descending upon them.
- Apart from preparing the ground for destabilizing Russia from within, the US is already
planning
I haven't gone through the sources yet. But are you telling the sources tells "US"
wants to destabilize Russia, and also start a WW? US is a superpower in decline -> US has
more important problems to worry about
US think tank - does not have to mean the client is US
A Russian think tank may be pro-Putin or anti-Putin. In last case that is not a "Russian"
think tank, more an Oligarch think tank
The US either wants to topple an independent Russian government or to go step for step up
a pre-planned escalation ladder. The fictitious scenario in the script, composed by a
thinktank for that conference, shows something like a chess arrangement: We will make move
x1, then they either will have to surrender or they will go step y1. Secondly we make move
x2, then they will either have to.... and so on.
In this scenario (which really names
the dates of the described chain of events, supposed to start next year) they really think
through any use of the weapons they have at their disposal.
And a second aspect becomes obvious: They are determined never to allow any of their
"allies" turning out to be a possible game-changer. They take into consideration that they
may always use Poland and Lithuania for the next step of escalation, if it's convenient,
and the German government to slow things down, if they need it. But that any other country
could persuade them to alter any of their steps or even the general course is definitely
outruled.
Nuclear war is not at all a no-go for the US, while I am absolutely sure that the
Russians would only make use of it under the inescapble threat of physical extinction -
following the clear message: "If you decide, we have to die, we won't go alone."
This is as well Ron Paul's view, that of Clinton's defense secretary William Perry and
Andre Damon's interpretation of John Kerry's current message to Japan.
Your source (1) is Washington DC / Pentagon related
http://csbaonline.org/publi...
We may equal that with Hillary in US. Your source (2) "FutureWorld Fundation"
My source (1) is from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. The persons
who sign responsible are all US congressmen. They have as well produced the script I
have linked (even if the link was as well given on the sites of Future World.)
Wikipedia says about the CSB:
"The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) is an independent,
non-profit, Washington, D.C.-based think tank specializing in US defense policy,
force planning, and budgets. It is headed by Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point
graduate. According to its website, CSBA's mission is "to promote innovative
thinking and debate about national security strategy, defense planning and military
investment options [and] to enable policymakers to make informed decisions in
matters of strategy, security policy and resource allocation."[1] CSBA emphasizes
initiatives the United States and its allies can take to wisely invest in the
future, even during periods of fiscal austerity and uncertainty. CSBA evaluates its
policy proposals through the net assessment methodology, wargaming, and by estimated
impact on the Department of Defense budget over multiple Future Years Defense
Programs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
How can you claim it has nothing to do with the US-administration?
the destabilizing of Russia project goes apace, even accelerating - it is what the USA
has to do in order to preserve its primacy - that's the whole point. it knows it is a
vicious rabid dog cornered in its exposed brutality so now -- it is lashing out in all
directions -- it's an all-out war, . that has actually been going from the USA FOR A LONG
TIME NOW. it can't help itself -- it's what the USA IS AND DOES.
Not very plausible, as Navalny spend time int he USA in YYale, so if he was recruted it is
probably during his stay in the USA, but connection of Bill Browder and MI6 is plausible
According to MI6 and CIA internal documents, Alexei Navalny had been recruited to work for
MI6 by UK hedge fund manager Bill Browder. His task is to carry out operation "Quake" which
aims to undermine the existing constitutional order of the Russian Federation. He is being paid
handsomely for his services via the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) human rights organisation.
Russia has claimed Magnitsky died of natural causes and, in a new twist, is now accusing
Browder of colluding with a British spy in 2009 "to cause the death of S. L. Magnitsky by
persuading Russian prison doctors to withhold care," according
to The New York Times .
From Vimeo site comment section: "Cynthia Buckner, 22 hours ago What a detective story, I watched it two times. This is what
making a documentary is all about, uncovering truth under layers of lies. This is why today's News Media is nothing but "Fake
News".
It's no longer available on Bitchute site. In any case, the two I have downloaded have
been dubbed in Russian. I was hoping to watch it later, but it's going take me awhile to
learn the language.
Amazing story of lies and deceit on the part of Browder seems like. I don't judge people
by the way they look, but just looking and listening to this guy makes me believe he is one
BIG slimey fellow, even without watching the movie.
I'd turn him over to the Russians for questioning. After all, he has nothing to worry
about if he has nothing to hide.
"... In Brussels, Trump attacked Frau Merkel. How does she dare to buy Russian gas, if Germany faces a Russian threat? ..."
"... NATO is an instrument of American control over Europe, and Washington keeps dozens of bases in Europe, in particular – in Germany. Germany has remained under American occupation since 1945. This would seem good for America, but the occupied and controlled Western European states are tied to the Clinton camp, to Democrats and liberals. They do not accept Trump as their rightful sovereign. And Europe does not pay for its occupation, so it is costly. Of course, it is a great honour to occupy and control the great powers of the past, England, France, the Netherlands, Spain. But it costs a lot of money for America. Likewise, in 1990 Russia discovered that it is expensive to control surly East Germany, independent Poland, sunny Georgia, tricky Armenia, populous Uzbekistan and the rainy Baltic States. ..."
"... Russians are in a very uncomfortable seat. All their neighbours are subject to American pressure to annoy Russia, be it Georgia (once they even attacked Russia militarily being led by American and Israeli advisers) or the Ukraine (Americans arranged a coup d'état and installed extremely hostile to Russia government in Kiev). American military bases surround Russia and NATO troops drew closer and closer to its centres. American military budget of 600 billion dollars dwarfs the Russian one, while the armaments' race can undermine Russian finances. If Russia were a woman, she would scream: stop it! ..."
"... From the beginning to the end, the US media was highly hostile to Trump and to his mission in Europe. They eagerly followed anti-Trump demos and exaggerated his every blunder. Google obediently trailed at the top Twitter messages of the ex-CIA boss calling Trump 'a traitor'. All prominent Western newspapers spoke of Trump's 'treason'. ..."
"... In the current Russophobian climate, it would have been impossible to concede almost anything to Russia, and V. Putin understands this. But as Russiagate unravels ever so slowly, he will have more room. But as long as both leaders agreed not to start WWIII , something has been achieved, therefore I also believe the Iran threats to be posturing, it would make sense if Russia have calmed Israel, what the current situation indicates. ..."
"... The US knows fully well than an Iran war would not be winnable and bring the rest of the world together; the world has not yet overcome the last financial crisis, a new largescale war in the ME could very well crash the Global economy and the petrodollar. Nobody are keen on that. ..."
an orange hurricane, President Trump
made a stormy visit to the Old World. Usually American presidents' visits to Europe present photo
opportunities and vows of eternal love and friendship. Not this time. Since the Mongol invasion, not many
visitors from outside shook Europe like he did. The US President has finally emerged from the cage built by
his political adversaries, and begun to say things his voters wanted to hear.
However, his wonderful daring statements were quickly undermined and
disowned by his ministers and advisers, creating the feeling that Trump speaks only for himself, while the
US administration, his own appointees say the opposite. And then he also repudiated his own statements,
saying he was misunderstood.
The American president increasingly resembles the hero of
The Prince
and The Pauper
, the poor boy who accidentally became a king – and began to behave in a non-royal way:
showing mercy and caring for people. His own staff disregards his commands. Trump says what people like to
hear, but his administration sticks to the original course.
During the first part of his trip he acted a rebel in Wodehouse World with
its feeble men and formidable women. Indeed the West is ruled by formidable aunts and elder sisters. Aunt
Angela in Germany, Aunt Theresa in England, Aunt Brigitte in France. Only Aunt Hillary is missing to
complete the puzzle and establish the rule of Aunties over their hen-pecked nephews.
(Hillary's defeat didn't derail the Aunties' program of emasculation:
#MeToo campaign goes on unabated. Men are afraid to flirt with girls. Henry (
The
Superman
) Cavill admitted as much in an interview, saying that flirting with somebody would be like
"casting myself into the fires of hell", as a person in the public eye. "I think a woman should be wooed and
chased", he said, but it could lead to jail. He was immediately attacked for this heresy: "If Henry Cavill
doesn't want to be called a rapist then all he has to do is not rape anyone", implausibly they claimed. And
he apologised profusely.)
Trump's trip had been accompanied by mass
protest demos. Normally I am all in favour of a good anti-American demo, but in this case, the protesters
were extreme feminists and supporters of unlimited immigration. That's people who like the Aunties, and hate
Uncles. They do not mind conflict with Russia and even consider Trump as a "Russian agent". They dislike
that he does not obey Aunties.
In the second part of the tour, Trump had met with the formidable Mr
Putin, a real man. Now that we have learned from our reliable sources what had happened in the palatial
halls of Helsinki (excepting face-to-face private talk with Putin) we can describe Trump's Pilgrim's
Progress and share our knowledge and conclusions with you.
In short, President Trump made the right sounds and called for right
solutions, but he has been unable to insist on any. If he were a free man of his own mind, this trip would
transform the world. The way things are, it will remain a sign of his honourable intentions, for everything
he said has been overturned and denied by his aides.
In Brussels, Trump attacked Frau Merkel.
How does she dare to buy Russian gas, if Germany faces a Russian threat? Why does it accept immigrants and
refugees who undermine the European way of life? Saying that, he sided with "the populists", the Italians,
Hungarians and Austrians, whose top politicians are male and friendly to Trump and Putin.
The Brussels meeting almost came to an
undoing of NATO. Trump hinted that the US would leave NATO unless they pay. They have to pay more, much
more, if they want to have American protection.
Could he mean it? NATO is an instrument
of American control over Europe, and Washington keeps dozens of bases in Europe, in particular – in Germany.
Germany has remained under American occupation since 1945. This would seem good for America, but the
occupied and controlled Western European states are tied to the Clinton camp, to Democrats and liberals.
They do not accept Trump as their rightful sovereign. And Europe does not pay for its occupation, so it is
costly. Of course, it is a great honour to occupy and control the great powers of the past, England, France,
the Netherlands, Spain. But it costs a lot of money for America. Likewise, in 1990 Russia discovered that it
is expensive to control surly East Germany, independent Poland, sunny Georgia, tricky Armenia, populous
Uzbekistan and the rainy Baltic States.
There is no certainty that the countries of Europe will agree to pay and
submit to Trump's demands. In Germany, there are growing voices demanding the Yankees be sent home, that is,
to ask the American soldiers to leave Germany. It would be good if NATO were to disintegrate and disappear,
like the Warsaw Treaty Organization disappeared. Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to return the
American soldiers home. Perhaps we shall witness Pax Americana without American troops in Europe, like
England fictitiously claimed to belong to the Roman Empire, though Roman legions had left, and Rome lost all
interest in foggy Albion.
In England, Trump confronted Mrs May.
She reminded him of his school mistress, and Donald does not like school mistresses. The soft Brexit, which
she intends to conclude, is a complete bummer, not a Brexit, he said. Under the proposed treaty, all
prerogatives remain in Brussels. So, there can be no trade agreement between the United States and Britain.
America will negotiate directly with Brussels. And in general, it would be better if May transferred Downing
Street 10 to her former Foreign Secretary, a hard-line Brexit supporter, the red-headed Bojo (as the Brits
call Boris Johnson, who had just resigned, resenting the proposed plan for soft Brexit).
The European Union is an American
design, too. Why, then, does the US President want to undermine it by removing the UK, his own Trojan Horse?
Apparently, it means that the globalist forces have entered a state of direct confrontation with America.
This first part of Trump's tour had been
followed by the Kremlin with satisfaction. The Kremlin also believes that NATO has become obsolete, and that
Brexit is the right step. Russia instinctively disapproves of mass migration, just like Trump.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump's meeting with President Putin had
been postponed for a year; both men were eager to meet. Trump wanted to meet another strong man, a powerful
chieftain who can assist him in building a new world, instead of the one created under Obama, by media and
Supreme Court Judges. President Putin wanted to solve bilateral issues and to ease American pressure upon
Russia.
Their problems were very different. The
main problems of Trump were Mme Clinton and Barack Obama, and the whole army of their obstinate followers
who didn't recognise Trump's legitimacy. Putin couldn't do much for him, with all his sympathy.
Putin's problem is the hybrid warfare
carried out by the United States against Russia. Despite accusations you hear in your media (alleged Russian
ads in the Facebook and Twitter influencing voters), American pressure on Russia is very real and very
painful. American officials try to wreck every international deal Russia attempts to clinch. It is not only,
or even mainly about weapons. If a country A wants to sell Russians, say, bananas, the US ambassador will
come to A's king, or his minister, and will expressly forbid him to sell bananas to godless Russians.
Otherwise, do not expect the US aid, or do not count on US favours in your disputes with your neighbours, or
the US won't buy your production, or US banks will take another long and jaundiced view at your financial
transactions. You witnessed the
scene
, when the crazed Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, threatened sovereign nations with
severe punishment for voting against the US desires, so you have an idea of American delicacy and caution
while pushing their will through.
Russians are in a very uncomfortable
seat. All their neighbours are subject to American pressure to annoy Russia, be it Georgia (once they even
attacked
Russia militarily being led by American and Israeli advisers) or the Ukraine (Americans arranged a
coup d'état
and installed extremely hostile to Russia government in Kiev). American military bases
surround Russia and NATO troops drew closer and closer to its centres. American military budget of 600
billion dollars dwarfs the Russian one, while the armaments' race can undermine Russian finances. If Russia
were a woman, she would scream: stop it!
Perhaps our colleague
Mr Andrei Martyanov
is right and the US can't destroy Russia militarily; perhaps
Immanuel Wallerstein
is correct and American power is in decline; but meanwhile the US is perfectly able
to make life hard and difficult for any state. It made life unbearably hard for North Korea, extremely hard
for Iran. Russia is not doing half as good as she could do without ceaseless American meddling.
President Putin would like Trump to
relent. There is no reason for this incessant picking on Russia; it is not Communist anymore; it is much
smaller and less populous than the former USSR; it wants to live in peace as a member of the family of
nations, not as a great alternative. The anti-Russian offensive began in earnest in the days of previous US
presidents, namely Obama and Clinton; so it would make sense for Trump to stop it.
Problem is, President Trump is also
actively engaged in war against Russia. Just a few days ago he pressured the German Chancellor to give up on
the North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers demanded that Turkey desist from buying a
Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force bombed Russian troops in Syria.
Still Putin made a good try. He proposed
to hold a referendum in the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine which is presently independent though lacking
international recognition. The people of Donbas had their own referendum in 2014, and voted for
independence; Kiev regime and its Western sponsors denied its validity as it was done under Russian army's
protection, they claimed. Now Putin proposed a re-run under international auspices.
Trump ostensibly agreed, he said it was
a good idea, and he asked for the opinion of John Bolton, his national security advisor; Bolton confirmed it
was a good idea. This was in Helsinki; however, since then the idea had been rejected by the Americans, as
the Kiev regime balked at it. The regime knows well that the people of Eastern Ukraine aren't likely to opt
for their tender mercies, and Trump administration won't push Kiev to agree to secession, or to abide by the
Minsk agreements and let them re-join federal Ukraine as an autonomous unit. So this haemorrhaging wound at
the western border of Russia will bleed on.
As for Syria, Putin told Trump that he
agreed upon the arrangements with Mr Netanyahu to keep Iranians and their militias at some 80 km away from
the disengagement (1974) lines at the Golan Heights. (Iranians are now going through a difficult stretch and
they accepted this solution without a murmur.) This was acceptable to Trump, and both presidents stressed
that they value Israeli security highly.
(They have differing reasons for it.
Putin wants Syria to remain in peace under his protégé and ally President Bashar Assad, and for this, he
needs some security arrangements with pugnacious Israel. Putin is aware of Jewish state's ability to pull
strings and he doesn't want to antagonise it. Putin also wants Trump to be happy, and Israel is a point of
huge importance for the US President, much more than for Putin.
Trump sacrifices at the altar of Israel
to propitiate the Jews he is fighting in the US. Trump fights everything American Jews stand for, against
all they achieved recently. He wants to have them back in the cash flow cubicle, the 'short guys that wear
yarmulkes every day', counting his notes. They want much, much more: they wish to dominate and rule America
their own way. Trump is ready to give all he can to Israel, so the American Jews will be less eager to fight
him.
This ploy had been tried by the German
National-Socialists in 1930s, who gave the Zionist-Socialists the most profitable
Ha'avara deal
to offset and overcome hostility of American Jews. It failed then, it is likely to fail
again, but not before the Zionists will get all they dream of.)
For North Korea, Putin lauded Trump's
move and said he will keep playing a supportive role to American efforts.
ORDER IT NOW
For the bogus "Russian interference in
the US elections", Putin proposed to establish a bilateral expert group for cyber security. Let experts deal
with experts, and sort out the claims, he said. Trump agreed with the idea, though his advisers were quick
to repudiate it upon their return to Washington.
Putin also proposed to allow
cross-examinations on the reciprocity basis: the US investigators will travel to Russia and interrogate
Russian officials indicted by Mueller's team; while Russian investigators will travel to the US and
interrogate Ambassador McFaul for his participation in
Browder affair
. Trump had been impressed by the generous offer; but as he returned to Washington, McFaul
(falsely) claimed Trump intends to send him to the Gulag, and Trump's advisers promptly repudiated the
proposal.
Putin did not intend to arrest and
detain McFaul, just to question him; likewise, he wouldn't permit Mueller investigators to carry Russian
intelligence officers to a Guantanamo of their choice, just to ask them questions. The Browder Affair grows
bigger as time goes: though the rascal was not the biggest of Russian assets' looters, he was the most
outspoken and keen on hanging on the stolen goods. The US advisers from top-league universities implanted in
the Yeltsin administration in 1990s had stolen more; they also facilitated creation of the mighty oligarchs
of that time. However, Browder had more tenacity and he judiciously invested a lion share of his ill-gotten
profits in bribes aiming to suborn the US administration and turn it onto relentless pursuit of Russia.
Ambassador McFaul fronted for him and covered his misdeeds; while McFaul tried to interfere in Russian
electoral process following the precedent established in 1996.
Thus at Helsinki, a pattern had been
established, I was told by a witness. Putin would make a proposal, Trump would tentatively agree and
promptly deny and repudiate on return to Washington.
From the beginning to the end, the
US media was highly hostile to Trump and to his mission in Europe. They eagerly followed anti-Trump demos
and exaggerated his every blunder. Google obediently trailed at the top Twitter messages of the ex-CIA boss
calling Trump 'a traitor'. All prominent Western newspapers spoke of Trump's 'treason'.
Perhaps they would be able to convince
some Republicans to follow their trend, but the
defeat of Rep. Mark Sanford
in South Carolina primaries following Trump's angry Twitter had brought them
to their senses. A Republican leader stated the case well: "Obviously there are going to be those who are
going to criticise him but they're going to criticise him for anything that he says. This committee stands
strong, stands behind him and wants to support him. We're interested not only in the 2018 elections, we're
interested in the 2020 elections as well."
The
result
of violent Trump-is-a-traitor campaign was surprising: 80% of Trump voters approved of his
Helsinki shtick, notwithstanding the vehement accusations. American media had lost its silver touch.
President may continue to build his power structure, and perhaps one day his word will be worth something.
Putin mentioned BILL BROWDER, and Lee Stranahan's twitter caught fire!
Crack the Deep State matrix.
Join Lee's campaign to make Senators answer the question,
"Have you seen Bill Browder's deposition in the
U.S. vs. Prevezon Holdings case?"
Full research links, including testimony, here -
Trump sacrifices at the altar of Israel to propitiate the Jews he is fighting in the US. Trump fights
everything American Jews stand for, against all they achieved recently. He wants to have them back in the
cash flow cubicle, the 'short guys that wear yarmulkes every day', counting his notes. They want much,
much more: they wish to dominate and rule America their own way. Trump is ready to give all he can to
Israel, so the American Jews will be less eager to fight him.
This could well be right, with Trump's slavish pro-Israel stance designed to get (some) US Jews off his
back.
The implication is that there is a split between US Jewry and the Israeli's, which seems likely since US
Jews want to dominate and rule America, whereas Israeli Jews want to dominate and rule the Middle East
(different concepts).
The Israeli project is a costly affair for the US, and is leading straight towards an Iran war which
could well duplicate the cost of Iraq. If it happens, the US will inevitably be weakened and further
impoverished – maybe more obviously this time as the US has reached its debt limit – with a guaranteed
increase in social unrest.
US Jewry couldn't care less if the US population is impoverished, but there is the issue that social
unrest builds support for Trump, so Israeli action on Iran may force US Jewry to deal with increased US
popular nationalism – with the (US elite Jewish) instinctive reaction to go for repression.
Basically US Jewry wants to be an untouchable minority elite (US Neo-Bolshevism) but the transition to
totalitarianism can be tricky, and the Israelis may be dangerously accelerating the process for them.
" Problem is, President Trump is also actively engaged in war against Russia. Just a few days ago he
pressured the German Chancellor to give up on the North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers
demanded that Turkey desist from buying a Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force bombed Russian troops
in Syria. "
As Trump said 'Russia is not a friend, nor a foe, but a competitor.
In Helsinki the gas price was discussed.
I wonder if Shamir understands what's going on, unique in history, the leader of an empire giving up that
empire, because he sees keeping it, even more expanding it, as neocons, AIPAC, AEI, want, is suicide.
"Indeed the West is ruled by formidable aunts and elder sisters."
Better characterised as childless Harpies, agents of globalist punishment, who defecate on the countries
and cultures they purport to represent and torture their people as they carry them down into the abyss of
Tartarus.
In the current Russophobian climate, it would have been impossible to concede almost anything to Russia, and
V. Putin understands this. But as Russiagate unravels ever so slowly, he will have more room. But as long as
both leaders agreed not to start WWIII , something has been achieved, therefore I also believe the Iran
threats to be posturing, it would make sense if Russia have calmed Israel, what the current situation
indicates.
The US knows fully well than an Iran war would not be winnable and bring the rest of the world together; the
world has not yet overcome the last financial crisis, a new largescale war in the ME could very well crash
the Global economy and the petrodollar. Nobody are keen on that.
There are numerous agendas and countless anti-Trump saboteurs at play in this latest escalation.
Nevertheless, it is in America's economic and security interests (as well as Russia's) to ease military
tensions and seek normalized relations.
Why not?
After all, the USSR collapsed nearly 3o years ago. And with it died the 'cold war'. America now trades
with communist China. So why not Christian Russia? What's the real roadblock? The last election? That's impossible to believe. Russian 'interference' (if it occurred at all) was not decisive. And what
Russia is alleged to have done is not unique or particularly unusual. Besides, the new cold war with Russia had been brewing for years. So what's behind it all?
This is where the oversized Israeli footprint in US politics rears its ugly head. International Zionists have their not-so-secret list of 'demands'. This list gets Washington's attention. So here's the Israeli deal: Russia's alliance with Iran and Syria must be 'contained' and diminshed. And
Putin–unless he capitulates–must be kept in his box, isolated. This is what Israel wants. Trump must accommodate–or try to accommodate–these demands. Israel's influence is too great to ignore.
The Zionist master plan is simple: continue the break-up of the Arab (and Persian) worlds into smaller,
compliant, non-democratic autocracies or puny, fragmented religious orthodoxies. Sound crazy? Not at all. In Israel's mind, we're already most of the way there.
Starting soon after 911, Zio-Washington initiated a war that crushed Iraq and set back its culture,
economy and military capabilities decades. Ditto on Libya. Syria has also been severely damaged. This is all
good news to Israel. But the job of re-making the Middle East to Israel's liking remains unfinished. Assad's Syria (with Russian and Iranian help) is about to emerge–if not victorious–then intact, after
years of Zio-American meddling and covert warfare. Assad survives but Israel has not given up. Syria remains
weak.
Next step: using Washington's awesome military and intelligence capabilities, global Zionism is now
embarking on a campaign that will attempt to destabilize Iran without using US bombs or missiles. How?
Hundreds of millions of US dollars have just been earmarked to target Iran's existing regime through
propaganda, sabotage and subterfuge. The ongoing Zionist-lead BDS campaign against Iran is about to hit an
even higher gear. This is another act of war against the people of Iran.
Yet no one seems to care. There's simply no discussion or dissent. It's simply Zio-America's next target. For the safety of Israel, Iran must fall.
Talk about direct interference in another country's sovereign affairs! What Zio-Washington is doing to
Iran makes 'Russiagate' look absolutely insignificant in comparison, even if every exaggerated assertion was
true. Yet no one protests.
Not the pundits. Not the politicians. Not even the anti-war Left. Either they're too frightened or
they're complicit.
Duplicity, dirty deeds, and double standards is how Zio-Washington rolls. And Israel wouldn't have it any other way.
Zionist power is simply too vast, too effective and too unrelenting to resist–even for a US President.
But Trump's objective to 'Make America Great Again' is up against Israel's presumption that it can direct US
policies to it liking. Can this marriage survive?
Can Trump serve two masters?
The inevitable clash ahead is why Trump is under so much media and political pressure. The Zions want to
keep him under pressure and off balance. Also, there is the simmering, embarrassing, unresolved matter of Palestine. The native goyim there are
still resisting. This fact too, is as astonishing as it is shameful.
The refusal of Israel to give back land, allow independence, and cut a deal that would allow Palestine
autonomy after decades of Israeli occupation and endless 'talks' speaks volumes about Israeli ruthlessness.
The 'Two State Solution' failed because Israel decided that it didn't want an independent and sovereign
Palestinian state. To the Israelis, the sad plight of the Palestinian people matters not.
And even Washington is not powerful enough to force Israel to return to the Palestinians the land that
the Jewish state snatched in its preemptive 1967 war. So the 'peace process' gradually died.
But as the talks dragged on, Israel expanded its borders, built Jewish settlements in Palestine, gained
greater militarily power, cultivated its regional influence (and power in Washington), and increased its
GDP.
Palestine on the other hand, achieved none of those things. Conditions have actually worsened. At this
point, all the Palestinians can do is hold on or surrender.
Meanwhile, it's clear that Israel's race-conscious majority want the native non-Jews out of the Jewish
State. This political 'value' can now be seen for what it is.
Can the torture of Palestine go on indefinitely?–or must Israel soon act ruthlessly and decisively?
One option is for the Jewish state to radically increase colonization of the Occupied Territories and
begin the forcible transfer of non-Jews into Jordan, Egypt or Syria.
Ironically, Meir Kahane's racist, reviled (but prophetic) proclamation (and book) 'They [the Arabs] Must
Go' has finally found its audience. Israel's 'national socialist' values are showing. Even Trump is being held hostage. Can Trump shake the Zionist monkey off his back?–or will he have to
obediently target all the usual bad guys: Iran, Hamas, Russia and Assad?
Israel orchestrates. Washington executes. And the sad story continues.
Trump is but another example of the Zionist control of the American government and Trumps pissing backwards
in his statements at the Helsinki news conference is the Zionist deep state in action for all the world to
see. Trump is a puppet of the Zionists who surround him and who hold the paper on his real estate house of
cards and so he does what he is told as the only other option is the JFK route and obviously he has made the
right choice for him but not for America.
Zionist control of American was proven on 911 when Israel and
the zionist deep state did 911 and got away with it and every thinking American knows they did it.
Trump has always been speaking out of both sides of his mouth, so his agreeing and disagreeing with the
"intelligence community" at the same time is all in a day's work for him. It seems to me that he is just
playing for time – he may of course still lose bigly in the end, but he has not yet conceded defeat.
"... (*) We say concealed, because it is becoming more and more the privileged method of the Empire to control and use for its own goals various rightist or leftist political currents and identities, inverting their original intentions and goals. Conspiracy and Deception were always formidable political tools. In our era, an era of unprecedented civilizational decline of Western Capitalism, they have become the main ones. That made it possible for America and the "Deep Finance" to use Tsipras and SYRIZA in Greece and that also made it possible for a politician so closely connected to the US and Israeli Neocons, as Donald Trump is, to deceive so many people and to present himself as a friend of Russia and an opponent of Wars, while in fact he was the guy entrusted with continuing the Neocon agenda in a more dangerous form, bringing into the equation also the nuclear card. ..."
We have witnessed during the last two years the multiplication of cases of political
repressions in various Eastern European countries, like Poland, where Mateusz Piscorski, leader
of the party Smena is detained illegally already for two years, without any
accusations formulated against him! But this is not the only authoritarian action of the Polish
authorities, which, by the way have been condemned by UN Human Rights Committee and by the
Polish Ombudsman (Rzecznik praw obywatelskich) for their actions. Among them the process
against the Polish Communist party, the harassment against the trotskyte group "Power to the
Councils", a pro-Palestinian conference and scientific conferences about Karl Marx! To all that
you may add the massive expulsion to the streets of impoverished tenants due to the
re-privatization process.
It seems that, for the Polish authorities, "Democracy" and "Freedom" were very good as
slogans against "Socialism" and the "Russians", but not so good to be really applied As for
Polish nationalism is of a very peculiar brand. Polish say for instance they are still angry
with the Soviet invasion to Poland in 1921 (after a failed Polish invasion of Soviet Russia!)
But they cannot explain why in the hell the leaders of this proud nation send their troops to
invade, occupy and destroy Iraq in 2003, along with US, Britain and Australia! It seems Iraq
cannot have the same right to national independence Poles claim for their country.
More to the South, in Moldova, an intellectual like Iurie Rosca, an internationally known
Moldovan is also persecuted by the authorities of the country. His real crime is that Rosca, a
militant for democracy since the Soviet times, remains a strong pro-independence and
pro-neutrality figure in a country NATO wants to include, as fast as possible.
More to the North, in the Baltic states, the so-called "Russian-speaking" huge minorities in
those states, of Russian, Ukrainian or Bielorussian origin, are the object of mass repressions
since the demise of the USSR. They are even deprived of their most fundamental political and
civic rights, with the complicity of European governments and EU institutions. In both Baltic
states and Ukraine, authorities do not object to the open celebration of the most terrible and
criminal Nazi or pro-Nazi figures as national heroes. (By the way one wonders why the World
Jewish Council and other similar organizations seem so little wondered by Nazi and anti-semitic
manifestations in this region, in particular by the Nazi activities in Ukraine. If something
like that happened anywhere else in the world, as a minimum they would ask for sanctions
against the powers which tolerate such manifestations or they would organize campaigns to
remove them from power!)
Except for the Baltic states and Ukraine, political persecutions did not take a massive
character and they don't need to take for the time being. Still those persecutions and the
general ideological climate (mostly anti-Russian and anti-Communist, sometimes clearly
pro-Nazi) are quite serious indications of the political project they want to serve.
Communists for instance or the Left are nearly inexistent in nearly all Eastern European
countries. Those repressions are not justified by any "Communist threat". As for Russia, it
dissolved, at its own initiative, both the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. To claim now it represents
a military threat for its ex-dominions it would be utterly ridiculous, if it was not very
dangerous. By the way, campaigns to persuade Europeans that Russia is a serious threat are
under way in all Europe, including Britain, Scandinavia or Germany, adapted to the particular
conditions and the level of consciousness in every European country. In Germany, in 2014, the
editor of Handelsblatt himself has compared the treatment of Russia by the local
media, with what German newspapers were writing in the beginning of WWI. It is clearly a
European wide project to present Moscow under the worse possible light.
Such media campaigns in History usually precede military campaigns, even if in the Russian
case it is not so simple. The aim here is not to counter a non-existent Russian threat but to
encircle, contain and provoke regime change in Russia and also undermine the relations between
Europe and Russia. By destroying the relations between Russia and Europe, you deny also to the
latter the means of its independence.
What the powers in place in Eastern Europe try to do by such repressive action is to
neutralize "pro-actively" any dissident voice, of the left or of the right, afraid that the
mere existence of any independent voice would harm their very ambitious plans. They are also
trying to begin shifting European ideology , from its old democratic values (even if often not
applied) to new authoritarian ones , something absolutely necessary for the attack of Capital
against popular classes and of Western Imperialism against Russia and other "outside enemies"
– targets. This is also essentially Trump's game: To use dissatisfaction from the
establishment policies to present a more authoritarian regime as an alternative.
Moldova: Encircling Russia from SE Europe
In Moldova, all economy and all politics and all power, except for the President of the
Republic, elected by direct vote, are controlled by one and only one Oligarch who was even
received officially in the US. Extreme corruption and exploitation of its people is the normal
state of affairs in this once rich land, turned into the poorest nation of Europe, after the
soviet collapse-suicide and the near to feudal neo-capitalist plundering of its resources, with
one third of its population emigrating abroad! NATO and the EU, as usual, pretend to fully
ignore the real situation in Moldova.
Moldova's Oligarch and the Western powers behind him are afraid now of the likelihood that,
in the next parliamentarian elections, the people of Moldova will overthrow their political
representatives. In the same time, Moldova is most probably one of the next targets of NATO on
its road to Moscow .
After destroying Yugoslavia , after launching a Debt War against Greece and Cyprus , after
provoking a bloody civil war in Ukraine , Western imperialism needs now to control Moldova, to
abolish whatever remains of its independence and neutrality and to turn it into a military
base, absolutely necessary for its war planning against Russia. Moldova , Serbia and FYROM are
the three remaining " holes " in the near complete chain of NATO protectorates now encircling
Russia from its South West, from the Adriatic to Donetsk, from the Mediterranean to
Hungary.
In reality, NATO is not doing anything different than what Hitler did, back in 1941,
spending precious time and his best military units to occupy Greece and control the Balkans
before launching the Barbarossa Operation. It is absolutely imperative for Western Imperialism
to control the Balkans and all of SE Europe before launching, if it will be able, its final
attack against Russia, an attack which may not take a ( notimpossible but rather
difficult) military form, but which can adopt other forms, such as geopolitical isolation and
threats, economic, financial and ideological war with the purpose of regime change, to return
this country to the status of Western vassal, as it was during the Yeltsin years, in alliance
with pro-Western forces inside Russia, probably more concealed that overt (*). In all possible
scenarios, the encirclement of Russia, the cutting of its access to the South , to the "Warm
Seas", is one of the principal strategic lines of attack of the West against Moscow, as it has
always been during the Soviet, but also during the Tsarist regime before the 1917 Revolution.
But now, the West is much more advanced as it is already waging war from positions like Kiev or
Caucasus, which belonged to the Russian Empire since centuries.
Hungary, Trump and the refugee crisis
Let us open a parenthesis at that point. Hungary is a very special case in Eastern-Central
Europe, as it pretends to be simultaneously a friend of Russia, of Trump and of Netanyahu! It
is only natural for Russia, attacked as it is from all sides, to see in Budapest a precious
ally and he is in some cases, when for example it supports Macedonian Slav nationalism thus
putting obstacles to the inclusion of FYROM into NATO. It is also rather normal for a power
like Russia to try to manoeuver exploiting serious contradictions inside imperialist centers
(Neocon-nationalists vs. Globalizers, Netanyahu against Soros, US Empire vs. Financial Empire).
The only problem is that, if the winds of the Western establishment are diverging in serious
problems, like Iran or the western political regime, they are absolutely united to their
hostility to Russia, even if some of those politicians try to portray themselves as friends of
Moscow. By the way that is not new. Even Hitler played in the past, rather successfully, this
game, before attacking Russia!
Returning to Hungary, the question is if Orban and similar regimes are or can be long-term
strategic allies of Russia. Especially in the context of the broader imperial game against
Moscow, of which the NATO expansion is only one, very important, but only one chapter.
We will see at the end of the day what all that game really means. Past historic experience,
but also the common anti-German, pro-US front of the Visegrád countries for decades is a
very strong indication of problems ahead. It is true that many people in Europe, even in
Germany, hate Merkel, Soros and globalization. Trump is using this dissatisfaction to create a
pro-US camp in Europe, with Poland and Hungary as its leaders. This does not seem the best
method to address the challenges put by Globalizers from the perspective of European
independence. (Greece is also such an example, with Tsipras counting on US and "Deep Finance"
support to counter Merkel. We have seen where all that led finally).
Hungary and its Eastern and Central European allies are now protesting against the refugees
who supposedly threaten them. But in reality it is not they who are threatened, the refugee
problem is serious and it is mainly affecting South and not Eastern European countries.
By attacking refugees, Eastern European states are constructing a very convenient outside
enemy, whose utility is first to help Trump against Europe, second to solidify an authoritarian
ideology at home, and third , to facilitate new Western wars against Islam.
It is very indicative the fact that both sides of the debate in Europe (pro- and
anti-immigrant/refugee) are hardly saying one word about the main root cause of the refugee
crisis, Western direct or by proxy interventions and the wars they provoked in the Middle East.
That means they are not so much interested in addressing the refugee crisis, they are
interested in using it.
The Dialectics of the Refugee Crisis
" Neocon – Nationalists " (the Huntington party) seem to be bitter enemies of Soros
and the Fukuyama type " Globalizers " and they are indeed regarding many questions. Still they
agree on the main, Western and Financial Domination in the world, they are seriously divided as
far as the means to impose it are concerned.
By the way, one gets often the impression of a kind of an objective division of labor
between those two camps. Neocons helped produce the refugees in the first place, by launching
the wars in the Middle East. Then, by greatly facilitating the massive transfer of refugees to
Europe, Soros-minded politicians and NGO's, tried to facilitate the implementation of their
totalitarian dream of destroying nations, states and every human identity, religion or
ideology, potentially able to resist the world domination of Financial Capital and the
institutions it is controlling, like the EU.
By doing that, they helped create the adverse reaction, which, instead of provoking a
backlash against the Wars, it is destined to fuel new ones! You bomb Libya, you create refugees
and then you use them to impose political regimes which are more convenient for new wars! Just
fine.
US vs. Europe
We must not forget also that all Eastern European elites, including the Hungarian one, were
formed by the Americans and some of their allies after the fall of the soviet regime and they
are structurally anti-Russian and against European independence from the US, even if, in some
rare cases, they can pretend to be friends of Russia. Eastern Europe, the "New Europe" of
Ramsfeld and the Neocons, stubbed in the back France, Germany and Russia, which were opposing
the war in Iraq in 2003, the same war which initiated the chain of Middle Eastern wars
responsible for the refugee crisis they are now protesting against!
Again on what is Trump
As for Mr. Trump, it is becoming really tiring to have to repeat, in 2018, already obvious
facts. The US President, examined on the basis of what he does, not what he says, on the basis
of the real record of his administration, on the basis of the fact that now Neocons in
Geopolitics and Goldman Sachs in economics are ruling Washington as never before, is nothing
else than the main tool for the reappearance of the main Neocon project, albeit in a much
expanded, multi-faceted and nuclear version. This program could not reappear by normal
political ways, so it reappeared as a result of a huge and complicated conspiracy to elect and
control Mr. Trump . Obama did not stop the Neocon policies, but he contained the more dangerous
manifestations of them, like war against Iran, a new, Iraqi-style invasion of Syria, or
providing Ukraine with more sophisticated weapons, as the present administration is already
doing, or in moving Israel's capital to Jerusalem.
Mr. Trump makes everything to persuade us he is mad and he probably is, I am not a
psychiatrist to make a diagnosis. But his policy is not mad at all. It is following, on the
contrary, an Iron Logic, the logic of Yinon, of Huntington, of the Wars of Civilizations, of
the New American Century, of Neocons, of Cheney, albeit adapted to the new international
situation. Here we are facing again nothing else than the centuries old phenomenon of Western
Imperialism, projected by both Western superpowers, the Empire of Finance and the US Empire, in
its more clear, more aggressive and more extremist form.
Regime Change in the West: Precondition for War
Most political and military leaders hate the fact that, always, even after the discovery of
Nuclear Weapons, War remains the continuation of politics with other means, as Clausewitz put
it. They like the fact that they can use their military means to implement their political
goals. But they don't like the fact they have to persuade their citizens and foreign opinion
for what they are doing. If they use their weapons without some form of consent, they will pay
a huge cost.
Without a political regime like Hitler's in Germany, without the enormous support he
commanded among German people (De Gaulle stated that no other people in History has supported
so much its leaders), all the technical and military means of the world would not permit the
Barbarossa Operation. (Let me clarify at that point that this is not an anti-German comment. It
is true that Germans committed horrendous crimes, for which there is no whatever justification.
But at least one can say they were pushed into committing them by the social disaster and the
national humiliation they suffered after WWII and the 1929 crisis. But there was no military
reason for levelling the German industrial, workers towns, or Nagasaki in Japan. Nowadays
Americans lack even such a pseudo-justification for what they are doing or threaten to do all
around the world. Nobody has invaded or plans to invade the United States, nobody has imposed
its catastrophic economic diktats to them.)
By the way it was exactly the will and capacity of Hitler's regime to attack Soviet Russia,
which made it acceptable to large sections of the German and Western establishment and
facilitated its ascension to power. As for his attack against Russia, it was not a mistake. It
was his aim and the logic of his project from the very beginning. But of course he had to hide
it in order to realize it.
We understand that some of our readers, accustomed to many decades of peace in Europe, may
be skeptical about this kind of reasoning. We should remind them that European history is full
of such abrupt changes from War to Peace and from Peace to War. It happened before, it can
happen again. By the way, it is already happening in modern Europe. It has happened in
Yugoslavia, it is happening in Ukraine, it is happening even in Greece, but by economic, not
military means. But mainly, the new Cold War is already and in many aspects the dominating
reality in nowadays Europe. It is War, even if it is not using the classical military
means.
To push further this War, to encircle and strangle Russia, Western Imperialism and its
military tool, NATO have now and "pro-actively" to silence any dissenting voice in Eastern
Europe, from the right or from the left, which may become tomorrow poles of resistance. They
have, through their repression, to teach to all potential dissidents the huge risks they will
assume if they express their disagreements.
They need also to persuade European nations that any resistance to their plans is futile and
they have nothing else to do than surrender and try to survive as best as they can. In the
beginning of the decade we had the transformation of Greece from a more or less usual Western
parliamentarian state into a Debt Colony , the Greek experiment and the Greek paradigm . The
2015 betrayal of the Greek people by its own leaders came to support the conclusion of futility
of any resistance, in a way even a military defeat would not do.
Now, Poland seems to have been chosen as the New Authoritarian paradigm, with clear
proto-Fascist elements, right and pro-US. The historic mission, the function of this new-old
Authoritarianism is to attack social rights and their force in both Eastern and Western Europe.
By doing that, they promote neoliberalism inside all of Europe, while creating the necessary
political and social conditions to facilitate the wars they plan against external threats
(Russia, Islam-Iran, Global South like Venezuela, China).
This is why we are witnessing such a definite turn to clearly authoritarian methods also in
Western and Central Europe, where special legislation is introduced everywhere, invoking the
need to "fight terrorism", which is in many cases a result of western services activities and,
in all cases, a result of Western interventions. This special legislation is not so much
addressed against terrorists but it aims in reality political dissenters, independent
intellectuals and social movements. To organize war against the East, it was always necessary
to suppress democracy, political dissent and social movements in the West. (This was also the
reason Mc Carthyism has been developed in the USA during the previous Cold War. It was
necessary to prepare USA for the War with USSR).
Note
(*) We say concealed, because it is becoming more and more the privileged method of the
Empire to control and use for its own goals various rightist or leftist political currents and
identities, inverting their original intentions and goals. Conspiracy and Deception were always
formidable political tools. In our era, an era of unprecedented civilizational decline of
Western Capitalism, they have become the main ones. That made it possible for America and the
"Deep Finance" to use Tsipras and SYRIZA in Greece and that also made it possible for a
politician so closely connected to the US and Israeli Neocons, as Donald Trump is, to deceive
so many people and to present himself as a friend of Russia and an opponent of Wars, while in
fact he was the guy entrusted with continuing the Neocon agenda in a more dangerous form,
bringing into the equation also the nuclear card.
"... There are many modern myths. One of them is about the events of 1989 as being the culmination of a grand historical struggle for freedom and liberty. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For years prior to 1989 the West through a combination of both legal business and criminal activity had interpenetrated the Communist elites with lucrative deals and promises of all kinds. ..."
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
-- Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"
There are many modern myths. One of them is about the events of 1989 as being the
culmination of a grand historical struggle for freedom and liberty. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For years prior to 1989 the West through a combination of both legal business and criminal
activity had interpenetrated the Communist elites with lucrative deals and promises of all
kinds.
This situation was even more pronounced in "non-aligned" Yugoslavia who for years had
maintained CIA and American and West European business contacts.
In effect, the "cold war" witnessed a rapid convergence between the economic and power
interests of both Western and Communist elites.
The "Communists" (in name only of course) quickly realized the economic benefits available
to them through at times open at times clandestine cooperation with Western business/criminal
interests.
Eventually, Communist elites realized that they had an unprecedented economic opportunity on
their hands: state privatization made possible, in part, with active Western participation.
For them, "Freedom" meant the freedom to get rich beyond their wildest dreams.
And the 1990's were just that. A paradise for thieving on an unimaginable scale all under
the rubric of the rebirth of "capitalism and freedom".
The true outcome of that decade was that the old communist elites not only retained their
social and political power behind the scenes; they also were able to enrich themselves beyond
anything the communist dictatorships could ever hope to offer them in the past.
Yes, the price was to give up imperial, national, and ideological ambitions. But it was a
very small price to pay; since the East European elites had ceased to believe in any of those
things years earlier.
The only firm belief they still held was the economic betterment of themselves and their
families through the acquisition by any means of as many asset classes as possible. In effect,
they became the mirror image of their "enemy" the "imperialist capitalist West".
This was not a case of historical dialectics but historical convergence. What appeared as a
world divided was actually a world waiting to be made whole through the basest of criminal
business activity.
But being clever thieves they knew how to hide themselves and their doings behind
superficially morally impeccable figures such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, to
name just a few. These "dissidents" would be the faces they would use to make a good part of
the world believe that 1989 was a narrative of freedom and not outright pubic theft which it
was.
Yes, people in the east, even in Russia, are freer now than they were. But it should never
be forgotten that the events of 1989/1990 were not even remotely about those revolutionary
dreams.
It was about something much more mundane and sordid. It was about greed. It was about the
maintenance of power. And finally it was about money.
How deep has the Western nexus of power and wealth gone into the heart of the East? So far
indeed that one can easily question to what extent a country like Russia is truly a "national"
state anymore and rather just a territory open to exploitation by both local and global
elites.
For that matter, we can ask the same question about the USA.
"... While not being a fan of Stalin, I acknowledge that only the people who rose to the top before Bolsheviks took power were good for anything. Those who rose after, from Khruschev on, were worthless nonentities. I consider this negative selection of leaders as one of the drawbacks of the Soviet system. ..."
Compared to modern western leaders Kruschev was rather good leader and Brezhnev is
downright genius. I was and am actually fond of Dear Leonid Iliich. So I believe it is not a
matter of social political organization but systematic and probably human feature.
The West has been producing non entities, idiots and morons at the top with unerring
consistency. It is just that conditions in the West are far more forgiving than in Russia.
Also we have not mentioned destruction and suffering caused by war in ussr somewhat lagging
in few aspects of life standards. Socialism slogan is from everyone by their abilities to
everyone for their contribution.
Hence obviously hardworking and better contributing people should be rewarded especially
like in Stalin times via glorifying and promoting them to higher status. Stahanov movement
comes to mind.
I think Stalin genius is underappreciated. Regarding weapons manufacturing I believe it
was a matter of great patriotic war shock.
That war in every respect has caused great damage to us including probably due to huge
loss of Tim and best human material laying foundation for further problems. Stalin wasted
8-10 years of his life to first win the war and then rebuild the country. Imagine no war. I
am pretty sure there would be no 1991.
While not being a fan of Stalin, I acknowledge that only the people who rose to the
top before Bolsheviks took power were good for anything. Those who rose after, from Khruschev
on, were worthless nonentities. I consider this negative selection of leaders as one of the
drawbacks of the Soviet system.
Materially the people in some Western countries lived better than the Soviet people.
However, the difference was ~2-3-fold at best, not 10+-fold as many in the USSR believed, and
there were (and are) very few countries with higher living standards than Russia. As far as
psychological wellbeing is concerned, the USSR compared to the West even better, except for
the people with excellent education and willingness to work hard, like me. That's the PR
campaign Soviet authorities lost to their peril: the support of better intellectually
equipped and the most active people.
I agree that nobody, even the laziest and most useless, should go hungry today, but the
difference between what those get and what hard-working people get should be many-fold.
Otherwise, the society provides disincentive for the people who can contribute, dragging
itself down.
Also, USSR should have paid more attention to the production of consumer goods, even if it
meant fewer tanks and artillery pieces. It's policies made all these tanks useless, anyway,
not to mention that today these tanks and other military hardware is used against Russia by
former "brothers" (with "bothers" like that, who needs enemies).
I agree that the people who went to college in Soviet times are better educated and more
creative than recent graduates. I am pretty sure that recent successes of Russian MIC are
largely due to the Soviet legacy. We'll see what happens next, as "effective managers" they
are cranking out now are totally useless in real life.
So Boyd D. Cathey
claims that the main reason of anti-russian hysteria is that Russia represents an obstacle to
establishing global US domninance -- a global neoliberal empire led by the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the center-right." Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The Washington Post ..."
"... When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... The Weekly Standard ..."
"... Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder, the grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President Putin's nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils ..."
"... Two Hundred Years Together ..."
"... The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, ..."
"... Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and Bruxelles, or ..."
"... More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin has offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror, but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your assistance or intel." ..."
"... as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today, and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not received with equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage and its traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria we have witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality. ..."
Almost one year ago the United States Congress (with only a handful of "nay" votes)
adopted
new and severe sanctions against Russia for its supposed attempt to influence and interfere
in the 2016 national elections. Included in that legislation was a provision -- specifically
placed there by Russophobe Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) -- that President Trump cannot alter
or lift any of the sanctions without future Congressional approbation.
The government of Vladimir Putin, in response to this provocation, announced that the
American diplomatic presence in Russia would be reduced by 755 persons, a drastic move by any
standards. But we cannot say it was unexpected -- or undeserved.
That sanctions vote was fascinating as it illustrated during the first year of the
contentious Trump presidency a rare point of political unity between the socialist
Left, the Democrats and the mainstream media -- formerly noted for their "soft" and favorable
attitude to the old and unloved Soviet Communist Russian regime -- and the conservative/GOP
mainstream, dominated by the Neoconservatives. Of course, perspectives and approaches to the
question differ, whether it was the Trump campaign that was colluding with Moscow, or if it was
Hillary and the Clinton Foundation that had collaborated in some way, but their target remained
the same: that man in the Kremlin and the country he governs.
One thing was clear: the result of the 2016 presidential election had the most unheard of
and remarkable result in recent American political history: a de facto alliance of
these supposedly antipodal political forces. And what we have witnessed is a phalanx of the
pseudo-Right Neocons and the formerly pro-Soviet Left linked together, competing to see who
could be more "anti" and who could come up with the more far-fetched Russia conspiracy
theories, and -- as with the 2017 sanctions -- the latest unwarranted, over the top
legislation.
Consider the recent -- but largely unreported -- formation of an umbrella group, the
Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), with the goal of "uni[ting] the center-left and the
center-right." Its leaders include former John McCain foreign policy advisor Max Boot, The
Washington Post 's Anne Appelbaum, Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former chess wizard Gary
Kasparov, and Richard Hurwitz of Council on Foreign Relations. [See " Neocons &
Russiagaters Unite! ," April 27, 2018] RDI's manifesto calls for "fresh thinking" and urges
"the best minds from different countries to come together for both broad and discrete projects
in the service of liberty and democracy in the West and beyond . Liberal democracy is in crisis
around the world, besieged by authoritarianism, nationalism, and other illiberal forces.
Far-right parties are gaining traction in Europe, Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on Russia
and undermines democracy abroad, and America struggles with poisonous threats from the right
and left."
Or, recall those on-camera Fox News Russia experts -- think here of General Jack Keane or
the unhinged Colonel Ralph Peters who literally foamed at the mouth when talking about Putin,
calling him "the new Hitler," and who asserted that Putin had committed "worse crimes" than the
German dictator. (Peters is so anti-Russian that he finally
left the Fox News network in March 2018 )
When Tucker Carlson on his prime time program last July 11, 2017, demanded that Peters
provide facts and figures for his accusations, Peters
immediately exploded and implied that program host Carlson was a "Hitler apologist." It was
a classic argument and instance of reductio ad Hitlerum .
Of course, such examples aren't rare in the establishment "conservative movement" media.
Pick up any issue of National Review or The Weekly Standard or listen to the
Glenn Beck radio program and you can find the same hysteria, largely laced with faked quotes or
disinformation (e.g., "Putin wants to re-establish the Soviet Union" or "Putin was
head of the KGB" or "Putin has had his enemies assassinated," and so on, ad
nauseum ).
Indeed, another ploy by Neocon pundits (and Congress) has been to parade Bill Browder,
the grandson of American Communist Party boss Earl Browder, as a star witness to President
Putin's nefarious dealings. Of course, it should be noted that Browder fils lost big
time financially in his manipulations in Russia, as investigative journalists Philip
Giraldi and Robert
Parry have documented, and he is engaged in a vicious personal vendetta against Vladimir
Putin.
For the Neoconservative leaders of what passes for "conservatism" these days, it is as if
nothing has changed since 1991, since the ignominious fall of Communism. It's even
arguable that their hostility to Moscow has increased since then.
Let me suggest several reasons for this: First, many of the more prominent Neoconservatives
descend from Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, whose memories go back to the
pre-Communist days of persecution and pogroms under the Tsars. They originally welcomed Lenin
and the Communist regime as liberators and formed some of its staunchest supporters and
apparatchiks in the regime of terror that followed (especially in the Cheka and KGB) until
Josef Stalin unleashed a wave of anti-semitism after World War II. [See the partially
translated excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together at: https://200yearstogether.wordpress.com , and the
commentary
]
Putin, despite his strong support from native Russian Jews and from the Moscow Rabbinate, is
a Russian nationalist and fervent supporter of the traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church, and
those two factors bring up painful memories of the "bad old days" of discrimination and Jewish
persecution for the Neocons.
A prime example of this comes in a recent volume authored by prominent Neocon journalist and
homosexual activist (yes, the two traits often seem to go together), James Kirchick: The
End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, 2017). In his jumble of
Neocon ideology and prejudice, Kirchick evaluates what for him seems to be happening ominously
in Europe. He is deeply fearful of the efforts to "close borders" against Muslim immigrants
from the Middle East. He blasts Marine Le Pen as a racist -- and most likely a subtle
"holocaust denier!" -- and attacks the attempts in places like Hungary and Poland to reassert
national traditions and Christian identity;
for him these are nothing less than attempts to bring back "fascism."
Russia comes in for perhaps his harshest criticism, and the reason is unmistakable: Russia
seems to be returning to its older national and pre-Communist heritage, to its age-old Orthodox
Christian faith. Russians are returning by the millions to the church and the "old-time"
religion. For Kirchick this can only mean one thing: the triumph of bigotry, anti-semitism, and
"extreme right wing" ideology, and the failure of what he terms "liberal democracy and
equality" (including, he would no doubt include, feminism, same sex marriage, across-the-board
equality, and all those other "conservative values"!).
Kirchick's critique, shared by many of the leaders of the national Republican Party and
dominating the pages of most establishment "conservative" publications and talk radio these
days, joins him arm-in-arm with globalist George Soros in efforts to undermine the Russian
state and its president all in the name of "democracy" and "equality." [See, " George Soros Aghast
as Collapsing EU, while Russia Resurgent, " January 19, 2018]
But, just what kind of "democracy" and what kind of "equality" do Kirchick and Soros
defend?
Beyond the ideological foundations for their hatred of nationalist Russia are economic
considerations and the issue of who controls and manages the Russian economy: Wall Street and
Bruxelles, or Russia, itself. Unlike the weak and pliant Boris Yeltsin, Putin the
nationalist ended the strangle-hold of Russian industry, in particular control of Russia's
important energy sector, by those few international businessmen, the oligarchs (many of them
Jewish), most of whom fled the country. That could not stand! How dare Russia -- and its
president -- oppose the economic diktats of Bruxelles and Wall Street!
Lastly, we should add one more reason for hostility, and that is Russia's remaining
international presence, in particular, in Syria. It is very simple: you don't go from being one
of the world's two "superpowers" to all of a sudden a second-rate, economically-handicapped
"has been" without some remorse. As a patriot and nationalist President Putin has,
understandably, attempted to reassert Russian prosperity and power -- certainly, not as much or
in the same manner as the old Communist leaders. But, from his reasonable point of view, the
largest country in the world does have interests, and not just in what goes on in neighboring
nations where millions of Russians (formerly within Russia) reside, but also with long-time
allies such as Syria.
Is not this same criterion true for the United States and its dealings with its neighbors
and allies?
More, for the past twenty-five years Russia has experienced the poisoned tip of Islamic
terrorism, domestically, including the brutal war in Tchechnya in the Caucasus region and the
horrid bombings in the heart of the country, Moscow. From the beginning of his tenure Putin has
offered to cooperate with the United States in the fight against international Islamic terror,
but each time it was the United States -- us -- who refused, including famously Paul Wolfowitz
during the George W. Bush administration who replied to one such offer: "We don't need your
assistance or intel." And thus, the revealing files on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston
bombing) were not received.
But, as Neocon Charles Krauthammer once declared: "We live in a unipolar world today,
and there is only ONE superpower, and that is the United States." That attitude was not
received with equanimity by post-Communist Russia, a Russia that has discovered its heritage
and its traditions and has asked for partnership with the United States, and not the hysteria
we have witnessed in the United States sweeping aside all rationality.
"... Keep the fracturing United States together by focusing on an external aggressor. ..."
"... Keep the Europeans in line by making them afraid of the Russians ..."
"... Greed. Russia has natural resources and wishes to export them to competing markets, undercutting our Ruling Class's cut. ..."
"... Russia is traditionally white and nominally Christian, socially conservative. Leftists beat up on Russia as a proxy for beating up on traditional white Americans. ..."
"... With all due respect, current Russia-bashing in the US is not an issue of Jews vs non-Jews. It's more about the direct contradictions of the interests of the US as a country with those of the US as an Empire. ..."
"... as an Empire, the US does not tolerate anyone refusing to toe the line, be it Russia, China, Iran, Syria, or even Venezuela ..."
"... The fact that the US Empire is in decline makes its policy less and less rational, more and more hysterical. That's how all dominant Empires ended: not so much by being destroyed by opponents, but because of suicidal overreach. ..."
1. Keep the fracturing United States together by focusing on an external
aggressor.
2. Keep the Europeans in line by making them afraid of the Russians .
3. This: "There are a huge number of cuckservatives who still think it is 1980. It isn't
just neocons, but just about any cold-war cuckservative" -- geezer boomers who are having an
end-of-life crisis.
4. Greed. Russia has natural resources and wishes to export them to competing markets,
undercutting our Ruling Class's cut.
5. Russia is traditionally white and nominally Christian, socially conservative.
Leftists beat up on Russia as a proxy for beating up on traditional white Americans. Back
when Russia started their anti-gay thing, American leftists went nuts on them. Of course, Saudi
Arabia is much worse but we didn't hear anything about them because they aren't white and being
critical in such a case would be waycist.
With all due respect, current Russia-bashing in the US is not an issue of Jews vs
non-Jews. It's more about the direct contradictions of the interests of the US as a country
with those of the US as an Empire.
It is in the best interests of the US as a country to maintain good working relationship
with Russia, China, and others, both to achieve economic prosperity and to solve complex
international problems.
However, as an Empire, the US does not tolerate anyone refusing to toe the line, be it
Russia, China, Iran, Syria, or even Venezuela .
The fact that the US Empire is in decline makes its policy less and less rational,
more and more hysterical. That's how all dominant Empires ended: not so much by being
destroyed by opponents, but because of suicidal overreach.
"... However, the truth – at least in retrospect – was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. ..."
"... This, as the 21st century should have (but hasn't) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn't have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, "contained." ..."
"... In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called "the shadows"). ..."
"... The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels. ..."
Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally
knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be
humorous, if it weren't so grim.
If you look, you can find examples of this just about
anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in The New York Times from a piece on the
topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. "The Americans and South
Koreans," wrote
reporter Motoko Rich, "want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the
country's resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens' economic
well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive."
Think about that for a moment. The US has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus
upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and
that's before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proved
eager to sink at least a
trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that's
still rising and
outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure
sags and crumbles. And
yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme
path.
"Clueless" is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or
a government. Yet how applicable it is.
And when it comes to cluelessness, there's another, far stranger path the United States has
been following since at least the George W Bush moment that couldn't be more consequential and
yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don't have a clue. In
fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist's couch, this might be the place to
start.
America contained
In a way, it's the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural
there. It was never – not until recently at least – "empire," always "empires."
Since the 15th century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the
larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least
three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or
slowly falling from it.
This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise,
the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of
history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two "superpowers," the
United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.
Of the two, the US was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically
feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire , which it
worked assiduously to " contain " behind that famed Iron
Curtain and whose adherents in the US, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of
fear and suppression.
However, the truth – at least in retrospect – was that, in the Cold War years,
the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the
Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the
never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American
leaders that their own power had its limits.
This, as the 21st century should have (but hasn't) made clear, was no small thing. It still
seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do,
places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn't have. Though no one ever
thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after
a fashion, "contained."
In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power
was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the
planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called "the shadows").
The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going
it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.
That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial
race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic
power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when
the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn't triumphalism (though that
came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected,
predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had
continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.
America
uncontained
Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the
moment, " the end of
history ." Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had
been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call "the last superpower," the
"
indispensable " nation, the " exceptional
" state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hit
the campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn't all-American any more).
In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the "last superpower" at that moment.
There was even, however briefly, talk of a "peace dividend" – of the possibility that, in
a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in
the sinews of war-making but of peacemaking (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being
of the country's citizens).
Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being
relegated to Washington's attic. Instead, with only a few rickety "rogue" states left to deal
with – like gulp North Korea, Iraq and Iran – that money never actually headed
home, and neither did the thinking that went with it.
Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in
Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet
Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory
led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one
that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would
be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.
And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but
one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993
when the world's greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found
itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the
planet (a place
still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).
In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the 20th century
had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements,
generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world – the very world of
competing empires now being tucked into the history books – and it hadn't gone away. In
the 21st century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both,
would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last
superpower.
Unchaining the indispensable nation
On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden
sent his air force (four hijacked US passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19
suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the
Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of
which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in
Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but
unchained
the last superpower.
William Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top
officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had
never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on
planet Earth. Just one superpower – wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech
military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse – had now been challenged
by a small jihadist group.
To president Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like
nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that "
Pearl
Harbor of the 21st century ," it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of
those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld would instruct an aide
at the Pentagon that day, "Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not."
Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost
instantly said to be "at war," and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on
Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan
largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have "terror
networks" of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration's potential
gunsights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.
In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the
invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly
envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East.
There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would
soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's top officials had been nursing just such dreams
since, in 1997, many of them formed a
think-tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for the New American
Century and began to write out what
were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and
their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.
In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly
dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single
power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself.
And this wasn't to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration's "unilateralism"
rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc
of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging US military power. The
administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put the
matter bluntly: The US was to "build and maintain" a military, in the phrase of the moment,
" beyond challenge
."
They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up,
destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be "shocked and awed" by a simple demonstration of
its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all,
as Bush said at a Veterans of
Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the US military was "the greatest force for human liberation
the world has ever known."
Though there was much talk at the time about the "liberation" of Afghanistan and then Iraq,
at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet's lone
superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a "conservative" one,
its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world
was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to
everything.
It was radical in ways that should have, but didn't, take the American public's breath away;
radical in ways that had never been seen before.
Shock and awe for the last
superpower
Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They
tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that
had never before been seriously imagined.
It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem
– to them at least – that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of
genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached
the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty.
But not George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and pals. In the face of what seemed
like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that
anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.
Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later,
having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still
with a military funded in a way the next seven
countries couldn't cumulatively match,
the United States would have won literally nothing?
Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the US of
the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all;
that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a
state of "
infinite war " and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed
states , destroyed
cities , displaced people , and
right-wing "populist" governments, including the one in Washington?
Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this
country would have found itself not just in decline, but – a new term is needed to catch
the essence of this curious moment – in what might be called self-decline?
Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising – and doing so on a planet that seems
itself to be
going down . Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus
in which America was both unchained and largely alone.
The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so
far suggests one reality about which America's rulers proved utterly clueless: After so many
hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too
ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one
gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.
Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet
Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of
limits from America's political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the
process, it also set the US on a path to self-decline.
The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday
make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever
wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the
political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving
so little for others.
Whether you're talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what
took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a
favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we Americans may be facing little short
of "regime change" on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that's likely to
prove to be.
All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush's boys tried to swallow whole. They left
us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump's America where cluelessness
has been raised to a new power.
"... The net result will be more of the aluminum market will flow through the Yuan rather than the dollar, neatly avoiding sanctions and any future threats. Because with the insanity caused by the overnight chaos in April, any aluminum supplier/consumer will be wary of another such edict from the naked Emperor in D.C. ..."
"... Rusal will be one of the main beneficiaries since Russian banks are already sanctioned. ..."
"... Abusing your customers is never a winning marketplace strategy and that's exactly what Trump's sanctions policy is doing, abusing customers of the dollar. Trust has been the dollar's strongest attribute for a long time now and it is the primary reason why it has dominated trade and reserves. ..."
"... But there is a limit to how much your customers will take. And Trump is pushing well beyond that limit. And when the benefits of using the dollar are eclipsed by the liabilities, people will naturally shift away from it. ..."
"... Putin has and will use future mini-crises like this to further clean up the rot left over from the Yeltsin years, like Deripaska, while building a Russia insulated from future attacks like this. ..."
"... The struggle for most Americans regarding this issue is the fact that the Ministry of Truth has always told us "Russia Bad!" while "US Good!". The Ole good guy vs bad guy paradigm. I grew up in the 80's and am very familiar with that paradigm. I am an American through and through but our government has become the most corrupt bunch of whoring thieves on the planet. ..."
"... True Americans have awakened to realize the power of our corrupt government lies in the dollar hegemony. True Americans hate it, and hate the power and control it wields in our own lives. We see it at work around the world. We see DC squeeze our lives to subsidize it's world empire. An empire is seeks to maintain for various reasons that are debated regularly. ..."
"... The USA is drunk on power with their dollar as they see it as invincible. It will be their own undoing. The world is eager and preparing to drop/run/destroy the dollar. One day they'll all lick their wounds take their losses and forget the dollar completely. ..."
"... The US will have to do one of the hardest things in the history of the nation. She'll have to stop LYING to herself! All those recommending weaponization of the petrodollar, are charlatans. The USA cannot get through restructuring via antagonism, that only tightens the economic noose. ..."
"... What is needed, is bankruptcy protection, via honest cooperation with the emergent economic powers in the East. This comes with a price, retrenchment of imperium. This in turn, requires sobriety that, the game while not completely lost, as in national decomposition, is nevertheless, unwinnable, as in rebuilding can only follow retrenchment. ..."
Looking at the unfolding trade war between Donald Trump and the world the phrase that should
come to mind is "One good turn deserves another."
In the case of the insane sanctions on Oleg Deripaska and Russian Aluminum giant, Rusal,
back in April, we finally got some clarity as to how Russia can and will respond to future
events.
In yesterday's Treasury International Capital (TIC) report, we saw clearly that Russia
activated its nearly $100 billion in U.S. Treasury debt to buy dollars in April.
More than $47 billion in U.S. debt was dumped into the market to cover the chaos engendered
by Trump's overnight diktat for the world to stop doing business with Rusal.
Also of note, U.S. ally Japan continues to shed Treasuries at around 8-10 billion per month.
Ireland dumped $17 billion and Luxembourg nearly $8 billion.
While China dropped $5 billion this is noise, ultimately as its holdings of U.S. debt have
been stable for over a year now. What is interesting is Belgium, the home of Euroclear, seeing
a $12 billion inflow. Likely that's where some of the Russian-held debt was traded to.
The Russians likely sold from their balance on reserve with the Federal Reserve. Here's the
latest iteration of the chart I keep for just such an occasion.
Rusal's shares and bonds went bidless but the damage wasn't contained there as major
Russian banks like VTB and Sberbank were hit hard as well. So, while Rusal didn't have much
in the way of dollar-denominated debt. It did have major dollar-related obligations as accounts
receivable on its balance sheet because of the sheer size of its trade conducted in
dollars.
And that's why there was such an outflow from Russia's stock of Treasuries. But, here's the
thing. It didn't matter one whit. Why? It didn't undermine Russia's Foreign Exchange
Reserves.
No Dip in Russia's Foreign Exchange Reserves During Rusal Crisis
Russia just sold Treasuries into the market, raised dollars and swapped out Rusal's bonds,
holding them as collateral for a Repo.
The Bank of Russia Intervened to keep Rusal and Other Banks Solvent by Dumping U.S.
Treasuries
This mass dumping of U.S. debt caused the long end of the U.S. yield curve to blow out past
significant resistance points, like the 10 year pushing above 3.05% in sympathy with the Fed's
policy to dry up dollar liquidity. If this first-order analysis by Zerohedge is correct, then
we can assume Russia has been holding a lot of long-dated Treasuries versus say China which we
know has shortened up the average maturity of their massive bond portfolio.
In times past we may have not seen such a massive dump of U.S. debt by Russia. They may have
simply sold dollars directly or swapped euros or yuan for them. But, these are different times.
Trump has taken the use of sanctions to a level that hasn't been seen before.
Putin is the master of parallel aggression. You take an action against Russia, he will
generally hit you back along some other vector.
In this case it was a direct confrontation to Trump's bringing the full weight of U.S.
financial dominance down on its rivals and allies, who are all heavily exposed to
Rusal's market position.
Russia is not out of the water with this situation which is why Oleg Deripaska, the majority
owner of Rusal and the one targeted by the Trump administration, is looking still to find ways
to satisfy the U.S.'s demands on this issue.
Putin's Pivot
But, don't think this isn't working to Putin's advantage as Deripaska is not one of his
supposed favored oligarchs. This report from Bloomberg spelled out the situation well back in
April.
As for Deripaska, he will get help from the Russian government again. {which he did, see
above} Rusal has warned that the sanctions might mean a default on a portion of its debt.
That's most likely to happen to its more than $1 billion in dollar-denominated debt. But, as
ever, the company's biggest creditors are Russian state banks, and the Kremlin will keep
Rusal solvent one way or another as it reorients toward Asian markets. It won't be a huge
headache for Putin: He's seen worse, including with Rusal during the financial crisis.
And that's the most important part.
Once the current positions are wound down and the aluminum market adjusts to the new reality
of U.S. hyper-aggression to restart an industry we really don't need (smelting aluminum?
really?) just to satisfy Trump's outdated views on trade (which they are MAGA-pedes) Rusal's
business will not be so U.S.-centric.
And therefore the world will become less exposed, over time, to the depredations of U.S.
financial attack. I told you before that China has responded to this by issuing new
yuan-denominated futures contracts for industrial metals.
Why do you think they did that?
Will it create pain in the short-term? Yes. Europe will experience even more of this as will
Asia.
Will a lot of companies fear being sanctioned and fined by the U.S. for doing business with
Rusal? Yes. It's happening now. Will this exacerbate underlying economic conditions in Europe?
Of course.
But, if Deripaska submits, like it looks like he will, then the aluminum market will calm
down and Trump's sanctions will look silly.
Sanctions Bite Both Ways
The net result will be more of the aluminum market will flow through the Yuan rather than
the dollar, neatly avoiding sanctions and any future threats. Because with the insanity caused
by the overnight chaos in April, any aluminum supplier/consumer will be wary of another such
edict from the naked Emperor in D.C.
And, as such, they will diversify the currencies they buy and sell aluminum in. It won't be
a sea change overnight. Those least exposed will jump ship first. Rusal will be one of the main
beneficiaries since Russian banks are already sanctioned.
But it will be a trend, that once started will gain steam.
China can and will tie convertibility of its futures contracts to gold through the Shanghai
exchange to allay worries about getting money out of the country.
Abusing your customers is never a winning marketplace strategy and that's exactly what
Trump's sanctions policy is doing, abusing customers of the dollar. Trust has been the dollar's
strongest attribute for a long time now and it is the primary reason why it has dominated trade
and reserves.
But there is a limit to how much your customers will take. And Trump is pushing well beyond
that limit. And when the benefits of using the dollar are eclipsed by the liabilities, people
will naturally shift away from it.
Look at the TIC chart above and note the total. This is a $6.3 trillion synthetic short
position against the dollar. He's inviting countries to dump treasuries to defend their
currencies as the dollar strengthens while shifting their primary materials buying to the
biggest rival's currency.
This is why Russia continues to run a very tight financial ship while it leads the charge
away from the dollar. It's inviting customers into the ruble with both a strong national
balance sheet and relatively higher interest rates. This has the U.S. fuming.
Putin has and will use future mini-crises like this to further clean up the rot left over
from the Yeltsin years, like Deripaska, while building a Russia insulated from future attacks
like this.
Remember, even the U.S. has limits. It cannot sanction people for refusing to trade in
dollars. Even the U.S. doesn't have that power. It can try but it will fail. New systems, new
banks, new institutions can always be created.
... " ... in the case of the insane sanctions on Oleg Deripaska and Russian Aluminum
giant, Rusal, back in April, we finally got some clarity as to how Russia can and will
respond to future events .. . " ...
... most recently, Trump had been focusing on protecting steel and "aluminum" on world
trading ... could there be an underlying reason behind these sanctions? ... who is Trump
really protecting here? ...
... let's follow the money ... these links might let us connect the (((dots))) ...
Should the London Metal Exchange allow Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Glencore to own
aluminium warehouses even as they trade the metal?
GOLDMAN'S NEW MONEY MACHINE: WAREHOUSES ) ...
The struggle for most Americans regarding this issue is the fact that the Ministry of
Truth has always told us "Russia Bad!" while "US Good!". The Ole good guy vs bad guy
paradigm. I grew up in the 80's and am very familiar with that paradigm. I am an American through
and through but our government has become the most corrupt bunch of whoring thieves on the
planet.
True Americans have awakened to realize the power of our corrupt government lies in
the dollar hegemony. True Americans hate it, and hate the power and control it wields in our
own lives. We see it at work around the world. We see DC squeeze our lives to subsidize it's
world empire. An empire is seeks to maintain for various reasons that are debated
regularly.
The rub comes when we see that the only force capable of standing up to this corrupt
empire is a country that we have been told all our lives is evil. Russia wasn't always the
communist soviet union.....and is no longer that today. But in the minds of many Americans
that is all that it will ever be. Russia has the resources, military, intelligence, and skill
to control it's own destiny. It has everything it needs to tell the US empire, "No!" I
respect that....admire that.....cheer that....and wish them success in their stand. For those
of us looking for a way to bust the evil cabal now running our own country, Russia's
rebellion of US dominance is a ray of hope. It's not that we don't love our own country or
want to be Russians, but we don't care about supporting a world empire that requires wars,
taxes, and a strategy that strip us of our individual sovereignty by contaminating our
country with people that don't belong here and will never think like an American.
People need to put aside their "fan-boy" biases, drop the blind loyalty, and start dealing
with reality. We are not rooting for Putin and Russia, rather we are rooting for the downfall
of thus evil banking cartel that is slowly killing us all and taking more and more of our
freedoms. To those of you that say that will cause pain and we STILL have the greatest
country on earth, I say, somethings are worth the pain.....and we can be a lot better. We
have got to change direction....and the sooner we get off this road of empire destruction,
the better.
Maybe it is because The Aluminum Company of America (formerly ALCOA now Arconic an others)
is going broke. Check out their stock price for the last 10 years or so. Are they still part
of the DOW Index? Bonehead move to include them years ago.
Trump is worth what, a couple of billion? And those assets are encumbered by a lot of debt
held by US banks. That does not an oligarch make. When it comes to US oligarchs, Trump is a
piker compared to the massive family trusts that can move markets and voting results.
Trump is worth exactly the debt that the Israeli Sheldon Adelson holds over him IIRC. Far from being independent he is owned by America's biggest parasite and enemy:
Israel.
The USA is drunk on power with their dollar as they see it as invincible. It will be their
own undoing. The world is eager and preparing to drop/run/destroy the dollar. One day they'll all lick
their wounds take their losses and forget the dollar completely.
The USA and Israel aka banksters will start WWIII to prove literally they will destroy the
world if need be instead of lose their power over mankind
The US will have to do one of the hardest things in the history of the nation. She'll have
to stop LYING to herself! All those recommending weaponization of the petrodollar, are
charlatans. The USA cannot get through restructuring via antagonism, that only tightens the
economic noose.
What is needed, is bankruptcy protection, via honest cooperation with the emergent
economic powers in the East. This comes with a price, retrenchment of imperium. This in turn,
requires sobriety that, the game while not completely lost, as in national decomposition, is
nevertheless, unwinnable, as in rebuilding can only follow retrenchment.
Now, US policy wonks must be imbibing some real potent hallucinogens, to be unable to see
what's right in front of their noses that, no matter the strategy, if it's not one of
cooperation, the game is forfeit! The only strategy that helps the US retain great power
status, is one whereby clear eyed, hard nosed assessment of assets and liabilities, are
carried out.
The East is helping the USA buy time, the exceptionalists are once again, squandering the
opportunity, just like they did in 91. They somehow believe the US military can change the
trajectory of events. This is not possible any longer except humanity signs up for
civilizational extinction.
To cut a long story short, it's time to declare mea culpa, and request a recalibration of
goals, objectives, tactics, and critically, strategy. The strategy going forward? Honest
cooperation to resolve issues that are creating global tensions, foremost amongst them, the
one where the West gets to live like kings, at the expense of billions. This is the major
issue, and it cannot be resolved without humility on the part of the West, and indemnity on
the part of victims.
Humanity will only move forward through forgiveness, which cannot be activated without
contrition.
If Russia is selling Treasuries, it may be ahead of the market selling to prevent losses
down the road. There is a shift happening not just with Russia as the long-standing bankers
like the Rothschilds, etc. have been also selling their UST holdings and moving the money to
Asia as per their reports for the last year.
The other thing to watch is the Vienna OPEC meeting later this month. The Saudis and
Russia have now setup a long-term partnership to control the Oil market, including
speculation on the markets as of today's press, so a discussion of abandoning the Petrodollar
may not be off the table as there are portions of that deal that have been announced as
secretive and this may be part of the plan.
"... There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push. Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid. ..."
"... There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on. ..."
"... After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases, nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again. ..."
"... Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm. ..."
"... And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :). ..."
"... On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate. Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade. ..."
... EU wants cheap, reliable energy from Russia and to export to Russia as much as possible without
interference from US. That is pure business. But the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia, some because they are fed
by the security-military-academic spending, some because they 'studied' and were politically formed in US or UK. Some because
that's just the way they are.
There is a strong, EU domestic anti-Russian population based on hundreds of years of history, resentment over losses (Germany,
Poland, Sweden, Finland), self-brainwashing about perceived abuse (Poland, Baltics, eastern Europeans in general), hatred and
contempt towards anything 'eastern', and the traditional anglo anti-Russian policies. Recently new emotional hatreds have been
added with endless demonising Russia about xenophobia, hooligans, gays, stray dogs, anything the creative propagandists can push.
Most Europeans turn out on reflection to be quite gullible and stupid.
There are a few minor exceptions and some Latin nations are more level headed. There is also a minority view in the German
world, mostly based on their business realism that is neutral toward Russia, but not pro-Russian. There will be no political rapprochement
between EU and Russia. There will be better business relations because water flows downhill and EU-Russia economic ties are such
an obvious fit. The cultural hatred and political hostility will go on.
After WWII it took most Europeans less than a generation to revert to the traditional anti-Russian attitudes. In some cases,
nations that were literally saved from extermination were more resentful than grateful. In Poland it took less than a year, in
Czech Republic 20 years, but the old visceral hatreds emerged again.
My advise to Russia would be to mind its own business and not try to sacrifice for the others or to help them. It has always
backfired because the cultural milieu in Europe is naturally resentful of Russia and the east in general. Business doesn't change
that.
Thanks. Current trends strengthen Euro-asia (and thus China and Russia), so West will have to do something, otherwise they
get weaker over time.
There has been a maximalist group in the West who believe that ' anything is possible ', that even with nukes it is
possible to defeat and dismember Russia. The key factor would be internal instability inside Russia. Maidan, Saaksavilli's mad
dash in 2008, and the support for Caucas separatists were all done with that in mind. It has mostly failed with Russia becoming
more united in the process.
Failure has never discouraged true fanatics. It is a mistake to see them only in Washington and London, there are plenty
of them in positions of power in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, and even Stockholm.
And in Washington the loudest ones are often bitter ethnics from eastern Europe. I honestly think it is about 50-50 whether
this gets escalated beyond all reason and we face a catastrophe (so I admit that I don't know :).
On the one hand there are the nukes. On the other, it is so hard to climb down for any ideological fanatic. They felt that
they were so close, when they bombed Beograd and Russia did nothing, they thought it was all just a question of time. And then
Putin happened and the dream has been slowly dying. Imagine the painful void that they have to live with every day. So they hate.
Any concession to people who hate you is counter-productive, thus there will be no deal between Russia-EU. Only obvious trade.
The best examples are, of course, the three Baltic statelets, but the #1 position has to
go to the "fiercely patriotic Poles" who are now willing to actually pay Uncle Sam to be
militarily occupied (even though the very same Uncle Sam is trying to racketeer them for
billions of dollars).
Talking about individual EU countries, the Poles need to realize that they're no longer
dealing with Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, and try exploring avenues for productive
co-operation with Russia. It's working with "historic enemy" Germany, so why not with
"historic enemy" Russia?
There are plenty of opportunities, with the first one surely being shutting down US bases
on Polish territory and getting US missiles out of Poland. The current USA and the UK are
under UZA management which is clearly hostile to everything modern Poland stands for.
Mixture of interesting although almost irrelevant information about personalities such as
Gorbachov and his wife (viewed over rose glasses) with some idiotic statements. Avoid.
The collapse of the USSR was the collapse of the society which ideology (Marxism-leninism)
collapsed and replacement it with neoliberalism. Neoliberal counterrevolution.
Also the economics of the USSR was a war economics. Part of it was due to the threat from the West and embargo on high tech.
Part due to own military-industrial complex. Agriculture was a failure. The net result was deterioration of he standard of
living in 80th. People because seduced by western consumerism and elite was seduced by neoliberal ideology. So
neoliberal revolution (counter-revolution) logically followed
April 5, 2017
In this lecture, William Taubman, professor of Political Science at Amherst College and the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, sheds a light on how Mihail Gorbachev undermined the Soviet
system in pursuit of his dream of the democratized country.
The West will always hate Russia. Because the Soviet Union destroyed the colonial world
order where the rules of the West. Despotism of the "white man" was destroyed, and enslaved
peoples of Africa, Asia, Islamic world, Latin America was released. In the 19th century, the
West ruled the world, now only n their historical lands. Russia has caused considerable
damage to Western domination.
Why USSR collapsed according to America, Fake news. The USSR empire collapsed for the same
reasons that European empires collapsed. The American empire has been in decline for a while
now and will eventually collapsed too.
The USSR was doomed to collapse. It is a totally corrupted union, with selfish leaders who
lived in luxury while the people lived in poverty. However, it devoted its resources to
military development. No extra resources were given to production of consumer goods and foods
for the people. Its union comprises many countries with different races and cultures, which
could never be reconciled. Its collapse is just a matter of time, and could not blame
Gorbachev.
"... They have virtually given up on the political channels even through intermediaries like the EU). The only relationship left is that of military balance/confrontation. ..."
I just listened to Lavrov's interview with the BBC. Early on, when asked how he responds to
waking up to a tweet that tells Russia to get ready for those nice new cruise missiles, Lavrov
responds by distinguishing between the tweets and the dialogue between military leaders. Lavrov
makes clear they only treat the dialogue with the military leadership seriously.
To me, while stated very subtly, this marks a profound shift in how Russia will interact
with the US. They have virtually given up on the political channels even through
intermediaries like the EU). The only relationship left is that of military
balance/confrontation.
See BBC
interview . One really good sarcasm from Lavrov. Sergey Lavrov comperating UK beahviour with
the famous Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland episode in order to describe the new western
'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by all...what a
masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international discourse.
Sergey Lavrov: No, I said "highly likely" as a new invention of the British diplomacy to
describe why they punish people – because these people are highly likely guilty, like in
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - when he described a trial. And when they discovered that
the jury could be engaged, then the King said "Let's ask the jury" and the Queen shouted "No
jury! Sentence first – verdict afterwards." That's the logic of "highly likely".
Question: Have you got one shred, shred of evidence to suggest British intelligence tried to
kill Sergei Skripal?
Sergey Lavrov: There is an old Roman criteria "who is to benefit". The UK is grossly
benefiting from the provocations both in Syria and in the United Kingdom itself.
Sergey Lavrov: That's a problem. First, the A-234 agent in highly pure form in high concentration is already raising
suspicions.
Question: It came from Russia. In the former Soviet Union, you invented that.
Sergey Lavrov: Stephen, you are not factual. You may be hard talking, but you are not listening. This chemical substance
indeed was invented in the Soviet Union, then one the inventors fled to the United States and made the formula public. And if you
want to check before raising the issue, please do so, the United States patented this formula; and it was formally taken by United
States special services or the army, I don't remember. But A-234 is a very light, I mean, it seriously damages a person, kills him
of her, but it evaporates very fast; and the sample taken two weeks after the event cannot, according to our scientists, contain
very high concentration.
Sergey Lavrov: For a Brit, you have very bad manners. The Swiss laboratory report also said that, and in the first place, they
found BZ, which was I think invented in the United States in 1955 and was among the equipment of the US and UK army. And we asked
OPCW, whom we trust, whether this is true or not that in addition to A-234 there was also BZ discovered. And we are waiting a
reply of OPCW, whom, of course, we trust, but we want to trust and verify.
Notable quotes:
"... Sergey Lavrov analogising from Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland in order to describe the new western 'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by all...what a masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international discourse. ..."
I just listened to Lavrov's interview with the BBC. Early on, when asked how he responds to
waking up to a tweet that tells Russia to get ready for those nice new cruise missiles, Lavrov
responds by distinguishing between the tweets and the dialogue between military leaders. Lavrov
makes clear they only treat the dialogue with the military leadership seriously.
To me, while stated very subtly, this marks a profound shift in how Russia will interact
with the US. They have virtually given up on the political channels even through intermediaries
like the EU). The only relationship left is that of military balance/confrontation.
Wouldn't be surprised to discover it was an Aussie 'fixer' behind the hold up of the OPCW
inspection team, Australia has been pretty much 100% compliant since being regime changed in
1974.
...
Your greatest friend, most staunch ally tells you the truth despite what may come. Sergey Lavrov analogising from Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland in order to describe the new
western 'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by
all...what a masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international
discourse.
The logic of 'highly likely.' No proof required.
Such honesty, what a friend... and the correct book to quote too...given the current ocean
of media backed fantasy.
Lavrov is truly a class act. Intelligent, well read, humorous. He, and a very few like
him, are all that's standing between us and oblivion.
@Madmax2 87
I agree that Australia with Turnbull and Bishop - especially the latter - in control is
100% onboard with the Deep State narrative - one just has to listen to the ABC to know
that.
But since 1974? For all his faults, Fraser would have been opposed to what the US is
doing. As Gough said, long after Fraser left office, "Malcolm is a much improved person."
Fraser did much to assist in dismantling apartheid in South Africa and wrote a book espousing
an independent foreign policy for Australia.
@Madmax2 87
I agree that Australia with Turnbull and Bishop - especially the latter - in control is
100% onboard with the Deep State narrative - one just has to listen to the ABC to know
that.
But since 1974? For all his faults, Fraser would have been opposed to what the US is
doing. As Gough said, long after Fraser left office, "Malcolm is a much improved person."
Fraser did much to assist in dismantling apartheid in South Africa and wrote a book espousing
an independent foreign policy for Australia. /div
I know b is not fond of us posting content from other blogs but the Saker has just put up
a must-read interview with a personal favorite author of mine, F. William Engdhal, entitled
"The rape of Russia". Very informative, it documents the strategies put in place during the
Yeltsin years to plunder the assets of the new CIS. Enjoy!
After collapse of the USSR the mount of infometion that has flown to the West is staggering.
KGB might be then most open of intelleigence services in this sense. multiple defector probably
created a very complete picture of the organization and its methods.
July 2, 1996
A NOTE ON KGB STYLE
Wayne Lambridge
The KGB like any enduring institution has a style, its own way of doing things. When we
seek to understand the service and its officers, we should perhaps pay attention to how they
do business as well as to what kind of business they do. This article is intended to raise
the subject for discussion, to present largely one man's opinion. It is far from a definitive
study.
By way of indicating something about KGB style, consider the implications for the
organization as a whole of a communication system that carries one tenth or less as much
traffic -- both electric and by pouch -- as its American equivalent. The KGB sends very few
cables and its dispatches are infrequent. For maximum security, they are pouched on
undeveloped microfilm, which is recovered and printed when the dispatch reaches its
destination. Although Moscow headquarters does excellent and prompt printing, both exposure
and development are sometimes haphazard in the field. Ten years ago, they were downright
unreadable at times. Now, the quality is generally better. Volume, however, does not seem to
have risen much.
The prints of the developed films are seen by the Rezident (the KGB Chief of Station) and
by the case officer concerned. In large Rezidentury (KGB Stations) some intermediate may also
read the traffic, but that is by no means always the case. The Rezident keeps a file --
sometimes in the form of notes or perhaps as copies of pertinent cables and dispatches -- for
reference. The case officer keeps all his files in a briefcase or a notebook. Calling them
"files" is perhaps misleading. It is better to say that the KGB officer keeps a movable
In-Box. When a document leaves that box it is either returned to the Rezident or destroyed
and the fact of destruction recorded. The case file is really in the case officer's head. The
excellent memory that KGB officers often display concerning the details of their operations
may well be traceable to the necessity of remembering the vital information on each operation
that they cannot look up anywhere. Of course, when a new case officer replaces an old one,
especially if the latter has been unable to brief his successor fully, complications may
ensue. Illness, car accidents and PNG'ing have led to real chaos in some KGB operations when
a harassed new man has tried to tie down the broken threads of a departed colleague's dropped
contacts.
Although the amount of paper that he sees is small, the KGB case officer is held strictiy
accountable for each sheet of it. When he destroys a document, a notation to that effect is
included on a record. Even his scrap paper may bear a serial number and have to be accounted
for. At the Moscow headquarters each document is sewn into the file by the senior officer
directly responsible for the case. A special record of all documents in the file is kept by
the case officer and its accuracy is regularly verified by the case officer's supervisor.
Safe storage areas are locked and sealed with wax each night.
The ritual of sewing in the documents is often regarded as a waste of time by senior case
officers in Moscow. Nevertheless, they would not dream of delegating the job. It seems to
have a symbolic significance as an embodiment of both their authority and their
responsibility.
The KGB case officer is his own intel assistant. At headquarters he does his own traces,
gets his own documents from the archives and handcarries his own messages. Not too long ago,
he also often wrote or typed his own dispatches. Even now he may write his own telegrams and
personally take them and dispatches to his supervisor for review. In the field he is, if
anything, even more responsible for doing everything connected with his operation except for
technical surveillance and the like where he must call on experts.
The field case officer under official cover often works at his cover job about as much as
do his colleagues who do not have intelligence responsibilities. This obligation is usually
not as demanding on the case officer's time as it might first appear because KGB cover slots
are usually selected so that cover duties complement intelligence tasks to a substantial
degree. By contrast, other KGB officers have virtually no serious cover responsibilities and
rely on the all-embracing security system of the Soviet colony to protect their true
affiliation. In either case, the 'KGB officer is not expected to spend much time on the
administrative or reporting aspects of his intelligence job. Within the limitations of his
cover assignment, he is supposed to be out on the street, making contacts, working agents and
performing other intelligence tasks, reporting only the highlights and the most crucial
information back to headquarters.
In developing new sources, he will usually bring things along to the point where
recruitment or some other substantial development is clearly foreseeable before asking for
traces from headquarters or getting approval to go ahead with his plan. Local informers and
support agents are sometimes picked up without reference to headquarters at all, except
perhaps after the fact of recruitment. The KGB officer must account with some precision,
however, for his operational expenditures and is usually quite limited in what he can spend
for development prior to coming up with a concrete proposal for recruiting a source.
Once an agent is recruited or is established as a source, headquarters' control and
demands for accountability are exacting, though never voluminous. For a recruited source with
significant access, a senior officer, such as a branch chief or his deputy is specifically
charged with responsibility for the case. Moscow's concern to insure that information is
really coming from the source as described by the case officer and that the source is bona
fide is very considerable. Somewhat by contrast, Moscow's requirements (outside of S&T
operations) sometimes seem quite general, apparently leaving it up to the case officer and
source to report what seems to them most important. On the other hand, reporting is expected
to be factual and documentary, if possible. Sometimes the KGB seems obsessed with documents
as the only reliable sources. Speculation is not usually encouraged.
In such a system of extreme compartmentation and vertical lines of communication and
authority, the advisory role of staffs and other elements not within the chain of command is
small. The First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, has a
counterintelligence unit, for example, that actually takes over a case from the regular chain
of command in the event that the agent appears to be doubled, compromised or in danger of
compromise. The field case officer may remain the same, but in Moscow the Counterintelligence
Service assumes full authority for directing the case. Deception and some types of complex
political action operations often appear to be run directly by the headquarters element,
Department A, that prepares the operation in Moscow. In such cases, of course, local assets
of a Rezidentura may well be employed in support, but the operations are frequently run by
specialists.
The typical KGB officer, trained in an environment where political agitation is part of
daily fare, sees political action and propaganda as part of his regular routine. There are
numerous examples of Soviet officers around the world who seem to concentrate almost
exclusively on pushing the Soviet line on the issues of the day with whatever contacts they
meet. To them the political approach is not something apart from spotting, developing,
assessing, recruiting and agent handling. It is integral to that effort. Some do it crudely,
some ineffectively, some with great skill. The point is that in almost all cases, it is a
part of the operation.
In addition to politics, KGB recruiting and training of staff personnel emphasizes
operational and area knowledge and experience from bottom to top. The main sources for new
KGB officers are the institutes of International Affairs and Eastern Languages in Moscow.
These institutions, which are better compared to the U.S. service academies than to other
organizations of higher learning in America, prepare young Soviet citizens for careers abroad
not only in the intelligence services, but for the foreign service, the Ministry of Foreign
Trade, Radio Moscow, etc. Assignment of a student after graduation is worked out among the
various consuming organizations. The students are under what amounts to military discipline
and are required to accept the assignment given them. Few students, see much difference among
the organizations these days except for differences in pay, length and location of overseas
service and other practical matters.
In the course of their education the students learn two or three foreign languages well
and study the history and culture of the area in which they specialize in considerable
detail, although current politics is likely tobe a much weaker course than history. Access to
native sources is still circumscribed. A substantial number of students go for a year or more
as exchange students or as trainees with Soviet organizations working abroad. As a result,
they often end up knowing the area, its language, its politics, customs, police systems,
local geography and so on very well. Although the old-style Soviet intelligence officer who
was raised in the shadow if not the institutions of the Komintern and could recruit agents
through appeals to an international revolutionary ideology are long since past, the newest
generation of Soviet intelligence officers can be quite effective by trading on their precise
knowledge of target personalities and the problems and frustrations of the countries in which
they operate.
A KGB officer is ranked in his service by two systems. He progresses up the ladder from
junior lieutenant to senior lieutenant and so on up to colonel and general. At the same time,
he is classified as a junior case officer, case officer or senior case officer and then as he
progresses further by his position, such as Rezident, which he may hold. His pay depends on
his ranking in both hierarchies and there is no necessary coincidence between where he stands
in one and where he stands in the other. The operational designations are based on his
experience and performance as an operator. His formal rank is largely based on length of
service up through major or lieutenant colonel. The chain of command is designated through
the operational positions rather than formal rank. For example, a major of State Security
from some other part of the KGB might be transferred into the First Chief Directorate under
the designation of junior case officer and find himself subordinate to a senior lieutenant
who had attained the position of case officer.
The phenomenon of marked disparity between formal rank and operational designation was
probably more common during the period of considerable expansion of the First Chief
Directorate's personnel ten and more years ago than it is today. At that time officers from
other branches of the service were being brought into the First Chief Directorate more
frequently than they are now. Nevertheless, the emphasis on operational experience and
operational ability continues to be a marked element of the KGB style. The top officers in
the service, for example, usually involve themselves directly in operations. They meet and
develop agent candidates, they recruit and they handle agents.
In part this is a consequence of the strongly operational orientation of the KGB as a
whole. A direct involvement in operations comes naturally to almost everyone in the
organization. This operational orientation is manifest also in the concentration of
relatively few cases per case officer. Generally, one man may handle four or five agents or
targets under development. He is not expected to spread his range of intelligence activities
further, although he may well be encouraged to develop a large circle of casual contacts from
whom a relatively small number of serious targets may be selected.
From the foregoing one can see that the typical KGB officer is a man who sees himself in a
strict vertical chain of command. He expects to do everything necessary for his operation
without much outside help, except in technical matters. Depending upon circumstances, the
case officer may be closely guided by the Rezident in a particular operation, but he is not
supposed to discuss it with anyone else. (Gossip and shop-talk are endemic, however, in part
to overcome the excessive official compartmentation.) Although the case officer is held
strictly to account for the results of his actions, he is not expected to report on
day-to-day developments to headquarters and in fact the capacity of his communications system
is far too limited to permit him to do so. He is street-oriented in the concept of his job
and does not put in a lot of time at the desk writing reports, reading guidance from
headquarters or maintaining his files. When he has a problem he takes it up with his boss and
he is generally not expected to have many problems. He is supposed to know the difference
between what he really needs consultation about and what he ought to be able to handle on his
own.
His boss in turn has the responsibility of not only guiding the case officers that work
for him, but of ensuring that vital information pertinent to the work of one case officer but
acquired through another is made available. In both operational guidance and information
sharing, the role of the Rezident is crucial. There is virtually no lateral distribution of
communications and an extreme emphasis on compartmentation. Although the rigid
compartmentation of the system is probably a major vulnerability, superiors both in the field
and headquarters are usually able to keep up with each case because they are not overwhelmed
with paper. Relatively primitive (in terms of capacity) communications equipment and the
custom that each officer prepare his own reports and keep them brief make it possible for
such reports as do get written to be read all the way up the chain of command. The general in
command of the First Chief Directorate has been reported on several occasions as reading all
the incoming traffic. Much of the outgoing traffic is also signed personally by him.
The strictness of the chain of command and the limited amount of communications place a
great weight of responsibility on each Rezident and on each case officer. As with all Soviet
officials, KGB case officers have a norm to fulfill for the year and are usually called to
account for their activities during part of the annual home leave in the Soviet Union. In a
system like that, if something goes wrong, someone must be found to have been responsible.
This can encourage an extreme of caution, particularly when the relations between case
officer and the Rezident are not of the best or when the headquarters desk officer is not
cooperative and understanding of the problems in the field.
Although we are accustomed to think of Soviet organizations as highly impersonal, in the
KGB personalities and the private connections of individual officers are often crucial to the
success or failure of an operation -- or a career. In many ways, the KGB is an organization
made to order for the man who wants to claim all the glory for himself and put all the
mistakes on the backs of his subordinates. Family connections or other personal contacts have
special significance in this sort of an organization because they can provide a secure and
effective second channel for communication in a system in which there is otherwise only one
narrow route watched over by jealous monitors for all the messages an officer may want to
send.
The emphasis on the role of the individual in the organization also has its advantages, of
course. A capable officer, particularly one from an influential family, working under a
Rezident who knows his business and will accept responsibility is likely to find himself in a
stimulating work environment that may compensate very well for shortcomings of the service or
the Soviet system as a whole that might otherwise disturb him.
While the KGB style as outlined above is in many ways admirably suited to running
operations, it appears to have limitations in the way it makes use of the product of its
operations and in evaluating whether the operations themselves are really worthwhile. There
are enough instances on record to permit the generalization that in political matters
especially Moscow is often reluctant to receive bad news. The ambitious case officer may find
himself frustrated by pressure to conform, either from his Rezident or from Moscow, when he
tries to report things as he sees them. To a large degree this is probably an inevitable
manifestation of the extreme isolation from the outside world in which the Soviet policy
makers live and their lack of exposure to unwelcome information. In addition, the emphasis on
operations as such and the overall environment of the KGB, which is predominantly an internal
security, criminal investigation, and antisubversive organization, probably discourages the
kind of critical intellect by whom frank reporting, regardless of its content, is most
prized.
This last consideration, the emphasis on an investigative, operational style at the
expense of analytical curiosity, may well be the source of considerable tension within the
First Chief Directorate today. Bigoted and inflexible ultimate consumers are problems enough.
But also the older generation of KGB officers, including many of today's Rezidenty, was
largely trained in war time and internal security operations. Their juniors, speaking
broadly, are more academically inclined, more tempted to discourse on their theories, more
interested in foreign societies and politics per se and less dedicated to fulfilling the
obligations of the party and the state. They are often perceptive and realistic about
developments not only abroad, but also in their own country. Bearing in mind the importance
of personal relations and the dependence of juniors on seniors in the rigid chain of command,
the signs we see these days of tension and cynicism among these younger officers should not
be surprising.
As they rise in the KGB, we may see some organizational changes over time. If these
changes preserve the laconic style of communication while at the same time do away with some
of the most cumbersome and archaic aspects of the communications and records keeping systems,
the KGB could become an even more formidable institution than it is today. The problem of
encouraging intelligence analysis and imaginative, critical thinking is a problem for Soviet
society as a whole. As a part of that society, the KGB shares the problem, but probably not
in greater degree than other Soviet institutions and possibly less than many.
Judgments about the influence the KGB style has on KGB officers as individuals, about the
implications for KGB operations of the way they do business, about the relevance of the style
to Western operations against Soviet targets, and about many other related matters lead us
beyond the scope of this note which, as stated in the introductory paragraph, hopes only to
raise an interesting topic for further comment. If this piece succeeds in making the point
that KGB organizational style is important to Western intelligence and that we should concern
ourselves with it more than we have, it will have served its purpose.
"... what purpose does Nato serve? it seems like a perfect wedge serving the USA's foreign policy objectives in isolating Russia.. what amazes me is the willingness of the poodles to go along with this.. obviously the military industrial complex is well served by this as well.. what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on all levels? would this somehow interfere with the role the usa has had with these same countries since ww2? at this point nato seems very redundant and only of value as i have stated above.. ..."
"... The deciders have been weeding out the intelligent, principled, honest, and patriotic individuals from the positions of influence in order to ensure that only the mediocrities and pliable opportunists were "elected" for the important governmental positions in the "rest of Europe." ..."
"... Part of the background to Gorbachev's approach at the time was the advice he was getting -- very bad advice, it now seems clear, with hindsight wisdom -- in particular from Georgy Arbatov, the long-serving head of the Institute of the USA and Canada. ..."
"... As it happened, Arbatov was completely and utterly wrong. The liquidation of the security posture inherited from the Stalinist period, followed by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of communism, in no ways decreased Western hostility to Russia. The seething and near unanimous hatred of Putin is greater by far than that towards any of the leaders of the old Soviet Union. ..."
"... The truth, it turned out, was that people like Gorbachev and Arbatov were naive fools. ..."
Not only was there a pledge to halt any eastward expansion of NATO. It was clearly
understood that Ukraine would be a permanent buffer state between NATO and Russian borders.
During the early days of the Clinton Administration, the U.S. launched the Partnership for
Peace, which was presented as an alternative to NATO expansion. Russia was promised membership
in the new security structure.
While some American officials, including military flag officers, called for the dismantling
of NATO at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, others argued that
NATO had an important mission: To assure that there was no new outbreak of war on the European
continent. NATO was the only treaty organization under which the United States maintained a
presence in Europe. There was legitimate concern that, after two world wars in the 20th century
broke out in Europe, it was appropriate to maintain a watchful eye that no new conflict erupted
among the contending European states. Given the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s, this was not an
outlandish concern. Ultimately, according to the logic of those promoting a continuation of
NATO, Russia could be incorporated in a new security architecture. In effect, under a revived
American-Russian cooperation, war in Europe would be a permanent thing of the past.
This narrative may seem absurd by today's circumstances. But there is now a growing body of
declassified documents that confirm that there was a gentlemen's agreement that there would be
no further eastward expansion of NATO, and that the Partnership for Peace would be the anchor
of a new Eurasian security architecture to prevent the outbreak of future wars, and to build
new cooperative relations in the economic and political spheres as well.
The National Security Archive, hosted at George Washington University ([email protected])
has recently obtained and posted a number of documents from U.S. and Russian files from the
early 1990s, recounting this story. They can be found under the headline "NATO Expansion: What
Yeltsin Heard." They are well-worth reading for anyone looking for a way out of the current
madness New Cold War rhetoric coming from Washington, Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow.
"... there is now a growing body of declassified documents that confirm that there was a
gentlemen's agreement that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO..."
Harper, Thanks very much for posting this piece. Somehow, I always thought (probably
naively), that the agreement was always a well known fact. I often wondered why our esteemed
leaders broke it. Why the desire to reduce the Russians to total insignificance?
thanks harper.. this "gentlemen's agreement" story seems to rear it's ugly head every so
often.. as an outsider it would seem to me that there has been an ongoing concerted effort to
not let any friendly relationships between russia and the rest of europe develop.. i can only
think that this has been the intent of nato, especially since the changes in the russia from
89 onward...
what purpose does Nato serve? it seems like a perfect wedge serving the USA's foreign
policy objectives in isolating Russia.. what amazes me is the willingness of the poodles to
go along with this.. obviously the military industrial complex is well served by this as
well.. what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on all
levels? would this somehow interfere with the role the usa has had with these same countries
since ww2? at this point nato seems very redundant and only of value as i have stated
above..
Harper, this has been the lonely argument of Harald Kujak and a select few public others for
a longtime over here in Germany.
Yesterday I witnessed a debate under the header: Who is more dangerous Trump or Putin? on
German TeVe.
The British representative invited, the expert on British intelligence, argued he couldn't
understand in the least the German public. Seems 'poll wise' the vast majority of Germans
considers Trump more dangerous then Putin. There were phases in his talk were he seemed to
get exhausted and tried to address us more directly via our conscience/soul: We have to stand
up bold against Russian aggression, since it does not necessarily mean war, but if you do it
in a united fashion the other side will fold.
Meanwhile on another public channel a day earlier, second vs. first, a prominent German
economist seemingly joined Trump*. Strictly this is only to
Strictly it was part of the promotion of his latest book, something in like in search of
the truth. As economist he is obviously aware of matters that lately were alluded to here via
OECD. In fact it was the context of the first question to him.
*****
concerning European foreign policy, by now it feels the east dictates it to a large extend,
led by Poland.
I seem to remember that Yeltsin specifically asked that Russia be allowed to join NATO and
was turned down. The creation of an alternate organization was suggested, probably the
Partnership for Peace.
I was unaware of the "gentlemen's agreement," but it makes sense, and Matlock's testimony is
good enough for me. NATO was a cold war construct, and with the end of the cold war, NATO
could have been dismantled as the relic of a previous age. But institutions die hard and
those vested in them seek to maintain their budgets and find new missions to justify their
existence. European countries have indeed had a long history of conflict, and the alliance
did seem effective at maintaining the peace in Europe. Many of the new post-Communist
governments in the former Soviet Bloc also wanted in. It wasn't all our own doing.
The Partnership for Peace was another post-cold-war construct that gave the old school in
Garmish a new mission and something else to do. I think it might have been possible to bring
Russia in, but was that the purpose of an expanded NATO and the Partnership for Peace, or was
it aimed at isolating Russia and ensuring a perpetual western domination?
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine seems to have been the tipping point Did we play a
clandestine role in that? I frankly don't know, but I suspect we did. Then came Putin's
assertion of Russian interests in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine. And here we are,
witnessing the revival of populist nationalisms in many places, including the USA.
These pose a challenge to the post-cold-war "new world order" (I'm citing President #41)
which likely will be less and less pretty as it gains momentum. It might have been easier to
have abided by that "gentleman's agreement," and the issues we face to day might have been
avoided. But then there would have been other issues. We are humans after all and seem to
like "issues."
"...what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on
all levels?"
The non-obedient leaders of such countries in the "rest of Europe" would have been
compromised and removed from the positions of power by the deciders. Take a closer look at
May, Johnson, and, particularly, Gavin Williamson. Do they look like the persons of integrity
and able leaders? Was not Macron competitor conveniently (and fraudulently) compromised
during the last elections? Were not the Swedes ordered to keep the ridiculous lawsuit against
Assange?
The deciders have been weeding out the intelligent, principled, honest, and patriotic
individuals from the positions of influence in order to ensure that only the mediocrities and
pliable opportunists were "elected" for the important governmental positions in the "rest of
Europe."
"Did we play a clandestine role in that? I frankly don't know, but I suspect we did. Then
came Putin's assertion of Russian interests in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine."
Why don't you do some minor research on the "clandestine role?' The materials are in
abundance and are widely available on the internet.
For example:
There has been innumerous stories circulating about the West's broken promises towards
Russia. To be honest I thought most of them was fake and the russians were making them up to
to ease their pain felt about the loss of an empire.
Now based on the above the opposite seems to be true.
I just dont come to understand at all how can a once superpower with 1000s of nuclear
warheads can downplayed for decades. I just don't get it.
The ignorant western elite should heed the old szekler saying: "The bear is not a
toy!"
Yes, a very worthwhile reminder, thanks. It should be run every day on the front page of
major news outlets for the next year. Ignorance of NATO's failure to sustain that accord
becomes a Pandora's box of bear-filled nightmares.
"Why the desire to reduce the Russians to total insignificance?"
Your question provides the answer. The US and NATO aimed for a Russian government run by
natural resource-vending oligarchs. China would have been raised from its understudy role to
serve as an excuse for big ticket military spending.
Anna
@11
...The deciders have been weeding out ...that is very important observation. The other half
of that sentence is ´..who is weeded in..´ for example, in Germany, the current
new government has a social democrat at minister of finance, but he nominated a guy from
Goldman Sachs - Jörg Kukies. What more can be said?
I remember some bigwig, I want to say Scowcroft but can't really remember, said the reason
Russia wasn't allowed in to NATO is that they would be an alternate power centre to the US
within NATO. NATO is really there to assert US primacy over Europe. The Russia nonsense keeps
Europe divided and under the thumb, reconciliation between Germany and Russia is an abiding
fear for some.
NATO expansion was largely the result of extensive lobbying of the US Senate by American
arms and manufacturers in the 1990s, exposed by the New York Times at the time, as well as
for domestic political reasons to make Clinton look tough. Now it has all become a self
fulfilling prophesy by creating an adversary in Russia.
Prior to the 'Briefing Book' to which 'Harper' linked, the National Security Archive
published, last December, one entitled 'NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard.'
A crucial point not mentioned in the -- generally excellent -- introduction to this series
of documents is that Gorbachev did not even ask for the verbal assurances he was given to be
put in writing.
This, incidentally, is a matter which Putin raised in his interviews with Oliver Stone. In
these, his comments on almost all the people discussed -- up to and including John McCain --
are restrained and emollient. His contempt and distaste for Gorbachev, however, shine
through.
Part of the background to Gorbachev's approach at the time was the advice he was
getting -- very bad advice, it now seems clear, with hindsight wisdom -- in particular from
Georgy Arbatov, the long-serving head of the Institute of the USA and Canada.
In a letter to the 'New York Times' in December 1987, in response to a column by William
Safire, which was headlined 'It Takes Two to Make a Cold War', Arbatov made clear that
Gorbachev was intended to, as it were, 'walk away', from the Cold War. And he wrote:
'And here we have a "secret weapon'" that will work almost regardless of the American
response -- we would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the
military expenditures that bleed the American economy white, a policy that draws America into
dangerous adventures overseas and drives wedges between the United States and its allies, not
to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries? Wouldn't such a policy in the
absence of The Enemy put America in the position of an outcast in the international
community?'
As it happened, Arbatov was completely and utterly wrong. The liquidation of the
security posture inherited from the Stalinist period, followed by the break-up of the Soviet
Union and the abandonment of communism, in no ways decreased Western hostility to Russia. The
seething and near unanimous hatred of Putin is greater by far than that towards any of the
leaders of the old Soviet Union.
The truth, it turned out, was that people like Gorbachev and Arbatov were naive
fools.
What however then becomes material is that if Western behaviour makes clear that those who
sought good relations with us were indeed such, it really is very foolish to expect that
Russians will vote for such people.
Something that saddens me somewhat is that, as became clear if one probed, a strong
undercurrent in the thinking of people like Arbatov was the belief that, although this had
not been Stalin's intention, his post-war policies had gratuitously wrecked the relationship
with the United States built up during the wartime 'Grand Alliance.'
I have difficulty thinking of any more promising way causing people to abandon such
beliefs than allying with those who venerate Stepan Banderistas in an attempt to bring the
Crimea into NATO. One thought people might be aware that Sevastopol is the scene of two great
sieges, by the French, Ottomans and British in 1854-5, and by the Germans, Romanians and
Italians from December 1941 to July 1942.
In both cases, the city fell. In the latter, however, the defenders tied up Erich von
Manstein -- one of the greatest exponents of mobile warfare -- and the German Eleventh Army
for seven crucial months, which among other things made a major contribution to the fact that
Stalingrad did not fall, and the Germans were decisively defeated there.
I am certainly aware of the role that Nuland and the State Department and the Obama
administration in general played in supporting the Orange Revolution. What I don't know is
what "clandestine" efforts--cash payments, secret promises, etc.--other elements of our
government may or may not have played. I suspect we did, but I don't know and for this, open
research is difficult to conduct.
anna - we see this much the same.. this is an organized move on the part of the west to
isolate Russia... i don't think it is working.. they have resorted to dirty tricks to get the
same result.. it isn't working either..
Now that matters are heating up in Europe-Russia relations, strictly along the lines of the
representative in the political talksshow circle, I talked about above, was Prof. Glees, he
speaks German has a semi-German background. Apparently was more frequently present on German
media, got glimpses. DW? Didn't take a closer look.
Strictly two of his arguments stuck out for me. One challenged how it would be challenged
here, Iraq, anyway:
a) it is no doubt significant that it only happened 7 km/?miles? from Porton Down. What
was he doing there?
b) if the Foreign Minister speaks he has relevant intelligence information.
Anna, re #11. There is very little 'weeding out from positions of influence' as you suggest.
The political preselection process ensures that such people do not actually get started on
the train, but in most cases they have already left as soon as they arrived, having seen, to
them, the nauseous and noxious collection of people with whom they would otherwise spend
years rubbing shoulders.
You will not find a Teddy Roosevelt or a George Washington in the current era.
I think you are underestimating the demand side of NATO expansion; many Eastern European
states wanted to be included in NATO - for reasons of both security and prestige (of being
associated with the dominant civilization on Earth and the Winners of the Cold War). In fact,
EU membership, NATO, and Plato went together - it was an act of joining (or re-joining) the
"Civilization".
I seem to recall that the purely European WEU (Western European Union) was touted as
replacement for NATO that would be purely European and built up, so there would have been at
least some discussion. I wonder what the dynamics of that fail were and if there are any
public documents that highlight it?
Stalin promised free elections in these exact same eastern European countries now conquered
by Nato only 45 years earlier. Instead he delivered murder, gulags, rape and ethnic
cleansing. Because of his total obliteration of any opposition, the postwar history today is
still corrupted with Stalin's and the Bolshevic's lies. Not to mentioned all those falsely
charged and executed at Nuremburg.
Take Stalin himself. Many Russians would claim that his continuing murder of millions
after the war was already won cannot be blamed on Russia or Russians. They claim it was the
USSR that perpetrated these deeds. But many of these same Russians suffer from nostalgic
delusions about the good old days under "Uncle Joe".
Yeah, I'd say they're moving from worse to as bad as it gets, as Mr. Global sets up a
coordinated, simultaneous, four-front attack (Syria, Ukraine, Iran, DPRK) on Rus allies,
along with their various false-flag absurdities. We'd better hope any adults left in the room
put Mr. Global in the psych ward, and real soon.
A handshake agreement to limit the eastward expansion of NATO ? This handshaking was going on
while Western commercial interests were penetrating, en-masse, the newly de-Sovietised
economies of Russia and the CIS states and that alone should have been a hint of what was to
come. I'd suggest that Putin was not one to miss that hint.
Power depends on domination and monopolisation of resources, people and ground, or at least
in an interim period denying their exploitation by competitors such as their contemporary
owners. Control of or denial of use of the wealth of Eurasia, the greatest land mass on the
planet, is the key to hegemonic control of the planet for an inestimable time interval, and
numerous routes have and will be tried to achieve this objective.
With that in mind, could anyone really express surprise at some long ago handshakes and
broken agreements made to Boris Yeltsin and a bunch of bewildered former Soviet bureaucrats ?
The Chinese has long since learned the lesson.
"[...] Anders Fogh Rasmussen said alliance members must be willing and able to exercise
military power "beyond our borders" to combat threats such as terrorism and missile
attacks."
"[...] By contrast, Britain and the US believe that to remain relevant, Nato must be
prepared to tackle potential security threats beyond its members' borders."
"[...] Afthanistan could serve a template (sic) for future threats and Nato's response to
them."
No mention of course of who defines what may or may not represent a threat.
Note also the author's opinion that Afghanistan is to be held up as a model of how to go
about things. The MIC's dream come true.
Whatever aliby is offered to explain whatever promise ever made by the US and Western allies
on whatever issue is difficult to take into account, since their very way of procceed have
been consistently always the same.
On historical facts on inteventions by US Imperialism in Russian sphere of influence and
everywhere, I bring in this Spanish translation of 56 chapter of the book "Killing
Hope" by Wiliam Blum, currently discontinued, with the following comment by the editor of
the blog which made the effort:
The recent American Empire (chapter 56 of Assassinating Hope, by William Blum)
"The way Bush and his people managed to deflect America's anger from Bin Laden to
Saddam Hussein is one of the greatest public relations sorcery tricks in history." John
le Carré, quoted by Blum.
Note from the blog editor : We offer the last chapter of William Blum's book on
interventions by the CIA and the US Army since the end of World War II. In this chapter
that closes his book, Blum tells us about the recent American "Empire", from 1992 to 2002.
It is obvious that between 2002 and 2016 many events have taken place in the world, linked
to US imperialism. The last 13 years are not reflected since Blum's book was finished
writing in 2003 and published in 2004. Even so, it is a chapter that we can extrapolate
perfectly to understand US imperialism. since then. Perhaps, everything that Blum describes
has been accentuated more and more in recent years. It is, then, a text that maintains its
relevance.
The term "Empire" applied to the United States it began being used by critics of
imperialism. However, as Blum tells us, more and more apologists of US foreign policy are
using it proudly; recognize and defend such imperial reality.
"The American Empire" is the last chapter of Blum's book. It closes a magnificent and
indispensable work whose knowledge and diffusion are required if we want to understand the
contemporary world. It is not possible to understand international relations, peaceful or
violent, outside of imperialism, just as it is not possible to understand capitalism
outside of the latter.
Documentary reference: William Blum: "The North American Empire from 1992 to the
present" , in "Killing Hope. Interventions of the CIA and the United States Army
since the Second World War" , chap. 56, pp. 460 to 471. Editorial Oriente, Santiago de
Cuba (Cuba), 2005 (original in English: William Blum, "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War II" , Common Courage Press, 2004).
Digitization source and corrections (cite and keep the hyperlink): Blog Del Viejo Topo.
Images, captions and bold: they are our addition.
Other chapters of the book: to access other chapters published on the blog, see the index
at the end and click on the hyperlinks that are active."
David, I am familiar with the argument you refer to in the last paragraph. It surfaced in
looks at the larger ideological battle at the time as far as the more then extreme Nazi
propaganda was 'echoed' or found supporters for historical reasons e.g. in Hungary and/or the
Ukraine, arbitrarily. The larger "Judeo-Bolshevik" complex. I have a deep inner resistance to
where it feels it would end theoretically. Had they taken a different route they could have
made it? Seriously? They should have?
Along these lines, I am not sure either, if I want to reduce Ukrainians collectively to
Banderistas. Fact seems that obviously everyone in Russia is anti-Nazi, which includes the
extreme right.
*******
Prof Glees alluded to several people beyond the more spectacular cases in the UK. Eight, I
seem to remember. Only three were mentioned: Litvinenco, Skripal and Berezovsky's (suicide)*.
Not sure if Glees does include him in this list. unfortunately no one asked him for a list.
Who else does he have in mind?
david, it is always interesting and informative reading your comments.. thanks for making
them.. i struggle with the idea that anyone is is idealistic is being naive.. this is how it
would appear gorbachev has to be taken, but i struggle with it regardless, as i am attached
to the idealism that is built into his way of thinking as you outline here.. at what point
does humanity seek an alternative to war and the build up and preparation for war which is
the basis for NATO? as john lennon said 'give peace a chance'.. i think gorbachev did this..
would the usa ever let europe drop nato? would europe ever recognize how it is a block to
greater peace in europe? or, do bigger fences make better neighbours?
pat mentioned you might do a thread on the skripal / uk dynamic at some point.. i hope you
do... thanks..
Actually, the bezirk of which I am a citizen and taxpayer was once the oldest Republic in
Europe. Some Alemeni hill volk and some lake dwellers managed to purchase their freedom from
the Habsburgs in about 1350. This Free Republic existed for centuries until its
representatives arrived late at the Congress of Vienna in 1817. Our Republic was lost in the
same way that Switzerland was lost when it joined the UN.
Switzerland had a long history of preventing rulers and powerful cliques from gaining a
monopoly on power. Unfortunately, that history has been discarded in favor of giving up
sovereignty to globalist agendas like refugee settlement, global warming, tax law, and here
specifically: to NATO empire building (Switzerland is active in "defending" Kosovo).
This an old but pretty interesting article. Very well thought out and insightful analysis of American thinking and
objectives regarding their obsession with world hegemony, and Control of vital global resources, a very dangerous period now
threatens The Russian people and their resource rich land.
US Policy towards Russia today simply continues US Policy towards the USSR during the Cold War
Notable quotes:
"... The American leadership clearly also disliked the prospects of Russia's collaboration with China and India, the introduction of the practice of summits in the BRICS format, the successful activity of other organizations in which Russia occupies leading positions (the CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization], the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], and the EAEC [Eurasian Economic Community]), and the formation of the Customs Union. ..."
This is an edited version of an interview Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of Russia's Security Council, gave to the official
government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta.
Patrushev is one of Putin's most important advisors on national security. His position is similar in some ways to that of the
US President's National Security
Adviser .
As important about what Patrushev does, is who he was. He is Russia's most senior intelligence official.
He has served continuously in intelligence since he joined the KGB in 1975 and was from 1999 to 2008 chief of Russia's FSB – the
successor organization to the KGB. He left this post to become the Secretary to Russia's Security Council.
One of Patrushev's key jobs is to collate intelligence information provided by Russia's various intelligence agencies and to provide
it to Putin and to Russia's other key foreign policy decision makers.
In this interview Patrushev gives insight into what Russia's intelligence agencies are telling the Kremlin. Thus we learn that
Russian intelligence:
Did not expect Yanukovych to fall because of the Maidan protests;
Did however warn the Kremlin long ago that a pro-Western coup in Ukraine was only a question of time because of massive US
subversion in the country.
We also get an idea of how Russian intelligence sees the world.
According to its view US hostility to Russia is an unvarying "constant" because Russia, irrespective of its system of government,
resists US policies aimed at achieving world hegemony and because the US wants to control Russia's immense natural resources in order
to seal its hegemony.
Russia's ties to China and India and the emergence of the BRICS bloc have merely provoked the US to intensify its campaign against
Russia. Events such as the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the rebellion in Chechnya in the 1990s, the Georgian attack on South
Ossetia in 2008 and the February coup this year in Ukraine, are all simply manifestations of US policies targeted at Russia.
One does not have to agree with every part of this view. For example the claim that the USSR collapsed because of a US engineered
fall in oil prices as part of some carefully thought out US "strategy of vulnerabilities", though widely believed and not just in
Russia, is a myth and serves as a typical case of a spymaster's belief in external, conspiratorial causes for events that actually
had purely domestic, structural and sometimes even accidental causes.
Patrushev also undoubtedly overstates the degree of coherence in US policy and the extent to which US policy is always and invariably
hostile to Russia.
There is however much that is compelling about this view and it is easy to understand why within Russia it is becoming increasingly
influential.
From a Russian point of view it is not difficult to see US policy since the USSR's break up (eg. NATO's eastern expansion, the
tearing up of the ABM Treaty and positioning of anti-ballistic missiles in eastern Europe, the US support for "colour revolutions"
in the countries of the former USSR, the US support for anti-government groups within Russia itself, the US's wars of intervention
in many parts of the world and last but by no means least the ferocious US media campaign against Russia) as unremittingly hostile
towards Russia.
For the increasing number of Russians who hold this view (including its intelligence community) the US backed coup in Ukraine
was the final proof.
Russian Intelligence failed to Predict Yanukovych's February Overthrow
Our specialists were warning of the high probability of an escalation of the situation in Ukraine in the context of political
and economic instability, particularly under external influence. At the same time it should be acknowledged that the probability
of an imminent instant seizure of power in Kiev with the support of militant groups of open Nazis was not considered at that time.
Let me remind you that prior to the coup you mentioned, Moscow was implementing in full all its partnership commitments to Kiev.
We were constantly providing material and financial aid, without which Ukraine was in no condition to cope with economic difficulties
that had become chronic in nature. To support our neighbours, material and financial resources amounting to tens of billions of dollars
were mobilized. Unfortunately for many people in Ukraine this aid became, in time, so customary that its importance for the country's
survival was simply forgotten.
Russian Intelligence Did Predict a Pro US Coup in Ukraine
As for longer-term predictions, the Ukraine crisis was an entirely expected outcome of systematic activity by the United States
and its closest allies.
For the past quarter of a century this activity has been directed towards completely separating Ukraine and the other republics
of the former USSR from Russia and totally reformatting the post-Soviet space to suit American interests. The conditions and pretexts
were created for colour revolutions, supported by generous state funding.
Thus, Victoria Nuland, US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, has repeatedly stated that during the
period 1991 through 2013 Washington spent 5bn dollars on "supporting the desire of the people of Ukraine for stronger, more democratic
government".
According to figures from open sources alone, for instance US Congress documents, the total amount of state funding for various
American programmes of "aid" to Ukraine in the period 2001 through 2012 came to at least 2.4bn dollars. That is comparable with the
annual budget of some small countries. The US Agency for International Development spent about 1.5bn dollars, the State Department
nearly half a billion, and the Pentagon more than 370m dollars.
According to congressional records, organizations such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Peace Corps, and the Open
World Centre took part in Ukrainian aid programmes, in addition to the well-known USAID and other departments. It is not hard to
guess for whom and why American volunteers and staffers of diplomatic missions have been "opening the world" throughout the 23 years
since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
.. as a result of this activity ..an entire generation was raised that is completely poisoned with hatred of Russia and with the
mythology of "European values". It has not yet realized that these values, even in the positive sense of the term, are not actually
designed for Ukrainians. Nobody intends to set about boosting living standards in Ukraine or establishing these young people in Europe,
which is itself having great difficulty coping with extremely serious challenges and threats.
The Coup in Ukraine is a Disaster First and Foremost for Ukraine itself
I think the "sobering up" of the Ukrainians will be harsh and painful. It remains to be hoped that this will happen relatively
quickly, and a whole string of objective factors could promote that. I would like to note another factor that is of fundamental significance. Irrespective of the subsequent development of events,
the significance of the one for the other – Russia and Ukraine – will persist. Ukraine will simply not be able to develop successfully
without Russia, whether anyone likes it or not .
Whereas for Russia the total severance of links would be a painful blow, for Ukraine it would be disastrous. It is no accident
that current President Petro Poroshenko was obliged, in the wake of his ousted predecessor, to raise the question of postponing the
implementation of economic section of the already signed association agreement between Ukraine and the EU . It is to be expected
that the victory euphoria of other Kiev rulers will also give way to more sober assessment of the real state of affairs .
US Policy towards Russia today simply continues US Policy towards the USSR during the Cold War
... if the catastrophe in Ukraine had not happened some other grounds would have been found to step up the policy of "containment"
of our country. This course has been pursued unswervingly for many decades; only the forms and tactics of its implementation change.
As you know, after World War II the confrontation between the USSR and the West headed by the United States took the form of a
"cold war". The military-political component of this standoff was entrusted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed
on the initiative of the United States on 4 April 1949. An analysis of NATO's practical activity indicates that in creating the alliance
the United States was pursuing two main objectives.
First, a military bloc directed against the USSR was formed under American leadership.
Second, Washington forestalled the emergence in Western Europe of an autonomous grouping of states that could have competed with
the United States. It should be recalled that the territory of the United States itself, which essentially established unilateral
military control over the allies, is not included in NATO's zone of responsibility.
After the breakup of the USSR and the termination of the Warsaw Pact, which united Europe's socialist countries and which by definition
represented the main danger to NATO, not only was the bloc not disbanded, it began to expand even more in quantitative and military
terms.
The US Engineered the USSR's Collapse by Identifying its "Points of Vulnerability"
In the cold war period a whole string of ideological doctrines emerged in the West that served as justification for an anti-Soviet
political course. One of the authors of this kind of research was Zbigniew Brzezinski, an American political scientist and statesman
of Polish extraction. He established the so-called strategy of "vulnerabilities" in relation to the USSR, and under President Reagan
this became the basis of American policy towards our country .The identification and definition of "vulnerabilities" and the task
of organizing ways of converting them into substantial problems for the USSR were entrusted to the US Central Intelligence Agency.is
work, first and foremost economists but also experts from the business world who had real experience of business wars with competitors.
As a result of large-scale analytical work, the USSR's "vulnerabilities" in the political, economic, ideological, and other spheres
were defined and systematically studied.
Our country's main "vulnerability," as defined by the CIA, was its economy. After detailed modelling, the American experts identified
its "weakest link", namely the USSR budget's extremely high dependence on the export of energy resources. A strategy of provoking
the financial and economic bankruptcy of the Soviet state was formulated, envisaging two interconnected objectives: the bringing
about of a sharp reduction in revenue to the USSR's budget from foreign trade, combined with a substantial increase in expenditure
on resolving problems created from outside.
A reduction in world oil prices was envisaged as the main measure for reducing the income side of the budget. This was successfully
achieved by the mid-1980s when, as a result of US collusion with the rulers of a number of oil extracting countries, an artificial
surplus of crude was created on the market and oil prices fell almost by a factor of four.
A growth in the Soviet Union's expenditure was provoked in several areas: the transition from the strategy of American opposition
to the USSR in Afghanistan to the strategy of dragging it deeply into the Afghan war; the incitement of antigovernment demonstrations
in Poland and other states in the socialist camp with a view to provoking Moscow into additional expenditures on stabilizing the
situation in Eastern Europe; the whipping up of the arms race, among other things by introducing the SDI [Strategic Defence Initiative]
bluff, and so forth.
It should be said that at that time the Americans succeeded in achieving their objectives. The outcome of their activity was a
substantial excess in the USSR's expenditure over income, which ultimately provoked a profound economic crisis that extended into
the political and ideological spheres. Shortsighted attempts by the Soviet leadership to alleviate the situation through foreign
financial aid gave Washington additional levers of influence over Moscow. The "recovery" measures proposed by the West and implemented
through the IMF and the World Bank to liberalize foreign trade without a smooth transition from the previous monopoly system led
to the final collapse of the economy.
In the assessment of American experts, it was the strategy of "vulnerabilities", which demonstrated the colossal effectiveness
of economic variety of cold war compared with "hot" war,that was decisive in promoting the elimination of the USSR and the Warsaw
Pact.
The US Backed Coup in Ukraine and Sanctions are part of a US Strategy of "Points of Vulnerability" aimed at Russia
The coup d'etat in Kiev, accomplished with clear US support, followed the classical pattern tried and tested in Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East. But never before has such a scheme affected Russian interests so profoundly.
Analysis shows that by provoking Russia into retaliatory steps the Americans are pursuing the very same objectives as in the 1980s
with regard to the USSR. Just like back then, they are trying to identify our country's "vulnerabilities". At the same time, incidentally,
they are pursuing the objective of neutralizing European economic competitors who have, in Washington's opinion, grown excessively
close to Moscow.
Washington has always sought to have levers of pressure on Russia. Thus, in 1974 the famous Jackson-Vanik Amendment was adopted,
restricting trade relations with our country. It appeared to have completely lost its relevance immediately after the breakup of
the USSR, but it was still in force right up to 2012, when the so-called "Magnitsky List" was promptly adopted in its place.
The current sanctions are in the same category. The US Administration's activity in the Ukrainian sphere is taking place within
the framework of an updated White House foreign policy course aimed at holding on to American leadership in the world by means of
the strategic containment of the growing influence of the Russian Federation and other centres of power. In this context Washington
is actively making use, on its own terms, of NATO's potential, seeking to use political and economic pressure to prevent any vacillations
on the part of its allies and partners.
Yugoslavia was a Dress Rehearsal and Russia's Weaknesss under Yeltsin let it Happen
In the 1990s the Russian Federation, for well-known reasons of an internal and external nature, lost the dominant influence in
the Balkans that the Soviet Union had enjoyed and embarked on the path of conciliation with the West. It was in the Balkans that
the unilateral and totally uncompensated surrender by Russia of its positions in the international arena was manifested most distinctly.
In 1991-1996 the bodies that shaped our country's foreign policy did not officially even have any such concept as "national interest".
They nurtured groundless expectations of gratitude for obedience from the Western partners and some kind of special benefit for our
country from close and unconditional cooperation with the United States. In practice our American partners almost immediately stopped
taking us seriously and only gave us a condescending "slap on the shoulder", so to speak, from time to time.
The NATO bloc, under cover of peacekeeping and without encountering serious objections from our side, operated increasingly confidently
outside its own zone of responsibility, sought the rights to lease strategic infrastructure facilities for lengthy periods, and effectively
brought the organs of military command and control of a number of Balkan countries under its own control by various means. The Alliance's
subunits became firmly established in the region. Other states taking part in peacekeeping missions, including Russia, set themselves
no such objectives, having reconciled themselves to the role of junior partners and preferring not to see the self-evident fact:
The war in the Balkans could perfectly well be regarded as a rehearsal and a prologue to larger-scale steps to redivide the world.
The US "War on Terror" Gave Russia only a Temporary Respite
Encouraged by the weakening and subsequent elimination of the USSR, American ruling circles did everything possible to ensure
dominance over the major sources of raw materials resources in our country and in Central Asia, as well as the transit routes for
their export. Washington planned to extend its sphere of direct influence to the regions of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the
Caspian.
All these territories were named a US zone of strategic national interests. The only remaining obstacle to the realization of
the Americans' plans to take complete control of the corresponding deposits and transport corridors was Russia, which preserved its
military potential to inflict unacceptable damage on the United States.
American strategists saw the solution to this difficulty in the final collapse of the system of state power and the subsequent
dismemberment of our country . The first region that was supposed to leave Russia was the North Caucasus.
Particular importance was attached to Chechnya, which declared its independence and was temporarily under the effective control
of the West. Extremists and their supporters in Russia were offered support by the special services of Britain, the United States,
and allies in Europe and the Islamic world.
In these conditions the Russian leadership adopted a firm, principled stance of defending the unity of the state. Ultimately,
as a result of the firm political will displayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and at the cost of enormous efforts, it proved
possible to stop attempts to detach Chechnya from Russia and then to consolidate the Republic's place within the Federation.
After 11 September 2001 the world community recognized the terrorist threat as the main threat and a global threat, reaching the
understanding that countering this threat requires common efforts. As a result there was, in particular, a slight weakening of the
West's attacks on Russia because of its campaign against international terrorists in the Caucasus, while we did not object to the
operation by the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. The announcement of the formation of a broad antiterrorist coalition
followed.
At that time Washington displayed a certain readiness to collaborate, although in actual fact it did not intend to abandon the
policy of "containment" with regard to Russia. More and more new NATO facilities moved up to our borders. International law was supplanted
by the law of force (let us recall the aforementioned dismemberment of Yugoslavia, followed by Serbia, the occupation of Iraq, and
the invasion of Afghanistan by the so-called coalition forces).
Russia's post 1999 Revival and its forging Alliances with China, India and the other BRICS Has Alarmed the US
After 7-8 August 2008, when the Georgian leadership, with US support, attempted to annihilate South Ossetia, the world once again
changed substantially.
Everything was staked on surprise. The Georgian dictator believed that a military incursion on the opening day of the international
Olympic Games would put Russia in a difficult position, and the Georgians, taking advantage of this, would carry out their "blitzkrieg".
However, the Russian leadership reacted promptly to the sharp deterioration in the situation and the necessary measures were adopted
to halt the aggression.
After the August events in the Caucasus, Washington was clearly alarmed by Russia's obvious intention to take its place among
the world powers of the 21st century and uphold the principle of equal opportunities and full autonomy in global politics. And also
to convert the state's financial income from the exploitation of natural resources into real economic and defence potential and human
capital.
The American leadership clearly also disliked the prospects of Russia's collaboration with China and India, the introduction of
the practice of summits in the BRICS format, the successful activity of other organizations in which Russia occupies leading positions
(the CSTO [Collective Security Treaty Organization], the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], and the EAEC [Eurasian Economic
Community]), and the formation of the Customs Union.
In the context of the growing world financial and economic crisis, major new players in the international arena such as the PRC,
India, Brazil, and Iran as well as the growing economies of Southeast Asia and South Korea became increasingly significant factors
for the United States. Hence, incidentally, the emergence of new conceptual principles such as the American-Chinese special partnership,
the strategic collaboration between the United States and India, the establishment of direct dialogue between Washington and Iran,
and so forth.
Indications of the need to resume the beneficial dialogue with Russia on a whole range of issues began to emerge from the new
administration of President Barack Obama. This positive inclination on the part of the American authorities could only be welcomed.
However, it soon became clear that Washington is not inclined towards real cooperation. It confined itself to mere statements
of friendliness and the devising of certain negotiation tracks from which the benefit to Russia, in the end, proved almost zero.
After a while even totally nonbinding positive dialogues of this kind came to an end and the US attitude towards our country began
once again to be reminiscent of cold war times.
The US aims to gain Control of Russia's Energy, Food and Water Resources to Seal its Domination
specialists are certain that no real substitute for hydrocarbons as the basis of power generation will emerge in the next few
decades. Furthermore the understanding prevails in the West that the total capacity of nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and other power
stations will meet no more than one-fifth of world demand.
Nor should another important aspect be forgotten. In the modern world we can observe a steady growth in the shortage of food and
drinking water for the growing population of the planet. The absence of the most elementary means of existence pushes desperate people
into manifestations of extremism and involvement in terrorism, piracy, and crime. This is one reason for the acute conflicts between
countries and regions and also for mass migration.
The shortage of water and irrigated land is not infrequently the cause of friction, for instance, between the Central Asian republics.
The problem of water resources is acute in a number of other countries in Asia and particularly in Africa.
Many American experts, in particular former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, assert that there are vast territories "under
Moscow's power" that it is incapable of exploiting and which therefore "do not serve the interests of all humanity". Assertions continue
to be heard about the "unfair" distribution of natural resources and the need to ensure so-called "free access" to them for other
states.
The Americans are convinced that people must be thinking in similar terms in many other states, particularly those neighbouring
on Russia, and that in the future they will, as is nowadays the custom, form "coalitions" to support the corresponding claims on
our country. As in the case of Ukraine, it is proposed to resolve problems at Russia's expense but without taking its interests into
account.
The Threat to Russia from the US is "Constant" and "Thaws" Never Last
Even during periods of a relative thaw in relations between Russia (the USSR) and the United States, our American partners have
always remained true to such notions.
Therefore irrespective of the nuances in the behaviour of the Americans and their allies the Russian leadership still faces this
task as a constant: To guarantee the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Motherland, to defend and multiply its riches,
and to manage them correctly in the interests of the multiethnic people of the Russian Federation.
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More like hubris coming home. I do not believe in such "theories". USSR fall also was mostly to ineptness of the Soviet
Union leadership later period leaders and dark horse Eltsin. Stranger things happened in history.
I visited the Soviet Union in 1990 and Russia in 1994. All the Russians that I met, many rather influential, felt
that America would become their good friend after the Communists were gone. I told them that America would only be their
friend after American armored tanks were stationed in Red Square. They all bitterly rejected my assessment of the situation.
Unfortunately the Russian intelligence agencies see the light, dark as it is. Other factors, besides hegemony and natural
resources are at play. The American Neocon Jews have a murderous hatred for Slavics and they wield great power in America.
The British Royals eliminated competition. Why are they still ruling? Have you heard of Sir Halford John Mackinder?
Probably not. But here are some links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
https://www.sott.net/articl...
The Russian Revolution was instigated by the AngloZionist Banking elite and the British ruling class headed by their
royals. Brittain has fought many wars against Russia before the Russian Revolution. Russia was always seen as a threat
for the British Empire which was replaced by the American Empire.
While you are brushing up on your history read Conjuring Hitler. The game is to prevent Russia and Europe, especially
Germany, to cooperate so that the AngloSaxonAmericanZionist can continue ruling the world. The revolutionaries of Russia
were useful idiots in this masterful game.
So when are you starting your American revolution mister braveheart? I'm sure you will find funding in Wall Street if
you prove to be useful to them. Enjoy chopping of those heads. Hope you do it yourself. Do you have the stomach for it...
If you live in America, Russia and China guarantee your freedom. If you live in Russia then it is the West that
guarantees your freedom as well. Same thing in China. The external threat takes away from a government's
ability to persecute their own citizens. See that soldier sitting in front of Russia's flagship S-400 anti-aircraft missile
control
console? He is keeping YOU and YOUR family safe, say "Spasiba!", that's thank you in Russian. The same
thing goes for the soldier that is watching the displays in an American AWACS aircraft. He is keeping Russian
and Chinese families safe, so if you're in Russia or China, say "Thank you!"
What do you think would happen to you if Russia and China were eliminated? That's right. Again all those resources
that were spent on Russia and China would get spent on you. In a bad way. You could then truly expect hell
on Earth with the state having an over-abundance of resources to make your lives miserable. And by the same
What an interesting viewpoint! I agree. They will find a way to manipulate and mess with someone, either here or there--simply
can't help themselves. To them it is all a game, it matters not how it affects people at all, as long as they themselves
get something they want. I guess when a person gets too powerful, they get jaded and need bigger and greater playing
boards to wield their power on, with higher stakes.
I somehow think how very sad it is that Americans first escaped the clutches of the British Empire - only to be grasped
by them again and even to take over its mantle and to keep the empire alive. The Founding Fathers and all other ancestors
must be turning in their graves!!! How much struggle and suffering they underwent just to flee from the British Empire,
to get freedom and a better life for themselves. And their descendants threw that all away stupidly and fall into the
same abyss their ancestors tried to escape from. How very sad and tragic. Ironically, the only way the USA people can
free themselves (and survive), is if the USA collapses, the world leadership is taken over by BRICS and Americans can
rebuild their country. Pity most of them don't understand that. Because they are slowly dying! More and more of them
are becoming poor and doomed. And look at the draught in California, in this system ruled by the FED and bankers - no
USA government will be willing to solve problems like that and that means a very ominous future for the people of the
USA. When will they wake up??? Is it that their arrogance and idea of being "rulers of the world" keeps distracting them
from their own ever increasing suffering?
I wouldn't rush on dismissing the explanation for USSR fall. Absolutely everything he said did happen, after all.
Not only that but we clearly know that they're doing it again, on purpose. We know for sure Saudi Arabia made oil prices
drop on request from the US because they admitted so openly. We know Afghanistan was designed as a money hole for USSR
because Brezinsky admitted it openly. We know the USSR collapse was an economical one. It's very simple, very straight.
I don't see why it's hard to believe. Actually, it's hard to prove wrong.
I don't believe in the continuation of the US as it exists currently. Like there may be a 'window' for Putin there
is also a 'window' for the US, The US economy is in decline, it is de-industrializing and its financial system in real
danger of collapsing. Many countries are dropping the Dollar for trading and although Americans full of hubris think
it is not important it could cause a crash in the value of the Dollar. Once that happens the ability to project a global
military will become impossible as the UK found when the Dollar become the dominant currency. Even now the US is having
to stand down assets due to cost issues and keep destroyers in service that will be 50 years old when they are retired.
The real game change is the Russians giving the Chinese 'civilized' access to all the resources of Russia via trade
deals whereas the US wants to 'take' them. This will continue to drive the Chinese economy. Not easy to predict the future
but both sides of the power play are in a state of flux.
This just tells me the Russians are either naive or unable to do anything. Perhaps Putin really IS scared the sanctions
are hurting Russia so much he is almost ready to capitulate.
After observing Putin's dis-actions for one whole year, I don't think he will be able to win against USA. USA is just
too powerful and can do things nobody else can such as print as much dollars as it can. USA is playing a long term game
while Russia/China the BRICs are just sitting around. Soon the TTIP between EU and USA will be verified and it will be
all over. Even China will have to play to USA tune then. The sanctions against Russia will not be lifted for a long very
long time. USA will just wait Putin out and will make sure pro Western president is chosen next in Russia. Putin better
do something soon or it will be over and done with. Putin doesnt have much room to maneuver, all he can do is try to
blackmail the EU over the gas or demand he gets paid for his gas either in gold or Euros. Once Russia is subdued USA
will go after CHina and then it's all over the humanity itself. New 1000 years dark ages will come. I hope Im wrong but
I dont think I am.
Money is the strength of nato. Without money, nato is powerless. Money is also nato's achilles heel. Nato money is
worthless trash that has been devalued such that even cash is too expensive, and nato consumers use digital credits for
even basic purchases. You see, nato countries have so severely inflated currncy and taxed tye common man that to pay
taxes and buy basic food requires using credit cards that pay you to use them.
To counter this, a system reverted back to gold and more important silver will cause a complete collapse for nato
countries. Nato countries are bankrupted. all prices are rigged with algorithms and centrally planned. If bric countries
formed together a union and coordinated physical delivery for gold and silver, nato centrslly planned economy based on
worthless credits would crumble. Coordinated attack for physical delivery even on oil at todays price would crush nato
and usa economy forcing them to,deliver oil for less than cost of production.
This is the achilles heel for nato. Forcing nato to deliver physical goods, such as oil, gold, and silver for less
than cost of production. Then have currency backed by physical goods such as gold and silver to bring the est of the
world to use the new bric currency, the new world reserve currency, and thereby leave worthless nato currency to devalue
to absolute zero and face riots and civil unrest in their own borders. This will force nato countries to beg for treaties
and new conditions of peace, which the bric countries are free to accept if the terms are generous, but considering past
nato behavior, the terms will promise everything and offer nothing in reality, so the bric countries should ignore them
and let nato burn into ashes.
You have no clue how modern banking systems work. the two main issues wrong with the current fractional reserve system
are:
1. It gives banks the power to issue loans to whomever they want and to buy what they want.
2. They charge compound interests for their bookkeeping service. If I take a loan from a bank to buy a house from you,
I issue an IOU to the bank and the bank issues their IOU to you, the seller. The seller should actually get the interest
as the seller makes the loan, not the bank.
Gold and Silver are just trading commodities. Steel and oil is much more important. From the one you can make weapons
or agricultural implements, the other can transport the weapon or food. It is useful stuff that is needed for trade and
an accurate bookkeeping system is all that is required. A country that lives in the past where illiterate people had
to use gold and silver to trade, will never become a world power.
Read this sentence carefully. "All that is required to have a good and fair banking / financial system is an accurate
bookkeeping / accounting system to keep track of the value of mutual trading.". It can be electronic or if you really
don't trust electronic stuff,
Putin is playing the long game. Time is on his side--but not if he acts rashly. To contend with a monster like America,
a hero needs to remain patient, cunning, clever, sly, nimble, and resourceful as well as ruthless. Going after the monster
like an enraged berserker is a suicide mission. Whether Putin will be around to administer the deathblow is unimportant.
This grand game is much bigger than is Putin. God is on the side of Russia and China. The right people will be in charge
of them when the day of America's doom approaches. The Disruptor and Destroyer will then swoop and kill her in one night--but
not before annihilating her oh-so-invincible armed forces. America military might is maneuvering toward a date with monumental
humiliation....
Now I understand why Putin is so demonised in the West, and why Hitlery believes him to be the cause of all the world's
problems.I can see how Putin has thrown a monkey wrench on their diabolic visions by Assad's support, Asia-Eur-Asia cooperation
activities, BRICS,Crimea, improving relations with Egypt and former USSR friendly states in Africa etc etc. Good Work
Putin they can't fool Russia twice.I really pityUkraine, for becoming a piece in the US power games.
"A growth in the Soviet Union's expenditure was provoked in several areas: the transition from the strategy of American
opposition to the USSR in Afghanistan to the strategy of dragging it deeply into the Afghan war; the incitement of antigovernment
demonstrations in Poland and other states in the socialist camp with a view to provoking Moscow into additional expenditures
on stabilizing the situation in Eastern Europe; the whipping up of the arms race, among other things by introducing the
SDI [Strategic Defence Initiative] bluff, and so forth." Isn't this part completely accurate? Brzezinski himself gloated
over how he had brought USSR down with his plan of arming the mujahideens and forcing the USSR to intervene and entering
in a quagmire. The USSR had many flaws but it was still a great State, and its demise was a great tragedy for Soviet
peoples and to the whole world's working class, that now face unbridled neoliberalism since the "communist menace" is
gone.
I generally think that Stalin was evil. But I think if Trotsky and his minion would have taken over things for Russia
would have been even worst. Sort of like what happened when Yeltsin had power and then Putin took over. Putin has stabilized
the country as he is not the agent of the West.
Stalin decoupled the East from direct control of the ZioAnglo Cabal. That is clear to me at least. Then after Stalin
death Russia was able to modernize itself which I doubt would have happened if it was coupled to the West. If that happened
it would have gotten to the same state that Ukraine is in today. Just a cheap piece of meat that the wolves feed on from
the West. West does not develop ANYTHING once it enters a given country. It just feeds on it. Africa is the extreme example
of this.
The best defense is offense and as Cato the Elder put it:" Carthago dilecta est".
US has own weak spots to get exploited. Everybody knows what US power rests upon. Efforts must be made to use pressure
at those points, create zones of unrest and hostility between US and her neighbors ot make US increasingly busy at home,
reveal US agenda via RT and similar media outlets, US$ as world premier reserve currency status should be undermined
using every way possible and especially leaving the system itself to avoid US using her edge against Russia and China
and other measures. US should be kept busy guessing and put on defensive everywhere.
USA location has been to benefit of US but on the other hand it can serve as a jail when the rest of the world decides
to block US form having any influence outside her borders and region . Deprived of allies US is basically impotent outside
of her immediate vicinity.
It is all just a game of chess and the grand prix is world domination. Or perhaps it is all about survival. Is not
Novorossiya rich in coal and shale gas? Ukraine cant survive without it, Novorossiya could do well with it. To have or
have not.
Patrushev admits that the overthrow of Yanukevich caught Russian intelligence flat-footed, but does not explain how
and why. One of the foremost intelligence apparatus in the world, Russian intel couldn't see it coming?
"According to its view US hostility to Russia is an unvarying
"constant" because Russia, irrespective of its system of government,
resists US policies aimed at achieving world hegemony and because the US
wants to control Russia's immense natural resources in order to seal
its hegemony."
THAT is why you are always hearing nothing but "Because Russia, Russia, Russia" even as it pertained to the BIG LOSER,
SHILL-ary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. Election. SHILL-ary works for the CIA, which reports to the CFR (Council on Foreign
Relations), which reports to CHATHAM HOUSE in the 'City' of London ~ London's FINANCIAL district ~ and home of the Rothschilds
(who, incidentally, created Rothschild-"Israel" in 1948 AD, for the very first time in human history).
I've said.. I think the average Joe Middle American, I think... has an order of magnitude more in common with the
Average Joe Russian than he does with your average German or Frenchman. I'd say, perhaps, even more than your average
Brit. We are both deeply Christian peoples who refuse to give up our faith and have been caught up in a terrible struggle
not of our choosing. It is a shame we cannot be like Rome and Constantinople... perhaps rivalrous quarrelsome brothers...
but brothers still.
I grew up in the shadow of Ft. Bragg and was aware of the concept of the cold war and the instant nuclear death at
a young age. I, too, in my youthful naiveté thought that the conclusion of the cold war would result in friendship. As
I became politically aware, I developed a grudge towards Russia for inflecting the Communists and liberal left on my
country. I saw the predicament and cultural rot my country faces to entirely be mechanizations of the KGB and its active
measures. Now, I understand the distinction between Soviet and Russian. The truth is, you were externally infected with
the same virus that we now face.. The Russian People and Culture are just as much a victim as me and mine own countrymen.
Maybe Secretary Nikolai Patrushev is one of the few who appreciates American/German history without dressing it up
in a multi-generational conspiracy. Does Sec. Patrushev know it's not about Russia? 1st, the Monroe Doctrine is still
here and it's not good: "Historians have observed that while the [Monroe] Doctrine contained a commitment to resist colonialism
from Europe, it had some aggressive implications for American policy, since there were no limitations on the US's own
actions mentioned within it. Scholar Jay Sexton notes that the tactics used to implement the doctrine were "modeled after
those employed by British imperialists" and their competition with the Spanish and French. Eminent historian William
Appleman Williams described it as a form of "imperial anti-colonialism." Noam Chomsky, argues that in practice the Monroe
Doctrine has been used as a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the Americas." 2nd, Manifest
Destiny is still here and it's not good, either: ""Manifest destiny" is sometimes used by critics of U.S. foreign policy
to characterize interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. In this usage, "manifest destiny" is interpreted as the
underlying cause of what is denounced by some as "American imperialism." A more positive-sounding phrase devised by scholars
at the end of the twentieth century is "nation building," and State Department official Karin Von Hippel notes that the
U.S. has "been involved in nation-building and promoting democracy since the middle of the nineteenth century and 'Manifest
Destiny.'"
"... what purpose does Nato serve? it seems like a perfect wedge serving the USA's foreign policy objectives in isolating Russia.. what amazes me is the willingness of the poodles to go along with this.. obviously the military industrial complex is well served by this as well.. what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on all levels? would this somehow interfere with the role the usa has had with these same countries since ww2? at this point nato seems very redundant and only of value as i have stated above.. ..."
"... The deciders have been weeding out the intelligent, principled, honest, and patriotic individuals from the positions of influence in order to ensure that only the mediocrities and pliable opportunists were "elected" for the important governmental positions in the "rest of Europe." ..."
"... Part of the background to Gorbachev's approach at the time was the advice he was getting -- very bad advice, it now seems clear, with hindsight wisdom -- in particular from Georgy Arbatov, the long-serving head of the Institute of the USA and Canada. ..."
"... As it happened, Arbatov was completely and utterly wrong. The liquidation of the security posture inherited from the Stalinist period, followed by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of communism, in no ways decreased Western hostility to Russia. The seething and near unanimous hatred of Putin is greater by far than that towards any of the leaders of the old Soviet Union. ..."
"... The truth, it turned out, was that people like Gorbachev and Arbatov were naive fools. ..."
Not only was there a pledge to halt any eastward expansion of NATO. It was clearly
understood that Ukraine would be a permanent buffer state between NATO and Russian borders.
During the early days of the Clinton Administration, the U.S. launched the Partnership for
Peace, which was presented as an alternative to NATO expansion. Russia was promised membership
in the new security structure.
While some American officials, including military flag officers, called for the dismantling
of NATO at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, others argued that
NATO had an important mission: To assure that there was no new outbreak of war on the European
continent. NATO was the only treaty organization under which the United States maintained a
presence in Europe. There was legitimate concern that, after two world wars in the 20th century
broke out in Europe, it was appropriate to maintain a watchful eye that no new conflict erupted
among the contending European states. Given the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s, this was not an
outlandish concern. Ultimately, according to the logic of those promoting a continuation of
NATO, Russia could be incorporated in a new security architecture. In effect, under a revived
American-Russian cooperation, war in Europe would be a permanent thing of the past.
This narrative may seem absurd by today's circumstances. But there is now a growing body of
declassified documents that confirm that there was a gentlemen's agreement that there would be
no further eastward expansion of NATO, and that the Partnership for Peace would be the anchor
of a new Eurasian security architecture to prevent the outbreak of future wars, and to build
new cooperative relations in the economic and political spheres as well.
The National Security Archive, hosted at George Washington University ([email protected])
has recently obtained and posted a number of documents from U.S. and Russian files from the
early 1990s, recounting this story. They can be found under the headline "NATO Expansion: What
Yeltsin Heard." They are well-worth reading for anyone looking for a way out of the current
madness New Cold War rhetoric coming from Washington, Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow.
"... there is now a growing body of declassified documents that confirm that there was a
gentlemen's agreement that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO..."
-- Guess there are no gentlemen left among the US deciders... Cannot be too much of reminding
about the zionization of the US army:
https://israelpalestinenews.org/fighting-israels-wars-u-s-military-government-become-zionized/
Harper, Thanks very much for posting this piece. Somehow, I always thought (probably
naively), that the agreement was always a well known fact. I often wondered why our esteemed
leaders broke it. Why the desire to reduce the Russians to total insignificance?
thanks harper.. this "gentlemen's agreement" story seems to rear it's ugly head every so
often.. as an outsider it would seem to me that there has been an ongoing concerted effort to
not let any friendly relationships between russia and the rest of europe develop.. i can only
think that this has been the intent of nato, especially since the changes in the russia from
89 onward...
what purpose does Nato serve? it seems like a perfect wedge serving the USA's foreign
policy objectives in isolating Russia.. what amazes me is the willingness of the poodles to
go along with this.. obviously the military industrial complex is well served by this as
well.. what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on all
levels? would this somehow interfere with the role the usa has had with these same countries
since ww2? at this point nato seems very redundant and only of value as i have stated
above..
Harper, this has been the lonely argument of Harald Kujak and a select few public others for
a longtime over here in Germany.
Yesterday I witnessed a debate under the header: Who is more dangerous Trump or Putin? on
German TeVe.
The British representative invited, the expert on British intelligence, argued he couldn't
understand in the least the German public. Seems 'poll wise' the vast majority of Germans
considers Trump more dangerous then Putin. There were phases in his talk were he seemed to
get exhausted and tried to address us more directly via our conscience/soul: We have to stand
up bold against Russian aggression, since it does not necessarily mean war, but if you do it
in a united fashion the other side will fold.
Meanwhile on another public channel a day earlier, second vs. first, a prominent German
economist seemingly joined Trump*. Strictly this is only to
Strictly it was part of the promotion of his latest book, something in like in search of
the truth. As economist he is obviously aware of matters that lately were alluded to here via
OECD. In fact it was the context of the first question to him.
*****
concerning European foreign policy, by now it feels the east dictates it to a large extend,
led by Poland.
I seem to remember that Yeltsin specifically asked that Russia be allowed to join NATO and
was turned down. The creation of an alternate organization was suggested, probably the
Partnership for Peace.
I was unaware of the "gentlemen's agreement," but it makes sense, and Matlock's testimony is
good enough for me. NATO was a cold war construct, and with the end of the cold war, NATO
could have been dismantled as the relic of a previous age. But institutions die hard and
those vested in them seek to maintain their budgets and find new missions to justify their
existence. European countries have indeed had a long history of conflict, and the alliance
did seem effective at maintaining the peace in Europe. Many of the new post-Communist
governments in the former Soviet Bloc also wanted in. It wasn't all our own doing.
The Partnership for Peace was another post-cold-war construct that gave the old school in
Garmish a new mission and something else to do. I think it might have been possible to bring
Russia in, but was that the purpose of an expanded NATO and the Partnership for Peace, or was
it aimed at isolating Russia and ensuring a perpetual western domination?
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine seems to have been the tipping point Did we play a
clandestine role in that? I frankly don't know, but I suspect we did. Then came Putin's
assertion of Russian interests in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine. And here we are,
witnessing the revival of populist nationalisms in many places, including the USA.
These pose a challenge to the post-cold-war "new world order" (I'm citing President #41)
which likely will be less and less pretty as it gains momentum. It might have been easier to
have abided by that "gentleman's agreement," and the issues we face to day might have been
avoided. But then there would have been other issues. We are humans after all and seem to
like "issues."
"...what would happen if Russia was to have good relations with the rest of Europe on
all levels?"
The non-obedient leaders of such countries in the "rest of Europe" would have been
compromised and removed from the positions of power by the deciders. Take a closer look at
May, Johnson, and, particularly, Gavin Williamson. Do they look like the persons of integrity
and able leaders? Was not Macron competitor conveniently (and fraudulently) compromised
during the last elections? Were not the Swedes ordered to keep the ridiculous lawsuit against
Assange?
The deciders have been weeding out the intelligent, principled, honest, and patriotic
individuals from the positions of influence in order to ensure that only the mediocrities and
pliable opportunists were "elected" for the important governmental positions in the "rest of
Europe."
"Did we play a clandestine role in that? I frankly don't know, but I suspect we did. Then
came Putin's assertion of Russian interests in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine."
Why don't you do some minor research on the "clandestine role?' The materials are in
abundance and are widely available on the internet.
For example:
There has been innumerous stories circulating about the West's broken promises towards
Russia. To be honest I thought most of them was fake and the russians were making them up to
to ease their pain felt about the loss of an empire.
Now based on the above the opposite seems to be true.
I just dont come to understand at all how can a once superpower with 1000s of nuclear
warheads can downplayed for decades. I just don't get it.
The ignorant western elite should heed the old szekler saying: "The bear is not a
toy!"
Yes, a very worthwhile reminder, thanks. It should be run every day on the front page of
major news outlets for the next year. Ignorance of NATO's failure to sustain that accord
becomes a Pandora's box of bear-filled nightmares.
"Why the desire to reduce the Russians to total insignificance?"
Your question provides the answer. The US and NATO aimed for a Russian government run by
natural resource-vending oligarchs. China would have been raised from its understudy role to
serve as an excuse for big ticket military spending.
Anna
@11
...The deciders have been weeding out ...that is very important observation. The other half
of that sentence is ´..who is weeded in..´ for example, in Germany, the current
new government has a social democrat at minister of finance, but he nominated a guy from
Goldman Sachs - Jörg Kukies. What more can be said?
I remember some bigwig, I want to say Scowcroft but can't really remember, said the reason
Russia wasn't allowed in to NATO is that they would be an alternate power centre to the US
within NATO. NATO is really there to assert US primacy over Europe. The Russia nonsense keeps
Europe divided and under the thumb, reconciliation between Germany and Russia is an abiding
fear for some.
NATO expansion was largely the result of extensive lobbying of the US Senate by American
arms and manufacturers in the 1990s, exposed by the New York Times at the time, as well as
for domestic political reasons to make Clinton look tough. Now it has all become a self
fulfilling prophesy by creating an adversary in Russia.
Prior to the 'Briefing Book' to which 'Harper' linked, the National Security Archive
published, last December, one entitled 'NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard.'
A crucial point not mentioned in the -- generally excellent -- introduction to this series
of documents is that Gorbachev did not even ask for the verbal assurances he was given to be
put in writing.
This, incidentally, is a matter which Putin raised in his interviews with Oliver Stone. In
these, his comments on almost all the people discussed -- up to and including John McCain --
are restrained and emollient. His contempt and distaste for Gorbachev, however, shine
through.
Part of the background to Gorbachev's approach at the time was the advice he was
getting -- very bad advice, it now seems clear, with hindsight wisdom -- in particular from
Georgy Arbatov, the long-serving head of the Institute of the USA and Canada.
In a letter to the 'New York Times' in December 1987, in response to a column by William
Safire, which was headlined 'It Takes Two to Make a Cold War', Arbatov made clear that
Gorbachev was intended to, as it were, 'walk away', from the Cold War. And he wrote:
'And here we have a "secret weapon'" that will work almost regardless of the American
response -- we would deprive America of The Enemy. And how would you justify without it the
military expenditures that bleed the American economy white, a policy that draws America into
dangerous adventures overseas and drives wedges between the United States and its allies, not
to mention the loss of American influence on neutral countries? Wouldn't such a policy in the
absence of The Enemy put America in the position of an outcast in the international
community?'
As it happened, Arbatov was completely and utterly wrong. The liquidation of the
security posture inherited from the Stalinist period, followed by the break-up of the Soviet
Union and the abandonment of communism, in no ways decreased Western hostility to Russia. The
seething and near unanimous hatred of Putin is greater by far than that towards any of the
leaders of the old Soviet Union.
The truth, it turned out, was that people like Gorbachev and Arbatov were naive
fools.
What however then becomes material is that if Western behaviour makes clear that those who
sought good relations with us were indeed such, it really is very foolish to expect that
Russians will vote for such people.
Something that saddens me somewhat is that, as became clear if one probed, a strong
undercurrent in the thinking of people like Arbatov was the belief that, although this had
not been Stalin's intention, his post-war policies had gratuitously wrecked the relationship
with the United States built up during the wartime 'Grand Alliance.'
I have difficulty thinking of any more promising way causing people to abandon such
beliefs than allying with those who venerate Stepan Banderistas in an attempt to bring the
Crimea into NATO. One thought people might be aware that Sevastopol is the scene of two great
sieges, by the French, Ottomans and British in 1854-5, and by the Germans, Romanians and
Italians from December 1941 to July 1942.
In both cases, the city fell. In the latter, however, the defenders tied up Erich von
Manstein -- one of the greatest exponents of mobile warfare -- and the German Eleventh Army
for seven crucial months, which among other things made a major contribution to the fact that
Stalingrad did not fall, and the Germans were decisively defeated there.
I am certainly aware of the role that Nuland and the State Department and the Obama
administration in general played in supporting the Orange Revolution. What I don't know is
what "clandestine" efforts--cash payments, secret promises, etc.--other elements of our
government may or may not have played. I suspect we did, but I don't know and for this, open
research is difficult to conduct.
anna - we see this much the same.. this is an organized move on the part of the west to
isolate Russia... i don't think it is working.. they have resorted to dirty tricks to get the
same result.. it isn't working either..
Now that matters are heating up in Europe-Russia relations, strictly along the lines of the
representative in the political talksshow circle, I talked about above, was Prof. Glees, he
speaks German has a semi-German background. Apparently was more frequently present on German
media, got glimpses. DW? Didn't take a closer look.
Strictly two of his arguments stuck out for me. One challenged how it would be challenged
here, Iraq, anyway:
a) it is no doubt significant that it only happened 7 km/?miles? from Porton Down. What
was he doing there?
b) if the Foreign Minister speaks he has relevant intelligence information.
Anna, re #11. There is very little 'weeding out from positions of influence' as you suggest.
The political preselection process ensures that such people do not actually get started on
the train, but in most cases they have already left as soon as they arrived, having seen, to
them, the nauseous and noxious collection of people with whom they would otherwise spend
years rubbing shoulders.
You will not find a Teddy Roosevelt or a George Washington in the current era.
I think you are underestimating the demand side of NATO expansion; many Eastern European
states wanted to be included in NATO - for reasons of both security and prestige (of being
associated with the dominant civilization on Earth and the Winners of the Cold War). In fact,
EU membership, NATO, and Plato went together - it was an act of joining (or re-joining) the
"Civilization".
I seem to recall that the purely European WEU (Western European Union) was touted as
replacement for NATO that would be purely European and built up, so there would have been at
least some discussion. I wonder what the dynamics of that fail were and if there are any
public documents that highlight it?
Stalin promised free elections in these exact same eastern European countries now conquered
by Nato only 45 years earlier. Instead he delivered murder, gulags, rape and ethnic
cleansing. Because of his total obliteration of any opposition, the postwar history today is
still corrupted with Stalin's and the Bolshevic's lies. Not to mentioned all those falsely
charged and executed at Nuremburg.
Take Stalin himself. Many Russians would claim that his continuing murder of millions
after the war was already won cannot be blamed on Russia or Russians. They claim it was the
USSR that perpetrated these deeds. But many of these same Russians suffer from nostalgic
delusions about the good old days under "Uncle Joe".
Yeah, I'd say they're moving from worse to as bad as it gets, as Mr. Global sets up a
coordinated, simultaneous, four-front attack (Syria, Ukraine, Iran, DPRK) on Rus allies,
along with their various false-flag absurdities. We'd better hope any adults left in the room
put Mr. Global in the psych ward, and real soon.
A handshake agreement to limit the eastward expansion of NATO ? This handshaking was going on
while Western commercial interests were penetrating, en-masse, the newly de-Sovietised
economies of Russia and the CIS states and that alone should have been a hint of what was to
come. I'd suggest that Putin was not one to miss that hint.
Power depends on domination and monopolisation of resources, people and ground, or at least
in an interim period denying their exploitation by competitors such as their contemporary
owners. Control of or denial of use of the wealth of Eurasia, the greatest land mass on the
planet, is the key to hegemonic control of the planet for an inestimable time interval, and
numerous routes have and will be tried to achieve this objective.
With that in mind, could anyone really express surprise at some long ago handshakes and
broken agreements made to Boris Yeltsin and a bunch of bewildered former Soviet bureaucrats ?
The Chinese has long since learned the lesson.
"[...] Anders Fogh Rasmussen said alliance members must be willing and able to exercise
military power "beyond our borders" to combat threats such as terrorism and missile
attacks."
"[...] By contrast, Britain and the US believe that to remain relevant, Nato must be
prepared to tackle potential security threats beyond its members' borders."
"[...] Afthanistan could serve a template (sic) for future threats and Nato's response to
them."
No mention of course of who defines what may or may not represent a threat.
Note also the author's opinion that Afghanistan is to be held up as a model of how to go
about things. The MIC's dream come true.
Whatever aliby is offered to explain whatever promise ever made by the US and Western allies
on whatever issue is difficult to take into account, since their very way of procceed have
been consistently always the same.
On historical facts on inteventions by US Imperialism in Russian sphere of influence and
everywhere, I bring in this Spanish translation of 56 chapter of the book "Killing
Hope" by Wiliam Blum, currently discontinued, with the following comment by the editor of
the blog which made the effort:
The recent American Empire (chapter 56 of Assassinating Hope, by William Blum)
"The way Bush and his people managed to deflect America's anger from Bin Laden to
Saddam Hussein is one of the greatest public relations sorcery tricks in history." John
le Carré, quoted by Blum.
Note from the blog editor : We offer the last chapter of William Blum's book on
interventions by the CIA and the US Army since the end of World War II. In this chapter
that closes his book, Blum tells us about the recent American "Empire", from 1992 to 2002.
It is obvious that between 2002 and 2016 many events have taken place in the world, linked
to US imperialism. The last 13 years are not reflected since Blum's book was finished
writing in 2003 and published in 2004. Even so, it is a chapter that we can extrapolate
perfectly to understand US imperialism. since then. Perhaps, everything that Blum describes
has been accentuated more and more in recent years. It is, then, a text that maintains its
relevance.
The term "Empire" applied to the United States it began being used by critics of
imperialism. However, as Blum tells us, more and more apologists of US foreign policy are
using it proudly; recognize and defend such imperial reality.
"The American Empire" is the last chapter of Blum's book. It closes a magnificent and
indispensable work whose knowledge and diffusion are required if we want to understand the
contemporary world. It is not possible to understand international relations, peaceful or
violent, outside of imperialism, just as it is not possible to understand capitalism
outside of the latter.
Documentary reference: William Blum: "The North American Empire from 1992 to the
present" , in "Killing Hope. Interventions of the CIA and the United States Army
since the Second World War" , chap. 56, pp. 460 to 471. Editorial Oriente, Santiago de
Cuba (Cuba), 2005 (original in English: William Blum, "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and
CIA Interventions Since World War II" , Common Courage Press, 2004).
Digitization source and corrections (cite and keep the hyperlink): Blog Del Viejo Topo.
Images, captions and bold: they are our addition.
Other chapters of the book: to access other chapters published on the blog, see the index
at the end and click on the hyperlinks that are active."
David, I am familiar with the argument you refer to in the last paragraph. It surfaced in
looks at the larger ideological battle at the time as far as the more then extreme Nazi
propaganda was 'echoed' or found supporters for historical reasons e.g. in Hungary and/or the
Ukraine, arbitrarily. The larger "Judeo-Bolshevik" complex. I have a deep inner resistance to
where it feels it would end theoretically. Had they taken a different route they could have
made it? Seriously? They should have?
Along these lines, I am not sure either, if I want to reduce Ukrainians collectively to
Banderistas. Fact seems that obviously everyone in Russia is anti-Nazi, which includes the
extreme right.
*******
Prof Glees alluded to several people beyond the more spectacular cases in the UK. Eight, I
seem to remember. Only three were mentioned: Litvinenco, Skripal and Berezovsky's (suicide)*.
Not sure if Glees does include him in this list. unfortunately no one asked him for a list.
Who else does he have in mind?
david, it is always interesting and informative reading your comments.. thanks for making
them.. i struggle with the idea that anyone is is idealistic is being naive.. this is how it
would appear gorbachev has to be taken, but i struggle with it regardless, as i am attached
to the idealism that is built into his way of thinking as you outline here.. at what point
does humanity seek an alternative to war and the build up and preparation for war which is
the basis for NATO? as john lennon said 'give peace a chance'.. i think gorbachev did this..
would the usa ever let europe drop nato? would europe ever recognize how it is a block to
greater peace in europe? or, do bigger fences make better neighbours?
pat mentioned you might do a thread on the skripal / uk dynamic at some point.. i hope you
do... thanks..
Actually, the bezirk of which I am a citizen and taxpayer was once the oldest Republic in
Europe. Some Alemeni hill volk and some lake dwellers managed to purchase their freedom from
the Habsburgs in about 1350. This Free Republic existed for centuries until its
representatives arrived late at the Congress of Vienna in 1817. Our Republic was lost in the
same way that Switzerland was lost when it joined the UN.
Switzerland had a long history of preventing rulers and powerful cliques from gaining a
monopoly on power. Unfortunately, that history has been discarded in favor of giving up
sovereignty to globalist agendas like refugee settlement, global warming, tax law, and here
specifically: to NATO empire building (Switzerland is active in "defending" Kosovo).
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet
Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms
the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by
inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets.
Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981.
Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal
fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the
Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of
Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain
Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea
"that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc
of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007,
pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White
House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the
Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is
based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in
what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the
Soviet Union
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin
later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support
for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I
don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war
planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved
ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around
the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in
aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows
what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti
air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an
escalation.
"... So, albeit the USSR registered up to 17% of GDP spending on the "military" (as some sources claim) -- you have to take it with a grain of salt. ..."
"... Another problem with this "too much military" theory is the logic behind it. During the 50s and 60s, the USSR was also spending a lot on the military, but it didn't stop it growing 15%-10% yoy ..."
"... It was only after the mid-70s, when the USSR begun to stagnate (it never had a recession), that the military spending theorists begun to sprout. The question is the same about the ill fate of the welfare state in Western Europe in the end of the 70s: which came first, the egg or the chicken. Putting it in another way: was it the Soviet was spending that caused its long stagnation or was it its long stagnation that made its military spending look big? ..."
The war hawks in my beloved country are the Soviet Politburo clamoring for a larger army,
navy, air force to be equipped with the most expensive weaponry. Back in the 80's the
Soviet Union had an army of 5M, they it is less than 1M and is purely defensive. We on the
other hand have built up our Defense Budget to epic levels and have consultant after
consultant telling us that it is at an all time low.
- Posted by: Christian Chuba | Mar 1, 2018 4:14:46 PM | 20
The USSR had deeper problems than that.
It's not that the Soviet expenditure with the military was a problem. On the opposite: the
Soviet were very familiar with the concept of dual industry, them being the masters of WWII.
Many industries in the USSR that were officially military were actually civilian: the most
colorful example being the airplane industry, which could produce either civilian or military
aircraft. Another example: the USSR was the biggest agriculture tractor producer in the world
at one point. These tractors were produced in the same industrial plants as the one used to
produce battle tanks. So, albeit the USSR registered up to 17% of GDP spending on the
"military" (as some sources claim) -- you have to take it with a grain of salt.
Another problem with this "too much military" theory is the logic behind it. During
the 50s and 60s, the USSR was also spending a lot on the military, but it didn't stop it
growing 15%-10% yoy .
It was only after the mid-70s, when the USSR begun to stagnate (it never had a
recession), that the military spending theorists begun to sprout. The question is the same
about the ill fate of the welfare state in Western Europe in the end of the 70s: which came
first, the egg or the chicken. Putting it in another way: was it the Soviet was spending that
caused its long stagnation or was it its long stagnation that made its military spending look
big?
"... members of Washington's smart set, Republicans and Democrats alike, declared that the opportunities now presenting themselves went beyond the merely stupendous. Indeed, history itself had ended. With the United States as the planet's sole superpower, [neo]liberal democratic capitalism was destined to prevail everywhere. ..."
"... In the 1990s, rampant victory disease fueled extraordinary hubris and a pattern of reckless behavior informed by an assumption that the world would ultimately conform to the wishes of the "indispensable nation." In the years to come, an endless sequence of costly mishaps would ensue from Mogadishu to Mosul. ..."
"... Trump is not a revolutionary, and he is not the devil. He simply represents an attempt late in a systemic downward cycle to correct few excesses and buy some time. ..."
"... The beneficiaries of the excess policies – cheap labor businesses, ethnic castes, trans-gender professionals, open border fanatics, military extremists – are fighting tooth and nail to keep any change from happening. They are at this point beyond hysteria, they sense the goodies might be slipping from their hands (it is mostly about their jobs and careers). ..."
"... Two fundamental omissions from the analysis are: in domestic policies the devastating impact of affirmative action on the next generation of young, white males. And in foreign policy the equally devastating impact of Bill Clinton's attack on Serbia (to create a 'Muslim' Kosovo statelet in Europe) had on the international law and norms. Iraq inevitably followed Serbia. ..."
1989: The Fall of the Berlin Wall. As the Cold War wound down, members of Washington's
smart set, Republicans and Democrats alike, declared that the opportunities now presenting
themselves went beyond the merely stupendous. Indeed, history itself had ended. With the United
States as the planet's sole superpower, [neo]liberal democratic capitalism was destined to
prevail everywhere.
There would be no way except the American Way. In fact, however, the passing of the Cold War
should have occasioned a moment of reflection regarding the sundry mistakes and moral
compromises that marred U.S. policy from the 1940s through the 1980s. Unfortunately, policy
elites had no interest in second thoughts -- and certainly not in remorse or contrition.
In the 1990s, rampant victory disease fueled extraordinary hubris and a pattern of reckless
behavior informed by an assumption that the world would ultimately conform to the wishes of the
"indispensable nation." In the years to come, an endless sequence of costly mishaps would ensue
from Mogadishu to Mosul.
When, in due time, Donald Trump announced his intention to dismantle the establishment that
had presided over those failures, many Americans liked what he had to say, even if he spoke
from a position of total ignorance.
Those who hate Trump, will hate Trump. And very little of what they write will not be
colored by the hatred.
The analysis – although based on a sound historical premise – is off by miles.
It focuses on personalities and avoids mentioning the systemic failures by Western
institutions, from media to academia, from Hollywood to UN. Trump is not a revolutionary, and
he is not the devil. He simply represents an attempt late in a systemic downward cycle to
correct few excesses and buy some time.
The beneficiaries of the excess policies –
cheap labor businesses, ethnic castes, trans-gender professionals, open border fanatics,
military extremists – are fighting tooth and nail to keep any change from happening.
They are at this point beyond hysteria, they sense the goodies might be slipping from their
hands (it is mostly about their jobs and careers).
Two fundamental omissions from the analysis are: in domestic policies the devastating
impact of affirmative action on the next generation of young, white males. And in foreign
policy the equally devastating impact of Bill Clinton's attack on Serbia (to create a
'Muslim' Kosovo statelet in Europe) had on the international law and norms. Iraq inevitably
followed Serbia.
Why are these points left out? Because they would make the neo-liberal Democrats look bad?
Right, Gore as president, that would had fixed it all
Bacevich didn't write a word about the Open Borders fetish of both parties from which Trump
dissented, or seemed to. Not a word. And this played no small part in Trump winning the GOP
nomination and the election.
Fantastic article. A very plausible hypothesis. "The Deal. Connected people, in-the-know, claim that a top-secret agreement
was reached between the late Mr Yeltsin and his cronies, on one side, and The West, on the other side, in 1991. Yeltsin et al had sold
Russia's interests down the river, and in return, The West allowed the bastards to hoard their ill-gotten gains in the Western financial
system. Yeltsin et al had promised to let the Soviet republics go; to disarm; to follow the Washington Consensus, i.e. to stick to the
liberal economic model; to allow the free import of consumer goods; to allow Western access to the Russian military complex; to let
the West write Russian laws; to permit the free outflow of capital from Russia. The West promised to bring investment, to let Russia
live in peace, to keep NATO away from Russian borders."
Notable quotes:
"... And now, at last, as the feasts are over, the real trial begins. The US is preparing a new round of sanctions, including seizure of Russian oligarch assets. They are ripe for collection. The confiscation of Russian holdings in Cyprus banks in 2013 passed without a hitch and served as a trial balloon. Putin didn't object overmuch, for he is a sworn enemy of offshore accounts. None of the fleeced Russian businessmen succeeded in recovering their losses in court. Now is the time for the real thing, and much of the anti-Russian hysteria is aimed at preparing the ground for the seizure. In this way, they plan to get a cool trillion dollars into the US Treasury. Who will lose his assets and who will survive, this is the talk of the day in Moscow. ..."
"... Now we are coming to a difficult part. The Deal. Connected people, in-the-know, claim that a top-secret agreement was reached between the late Mr Yeltsin and his cronies, on one side, and The West, on the other side, in 1991. Yeltsin et al had sold Russia's interests down the river, and in return, The West allowed the bastards to hoard their ill-gotten gains in the Western financial system. Yeltsin et al had promised to let the Soviet republics go; to disarm; to follow the Washington Consensus, i.e. to stick to the liberal economic model; to allow the free import of consumer goods; to allow Western access to the Russian military complex; to let the West write Russian laws; to permit the free outflow of capital from Russia. The West promised to bring investment, to let Russia live in peace, to keep NATO away from Russian borders. ..."
"... Mr Putin inherited The Deal. Slowly, the Deal has been eroded from both sides. NATO troops moved eastward, no sizeable investment came in, the West supported Chechen rebels. Russia limited Western access to its military-industrial complex; took Crimea; regained some of its international independence. ..."
"... The powerful personalities of Yeltsin's era remained embedded in the upper echelons of Putin's state. Chubais and Kudrin were and are untouchable. They are connected with the FRS and the IMF, they go to Bilderberg and Davos, they are often described as 'the colonial administration'. ..."
"... They steal with both hands, and do it with impunity. Just last week it was revealed and published that Mr Chubais and Mr Kudrin appropriated a cool billion dollars of Russian state money while repaying the Soviet debt to the Czech Republic. ..."
"... Yeltsin's oligarchs remained as rich as they were; Yeltsin's family still possesses immense riches. And Putin does not dare to touch them. He goes hat in hand to open a Yeltsin's Memorial Centre; he is courteous with Yeltsin's widow and daughter. Putin's establishment cautiously avoided celebration, or even mention of the Revolution centenary, in keeping with Yeltsin's anticommunism. This is the Deal. ..."
"... Putin has been unhappy with the Deal for a long time, vocally so since his Munich talk in 2007, but he stuck to the script. Even now, Russia's economy follows the liberal model; billions of dollars are being siphoned out of Russia monthly; billions of dollars' worth of Western manufactured consumer goods are imported and sold in Russia, though it would make perfect sense to organise local manufacture. Russia's Central Bank is directly connected to the Western finance system, and its emission is limited by the amount of hard currency in its coffers. The Rouble carry trade prospers, like the Yen carry trade did years ago. ..."
"... This presented the golden opportunity for the anti-Putin activists, the time they can collect the fruit of their hard work. A somewhat typical anti-Putin activist is an émigré, Mr Andrey Illarionov, a Yeltsin man, an ex-adviser to President Putin (until 2005), a US resident, a member of the loony Cato Institute and an adept of Ayn Rand. He is an anti-Russian fanatic; next to him Rachel Maddow is a Putin groupie and Tokyo Rose a symbol of patriotism. ..."
"... Speaking to the Congress Committee of Foreign Affairs in 2009, he famously claimed about the US administration policy towards Russia that "it is not even an appeasement policy so well known to us by another Munich decision in 1938, it is a surrender. A full, absolute, unconditional surrender to the regime of secret police officers, chekists and Mafiosi". Despite these fighting words, he is a frequent visitor to Moscow, and he never misses a demo where he can call out "Putin must leave" apparently unafraid of the "secret police officers, chekists and Mafiosi". This is all you should know about the totalitarian Russian regime! ..."
"... Now Mr Illarionov is lobbying the US Congress to remove its threats from the heads of those deserving oligarchs, who (in his words) amassed their fortune before advent of Mr Putin and "in order to survive, they had been forced to pay a large tribute to the Kremlin". His lobbying effort on behalf of the Old Money people has been shared and supported by two notorious Putin haters, a fellow émigré Piontkovsky and a Swedish Neo-Con Anders Aslund. ..."
"... This is not a coincidence; the Russian Old Money is solidly in bed with the Clinton camp. If Friedman succeeds in escaping the sanctions, it will be an additional proof that the Bankers still have the upper hand in the US Administration. ..."
"... Echo Moskwy ..."
"... But perhaps it is too late for him. An unverifiable odd rumour has risen in Moscow. They say that the Communist candidate Pavel Grudinin has strong backing among the "siloviki", that is Putin's appointees, often but not exclusively of security services background, for they are unhappy with Putin's adherence to the Deal. But that will be the subject of my next piece. ..."
"... That is my understanding also but I could be wrong. Excellent piece. But I have one small point–the crawling re-nationalization of many crucial industries did happen on Putin's watch. But in general, as I stated many times, he faces an inevitable meeting, if he were to survive as a politician, with the issue of 1990s robbery and with necessity to dismantle Yeltsin's "heritage'. ..."
"... I wonder how much of what Israel wrote might be real thing. If Putin really is going to do what you are writing he is going to be company of Russia history greatest. ..."
"... There is also indeed a question of all those offshore capitals which are stolen money. Considering state resources and capabilities there definitely might be an offer they cannot refuse to just give money back. ..."
"... Putin sure as hell has all necessary resources to make this offer. ..."
While you have probably already forgotten the feast, Russia is only now slowly coming back to life after its overlong Christmas
break completed on January 14 by the quaintly named Old New Year, or even perhaps by the Epiphany on January 19. Everybody went somewhere,
even candidates for the presidential race coming in on March 18: the Communist one went to ski in Austria, while the right-winger
went to Bali. On the eve of Epiphany, they dipped in the ice-cold waters: the ultimate trial of Russian fitness. Not only he-man
Putin, but even she-woman Sobchak did it!
And now, at last, as the feasts are over, the real trial begins. The US is preparing a new round of sanctions, including seizure
of Russian oligarch assets. They are ripe for collection. The confiscation of Russian holdings in Cyprus banks in 2013 passed without
a hitch and served as a trial balloon. Putin didn't object overmuch, for he is a sworn enemy of offshore accounts. None of the fleeced
Russian businessmen succeeded in recovering their losses in court. Now is the time for the real thing, and much of the anti-Russian
hysteria is aimed at preparing the ground for the seizure. In this way, they plan to get a cool trillion dollars into the US Treasury.
Who will lose his assets and who will survive, this is the talk of the day in Moscow.
The Russian assets in the west could be divided into New Money, assets of Putin's people, and the Old Money, assets of Yeltsin's
people. The sanctions are supposed to deal with Putin's people, but Russian experts think the Old Money is more vulnerable, for a
good reason. The New Money is under Putin's protection. If the US or any other western authority grabs it, the Russian government
may seize Western shares in Russian companies and properties.
But what about the Old Money? Its owners, elder oligarchs, are extremely worried about Putin's nonchalance. Putin takes it easy,
they say. Ma'alish , the Arab in Putin says. Que sera sera , says his inner Frenchman. And this nonchalant attitude
drives the oligarchs crazy. They want him to fight and save their money. They insisted on his meeting with President Trump in Vietnam;
some say the meeting took place in the depth of the night, far from prying eyes, and didn't bring results. Now Putin says to the
Old Money: if you want to save your money, repatriate it to Russia. We aren't that mad, they reply. You have to defend us anyway!
That was the Deal!
Now we are coming to a difficult part. The Deal. Connected people, in-the-know, claim that a top-secret agreement was reached
between the late Mr Yeltsin and his cronies, on one side, and The West, on the other side, in 1991. Yeltsin et al had sold Russia's
interests down the river, and in return, The West allowed the bastards to hoard their ill-gotten gains in the Western financial system.
Yeltsin et al had promised to let the Soviet republics go; to disarm; to follow the Washington Consensus, i.e. to stick to the liberal
economic model; to allow the free import of consumer goods; to allow Western access to the Russian military complex; to let the West
write Russian laws; to permit the free outflow of capital from Russia. The West promised to bring investment, to let Russia live
in peace, to keep NATO away from Russian borders.
Mr Putin inherited The Deal. Slowly, the Deal has been eroded from both sides. NATO troops moved eastward, no sizeable investment
came in, the West supported Chechen rebels. Russia limited Western access to its military-industrial complex; took Crimea; regained
some of its international independence.
Putin was elected, or you may say, he was appointed to stick to the Deal and to serve as the Supreme Arbiter among the oligarchs,
with very little of a power base of his own. Slowly, he created his own oligarchs (they are described as "siloviki", though not all
of them have some security forces background), and he had built up a limited power base; though many important positions, in particular
in the economic sphere, remained in the hands of the Old Guard, Yeltsin's men. This, too, was a part of the Deal.
The powerful personalities of Yeltsin's era remained embedded in the upper echelons of Putin's state. Chubais and Kudrin were
and are untouchable. They are connected with the FRS and the IMF, they go to Bilderberg and Davos, they are often described as 'the
colonial administration'.
They steal with both hands, and do it with impunity. Just last week it was
revealed and published that Mr Chubais and Mr Kudrin appropriated
a cool billion dollars of Russian state money while repaying the Soviet debt to the Czech Republic. The worst Putin can do about
them is to give them a fat chunk of the Russian economy to chew on, while limiting their access to the rest. So he gave Mr Chubais
the Rusnano company that made no profit but
embezzled
billions . This was the Deal.
Yeltsin's oligarchs remained as rich as they were; Yeltsin's family still possesses immense riches. And Putin does not dare
to touch them. He goes hat in hand to open a Yeltsin's Memorial Centre; he is courteous with Yeltsin's widow and daughter. Putin's
establishment cautiously avoided celebration, or even mention of the Revolution centenary, in keeping with Yeltsin's anticommunism.
This is the Deal.
The topmost schools of Russia, the most endowed, the most privileged schools for the children of the new nobility are the HSE,
(the Higher School of Economics, a clone of the LSE and the economic think-tank of the government), and MGIMO, (Moscow State Institute
of International Relations, the school for perspective diplomats). Their graduates were been trained to despise Russia and admire
the neo-liberal West (just like the Indian students trained by the Brits, had admired England and despised their country in the days
of the British Raj). Professor Medvedev of the HSE called upon Russian government to transfer the Russian Far North to the international
community, though this is the place of the greatest gas reserves (he kept his position). Professor Zubov of the MGIMO had compared
Putin to Hitler, and denounced Russian diplomats as liars (his contract hasn't been prolonged). All that is a part of the Deal.
Putin has been unhappy with the Deal for a long time, vocally so since his Munich talk in 2007, but he stuck to the script.
Even now, Russia's economy follows the liberal model; billions of dollars are being siphoned out of Russia monthly; billions of dollars'
worth of Western manufactured consumer goods are imported and sold in Russia, though it would make perfect sense to organise local
manufacture. Russia's Central Bank is directly connected to the Western finance system, and its emission is limited by the amount
of hard currency in its coffers. The Rouble carry trade prospers, like the Yen carry trade did years ago.
Meanwhile, the Deal has been undone from the West, as a result of the epic struggle between Bankers and Producers, otherwise described
as Liberals vs. Conservatives, or Globalists vs. Regionalists, personalised as Clinton vs. Trump. Yeltsin's people are historically
aligned with the Clinton camp. Now, their assets in the West, previously protected by the Deal, have lost their protection and come
up for grabs.
The Old Money people are putting their effort into persuading the West, namely the US, to let them live in peace and instead confiscate
the pro-Putin New Money.
This presented the golden opportunity for the anti-Putin activists, the time they can collect the fruit of their hard work.
A somewhat typical anti-Putin activist is an émigré, Mr Andrey Illarionov, a Yeltsin man, an ex-adviser to President Putin (until
2005), a US resident, a member of the loony Cato Institute and an adept of Ayn Rand. He is an anti-Russian fanatic; next to him Rachel
Maddow is a Putin groupie and Tokyo Rose a symbol of patriotism.
Speaking to the Congress Committee of Foreign Affairs in 2009, he famously
claimed
about the US administration policy towards Russia that "it is not even an appeasement policy so well known to us by another Munich
decision in 1938, it is a surrender. A full, absolute, unconditional surrender to the regime of secret police officers, chekists
and Mafiosi". Despite these fighting words, he is a frequent visitor to Moscow, and he never misses a demo where he can call out
"Putin must leave" apparently unafraid of the "secret police officers, chekists and Mafiosi". This is all you should know about the
totalitarian Russian regime!
(Émigrés are frequently like that, and the US, a country of immigrants, had been vulnerable to the attack by Illarionov Syndrome,
by listening to Masha Gessen, or to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi émigré who claimed Iraq has had WMD, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn with
his horror stories about GULAG, etc. I made it a rule to moderate my critique of Israel while abroad, in fear of failing the Illarionov
Sanity Test.)
Now Mr Illarionov is lobbying the US Congress to remove its threats from the heads of those deserving oligarchs, who (in his
words) amassed their fortune before advent of Mr Putin and "in order to survive, they had been forced to pay a large tribute to the
Kremlin". His lobbying effort on behalf of the Old Money people has been shared and supported by two notorious Putin haters, a fellow
émigré Piontkovsky and a Swedish Neo-Con Anders Aslund.
Direct and generous beneficiaries of their lobbying are the Three Alpha Jews, Peter Aven, Michael Friedman and Herman Khan. They
are owners of the Alpha Bank, a very big Russian bank , and they are Old Money oligarchs from Yeltsin's days when their kin ruled
the land.
Michael Friedman, the fat guy with a jolly piglet face, rose to his eminence from being a ticket tout selling illegally obtained
opera tickets to Western tourists near Bolshoi Theatre; afterwards he became The Mind behind all ticket mafias in Moscow, and then
proceeded to banking and so many other things.
Like many Old Money guys, Friedman earns money in Russia, but siphons it off for Jewish causes. He is a co-founder of a "Jewish
Nobel Prize", also called Genesis Prize, a cool million dollars being given annually to a deserving Jew, the most recent one being
the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg who
called Donald
Trump, "the faker". This is not a coincidence; the Russian Old Money is solidly in bed with the Clinton camp. If Friedman succeeds
in escaping the sanctions, it will be an additional proof that the Bankers still have the upper hand in the US Administration.
Alternatively, it could mean they are just smart and able to play the both houses. The Three Alpha Jews had been mentioned in
the Steele Dossier as the conduit of Putin influence for Trump and against Clinton in the recent US Presidential elections. (They
are
suing Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed for spreading the accusation).
According to an even better conspiracy theory spread on the social networks, both Mr Illarionov and the smart Alpha Jews are a
sleeper cell organised by cunning Mr Putin to ensure his survival in the most adverse conditions. All of them were very friendly
with Putin; perhaps they just pretended to become his enemies, the conspiratorially minded journalist from the anti-Putin Echo
Moskwy has implied.
Leaving the conspiracy theories aside for a while, we can reach a conclusion. The forthcoming attack of the US establishment on
Russian assets is likely to undermine the Old Money of the Yeltsin Oligarchs, and not only them. This confiscation will spell the
death knell to the notorious Deal, and then we shall see Putin Unbound.
But perhaps it is too late for him. An unverifiable odd rumour has risen in Moscow. They say that the Communist candidate
Pavel Grudinin has strong backing among the "siloviki", that is Putin's appointees, often but not exclusively of security services
background, for they are unhappy with Putin's adherence to the Deal. But that will be the subject of my next piece.
The forthcoming attack of the US establishment on Russian assets is likely to undermine the Old Money of the Yeltsin Oligarchs,
and not only them. This confiscation will spell the death knell to the notorious Deal, and then we shall see Putin Unbound.
That is my understanding also but I could be wrong. Excellent piece. But I have one small point–the crawling re-nationalization
of many crucial industries did happen on Putin's watch. But in general, as I stated many times, he faces an inevitable meeting,
if he were to survive as a politician, with the issue of 1990s robbery and with necessity to dismantle Yeltsin's "heritage'.
"Que sera sera". One of my favorite songs. Sung by Doris Day and was a hit in the 1950′s. Italian in origin and translates
to "whatever will be, will be".
Agree. I wonder how much of what Israel wrote might be real thing. If Putin really is going to do what you are writing
he is going to be company of Russia history greatest.
There is also indeed a question of all those offshore capitals which are stolen money. Considering state resources and
capabilities there definitely might be an offer they cannot refuse to just give money back.
New evidence that Washington broke its promise not to expand NATO "one inch eastward" -- a fateful decision with ongoing ramifications
-- has not been reported by The New York Times or other agenda-setting media outlets
John Batchelor Jan 11,
2018 | 2,513
70
John Batchelor has a very popular political talk show on America's largest radio network, WABC.
He has Stephen Cohen on live in the studio almost every week for a full 45 minute segment, the only guest he gives that much time
to.
Why? Because Cohen's appearances are killing the ratings. America seems to be thirsting for an alternative and critical view of
Obama's Russia policy.
Cohen returns to a subject he has treated repeatedly since the 1990s, mainstream media malpractice in covering Russia, but with
a new and highly indicative example that is both historical and profoundly contemporary.
There have been three relevant major episodes of such malpractice. The first was when American newspapers, particularly The
New York Times , misled readers into thinking the Communists could not possibly win the Russian Civil War of 1918–20, as detailed
in a study by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, published as a supplement to The New Republic , August 4, 1920. (Once canonical,
the study was for years assigned reading at journalism schools, but no longer it seems to be.)
The third and current episode grew out of the second but spread quickly through the media in the early 2000s with the demonization
of Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin's successor, and now is amply evidenced by mainstream coverage of the new Cold War, Russiagate's allegation
that "Russia attacked American democracy" in 2016, and much else related to Russia. This rendition may be the worst, certainly it
is the most dangerous.
Media malpractice has various elements -- among them, selective use of facts, some unverified, highly questionable narratives
or reporting based on those "facts," mingled with editorial commentary passed off as "analysis," buttressed by carefully selected
"expert sources," often anonymous, and amplified by carefully chosen opinion page contributors. Throughout is the systematic practice
of excluding developments (and opinion) that do not conform to the Times ' venerable motto, "All the News That's Fit to
Print." When it comes to Russia, the Times often decides politically what is fit and what is not. And thus the most recent
but exceedingly important example.
In 1990, Soviet Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed not only to the reunification of Germany, whose division was the epicenter
of that Cold War, but also, at the urging of the Western powers, particularly the United States, that the new Germany would be a
member of NATO. (Already embattled at home, Gorbachev was further weakened by his decision, which probably contributed to the attempted
coup against him in August 1991.)
Gorbachev made the decision based on assurances by his then–Western "partners" that in return NATO would never be expanded "one
inch eastward" toward Russia. (Today, having nearly doubled its member countries, the world's most powerful military alliance sits
on Russia's western borders.) At the time, it was known that President George H.W. Bush had especially persuaded Gorbachev through
Secretary of State James Baker's "not one inch" and other equally emphatic guarantees.
Now, however, the invaluable National Security Archive at George Washington University has established the historical truth by
publishing, on December 12 of last year, not only a detailed account of what Gorbachev was promised in 1990–91
but the relevant documents themselves . The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: All
of the Western powers involved -- the US, the UK, France, Germany itself -- made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions
and in various emphatic ways. If we ask when the West, particularly Washington, lost Moscow as a potential strategic partner after
the end of the Soviet Union, this is where an explanation begins.
And yet, nearly a month after the publication of the National Security Archive documents, neither the Times nor The
Washington Post , which profess to be the nation's most important, reliable, and indispensable political newspapers, has published
one word about this revelation. (Certainly the two papers are pervasively important to other media, not only due to their daily national
syndicates but because today's broadcast media, especially CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, take most of their own Russia-related "reporting"
cues from the Times and the Post .)
How to explain the failure of the Times and Post to report or otherwise comment on the National Security Archive's
publication? It can hardly be their lack of space or their disinterest in Russia, which they featured regularly in one kind of unflattering
story or another -- and almost daily in the form of "Russiagate." Given their immense daily news-gathering capabilities, could both
papers have missed the story? Impossible, even more so considering that three lesser publications -- The National Interest
, on December 12; Bloomberg , on December 13; and The American Conservative , on December 22 -- reported and
commented on its significance at length.
Or perhaps the Times and Post consider the history and process of NATO expansion to be no longer newsworthy,
even though it has been the driving, escalatory factor behind the new US-Russian Cold War; already contributed to two US-Russian
proxy hot wars (in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine since 2014) as well as to NATO's ongoing buildup on Russia's borders in the Baltic
region, which is fraught with the possibility of an actual war between the nuclear superpowers; provoked Russia into reactions now
cited as "grave threats"; nearly vaporized politically both the once robust pro-American lobby in Moscow politics and the previously
widespread pro-American sentiments among Russian citizens; and implanted in at least one generation of the Russian policy elite the
conviction that the broken promise to Gorbachev represented characteristic American "betrayal and deceit."
Soviet Fates and Lost
Alternatives .) Russians can cite other instances of "deceit," including President George W. Bush's 2002 unilateral abrogation
of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Obama's broken promise that he would not use a 2011 UN Security Council resolution to depose
Libyan leader Gaddafi. But it is the broken promise to Gorbachev that lingers as America's original sin, partly because it was the
first of many such perceived duplicities, but mainly because it has resulted in a Russia semi-encircled by US-led Western military
power, an encroachment that continues today.
Given all this, we must ask again: Why did neither the Times nor the Post report the archive revelations? Most
likely because the evidence fundamentally undermines their essential overarching narrative that Putin's Russia is solely responsible
for the new Cold War and all of its attendant conflicts and dangers, and therefore that no rethinking of US policy toward post-Soviet
Russia since 1991 is advisable or, it seems, permissible, certainly not by President Donald Trump. Therein lie the national-security
dangers of media malpractice, and this example, while of special importance, is far from the only one in recent years. In this regard,
the Times and Post seem contemptuous not only of their own professed journalistic standards but of their purportedly
cherished adage that democracy requires fully informed citizens.
If Americans cannot rely on the Times and Post , at least in regard to US-Russian relations, where can they
seek the information and analysis they need? There are many valuable alternative media outlets, but few hard-working citizens have
time to locate and consult them. Cohen recommends that they turn to two websites that almost daily aggregate reporting, analysis,
and opinion not to be found in the Times , Post , or most other mainstream publications. One is
Johnson's Russia List . The other is the website
of the American Committee for East-West Accord , of which Cohen is a board
member. Upon request, both will come to your computer. The former requests a nominal donation but does not insist on it. The latter
is free. For readers who worry about international affairs, the new US-Russian Cold War, and America itself, the information and
perspectives they will gain from these sites are invaluable.
It is something of a mystery that this should have escaped Gorbachev, although Cohen does say that Conservatives warned him
against going with the flow on this one. He ignored them.
There's an old saying about leopards and never changing their spots. I guess he was as fooled, as many are, that the appalling
history of the US was in each case a separate incident, involving and caused by different people, and therefor "it will be different
this time." Gorbachev was willing to overlook the horrific evidence of an Anglo West planning to destroy the Russia who had saved
their bacon by winning WWII for them; and to destroy her utterly and horrifically. That he could overlook that beggars belief.
It's so essential to get the bigger picture, to read the History of the Nations you are dealing with extensively, to determine
how to connect the dots to find the pattern, and to realise that ultimately nations are an aggregate of systems - and a system
is far more powerful than most individuals [until you find a rare person who knows how to break the system].
Sadly, it seems that they had fallen for the idea too, that, as V. P. said when Russia abandoned communism, their opponent would
"to them hand the sword". i.e. would become partners and equals. That was never going to happen. It also shows us, once again,
that all too often political leaders are not well enough educated, not well enough informed and not bright enough, to undertake
the job of national leader which they do.
And we are not interested nor thoughtful enough to demand better.
...And we may not be educated suficient to look through the matter.
Before 1968 in Nordic countries with Sweden had hollistic education systems, making academics able to see the whole picture.
After 1968-70 they changed the education system so the working class could get academic degrees, but separated the disciplines
so you only were able to see your part and not the whole picture and leaving out history and roots.
Newspeak was introduced and started.
Its about classes, deliberately leaving the knowledge and whole picture to the elite.
Any hollistic educated who analyse US history should be able to see that you deal with a hypocrite and liar country throughout
from start up til today.
When Russia with its excellent education system missed the point in 1990´es I think it maybe more due to their previous suffering
and emotional culture, than to actual foolishness as we can see the Russians quickly raised their heads again from the ashes.
Same happened here in Australia Tommy, they lowered the education standard so that anyone can obtain a University Degree under
the belief that everyone is entitled to one and not only those best suited. Now one has idiots running corporations and in politics.
Getting them out is the problem. I have always expressed concern that those who wish to go into politics and government should
present to the Public a full resume as anyone would who is seeking a senior position in a corporation.
Very true John.
If you look at the entire system, we see that immense power over the lives of millions of people is given to those who don't have
to show any form of qualification for the job; any training; or prior experience, assessment by qualified experience assessors.
In fact, all they have to be able do is to generate money for themselves by making promises to others using taxpayer money;
present themselves in a slick, eye catching fashion like an aspiring film actor auditioning for a role; lie; as Vladimir Putin
said "make promises better than those of your competitor"; and sell meaningless words better than a used car salesman.
In other words, present themselves to voters as an ignorant, inexperienced psychopathic, criminally fraudulent, snake oil salesman.
And then we wonder why that's exactly what we get as our "leaders". !!
Thank you John - yes I do feel deeply that as civilisations, we have strayed from so much that is balanced, natural, and optimal
for human growth and happiness. We have so much in our cultures that beggars belief in it's stupidity- and as always, the very
stupid are too stupid to know that they are very stupid. I see us preening ourselves as the epitome of civilisation, when research
into the distant past shows we have had about 3.5 thousand years of slow, non-stop collapse including an arrogant ignorance.
Yet the answers are so close to hand. It's only an understanding of where we have all gone wrong, and a willingness to do what
needs to be done to correct it which will stop us falling into the night, I suspect.
Then again, I remember that everything happens in circles, and follows Universal Laws. Maybe we have no course but to follow the
natural pattern we have put ourselves on try to learn from it.
Thanks for your kind words John.
Yes, all this was about the time they introduced the "expert". Prior to that idea, a well educated, intelligent person was
held to have a wide ranging education, and to be familiar with many different disciplines. They they got the "expert" idea - a
mechanic in my - then - University Department informed me that "expert means, here is x which marks the spot of a drip under pressure"
!! :-)
Now we have people who know more and more about less and less until they reach the pinnacle where they know absolutely everything
about nothing.
Yes, I think the Russian education got infected by America, and in the struggle to break free of all the other disasters that
caused - just to survive as a country and as a people - this is an issue that has had to be put on a back burner. But they are
doing fine in spite of it, and I'm sure will find their way back to the best of the Soviet times education.
I still (and know not alone) feel Gorbachev is a Traitor that "sold" the USSR, the People of the USSR for Personal ("friends")
gain .... so he knew what would happen !
Remember the people of the USSR wanted to work through the "problems / issues" leaving the USSR intact but Gorbachev decided
to GO AGAINST the Wishes of the People / Wishes of the country and allowed the regions to "break free" including denying the right
for Crimea to Return to RF (loaned to Ukraine while USSR existed) .... why would you Do that except for your own agenda !
And Where does Gorbachev live .... but in U$ america ... and every time he visits RF he comes with masses of Body Guards
That last part is very interesting Vtran - I didn't know he lived in America.
I hadn't caught up with any documentation about his "friends", although there is the comment - with the long/lat given of the
area on the documentary "The Unknown Putin" - that Gorbachev sold to US what wasn't his to sell - a huge chunk of sea off the
coast of Russia, containing massive amounts of oil deposits!! He did it to get the money to try and defeat Yeltsin!! So, he has
a track record, and as the saying goes "he who lies once, lies ten times". The principle holds for everything, as well as lying.
I also didn't know that there were grass roots movements of people trying to stop the collapse of the USSR.
Can you recommend any good modern history resource which covers these events please?
I got a lot from that excellent documentary, but as is so often one is left wanting more.
I know Vladimir Putin doesn't like him - not one bit. I could "read" it from the Stone Interviews :-)
I certainly agree with you - that if he did all that, selling out the people of Russia - no way does he deserve to be grouped
with them, they aren't "his" people, in that case - then yes, he was a sellout traitor. Should count himself lucky to be alive!!
Isabella,, I will look for a document regarding Gorbachev selling out the people of the USSR .... However my comment is personnel
... all Russians I know, all people of the ex USSR (except those of fanatical Ukraine) speak as One ...The did not at the USSR
to break ... their views were "over ridden" !
-
Interesting comment of "selling off which does not belong" reminiscent of Alaska where the Gold supposedly exchange disappeared
after the western inspired revolution of 1918 !
Quote: Over 500 treaties were made with American Indian tribes, primarily for land cessations, but 500 treaties were also broken,
changed or nullified when it served the government's interests.
Because U$ Americans citizens thought the had "Given away STOLEN Worthless Land" .... and then found that "Worthless Land"
contained "Yellow Gold" ...... later more so called "Worthless Land" contained Black Gold and so it went on
Yupp...
Like the mineral & natural wealth of Russia, doesn't belong to Russia, but belong to the WORLD (a.k.a. City of London/Wall St)
??
Mad Madeleine Notsobright.
Who was Christopher Columbus? Any can check it out. My guess as another Vtran.
- What do you see?
- No gold yet?
- Of course there is gold there
It was the same as Europa. War in Indians replaced war on Muslim.
This a a very unhelpful spin by Cohen. Dugin, addressing the end of the cold war, reports that Brzezinski once told him, "we
tricked you." That's what happened. This is what Russians need to think about when speaking with their common law partners.
I have wondered many times how the S Union, a nation with so many brilliant people, could chose someone like Gorbatchev to
lead the country.
Reagan and Thatcher did whatever they wanted with him. They achieved all their objectives in dealing with Gorbachev because he
was receptive, soft and a puppet. Worst of all, he was a mix of an idiot and naif by believing them.
It was hard to build the S Union, very hard, and Gorbatchev wanted to make a transition from socialism to capitalism in one year.
Only an idiot could think like that.
He is the main responsible not only of the demise of the S Union but of the shameful accumulation of wealth in the hands of a
bunch of soulless oligarchs whose wealth, to date, remain untouched.
As a communist, I ask myself how could a guy like him lead the S Union. Yeltsin was another calamity but the main responsible
of the debacle is Gorbachev.
As a result of his stupidity, not only millions of Soviets encountered poverty and criminality, but he opened the way to the unipolar
world. Many invasions took place because the US. did not face any opposition.
North Korea had to rearm itself to protect. Cuba underwent a terrible period.
Gorbachev will go down in the history of Russia and communist from across the world as an idiot, as an irresponsible leader and
as a traitor.
This is very true. Millions died as a result of this colossal stupidity. Tens of millions more suffered appalling misery and
destitution. Several countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, have been completely destroyed. These are crimes on a gargantuan
scale. And there has been zero accountability.
Right, zero accountability because the S Union was influential on world institutions. Because of "imported liberalism in 365
days" many factories closed (because they were not "modern"), many good engineers became poor, families destroyed, all sorts of
gangs emerged, collective property and natural resources went to oligarchs without scruples for a cheap price. And there was no
bread in stores.
All thanks to Gorbachev who was in power almost 17 years, a long period in which he succumbed to the sweet-talk of Reagan and
Thatcher.
Having lived through the incredible 90s and the end of the Soviet Union, I believe that it was not wrong for Gorbachev to seek
partnership with the West. That move brought all of mankind back from the precipice of total extinction.
It was the LYING and deceitful actions of the "superior and civilized" West that betrayed the world and their own interests, just
to expand their territory and control, like some mindless plague that knows no morality.
There must be balance in world affairs.
Power corrupts and absolute power has corrupted the US/EU/NATO gang absolutely.
The West's loss is the worlds gain.
Russia will lead the free nations away from the rotten and putrid fate offered by the death merchants of the West.
Russia cannot seem to be able to lead itself from the cluches of the ooligarks who out send capital Russia desparately needs.
If and when Russia cleans up the mess that Gorby, Gelsman, and others made, there will not be any free nations or any hope for
peace and freedom in this late stage of mankind's probationary time.
No wonder we are in deep trouble! How shall I say? Well Stephen Cohen is too pedestrian, to put it mildly. There is nothing
I have ever heard him say that I did not know years ago. Wow the NYT and WaPo both publish fake news and omit what isn't convenient
ideologically. Go suck eggs granny. Even if large numbers of people in the US now listen to him (which I very much doubt), he's
too late by decades and will probably never catch up with the fact that 9/11 was an inside job/CIA/Mossad operation. As for Gorbachev,
Yeltsin, US deception, etc., he could have asked me a thing or six back in the 80s when Gorbachev was best buddies with Reagan
and Thatcher, it was bleedin' obvious that he was a dupe, though at first I was hopeful for glasnost and perestroika.
Not that I didn't have hopes for the Soviet Union anyway, nor that I didn't understand hanging on to Eastern Europe for too
long, because of US betrayal after WW2 ... heck Prof Cohen, since when hasn't Russia been betrayed?. Too late for all those who
either couldn't or wouldn't be informed decades ago. Too late for there to be any chance of averting escalation to WW3, unless
by more or less luck, such as the US internally imploding like the Soviet Union did but, unlike the Soviet Union's collapse by
US design, collapse of its own hubris and Empire over-reach, perhaps. Academics generally do not impress me.
.
Sorry if I have condensed too much, but I daresay some will know what I'm getting at.
As a "well informed American", a retired Marine, and having spent some two decades in research of our "national history", as
it relates to the status of the world today, I have to say, I've not deliberately read either paper since I was in third or fourth
grade, and then only because we lived in Massachusetts for a couple years.
I spent nine years in Chicago, before entering the Marines, and as a "paper boy", laughed at headlines every day, knowing the
lies for what they were, and having "truth" solely because my parents subscribed me to Popular Mechanics and Popular Science,
because I'm dyslexic, had problems in school, but am endowed with talent in mechanics and the hard sciences.
Those two magazines spent their pages defining the world of mechanics, moving forward, and the world of science, advancing, and
while most facts regarding "our state of our Nation" were indirect, just part of background, when a boy reads such cover to cover,
every month dozens of times, for a decade and more, the bits and pieces add up and paint a picture behind the "mechanical issue
or science issue", that is easily seen, looking past, and is intrinsically absolutely true, because no part was put up for the
purpose of "the big picture", but the big picture naturally emerges, when sufficient bits and pieces of data accumulate, and we
add them to what has long been accepted as true, tested and tried.
Having come to understandings by multiple articles on definitive science and engineering, with background bits and pieces coalescing,
simply reading headlines were nothing but amusing, and the greatest factor was wondering how adults could believe this trash.
I began with the intent to debunk all the conspiracy theories regarding McCarthy and government, and ended up with the certainty
McCarthy was right, he simply named them wrong, they were "Bolsheviks", using socialism and communism for cover, with the full
intent of overthrowing our government, and they have continued to this day.
We have become "an empire whose people follow the Emperor, even when he dances around with no clothes, never believing that boy
who actually sees.
Semper Fidelis,
John McClain
Vanceboro, NC, USA
Well said. It is quite refreshing, as I have been upsetting a few of your neighbours over on Info Wars. The activists, who
are desperate for a war with Iran, managed to leave Breit Bart for the day and flock to one of the articles. Together with those
that have no idea that the US is in a bad way, economically. As I find myself being labelled a Soros paid troll. The standard
of debate is quite soul destroying, until you can get somebody, who does not need personal insult to enhance their argument. Which
is so liberating.
For those who know what Russians are this is no surprise. A classless herd of sheep lead by a maniacal leader. If you think
ISIS or Hitler were bad you should read about Russian history and the atrocities they have perpetrated and continue today.
Off topic, but, related. A few interesting articles that all merge together.
Putin: Turkey not responsible for drone attack; Russia knows who was
Russian President calls drone attack "provocation" aimed at causing rift between Russia and Turkey...
http://theduran.com/putin-t...
How does Ukraine, fit into it, bearing in mind that Ukraine is planning similar in Crimea. The same Ukraine that does so well
from having the US Bio-weapons factories up and running. Not forgetting that NATO is also setting up a base in Khakov, non-NATO
territory and close to the bio-weapons factories. Then you have the mother craft, found hovering around the Russian bases in Syria
and her sister working so hard around Crimea.
Remember the Pentagon begging for Russian DNA? Now what was that all about?
Kharkov Is Forcibly Prepared For The Status of a NATO Base (remember Ukraine is a non-NATO nation)...http://
www.stalkerzone.org/kharkov ...
US Military Bio-labs in Ukraine, Production of Bio-weapons and "Disease Causing Agents"
In 2015, American alternative media outlet InfoWars accused the Pentagon of developing new types of biological weapons in secret
military laboratories in Ukraine. The facilities were constructed under the terms of the bilateral agreement signed between the
Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense in 2012.
Today thirteen American military bio-labs operate in Ukraine, The International Mass Media Agency reports. They employ only American
specialists being entirely funded from the budget of the Department of Defense. Local authorities have pledged not to interfere
in their work. These military labs are reported to be mainly involved in the study and production of disease-causing agents of
smallpox, anthrax and botulism. The facilities are located in the following Ukrainian cities: Odessa, Vinnytsia, Uzhgorod, Lviv
(three), Kharkiv, Kyiv (four), Kherson, Ternopil.
Slightly off topic, but, another story of the West trying to upset Russia. Followed by what came next, which made me seriously
laugh. The first article is well worth reading, just for the awe aspect and mega congratulations to the team. The 2nd article,
just made me laugh. You gotta love those sanctions. Where there is a will there is a way.
President Gorbachev has made clear several times that the agreement reached with the former Soviet Union regarding NATO and
the reunification of Germany was specific to the East/West line through Germany. To date Germany and NATO have kept that promise.
What are Russia's rights? Well, Moscow simply has no right to expect that her neighbors do not enjoy the sovereign right to
join any alliances each may wish.
James Baker (and others) told Gorbachev that NATO will not expand to the East so western powers are a bunch liars, that's for
sure.
As for sovereign rights, that also depends if the organisation is willing to accept a certain country, not only if the country
wants to join it. Germany and France for example blocked Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO in 2008. Countries are also allowed
to join NATO in order to contribute to its security and i'm not sure about the "gain" of taking small countries on the border
of the biggest nuclear power. That increases the possibility for arms race and for war between the major powers, that's for sure.
Also it is unclear how "sovereign" these decisions are, since lots of western money was invested in media, NGOs and political
leaders and parties in Eastern Europe in order to promote pro-NATO views. US government officials bragged about "investing" 5
billion dollars in Ukraine for that purpose.
So those countries and their politicians were basically bribed, while their population propagandised via foreign sponsored
media. This has nothing to do with sovereignity, rather its about interfering in other countries affairs.
Moreover, the US uses loopholes in international law in order to support rebels in various countries, to stage coups and to
interefere in democracy and elections, with the aim of changing the politics of the target country, and even balkanising/disintegrating
the target country.
Well, if the US can do that, others can too, hence the rebels in Ukraine, who are now preventing the country from joining NATO.
It could be much more simple. An agreement for buffer zone between NATO and Russia, so that peace and stability are secured.
Or it could be "my way or the high way" mentality, which of course leads to wars and destabilisation. Which will not be a good
thing in the nuclear proliferation era.
Russia wants peace and stability. The US does not. Its entire geopolitical strategy is based on destabilising the rest of the
world, so that it remains divided and mired in internal squabbles, and no strong power could arise there. In addition to fueling
conflict and selling weapons to both sides while staying out of it. Divide and rule.
The Russian (and Chinese - OBOR) strategy will be to stabilise, unite and interconnect the rest of the world, particularly
Eurasia, in order to overthrow the US - the great disruptor. And as of now, they are winning.
Personally speaking, I have little choice but to go with what Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan, along with FM Shevardnadze and
Secretary Baker, have said on the subject. Not moving NATO troops or equipment one step east of the East/West German line of the
time was promised. This happens to fall precisely in line with what German Chancellor Schroeder has said and written as well.
The context of the discussions were in the context of Germany, not the whole of Europe.
According to President Gorbachev the collapse of the Soviet Union was not conceivable at that time. Thus, according to Mr.
Gorbachev, he never participated in any discussion of Soviet States joining (or not joining) NATO.
Lastly, I reject the popular notion in some circles that all who align themselves with Russia do so out of free will but those
who align themselves with the U.S. and the West must be corrupt or coorced. I believe such ideas ring of arrogance and dismissiveness.
This is not what recent US media says on ths topic.
"the collection shows that top officials from the U.S., Germany and the U.K. all
offered assurances to Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze
that NATO would not expand toward the Russian borders. The documents
make clear that the Western politicians meant no expansion to Eastern
European countries, not just the East German territory."
The context here is about NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, to the east of Germany, whether the new (former soviet) states
existed or not.
Large parts of EE were never part of the USSR.
"Lastly, I reject the popular notion in some circles that all who align
themselves with Russia do so out of free will but those who align
themselves with the U.S. and the West must be corrupt or coorced. I
believe such ideas ring of arrogance and dismissiveness."
Thanks for the straw man, but i did not say that.
About this, i will say several things. First, there are no bigger and more sophisticated liars than western elites. They are
specialists in hiding and masking their interests behind "freedom", "democracy" and "human rights". The russians are more direct
and directly talk about russian interests, economic gains, "the fate of our people in this or that country", etc.
Second, if you look at russian foreign policy docs and statements you will notice that russians embrace multipolarity and significantly
lower level of interference in other peoples affairs. Specifically, the russians do not try to impose their "system", or developmental
model, or culturo-religious model on other countries. After the fall of communism, Russia no longer believes that it should impose
its "model" or "system" on other countries, and it does not believe that such an attempt could work either. So Russia accepts
the cultural and developmental differences and diversity in the different countries of the world, and does not try to remake it
in its own image, or push for "one size fits all" models. For example Russia does not believe that its own "state capitalism"
should be imposed everywhere, the way the US believes that its own neo-liberal capitalism should be imposed everywhere.
In comparison, the West and especially the US is messianic and self-obsessed, with strong belief in its own superiority and
maniacal desire to impose its own cultural and economic models on everyone else, whether they like it, or not. It thus believes
that it "knows better" than anyone else, and therefore should rule the world "for its own good".
In other words the US interferes everywhere and sees the whole world as its playground and even property, something that it
can change or remake the way it sees fit. Its like someone who wants to make decisions instead of you "for your own good", which
implies that everyone else is mentally inferior to the US, that the whole world is in custody of the US "parent", who knows "better"
than anyone else. It becomes crazed and obsessed if its model and culture are rejected by someone, as if that fatally weakens
its confidence in itself.
In comparison, the russians are much more direct that things are about pure interests, and are also not interested in interfering
at the level or scope the US does. They do not want to remake Poland, Britain, Korea or Iraq in their own image and are ok with
whatever culture or economic model these people have. Russia has several military bases abroad in comparison to 700 bases for
the US, and that tells you what is going on. Russia can also interfere sometimes, but for far more practical (and real) reasons,
mostly in their neighbours, with the aim of ensuring its own security (anti-terrorism), or for making sure that NATO military
can not be deployed en masse near its borders. There can be also some economic interference (gas disputes) or attempts to protect
russian minorities abroad. But russian interference does not come close to the level of the US one, or the scope of the US one,
and certainly does not include messianic dreams about remaking the whole world in its own image, and Russia definitely does not
see the world as its playground. The russian embrace of multipolarity means that Russia accepts that there will be countries with
vastly different cultures, economic and developmental models, even very different than the russian one, that there will be many
powers, and that Russia can not impose its views on the rest of the planet.
The attack on Russian airbase in Syria is a sign that the Central Intelligence Agency is sleepwalking into 3rd world war
For the CIA's information at the start of WW3, the CIA will be nuked since everyone knows it is the brain and actor for the
entire Western group of criminals.
CIA you will be nuked. Those CIA agents who survived will be hunted down in different countries like the dogs they are. Many
CIA superior officers will sell out their boses and subordinates to survive at the end there would be no more CIA. Just like the
NAZIs.
Look up DUMBs and YouTube a guy called Phil Schneider. The elites (including the CIA) will be as safe and secure as possible
in the event of a nuclear war.
Russia was not betrayed by USA. Russia was letting themselves willingly being betrayed, this is a big difference. The Russians
were shining all over their faces, dreaming, hoping to become Europeans, and getting coca-cola, friendships, scolarships and dollars
from the Americans...............LOL.
The Russians loved to be betrayed man, you loved it man................LOL.
If you really believe your words then they just reveal that you have an underdeveloped character and lack of empathy towards
your own self ... and towards others ... and an even larger deficit in history ... the uprising in Russia 1991 and tanks shooting
holes in the White House in Moscow were absolutely not about becoming Europeans or the want of Coca Cola and Big Macs that were
then introduced and made available thanks to Yeltsin ... a US puppet ... you love nothing Tommy ... and you are LOLing yourself
in an illusion if you try making others believe anybody would love to be betrayed ...
I have got a project for you, if interested. Andrew came up with a wonderful idea for one of your images. A pyramid, of 'yes'
men/women, with their noses firmly embedded in the butts of those above them. If you fancy some artwork, public friendly and nothing
that would frighten us, or get you banned, I will leave it to you.
You can even use these characters and their friends that arrived in 2017.
[Choose a single Handle and stick to it, or else use Anonymous/Anon. Otherwise, your
comments may be trashed.]
For such an uncritical defender of everything Russian, Mr. Saker would be well advised to
undertake an objective analysis of the Russian policies and actions from the time of
Gorbachev to the current time in order to look for the true causes of the dismal
geo-strategic position of Russia today, instead of blaming it all on western "partners" only.
I'm sure he would be able to find a plenty of strategic mistakes done by the Russian
leadership including Putin, during more than 3 decades, some of them result of naked
ignorance and others result of pure stupidity.
He would also have to touch on the issue of the "despotic" nature of the Russian state
whereby one man, whether able or not, decides about everything while everyone else
applauds.
Some suggested points for the analysis: betrayal and hand-over of East Germany against its
will, dissolution of Warsaw Pact without any paperwork (parallel dissolution of NATO was very
much discussed at the time but Russians didn't even ask for it), dissolution of the USSR
absolutely contrary to the interests of Russian people, destruction of "Mir" station,
betrayal of Serbia, Cuba, siding with "partners" on Iran, Libya, North Korea etc., giving up
on Vietnam and many Soviet friends and allies all over the world, half-hearted "intervention"
in Georgia, loss of Ukraine due to negligence, occasional mistreatment of Belarus for its
refusal to sell out to Russian oligarchs, total lack of care for the Russians stranded all
over former Soviet space etc. etc.
All theses things add up leading to where we are today. (I'm not even touching upon the
state of affairs inside Russia regarding corruption, salaries, oligarchs, social justice and
many others).
Woah slow down there. It was a piece of aging junk, had already had fire aboard, had
nonfunctional solar panels, the computers were fritzing out, mold was growing in the
isolation. The ISS, formerly Space Station Freedom, formerly Space Station Alpha, was taking
shape. Time to dump that assemblage of canisters.
Far more important is to have a heavy launcher like the Energia so you can launch it again and service
it. Well, that doesn't exist either now. SAD!
Until now, apologists for the U.S.-Government side have been able to get away with various lies about these lies, such as that
there weren't any, and that Gorbachev didn't really think that the NATO issue was terribly important for Russia's future national
security anyway, and that the only limitation upon NATO's future expansion that was discussed during the negotiations to end the
Cold War concerned NATO not expanding itself eastward (i.e., closer to Russia) within Germany, not going beyond the then-existing
dividing-line between West and East Germany -- that no restriction against other east-bloc (Soviet-allied) nations ever being
admitted into NATO was discussed, at all. The now-standard U.S. excuse that the deal concerned only Germany and not all of Europe
is now conclusively disproven by the biggest single data-dump ever released about those negotiations.
This release on December 10th, by the National Security Archives, of a treasure-trove of all the existing documentation -- 33 key
documents -- that's been made available to them from numerous archives around the world, and brought together finally for the very
first time complete and in chronological order, makes crystal clear that the American apologists' lies about the lies WERE lies,
not accurate accounts of the history, at all.
The assemblers at the National Security Archives assume that the numerous and repeated false promises that were made by Bush's
team were mistakes, instead of as what they so clearly were (but you'll judge it here for yourself): strategic lies that were
essential to Bush's goal of America ultimately conquering a future isolated Russia that would then have little-to-no foreign
allies, and all of whose then-existing-as-Soviet allied nations within the Soviet Union itself, and beyond, including all of its
former Warsaw Pact allies, would have become ultimately swallowed up by the U.S.-NATO bloc, which then would be able to dictate,
to a finally alone nation of Russia, terms of Russia's ultimate surrender to the U.S. That view (which the National Security
Archives documents to be clearly true, even as it denies it and says that only Bill Clinton and subsequent Presidents were to
blame) is now exposed irrefutably to have been the U.S. plan ever since GHW Bush's Presidency.
In other words: This release of documents about the turning-point, provides capstone evidence that the U.S. never really had been
in the Cold War against communism; the U.S. was instead aiming ultimately to be the imperial nation, controlling the entire
planet. For America's Deep State, or what President Eisenhower famously warned about as the "military-industrial complex," the
Cold War was actually about empire, and about conquest, not really about ideology at all. This also had been shown, for example,
by America's having assisted so many 'former' Nazis to escape and come to America and to be paid now by the U.S. Government.
After World War II, the top level of the U.S. power-structure became increasingly taken over by the military-industrial complex,
America's Deep State, so that increasingly the U.S. Government is in a condition of "perpetual war for perpetual peace" -- a
warfare state and economy: fascism.
Here, then, are highlights from this historic data-dump, presented in chronological order, just as in the release itself, and
with a minimum of added commentary from myself [placed in brackets], but all stripping away here the dross of accompanying
inconsequentials, and leaving only the golden steady core of stunningly successful American deceit of Russia. These are those
highlights, from the December 10th data-dump, which the National Security Archives headlined "
NATO
Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
" and sub-headed "Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to
Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner," so that the swindlers
(or as the National Security Archive view them as having instead been blunderers) can become immediately recognized and known.
All of these documents pertain to negotiations that occurred throughout the month of February 1990, and a few relate also to the
immediate aftermath. That's the crucial period, when the geostrategic reality of today (which all the world now know to be a
continuation of the Cold War, but this time against only Russia, and not against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact) was
actually created.
At the negotiations' start, West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl's agent, Germany's Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher,
stated publicly to the whole world, West Germany's initial offer to the Soviet Union's President Mikhail Gorbachev, and this
offer did not include a simultaneous termination of both military alliances -- the Soviets' Warsaw Pact and America's NATO -- but
instead only a promise that NATO would never absorb any additional territory, especially to the east of West Germany (and this
publicly made promise was never kept). So: right from the get-go, there was no actual termination of the Cold War that was being
proposed by the U.S. group, but only an arrangement that wouldn't threaten Russia more than the then-existing split Germany did
(and yet even that promise turned out to have been a lie):
Document 01
U.S. Embassy Bonn Confidential Cable to Secretary of State on the speech of the German Foreign Minister: Genscher Outlines His
Vision of a New European Architecture.
1990-02-01
Source: U.S. Department of State. FOIA Reading Room. Case F-2015 10829
"This U.S. Embassy Bonn cable reporting back to Washington details both of Hans-Dietrich Genscher's proposals – that NATO would
not expand to the east, and that the former territory of the GDR in a unified Germany would be treated differently from other
NATO territory."
Document 02
Mr. Hurd to Sir C. Mallaby (Bonn). Telegraphic N. 85: Secretary of State's Call on Herr Genscher: German Unification.
1990-02-06
Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990.
"The U.S. State Department's subsequent view of the German unification negotiations, expressed in a 1996 cable sent to all posts,
mistakenly asserts that the entire negotiation over the future of Germany limited its discussion of the future of NATO to the
specific arrangements over the territory of the former GDR." [The National Security Archives' calling that Bill-Clinton-era State
Department cable 'mistaken' is unsupported by, and even contradicted by, the evidence they actually present from the February
1990 negotiations.]
Document 03
Memorandum from Paul H. Nitze to George H.W. Bush about "Forum for Germany" meeting in Berlin.
1990-02-06
Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library
"This concise note to President Bush from one of the Cold War's architects, Paul Nitze (based at his namesake Johns Hopkins
University School of International Studies), captures the debate over the future of NATO in early 1990. Nitze relates that
Central and Eastern European leaders attending the 'Forum for Germany' conference in Berlin were advocating the dissolution of
both the superpower blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, until he (and a few western Europeans) turned around that view and instead
emphasized the importance of NATO as the basis of stability and U.S. presence in Europe."
Document 04
Memorandum of Conversation between James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow.
1990-02-09
Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38)
"Baker tells the Soviet foreign minister, 'A neutral Germany would undoubtedly acquire its own independent nuclear capability.
However, a Germany that is firmly anchored in a changed NATO, by that I mean a NATO that is far less of [a] military
organization, much more of a political one, would have no need for independent capability. There would, of course, have to be
iron-clad guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.'"
Document 05
Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.
1990-02-09
Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38)
"Even with (unjustified) redactions by U.S. classification officers, this American transcript of perhaps the most famous U.S.
assurance to the Soviets on NATO expansion confirms the Soviet transcript of the same conversation. Repeating what Bush said at
the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: 'The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral
advantage in this process' of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, 'We understand the need for assurances to the
countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's
jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.'"
Document 06
Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow. (Excerpts)
1990-02-09
Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 1, Opis 1.
"The key exchange takes place when Baker asks whether Gorbachev would prefer 'a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely
independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that
NATO's jurisdiction or troops will not spread east of the present boundary.' Turning to German unification, Baker assures
Gorbachev that 'neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking
place,' and that the Americans understand the importance for the USSR and Europe of guarantees that 'not an inch of NATO's
present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.'"
Document 07
Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir Kryuchkov in Moscow.
1990-02-09
Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files, Box 91128, Folder "Gorbachev (Dobrynin) Sensitive."
"This conversation is especially important because subsequent researchers have speculated that Secretary Baker may have been
speaking beyond his brief in his 'not one inch eastward' conversation with Gorbachev. Robert Gates, the former top CIA
intelligence analyst and a specialist on the USSR, here tells his kind-of-counterpart, the head of the KGB, in his office at the
Lubyanka KGB headquarters, exactly what Baker told Gorbachev that day at the Kremlin: not one inch eastward. At that point, Gates
was the top deputy to the president's national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, so this document speaks to a coordinated
approach by the U.S. government to Gorbachev."
Document 08
Letter from James Baker to Helmut Kohl
1990-02-10
Source: Deutsche Enheit Sonderedition und den Akten des Budeskanzleramtes 1989/90
"Baker especially remarks on Gorbachev's noncommittal response to the question about a neutral Germany versus a NATO Germany with
pledges against eastward expansion."
Document 09
Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl
1990-02-10
Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros, edited by Alexander Galkin and Anatoly Chernyaev, (Moscow: Ves Mir, 2006)
"Prepared by Baker's letter and his own foreign minister's Tutzing formula, Kohl early in the conversation assures Gorbachev, 'We
believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity. We have to find a reasonable resolution. I correctly understand
the security interests of the Soviet Union, and I realize that you, Mr. General Secretary, and the Soviet leadership will have to
clearly explain what is happening to the Soviet people.' Later the two leaders tussle about NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with
Gorbachev commenting, 'They say what is NATO without the FRG. But we could also ask: What is the WTO without the GDR?' When Kohl
disagrees, Gorbachev calls merely for 'reasonable solutions that do not poison the atmosphere in our relations' and says this
part of the conversation should not be made public."
Document 10-1
Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze notes from Conference on Open Skies, Ottawa, Canada.
1990-02-12
Source: Hoover Institution Archive, Stepanov-Mamaladze Collection.
"Notes from the first days of the conference are very brief, but they contain one important line that shows that Baker offered
the same assurance formula in Ottawa as he did in Moscow: 'And if U[nited] G[ermany] stays in NATO, we should take care about
nonexpansion of its jurisdiction to the East.'"
"This diary entry is evidence, from a critical perspective, that the United States and West Germany did give Moscow concrete
assurances about keeping NATO to its current size and scope. In fact, the diary further indicates that at least in Shevardnadze's
view those assurances amounted to a deal – which Gorbachev accepted."
"Stepanov-Mamaladze describes difficult negotiations about the exact wording on the joint statement. 'During the day, active
games were taking place between all of them. E.A. [Shevardnadze] met with Baker five times, twice with Genscher, talked with
Fischer [GDR foreign minister], Dumas [French foreign minister], and the ministers of the ATS countries,' and finally, the text
of the settlement was settled."
Document 11
U.S. State Department, "Two Plus Four: Advantages, Possible Concerns and Rebuttal Points."
1990-02-21
Source: State Department FOIA release, National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38.
"The American fear was that the West Germans would make their own deal with Moscow for rapid unification, giving up some of the
bottom lines for the U.S., mainly membership in NATO."
Document 12-1
Memorandum of conversation between Vaclav Havel and George Bush in Washington.
1990-02-20
Source:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (
https://bush41library.tamu.edu/
)
"Bush took the opportunity to lecture the Czech leader about the value of NATO and its essential role as the basis for the U.S.
presence in Europe."
Document 12-2
Memorandum of conversation between Vaclav Havel and George Bush in Washington.
1990-02-21
Source:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (
https://bush41library.tamu.edu/
)
"Bush's request to Havel to pass the message to Gorbachev that the Americans support him personally, and that 'We will not
conduct ourselves in the wrong way by saying "we win, you lose." Emphasizing the point, Bush says, 'tell Gorbachev that I asked
you to tell Gorbachev that we will not conduct ourselves regarding Czechoslovakia or any other country in a way that would
complicate the problems he has so frankly discussed with me.' The Czechoslovak leader adds his own caution to the Americans about
how to proceed with the unification of Germany and address Soviet insecurities. Havel remarks to Bush, 'It is a question of
prestige.'"
[I think that Havel was deceived to believe that "prestige" was the issue here. This is what the U.S. team wanted the Soviet team
to think was the U.S. team's chief motivation for wanting NATO to continue. But subsequent historical events, especially the U.S.
team's proceeding under President Bill Clinton and up through Donald Trump to expand NATO to include, by now, virtually all of
the Warsaw Pact and of the Soviet Union itself except for Russia, in NATO, proves that U.S. aggression against Russia has been
the U.S. aim from the start, and the U.S. Government has been working assiduously at this plan for ultimate conquest. I think
that Havel's use there of the word "prestige" was very revealing of the total snookering of Gorbachev that Bush achieved.
Gorbachev and his team trusted the U.S. side. Russia has paid dearly for that. If the U.S. side continues and NATO isn't
voluntarily terminated by the U.S. Government, then WW III will be the inevitable result. NATO will end either after the
'conquest' of Russia or before that WW-III 'conquest' (likelier to be actually destruction of the entire world) even happens. The
world, today, will decide which. NATO should have ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact did.]
Document 13
Memorandum of Conversation between Helmut Kohl and George Bush at Camp David.
1990-02-24
Source:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (
https://bush41library.tamu.edu
/)
"The Bush administration's main worry about German unification as the process accelerated in February 1990 was that the West
Germans might make their own deal bilaterally with the Soviets (see Document 11) and might be willing to bargain away NATO
membership. The German chancellor arrives at Camp David without [West German Foreign Minister] Genscher because the latter does
not entirely share the Bush-Kohl position on full German membership in NATO, and he recently angered both leaders by speaking
publicly about the CSCE as the future European security mechanism.[11] Bush's priority is to keep the U.S. presence, especially
the nuclear umbrella, in Europe: 'if U.S. nuclear forces are withdrawn from Germany, I don't see how we can persuade any other
ally on the continent to retain these weapons.' [Bush wanted Lockheed and other U.S. weapons-makers to continue booming after
the Cold War 'ended' -- not for the nuclear-weapons market to end. Bush continued:] 'We have weird thinking in our Congress today,
ideas like this peace dividend. We can't do that in these uncertain times.' [For the U.S. team, 'perpetual war for perpetual
peace' would be the way forward; a 'peace dividend' was the last thing they wanted -- ever.] At one point in the conversation,
Bush seems to view his Soviet counterpart not as a partner but as a defeated enemy. Referring to talk in some Soviet quarters
against Germany staying in NATO, he says: 'To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch
victory from the jaws of defeat.'" [I earlier had placed that crucial secret statement from Bush into historical perspective,
under the headline, "
How
America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed the West
".]
Document 14
Memorandum of conversation between George Bush and Eduard Shevardnadze in Washington.
1990-04-06
Source:
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (
https://bush41library.tamu.edu/
)
"Shevardnadze mentions the upcoming CSCE summit and the Soviet expectation that it will discuss the new European security
structures. Bush does not contradict this but ties it to the issues of the U.S. presence in Europe and German unification in
NATO. He declares that he wants to 'contribute to stability and to the creation of a Europe whole and free, or as you call it, a
common European home. A[n] idea that is very close to our own.' The Soviets -- wrongly -- interpret this as a declaration that the
U.S. administration shares Gorbachev's idea."
Document 15
Sir R. Braithwaite (Moscow). Telegraphic N. 667: "Secretary of State's Meeting with President Gorbachev."
1990-04-11
Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990. (Foreign and Commonwealth
Office.
"Ambassador Braithwaite's telegram summarizes the meeting between Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Douglas
Hurd and President Gorbachev, noting Gorbachev's 'expansive mood.' Gorbachev asks the secretary to pass his appreciation for
Margaret Thatcher's letter to him after her summit with Kohl, at which, according to Gorbachev, she followed the lines of policy
Gorbachev and Thatcher discussed in their recent phone call, on the basis of which the Soviet leader concluded that 'the British
and Soviet positions were very close indeed.'"
Document 16
Valentin Falin Memorandum to Mikhail Gorbachev (Excerpts)
1990-04-18
Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros, edited by Alexander Galkin and Anatoly Chernyaev, (Moscow: Ves Mir, 2006)
"This memorandum from the Central Committee's most senior expert on Germany sounds like a wake-up call for Gorbachev. Falin puts
it in blunt terms: while Soviet European policy has fallen into inactivity and even 'depression after the March 18 elections in
East Germany, and Gorbachev himself has let Kohl speed up the process of unification, his compromises on Germany in NATO can only
lead to the slipping away of his main goal for Europe – the common European home. 'Summing up the past six months, one has to
conclude that the "common European home," which used to be a concrete task the countries of the continent were starting to
implement, is now turning into a mirage.' While the West is sweet-talking Gorbachev into accepting German unification in NATO,
Falin notes (correctly) that 'the Western states are already violating the consensus principle by making preliminary agreements
among themselves' regarding German unification and the future of Europe that do not include a 'long phase of constructive
development.' He notes the West's 'intensive cultivation of not only NATO but also our Warsaw Pact allies' with the goal to
isolate the USSR. He also suggests using arms control negotiations in Vienna and Geneva as leverage if the West keeps taking
advantage of Soviet flexibility. The main idea of the memo is to warn Gorbachev not to be naive about the intentions of his
American partners: 'The West is outplaying us, promising to respect the interests of the USSR, but in practice, step by step,
separating us from "traditional Europe".'"
Document 17
James A. Baker III, Memorandum for the President, "My meeting with Shevardnadze."
1990-05-04
Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files, Box 91126, Folder "Gorbachev (Dobrynin) Sensitive 1989 –
June 1990 [3]"
"Baker reports, 'I also used your speech and our recognition of the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to
develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead, it would produce a new
legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.'"
Document 18
Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.
1990-05-18
Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 1
"When Gorbachev mentions the need to build new security structures to replace the blocs, Baker lets slip a personal reaction that
reveals much about the real U.S. position on the subject: 'It's nice to talk about pan-European security structures, the role of
the CSCE. It is a wonderful dream, but just a dream. In the meantime, NATO exists. ' Gorbachev suggests that if the U.S. side
insists on Germany in NATO, then he would 'announce publicly that we want to join NATO too.' Shevardnadze goes further, offering
a prophetic observation: 'if united Germany becomes a member of NATO, it will blow up perestroika. Our people will not forgive
us. People will say that we ended up the losers, not the winners.'"
Document 19
Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Francois Mitterrand (excerpts).
1990-05-25
Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros
"[Miterrand] implies that NATO is not the key issue now and could be drowned out in further negotiations; rather, the important
thing is to ensure Soviet participation in new European security system. He repeats that he is 'personally in favor of gradually
dismantling the military blocs.' Gorbachev expresses his wariness and suspicion about U.S. effort to 'perpetuate NATO'." [This
was extraordinary documentation that the U.S. team had deceived Gorbachev to think that they were trying to suggest to him that
both military alliances -- NATO and Warsaw Pact -- would be ended, but that Gorbachev was "wary" and "suspicious" that maybe they
didn't really mean it. Stunning.]
Document 20
Letter from Francois Mitterrand to George Bush
1990-05-25
Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files
True to his word, Mitterrand writes a letter to George Bush describing Gorbachev's predicament on the issue of German unification
in NATO, calling it genuine, not 'fake or tactical.' He warns the American president against doing it as a fait accompli without
Gorbachev's consent implying that Gorbachev might retaliate on arms control (exactly what Mitterrand himself – and Falin earlier
– suggested in his conversation). Mitterrand argues in favor of a formal 'peace settlement in International law,' and informs
Bush that in his conversation with Gorbachev he "'indicated that, on the Western side, we would certainly not refuse to detail
the guarantees that he would have a right to expect for his country's security.'"
Document 21
Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush. White House, Washington D.C.
1990-05-31
Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Moscow, Fond 1, opis 1.[12]
"Baker repeats the nine assurances made previously by the administration, including that the United States now agrees to support
the pan-European process and transformation of NATO in order to remove the Soviet perception of threat. Gorbachev's preferred
position is Germany with one foot in both NATO and the Warsaw Pact -- the 'two anchors' -- creating a kind of associated
membership. Baker intervenes, saying that 'the simultaneous obligations of one and the same country toward the WTO and NATO smack
of schizophrenia.' After the U.S. president frames the issue in the context of the Helsinki agreement, Gorbachev proposes that
the German people have the right to choose their alliance -- which he in essence already affirmed to Kohl during their meeting in
February 1990. Here, Gorbachev significantly exceeds his brief, and incurs the ire of other members of his delegation, especially
the official with the German portfolio, Valentin Falin, and Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev. Gorbachev issues a key warning about the
future: 'If the Soviet people get an impression that we are disregarded in the German question, then all the positive processes
in Europe, including the negotiations in Vienna [over conventional forces], would be in serious danger. This is not just
bluffing. It is simply that the people will force us to stop and to look around.' It is a remarkable admission about domestic
political pressures from the last Soviet leader."
Document 22
Letter from Mr. Powell (N. 10) to Mr. Wall: Thatcher-Gorbachev memorandum of conversation.
1990-06-08
Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990. (Foreign and Commonwealth
Office
"Gorbachev says he wants to 'be completely frank with the Prime Minister' that if the processes were to become one-sided, 'there
could be a very difficult situation [and the] Soviet Union would feel its security in jeopardy.' Thatcher responds firmly that it
was in nobody's interest to put Soviet security in jeopardy: 'we must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its
security would be assured.'"
Document 23
Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, Moscow (Excerpts).
1990-07-15
Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros
"This key conversation between Chancellor Kohl and President Gorbachev sets the final parameters for German unification. Kohl
talks repeatedly about the new era of relations between a united Germany and the Soviet Union, and how this relationship would
contribute to European stability and security. Gorbachev demands assurances on non-expansion of NATO: 'We must talk about the
nonproliferation of NATO military structures to the territory of the GDR, and maintaining Soviet troops there for a certain
transition period.' The Soviet leader notes earlier in the conversation that NATO has already begun transforming itself. For him,
the pledge of NATO non-expansion to the territory of the GDR in spirit means that NATO would not take advantage of the Soviet
willingness to compromise on Germany."
[Of course, Gorbachev never knew that Bush had instructed his agents, on the night of 24 February 1990, "To hell with that. We
prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat," indicating that for the U.S.
aristocracy, conquest of an isolated Russia was the actual ultimate aim -- there would be no actual end of the Cold War until the
U.S. would conquer Russia itself -- grab the whole thing. Gorbachev was, it is now absolutely undeniable, conned.]
Document 24
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush
1990-07-17
Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons ((
https://bush41library.tamu.edu/
)
"In this phone call, Bush expands on Kohl's security assurances and reinforces the message from the London Declaration: 'So what
we tried to do was to take account of your concerns expressed to me and others, and we did it in the following ways: by our joint
declaration on non-aggression; in our invitation to you to come to NATO; in our agreement to open NATO to regular diplomatic
contact with your government and those of the Eastern European countries; and our offer on assurances on the future size of the
armed forces of a united Germany – an issue I know you discussed with Helmut Kohl. We also fundamentally changed our military
approach on conventional and nuclear forces. We conveyed the idea of an expanded, stronger CSCE with new institutions in which
the USSR can share and be part of the new Europe.'"
Document 25
September 12 Two-Plus-Four Ministerial in Moscow: Detailed account [includes text of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with
Respect to Germany and Agreed Minute to the Treaty on the special military status of the GDR after unification]
1990-11-02
Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Condoleezza Rice Files
"the agreed text of the final treaty on German unification. The treaty codified what Bush had earlier offered to Gorbachev –
'special military status' for the former GDR territory. At the last minute, British and American concerns that the language would
restrict emergency NATO troop movements there forced the inclusion of a 'minute' that left it up to the newly unified and
sovereign Germany what the meaning of the word 'deployed' should be. Kohl had committed to Gorbachev that only German NATO troops
would be allowed on that territory after the Soviets left, and Germany stuck to that commitment, even though the 'minute' was
meant to allow other NATO troops to traverse or exercise there at least temporarily. Subsequently, Gorbachev aides such as Pavel
Palazhshenko would point to the treaty language to argue that NATO expansion violated the 'spirit' of this Final Settlement
treaty."
[Obviously, now, it was no "Final Settlement" at all.]
Document 26
U.S. Department of State, European Bureau: Revised NATO Strategy Paper for Discussion at Sub-Ungroup Meeting
1990-10-22
Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Heather Wilson Files,
"Joint Chiefs and other agencies, posits that '[a] potential Soviet threat remains and constitutes one basic justification for
the continuance of NATO.' At the same time, in the discussion of potential East European membership in NATO, the review suggests
that 'In the current environment, it is not in the best interest of NATO or of the U.S. that these states be granted full NATO
membership and its security guarantees.' The United States does not 'wish to organize an anti-Soviet coalition whose frontier is
the Soviet border' – not least because of the negative impact this might have on reforms in the USSR. NATO liaison offices would
do for the present time, the group concluded, but the relationship will develop in the future. In the absence of the Cold War
confrontation, NATO 'out of area' functions will have to be redefined." [Clearly, they wanted the revolving door to land them in
high-paid positions supported by U.S. weapons-making corporations, not just in retirements with only military pensions. Or else,
they just loved war and, like Bush, didn't want there to be any "peace dividend."]
Document 27
James F. Dobbins, State Department European Bureau, Memorandum to National Security Council: NATO Strategy Review Paper for
October 29 Discussion.
1990-10-25
Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library: NSC Philip Zelikow Files
"This concise memorandum comes from the State Department's European Bureau as a cover note for briefing papers for a scheduled
October 29, 1990 meeting on the issues of NATO expansion and European defense cooperation with NATO. Most important is the
document's summary of the internal debate within the Bush administration, primarily between the Defense Department (specifically
the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney) and the State Department. On the issue of NATO expansion, OSD 'wishes to
leave the door ajar' while State 'prefers simply to note that discussion of expanding membership is not on the agenda .' The Bush
administration effectively adopts State's view in its public statements, yet the Defense view would prevail in the next
administration."
[This allegation, by the National Security Archives, fundamentally misrepresents, by its underlying assumption that the Bush
Administration's statements such as that NATO would move "not one inch to the east" weren't lies but instead reflected Bush's
actual intention. They ignore altogether Bush's having secretly told his vassals on the crucial night of 24 February 1990, "To
hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat." Gorbachev
believed that this was to be a win-win game; but, the U.S. side were now under secret instructions that it's to be purely more of
the win-lose game, and that now a lone Russia would end up being its ultimate loser. The despicable statement by the National
Security Archives, "yet the Defense view would prevail in the next administration," presumes that it didn't actually already
'prevail' in the Bush Administration itself. It prevailed actually in George Herbert Walker Bush himself, and not only in his
Defense Department. Bush brilliantly took advantage of Gorbachev's decency and expectation that Bush, like himself, was decent.
Bush lied -- and his team and their successors ever since have been carrying out his vicious plan. The National Security Archives
downplays to insignificance Bush's crucial instruction to his people, "To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot
let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat." That statement, at that crucial moment, is what enables us to understand
what was actually going on throughout these negotiations. The Archives' blaming only Bill Clinton and the other Presidents after
Bush is a despicable lie. And it wasn't just "the Defense view" -- Cheney -- who prevailed within the Bush Administration there.
Cheney, like Baker, were doing what GHW Bush had hired them to do. Baker's job was to lie. If it weren't, then he'd have told
Gorbachev the next day not to trust what the Bush team were saying, but instead to demand everything to be put in writing in the
final document, and to assume the worst regarding anything that the Bush team were refusing to put in writing in the final
document. Baker was a lawyer, and a very skilled liar, who was just doing his job for Bush. For some inexplicable reason, the
National Security Archives simply assumes otherwise.]
Document 28
Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite diary, 05 March 1991
1991-03-05
Source: Rodric Braithwaite personal diary
"British Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite was present for a number of the assurances given to Soviet leaders in 1990 and 1991 about
NATO expansion. Here, Braithwaite in his diary describes a meeting between British Prime Minister John Major and Soviet military
officials, led by Minister of Defense Marshal Dmitry Yazov. The meeting took place during Major's visit to Moscow and right after
his one-on-one with President Gorbachev. During the meeting with Major, Gorbachev had raised his concerns about the new NATO
dynamics: 'Against the background of favorable processes in Europe, I suddenly start receiving information that certain circles
intend to go on further strengthening NATO as the main security instrument in Europe. Previously they talked about changing the
nature of NATO, about transformation of the existing military-political blocs into pan-European structures and security
mechanisms. And now suddenly again [they are talking about] a special peace-keeping role of NATO. They are talking again about
NATO as the cornerstone. This does not sound complementary to the common European home that we have started to build.' Major
responded: 'I believe that your thoughts about the role of NATO in the current situation are the result of misunderstanding. We
are not talking about strengthening of NATO.'"
Document 29
Paul Wolfowitz Memoranda of Conversation with Vaclav Havel and Lubos Dobrovsky in Prague.
1991-04-27
Source: U.S. Department of Defense, FOIA release 2016
"These memcons from April 1991 provide the bookends for the 'education of Vaclav Havel' on NATO (see Documents 12-1 and 12-2
above). U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz included these memcons in his report to the NSC and the State
Department about his attendance at a conference in Prague on 'The Future of European Security,' on April 24-27, 1991. During the
conference Wolfowitz had separate meetings with Havel and Minister of Defense Dobrovsky. In the conversation with Havel,
Wolfowitz thanks him for his statements about the importance of NATO and US troops in Europe. In conversation with Dobrovsky,
Wolfowitz remarks that 'the very existence of NATO was in doubt a year ago.'"
Document 30
Memorandum to Boris Yeltsin from Russian Supreme Soviet delegation to NATO HQs
1991-07-01
Source: State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Fond 10026, Opis 1
"This document is important for describing the clear message in 1991 from the highest levels of NATO – Secretary General Manfred
Woerner – that NATO expansion was not happening
. The audience was a Russian Supreme Soviet delegation, which in this
memo was reporting back to Boris Yeltsin (who in June had been elected president of the Russian republic, largest in the Soviet
Union), but no doubt Gorbachev and his aides were hearing the same assurance at that time. The emerging Russian security
establishment was already worried about the possibility of NATO expansion, so in June 1991 this delegation visited Brussels to
meet NATO's leadership, hear their views about the future of NATO, and share Russian concerns.
Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: 'The principal task of the next decade will
be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will
have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union,
which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.' Now in
mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion -- '13
out of 16 NATO members share this point of view' -- and that he will speak against Poland's and Romania's membership in NATO to
those countries' leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia."
"... The problems now of USA in global politics in general, and with Russia in particular, was not the NATO expansion but the corrupted neoliberal economic model that the USA and the West imposed on themselves and Russia. Russia after Yeltsin and during the time V. Putin is in power limited the scope and the damage the neoliberal system was doing to the country, but the USA and the West continue on the same corrupted neoliberal path up until today. Another cause of the geopolitical problems the USA have now were and are the wars in the Middle East. ..."
"... If the US wants to ring Russia with bases why should't US taxpayers pay for it? DOD's budget is partly for imperial policing and partly a regional and corporate gravy train. It has some true "defense" functions but those are very limited. Why would Germans or the French want to pay extra taxes to protect themselves from a "threat" that if it even exists is because of aggressive American foreign policy? ..."
"... Bacevich nails it again. As a Cold War veteran I couldn't agree more. The United States didn't "win" the Cold War -- the USSR "lost" it, instead. Therein lays a huge difference. You don't kick a dog when he is down. The mindless expansion of NATO eastward following the demise of the USSR in 1991 was stupid–anyone who knows Russian history and geography is keenly aware of this fact. Putin, just like Trump, is trying to make his country great again. Surprise!!! ..."
"... Given Russia's history of being invaded from the West, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union being the bloodiest conflict in human history, it is remarkable to me that our government cannot understand why expanding NATO eastward would be viewed as very alarming to the Russians. ..."
"... American elites spend American treasure for their imperium, so that American elite interests take precedence, as per Nuland's "F -- the E.U." Confoundedly, Andy omits the Ukraine putsch she midwived. He who pays the piper calls the tune – and if a Europe still occupied by American forces as the continuation of WWII were to pay its own money, that military occupation would shortly end, just as the withdrawal of Soviet support ended their European satrapies' support of the Warsaw Pact. ..."
"... I was thinking the same thing as Sal. Almost the entire Elite Nomenklatura in Washington and Wall Street can be considered a collective "nasty piece of work" given all of the social and economic wreckage that they have produced both at home and abroad. Putin/Russia's excesses don't hold a candle to the catastrophes ginned up by that crew of arrogant militarists and corrupted parasites. ..."
"... Colonel Gaddafi believed the United States and refused to develop nuclear weapons. But leader of North Korea does not want to believe the USA. What do you think, why is this? ..."
"... These satrapies are offering the US forward deployment for military assets, possibly including first strike and decapitation weapons again – as Germany did before the reunification – as well as basing for missile defense systems that will eventually -- if they ever work -- complement these destabilizing weapon systems. They also provide bases without which US operations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean would be much more costly, if not difficult. These "privileges" come at substantial cost, as South Korea is in the process of recognizing. ..."
"... It should also be noted that US activities in Georgia and Ukraine preceded Putin's "act of transgression". It should further be noted that the Georgia conflict is very much an example of the erosion of international norms that Clinton and Kohl initiated in the Balkan conflict – which Russia explicitly warned the US about. ..."
"... It is completely unbelievable that the Soviets (after two invasions by Germany that killed about 27 million Soviets) would have just shrugged at the idea of NATO expanding to Poland let alone the Ukraine. The real question is why didn't Gorbachev insist on a written treaty. There was nothing in US history that should have made him expect honesty so why nothing in writing? I have no doubt he was lied to or manipulated but was he really that naive or incompetent to trust the US? ..."
"... Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I told my wife that, while the Soviets came in 'last' in the Cold War, the US came in second-to-last. I told her that Japan won the Cold War. The Soviets made tanks, the US made tanks and Japan made Nissans. My 1985 Nissan pickup truck still runs great and where are all the tanks today? Mind you, this was before the collapse of the Japanese stock market. ..."
"... Russia bought that land from Sweden, the same as the US bought Alaska. They gave them their independence after the revolution. All of these countries were dictatorships before the WWII and all of them voted and asked to join the USSR. ..."
"... On that note, I really think that my interview with Professor Richard Sakwa (Chatham House) titled "Between the Cold War and the Cold Peace: How the West betrayed Russia" may also be of your interest. ..."
"... Deep State's durable foreign policy, which is always the de facto policy, is remarkably resilient no matter which political party is elected to fill the chairs. Elections and the will of the voters have virtually no influence on it, except in the tenor of the propaganda. ..."
"... I am amazed at all of the commenters who think expanding NATO up to the borders of Russia is a great idea. How would you like for Russia to form a military alliance with Mexico and for the Russian military to be conducting exercises along our southern border with Mexico? ..."
President George H. W. Bush and President Mikhail Gorbachev sign United States/Soviet Union agreements to end
chemical weapon production and begin destroying their respective stocks in the East Room of the White House,
Washington, DC in June 1990. (White House photo)
Statecraft is a complicated business, but the criteria by which we judge statesmen turn
out to be less so. The central question reduces to whether those charged with formulating policy succeed in enhancing
the power and security of the nation they lead.
Yet near-term advantage does not necessarily translate into long-term benefit. With
the passage of time, a seemingly clever gambit can yield poisonous fruit. So it is with the way the George Herbert
Walker Bush administration managed the end of the Cold War.
From a geopolitical perspective, the Cold War from the very outset had centered on the
German question. Concluding that conflict necessarily required resolving Germany's anomalous division into two halves,
with West Germany a key member of NATO and East Germany occupying a similar status in the opposing Warsaw Pact. Of
course, no such resolution could be possible unless the victors of World War II, primarily the United States and the
Soviet Union, but also Great Britain and France, all concurred.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev provided the necessary catalyst to make agreement
possible. Gorbachev's bold effort to reform and thereby save the USSR, launched in the mid-1980s, converted the belt of
Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe from a source of strategic depth to a collection of liabilities. When Gorbachev
signaled that unlike his predecessors he had no intention of using force to maintain the Soviet Empire, it almost
immediately disintegrated. With that, momentum for German reunification became all but irresistible.
By the end of 1989, the issue facing policymakers on both sides of the rapidly
vanishing Iron Curtain was not whether reunification should occur, but where a reunited Germany would fit in a radically
transformed political landscape. Already possessing the biggest economy in all of Europe, Germany seemed certain to
become even more of a powerhouse once it had absorbed its formerly communist eastern precincts. No one -- including German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl -- thought it a good idea to allow this new Germany to become a free-floater, situated in the center
of Europe but untethered from the sort of restraints that the Cold War had imposed.
For Washington, London, and Paris, the solution was obvious: keep the Germans in a
warm but firm embrace. Ensuring that a united Germany remained part of NATO would reduce the likelihood of it choosing
at some future date to strike an independent course.
The challenge facing the Western allies was to persuade Gorbachev to see the wisdom of
this proposition. After all, twice within memory, Germany had invaded Russia, inflicting almost unimaginable damage and
suffering. That the Soviets might view with trepidation the prospect of a resurgent Germany remaining part of an
explicitly anti-Soviet military alliance was not paranoia. It was prudence.
To make that prospect palatable, the Bush administration assured the Soviets that they
had nothing to fear from a Western alliance that included a united Germany. NATO no longer viewed the USSR as an
adversary. Apart from incorporating the territory of the former East Germany, the alliance was going to stay put.
Washington was sensitive to and would respect Russia's own security interests. So at least U.S. officials claimed.
Thanks to
newly declassified documents
published by the National Security Archive, we now have a clearer appreciation of just
how explicit those assurances were. Among the documents is the transcript of an especially revealing conversation
between Gorbachev and Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow on February 9, 1990.
The discussion touched on several topics, but centered on the German question. As
Baker framed the issue, history was now handing the victorious allies an opportunity to correct the mistakes they had
made in the wake of World War II. "We fought alongside with you; together we brought peace to Europe," Baker told
Gorbachev. "Regrettably, we then managed this peace poorly, which led to the Cold War," he continued.
"We could not cooperate then," he said. "Now, as rapid and fundamental changes are
taking place in Europe, we have a propitious opportunity to cooperate in the interests of preserving the peace. I very
much want you to know: neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that
are taking place."
Washington's intentions were friendly. Gorbachev could absolutely count on the Bush
administration to support his
perestroika
and
glasnost
initiatives. "In a word, we want your efforts to be successful," Baker insisted. Indeed,
he continued, "if somewhere in the course of events you feel that the United States is doing something undesirable to
you, without hesitation call us and tell us about it."
By extension, there was no need for Gorbachev to trouble himself about NATO. The
alliance provided "the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe," which, Baker implied, was good for everyone.
Keeping G.I.s in Europe would prevent Germany from once more becoming a troublemaker, benefiting all parties to include
the USSR.
"We understand," Baker continued, "that not only for the Soviet Union but for other
European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany
within the framework of NATO,
not an inch of NATO's present military
jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction
[emphasis added]." Indeed,
the proposed U.S. approach to negotiating terms for ending Germany's division would "guarantee that Germany's
unification will not lead to NATO's military organization spreading to the east."
The secretary of state then posed a hypothetical. "Supposing unification takes place,"
he asked Gorbachev, "what would you prefer: a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without
American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that NATO's jurisprudence
[jurisdiction?] or troops will not spread east of the present boundary?"
The issue was one he wished to discuss with his colleagues, Gorbachev replied,
remarking only that "it goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable."
To which Baker responded: "We agree with that."
Later that very year German reunification became an accomplished fact. By the end of
the following year, Gorbachev was out of a job and the Soviet Union had become defunct. Before another 12 months had
passed, Baker's boss lost his bid for a second term as Americans elected their first post-Cold War president. By this
time, countries of the former Warsaw Pact were already clamoring to join NATO. The administration of Bill Clinton proved
more than receptive to such appeals. As a consequence, the assurances given to Gorbachev were rendered inoperative.
NATO's eastward march commenced, with the alliance eventually incorporating not only
former Soviet satellites but even former Soviet republics. In effect, U.S. policymakers responded favorably to the
aspirations of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians while disregarding Russian security interests, apparently assuming
that Kremlin leaders had no recourse but to concede.
As long as Russia remained weak, that may well have been the case. As if to press home
the point, Clinton's successors even toyed with the idea of inviting Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO -- more or less the
equivalent of incorporating Cuba and Mexico into the Warsaw Pact back in the bad old days.
At that point, a Kremlin leader less trusting of the West than Gorbachev had been
decided that enough was enough. Vladimir Putin, a very nasty piece of work but also arguably a Russian patriot, made it
clear that NATO's eastward expansion had ended. Putin's 2008 armed intervention in Georgia, annexation of the Crimea in
2014, and multiple incursions into Ukraine beginning that same year elicited howls of protest from the Washington
commentariat. Putin, they charged, was trampling on the "norms" of international conduct that were supposed to govern
behavior in the post-Cold War world.
But Putin was not wrong to observe that the United States routinely exempted itself
from any such norms when it perceived its own vital interests to be at stake. For roughly a quarter century, the United
States had paid no price for picking Gorbachev's pocket back in 1990. Indeed, nations once unhappily lodged within the
Soviet sphere had thereby benefited greatly. NATO became a club open to everyone but Russia. In Washington's favored
formulation, Europe thereby became "whole and free." Now, however, the bills incurred by this feckless policy are coming
due and Europeans are looking to the United States to pay them.
Today's NATO consists of 29 nations, nearly double what its membership was when
Secretary Baker promised Gorbachev that the alliance would not advance a single inch eastward. When it comes to paying
for the collective defense, few of those nations contribute their required share. In effect, America's allies expect it
to do the heavy lifting. The United States has thereby incurred burdensome obligations without accruing any obvious
benefit. Once more, over 70 years after World War II, the United States is sending its troops to defend Europeans fully
capable of defending themselves. Donald Trump has charged, not without cause, that our allies are playing us for
suckers.
In today's Washington, where Russophobia runs rampant, it has become fashionable to
speak of a New Cold War, provoked by Putin's aggressive actions. Yet if we are indeed embarking upon a new age of
brinksmanship, we can trace its origins to 1990 when Putin was merely a disgruntled KGB colonel and we were playing the
Soviets for suckers.
In his meeting with Gorbachev, Baker expressed regret about the victorious allies
mismanaging the opportunity for peace created by the end of World War II. A similar judgment applies to the opportunity
for peace created by the end of the Cold War. Upon reflection, the United States might have been better served had it
honored its 1990 commitment to Gorbachev.
AB is partly correct in that both Baker and Genscher did make very bold proposals to Soviet leadership about
the future of NATO – – Baker's 'not one inch into East Germany' conception being less extensive than Genscher's
comprehensive non-expansion 'Tutzing formulation' – – but he should have put much greater emphasis on at least
two points: 1) that these proposals were merely suggestions, and were designed to 'feel out' Soviet leadership
on what it was willing to negotiate regarding German reunification; second, and arguably even more important,
both of these conceptions did not have the support of either the West German Chancellor or the U.S. President –
– points which also follow from the 'recently declassified diplomatic record' (so read the Bush-Kohl dialogue,
and see that they were completely unified on German reunification without any conditions or restrictions to be
placed on NATO) – – and thus both Foreign Minister Genscher and Secretary of State Baker were completely
hamstrung at the time when each made his conception known.
We could add a third key point, and that is that,
even if Gorbachev or Shevardnadze had decided to push for EITHER the Baker or Genscher Plan – – and we can
easily appreciate why no Soviet official would be either willing or able to think in terms of post-Warsaw Pact,
let alone post-Soviet, times and thus of their forthcoming Russian Federation's future relationship with NATO
– – then they would have publicly met with the same unified American-West German refusal to put conditions on
NATO that Bush & Kohl had previously agreed; so, in effect, with these two supporting an open-ended future of
NATO, any Soviet leader would have been told 'nyet' if he had sought to codify Baker's or Genscher's
conceptions into a formal agreement.
Last, on the subject of what NATO did finally agree with the Russian federation, review the text of the
NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, and you'll find two very nice surprises from early post-Cold War history: 1)
that NATO was quite willing to codify its plans for membership expansion, principally to reassure Federation
leadership that its planned expansion had no hostile intent whatsoever toward the Fdereation; and 2) that
Yeltsin, as Federation President, did not feel threatened in the least by NATO expansion, and he said so
publicly he didn't like that expansion, and also said so publicly, but it's very telling that he never felt
threatened by it. Furthermore, NATO still avoided stationing its forces into the Eastern part of the reunified
German state until well after the Soviet collapse.
Given the article at hand, that's all that AB should need to know about the stark differences between
Yeltsin's Federation and Putin's, and the amazing continuity between NATO's late Cold War and its early
post-Cold War position regarding its expansion plans and how this continuity fits nicely with the context of
the only major treaty to be negotiated with the Federation.
This article links to the National Security Archive's recent collection of documents which clearly demonstrates
the assurances made to Gorbachev were sourced widely among NATO members, much more so than previously
understood. The opinions expressed in, for example, the 2014 Brookings article – shared by a commentator –
which downplays the matter, are now outdated.
Sphere of influence: the argument that Russia has no right to
have opinions on regional politics, or security concerns, usually ignores major contextual information; i.e the
NATO expansion has occurred during a transformation from defensive alliance to a more assertive posture, as
seen in Serbia and Libya. It has occurred while the US has assumed a military posture based on world hegemony
and clearly stated objectives of preventing other states from ever posing a challenge to this primacy. It
occurred while arms treaties (ABM) were broken and while missile systems were introduced to the region.
Important as well to acknowledge Russia as a major nuclear power, and this policy of poking the bear, so to
speak, seems needlessly aggressive and unintelligent.
Further, the situation in Ukraine appears to have been a deliberate provocation sought by the Anglo bloc of
the NATO alliance, in concert with the more paranoid political actors of the region. A negotiated political
settlement had been reached concerning the Maidan. The subsequent coup was an expressly deliberate reaction to
prevent this settlement from going into effect. The USA, UK, and Canada provocatively determined the coup as
"legitimate", and in doing so chose to assist in the destabilization of the country. This Anglo bloc has
promoted a false and incomplete narrative of events, and stepped up a dangerous militarization of the region
justified by this false account.
This betrayal may actually get rectified but much of it is outside the hands of the EU and in the hands of
Russia (my opinion).
Thanks to US support under Trump the VISEGRAD is front and center while western Europe
takes a backseat. The neocons may want to use the VISEGRAD as a launching point for Russia but I do not think
that is Trumps agenda. The fear in Poland, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics is not from the US or its
warmongering anti-Russian neocons. It comes from Russia's relationship with its former satellites since they
were freed and joined EU and NATO.
All VISEGRAD nations have said they will take no more muslim or African migrants even if it means fines,
loss of aid or an exit. The stance of the VISEGRAD is expanding to Lithuania, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria and
Slovenia. This would effectively fence off much, if not all, of the land route to Europe.
Russia doesn't want African and muslim migrants either.
If Russia can create a detent with the VISEGRAD and allay their fears then Russia could diffuse much of the
need for the NATO weaponry that Russia feels threatened. At the rate Europe and Russia are depopulating, even a
small war would be lunacy.
The other thing Russia craves are goods, services, technology, etc which the VISEGRAD would gladly offer in
exchange for Russian goods and services.
Further, we have seen common ground with VISEGRAD and Russia against migrants. The VISEGRAD is willing to
stand apart from the EU if necessary. Russia may not get the VISEGRAD to leave NATO but Russia might get the
VISEGRAD to operate more independently of the EU and NATO. The fundamental point here is a simple one. The
VISEGRAD has the potential to either be a barrier to Russia or a buffer zone from the EU and NATO to Russia.
Much of this is really up to Russia's ability to allay past fears and take a new approach.
Further I don't think Trump would object. My observation of Trump is that he has more contempt than respect
for Sweden, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, etc. NATO nations that cannot control their borders and do
not maintain their 2% commitment of GDP are parasites and freeloaders to Trump. However Trump shows great
respect to the VISEGRAD for protecting its borders and NATO commitments.
Historically, its worth noting about the VISEGRAD countries. They suffered more than the mass murders and
totalitarianism of being communist satellites of the Soviet Union. Prior to that these nations were destroyed
when Russia invaded to the west and when Europe invaded to the east. The VISEGRAD does not want to be the
battle field for a Russia defending itself against NATO or NATO defending itself against Russia. The VISEGRAD
knows that they suffer and lose under either scenario. The VISEGRAD wants security guarantees from Russia and
NATO. Knowing this, Russia could reframe the entire dynamic of the VISEGRAD. It wouldn't be a full win for
Russia but if played well, then it might be just be enough for the US, VISEGRAD and Russia.
Poor Russia, a country that occupied, then annexed the Baltic States against their will.
Poor Russia, a country that banned Ukrainian language and culture, starved to depopulate it, then tried to
replace its people with Russians.
Poor Russia, the country that occupied Eastern Europe and had no compunction about rolling tanks down the
streets of Prauge when they had the audacity to want to determine their own destiny.
Poor Russia, a country that took "active measures" and annexed Crimea from Ukraine and set it's troops and
media to foment rebellion in the Donbass.
There is a good reason all these countries sought protection from repeated, constant acts of Russian
aggression against their sovereignty.
The US leads a coalition of free nations that don't want to be treated upon by the boot off Russian
oppression. After the end of the Cold War the Russians were under no threat from NATO whatsoever. Their actions
are the actions of a bully and it is a poor strategy to hide in a corner and cower. The Russians are free to
take their place as one of the most powerful members of the coalition of free nations. Instead they have
decided to embark on their current pathetic path.
In light of this, what is China to make of its concerns for spread of US forces to its Yalu border, very close
to Beijing? Assurances? Bah. They'd have to be nuts, and they are not that.
Mr Bacevich seems to think that a backroom conversation between one cabinet member of the U.S. and the leader
of the USSR constitutes some sort of binding treaty on the U.S. and NATO. This will be news to all the other
NATO countries and to Congress who admitted the Baltic States and Poland some 15 years after this friendly
chat. Indeed, news to Russia too who weren't overjoyed by NATO's expansion but recognized it as a legitimate
decision that a sovereign country can make, as Russia's defense minister in 2002, Sergei Ivanov, stated in
2002. No mention of Baker's 'promise'. Indeed, Russia had, and has, little choice to respect these choices
because they were at the time claiming the Baltic States freely joined the USSR in 41.
More broadly, this article and similar ones never explain precisely how NATO expansion has harmed or threatens
Russia or precipitated any of the difficult events of the past decade. Does anyone really suppose that if NATO
were not in Estonia the events in Georgia, Ukraine and Crimea would have unfolded differently? Can Mr Bacevich
explain what might have been different if NATO hadn't expanded? In all likelihood, if NATO hadn't expanded,
we'd all be significantly more nervous about unimpeded Russia activity in Eastern Europe post-Crimea. The EU,
already under strain from the Euro crisis, might not have survived. It's impossible to say, but it's equally
true that none of the "NATO's eastern mistake" team can ever put their finger on the harm posed by NATO's
expansion. It's always something vague, like 'Russia's legitimate zone of interest' or 'putting Russia in a
corner'. But anyone can readily see that none of these countries pose the slightest threat to Russia. Latvia is
not gearing up for an invasion of Russia despite its annexation of Abrene by the Soviets that the Russia's have
held onto. Nor is Russia in a corner; it's the largest country on Earth with enormous potential as the only
bona fide Eurasian country, with land borders on two of the largest economic zones -- the EU and China -- in the
world. Its problems are almost entirely its own doing.
Lastly, this article makes some of the historic elisions common to its genre: Russia was not invaded in WW1
unless you call Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States "Russia". This will be news to the locals. Nor did anyone
pick Gorbachev's "pocket", unless you suppose all those Eastern European peoples are nothing more than Russia's
possessions. But, to slightly expand a quote of Latvia's former President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, "The Lord did
not put [Eastern Europeans] on Earth simply to please the Russians."
The logic of the article by A. J. Bacewich does not make any sense. What J.A.Bacewich is saying in this article
is that United States of America in 1990 effectively committed Yalta 2 through president G. H. W. Bush and the
secretary of state J. Baker. From what AJB writes in his piece it looks like the only purpose for the USA and
NATO to fight the 'cold war' was to unite Germany. Where is the logic in that kind of thinking? If uniting
Germany was the only purpose? What was the point in keeping the Germans in the framework of NATO, and NATO
itself with the USA military presence probably at the same level as during the 'cold war' apparently, according
to the logic of JAB, in perpetuity just to keep the Germans subdued and out of "troubles". The costs of that
would be probably higher for the USA that they are now. Does JAB thinks that the USSR (Russia) and obviously
Germany would stay at the same military and economic level as in 1980-90? Only very naive person could think
like that. It does not matter how you call it, USSR or Russia, sooner or later that country would bounce back
as she did with V. Putin.
It does not matter if NATO expanded or not, at this time (2017), USSR or Russia
would be back with the vengeance as she is now. The problems now of USA in global politics in general, and with
Russia in particular, was not the NATO expansion but the corrupted neoliberal economic model that the USA and
the West imposed on themselves and Russia. Russia after Yeltsin and during the time V. Putin is in power
limited the scope and the damage the neoliberal system was doing to the country, but the USA and the West
continue on the same corrupted neoliberal path up until today. Another cause of the geopolitical problems the
USA have now were and are the wars in the Middle East.
Does JAB thinks that if NATO would not expand and with Russia was left as she was in 1990 today the military
expenses for the USA would be less than they are today? I do not think so. I think probably by now you would
not have USA and NATO in Europe especially in Western Europe. What NATO expansion accomplished was prevention
of war in Europe. The problem was not the expansion of NATO, but irresponsible and shortsighted imposition of
the corrupted neoliberal economic order on the US, the West and on the Russia plus the wars in the Middle East.
To blame the current USA political problems on the expansion of NATO is not based on reality and on what
happened after 1990s, it is simply trying to stick head in the sand by those responsible for the current global
problems. After all what was the point of fighting the cold war? Would it not be cheeper, and more acceptable
for people like JAB, for the USA to cede the Europe to the USSR right after WW2 ?
Why in the world must you repeat the "nasty piece of work" mantra? Do you really believe it or is it to gain
acceptance? Or do you preface every mention of US presidents, justifiably, with the same "nasty piece of work"?
"Donald Trump has charged, not without cause, that our allies are playing us for suckers."
If the US wants to
ring Russia with bases why should't US taxpayers pay for it? DOD's budget is partly for imperial policing and
partly a regional and corporate gravy train. It has some true "defense" functions but those are very limited.
Why would Germans or the French want to pay extra taxes to protect themselves from a "threat" that if it even
exists is because of aggressive American foreign policy?
US taxpayers are being played for suckers but by their own defense department not Europeans.
Negotiating any agreement is a lengthy process, and parties cannot be bound by all offers and counter-offers
floated during discussions. What is in the actual treaty counts. If there had been a mutual agreement that NATO
would not expand, then it would have been put on paper. It was not.
Gorbachev asked for -- and got -- substantial financial help in repatriating his troops from East Germany, and
did not demand checks to NATO expansion.
Bacevich nails it again. As a Cold War veteran I couldn't agree more. The United States didn't "win" the Cold
War -- the USSR "lost" it, instead. Therein lays a huge difference. You don't kick a dog when he is down. The
mindless expansion of NATO eastward following the demise of the USSR in 1991 was stupid–anyone who knows
Russian history and geography is keenly aware of this fact. Putin, just like Trump, is trying to make his
country great again. Surprise!!!
Having the Europeans pay for their own security would end up destroying the American empire. They will want to
purchase weapons manufactured in Europe, not America, to give their own people jobs. They will need to develop
weapons that are on par with American weapons and so will commit to the necessary R&D. Their own MIC will
develop, and they will need to find reasons to use these weapons, which will require constant replacement and
upgrades.
And pretty soon Europe will return to its imperialist ways of old, with no need for America.
Given Russia's history of being invaded from the West, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union being the
bloodiest conflict in human history, it is remarkable to me that our government cannot understand why expanding
NATO eastward would be viewed as very alarming to the Russians.
In my opinion the best and most realistic
movie about Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union is the German made movie "Stalingrad" made in 1992 by the
production team that made "Das Boot" to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bloodiest battle in human
history. I think that watching this movie is helpful in understanding the Russian psyche and why the Russians
view the West moving its military forces eastward as particularly alarming.
20 years, Americans and Europeans lied that promises not. Putin said that we were deceived, but the Europeans
smiled and continued to lie. So why now are you surprised of the rigidity of Russia's position? We tricked the
Americans and the Europeans we'll be remembered for a thousand years and give to his descendants so they always
kept the powder dry. NATO is a punitive organization and someday we will have to face. The fate you have
created.
As usual, the U.S. won the war but lost the peace. One question, though: Why are the Russians so angry about NATO expansion? Yes, it's a broken promise on our
part. Yet, that aspect of it aside, why the anger? Why are they so opposed to the expansion of a defensive
alliance -- one which they could someday join? How, exactly, does the expansion of a defensive alliance threaten
their security interests?
The classic blinkered cold war distortion. Washington never assured "Russia" of anything in 1990. The country
we now call "Russia", the Russian Federation, has existed as a sovereign state only since 26 December 1991.
Thus, by very definition, the US could not have "assured" Russia of anything before that date.
The picture
quite correctly identifies Gorbachev as the president of the Soviet Union. He was never at any time president
of Russia, which has had only two presidents since it became independent: Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. It
is American cold war dinosaurs, who simply can't get their heads around the idea that the Soviet Union and
communism are gone forever, who are the cause of the "new cold war".
If they would stop treating the Russian
Federation as the if it were the Soviet Union and start treating as what it actually is, one of 15 successor
states to the Soviet Union, on the same basis as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova etc., NATO
expansion would be no problem. Indeed, if US cold warriors hadn't obstructed it, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia
would have become members of the alliance at the same time. The fact that Putin is every bit as much a cold war
dinosaur as his American counterparts doesn't change that. And none of that gives the Russian Federation the
right to deny the sovereignty of any of the other successor states and, even less, to invade and annex their
territory. American cold warriors caused the problem with Putin. It is up to them to clean up the mess their
blinkered and outdated world view caused. Capitulating to Putin and arrogantly asserting the right to give away
other people's countries does not achieve that purpose.
American elites spend American treasure for their imperium, so that American elite interests take precedence,
as per Nuland's "F -- the E.U." Confoundedly, Andy omits the Ukraine putsch she midwived. He who pays the piper
calls the tune – and if a Europe still occupied by American forces as the continuation of WWII were to pay its
own money, that military occupation would shortly end, just as the withdrawal of Soviet support ended their
European satrapies' support of the Warsaw Pact.
Guys, you first confess that you have deceived us for 20 years, and then wonder why we are against NATO
enlargement? Guys, you're ohueli. Why should we trust you at all? Why should we believe that NATO is a
defensive alliance?
Re: Sal, "Why in the world must you repeat the "nasty piece of work" mantra? Do you really believe it or is it
to gain acceptance? Or do you preface every mention of US presidents, justifiably, with the same "nasty piece
of work"?
I was thinking the same thing as Sal. Almost the entire Elite Nomenklatura in Washington and Wall
Street can be considered a collective "nasty piece of work" given all of the social and economic wreckage that
they have produced both at home and abroad. Putin/Russia's excesses don't hold a candle to the catastrophes
ginned up by that crew of arrogant militarists and corrupted parasites.
Dr. Bacevich should either tone down his histrionic shibboleth's against Vladimir Putin or else expand his
target set to include the larger universe of native political-crony trash.
I'm another Cold War veteran who agrees with Mr. Pando about the article. The same people who are clamoring
about Russia denying the sovereignty of independent nations were very likely cheerleaders each time the US
tried to remove Castro, when we invaded Panama, Iraq, and bombed the Serbs in the Balkans. As for Ukraine, the
Crimea has always been mostly Russian until Khrushchev gave it away in the mid 50's to achieve some internal
political aims.
Despite the explosive growth of NATO, the Baltic nations are really not "free" because of the guarantees of
the alliance. If Putin wanted to invade them he could have them easily; stashing one brigade of US troops over
there would have only the effect of daring an American president to risk a nuclear exchange with a country able
to defend itself. If anyone thinks any of these C-in-C's would do any nuclear sabre-rattling because Russian
tanks are rolling into Talinn, I have a deed to a wonderful NY bridge for you.
Colonel Gaddafi believed the United States and refused to develop nuclear weapons. But leader of North Korea
does not want to believe the USA. What do you think, why is this?
DanJ, you don't honor even signed agreements, so who cares?
In the end it was very dumb move that completely cured most of the Russian population from giving any trust to
the West sirens. Good for the US (presumably) in the short run, very bad in the long
This links to a useful reference, but the article has its omissions and misrepresentations.
"The United
States has thereby incurred burdensome obligations without accruing any obvious benefit."
This is unadulterated BS. These satrapies are offering the US forward deployment for military assets,
possibly including first strike and decapitation weapons again – as Germany did before the reunification – as
well as basing for missile defense systems that will eventually -- if they ever work -- complement these destabilizing weapon systems. They also provide bases without which US
operations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean would be much more costly, if not difficult. These "privileges" come at substantial cost, as South Korea is in the process of recognizing.
It might be customary for the hegemony to extract a tax from its satraps, but the incessant whining is
beginning to wear.
It should also be noted that US activities in Georgia and Ukraine preceded Putin's "act of transgression".
It should further be noted that the Georgia conflict is very much an example of the erosion of international
norms that Clinton and Kohl initiated in the Balkan conflict – which Russia explicitly warned the US about.
The expansion of NATO, more often than not, did not exactly solicit full-throated endorsement from legacy
members either.
But the really important omissions here concern the main actors – Gorbachev, Baker, Bush et.al. Is it really
convincing to assume that Gorbachev was not aware of the US propensity to scrap treaties and agreements as soon
as administrations change? Maybe my perspective is distorted by the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump "experience" of
the modern US, and actors like Reagan – whose violations of international law and norms are well known – and
Bush Sr. – who made his career by such acts – actually had a record of behaving honorably, and Gorbachev had
reason to trust their word, instead of insisting on a ratified treaty.
How likely is it that Gorbachev knew very well that Germany might be re-unified with a claim to become
"neutral" – as Stalin had once proposed – only to re-join NATO under some pretext within the decade? How
exactly was any of these "commitments" to be guaranteed between nations that did not exactly have a record of
upholding the international order and the peace at all cost?
More importantly, is there any reason to assume that Baker actually believed a single word of what he said,
or that he expected Gorbachev to believe any of it? We have to remember that this is the man who "managed"
Ronald Reagan's attempt to discuss abolition of nuclear weapons with Gorbachev. Whatever Gorbachev might have
believed, might have had to believe, or might have had to pretend to believe, it does not appear reasonable to
trust Baker's words then or later with respect to these gentlemen and their "agreements".
There is every reason to believe that Clinton did to the international order as he did to international
banking and financial industries, and that his legacy is exceeded in impact and damage only by Bush and Obama
in sins of commission (the former) and omission (the latter). There is every reason to believe that US – and
especially Democratic Party – insistence on breaking and ultimately breaking apart Russia as a project of
"national interest" is shortsighted and idiotic, and that within a context of power as described by Bismarck
and Machiavelli, it was very much in European and US interest to offer Russia a place in balance to China,
India and other emerging powers.
But this recognition does not really need an proof, claimed or real, that the US misled Gorbachev and
Russia. This may well have been a criminally fraudulent move, but more importantly, it was a criminally stupid
one, motivated by those two primal drivers of the American Prosperity gospel – shortsighted greed and willful
ignorance.
"Washington never assured 'Russia' of anything in 1990. The country we now call 'Russia', the Russian
Federation, has existed as a sovereign state only since 26 December 1991."
As an added benefit, not resorting
to the exegesis of the historical record of the various gambits performed by the great gamblers of their day
would also spare us this level of armchair litigation.
It is completely unbelievable that the Soviets (after two invasions by Germany that killed about 27 million
Soviets) would have just shrugged at the idea of NATO expanding to Poland let alone the Ukraine. The real
question is why didn't Gorbachev insist on a written treaty. There was nothing in US history that should have
made him expect honesty so why nothing in writing? I have no doubt he was lied to or manipulated but was he
really that naive or incompetent to trust the US?
Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I told my wife that, while the Soviets came in 'last' in the Cold
War, the US came in second-to-last. I told her that Japan won the Cold War. The Soviets made tanks, the US made
tanks and Japan made Nissans. My 1985 Nissan pickup truck still runs great and where are all the tanks today?
Mind you, this was before the collapse of the Japanese stock market.
"Poor Russia, a country that occupied, then annexed the Baltic States against their will."
Russia bought that
land from Sweden, the same as the US bought Alaska. They gave them their independence after the revolution.
All of these countries were dictatorships before the WWII and all of them voted and asked to join the USSR.
"Poor Russia, a country that banned Ukrainian language and culture, starved to depopulate it, then tried to
replace its people with Russians.
Poor Russia, the country that occupied Eastern Europe and had no compunction about rolling tanks down the
streets of Prauge when they had the audacity to want to determine their own destiny.
Poor Russia, a country that took "active measures" and annexed Crimea from Ukraine and set it's troops and
media to foment rebellion in the Donbass."
Actually, the Soviets made Ukraine, there was no any Ukraine or 'Ukrainians' before the 20th century. Also
they imposed official Ukrainization through their political and educational system. The people were losing
their jobs if they weren't using Ukrainian, there was a precise article in a criminal code.
The Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia after a violent armed coup in Kiev. That was a third referendum held in
Crimea after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
NATO troops in Baltic states, AMB system in Poland (western border of Ukraine) must not be Russia security
concern, but Russia's troops on eastern border pf Ukraine & Kaliningrad anclave-certainly is NATO concern.
Taking Kosovo from Serbia? annexation of east Jerusalem & Gollan Heights is right, returning Crimea by Russia
is wrong, USA invasion in Iraq, US arming & financing anti-Asad rebels(some are real terrorists) in Syria is
good, Russia support for separatists in East Ukraine is bad. Not keeping promoces about NATO non-expansion is
right, not keeping promice of Budapest memorandum by Russia is wrong.
In other words:"US & NATO masturbation is so good for population, and only Russia masturbation is very bad for
population".
I saw the translation of this article on a Russian site, and it's amazing. Does the United States have people
who understand that other countries also have their own national interests? Adopting this fact will eliminate
many of the problems of misunderstanding Russian politics.
The commentator above said:
"Washington never assured" Russia "of anything in 1990. The country we now call" Russia ", the Russian
Federation, has existed as a sovereign state only since December 26, 1991."
So, the Russians do not know at all that Russia is then "did not exist." START 1 was also signed by
Gorbachev, and he respected the Russian Federation.
NATO should have been disbanded along with the Warsaw Pact after 1990. What was supposed to be a defensive pact
against the USSR became an offensive war-mongering machine in control of neo-cons making war on Serbia in the
late 90s and manufacturing false-WMD claims against Iraq in the 2000s. Anyone and everyone involved in
high-command positions at NATO, including Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, should be indicted for war crimes.
James Baker could give assurances about how the president was thinking. He could not make a formal commitment.
Gorbachev knew that (or do you think he was an incompetent negotiator?). Nevertheless, the formal agreement
contained no restrictions on NATO. There was no commitment.
Mr Bacevich is better on the topic nevertheless, because he recognizes that the driver in NATO expansion was
not Bill Clinton or the Pentagon or NATO generals but Visegrad and the Baltic countries. About Visegrad, read
Joanna Gorska's _Dealing with a Juggernaut_. The Baltic states were in fact already threatened by post-Soviet
early on. TAC and the Progressives are apparently regretful that the West has been unwilling to throw these
countries to the crocodile. I prefer the attitude expressed by Strobe Talbot, in _The Russia Hand_, for
example.
NATO did not rush in admitting countries that were more than an inch east of Berlin. It practiced due
diligence. It did some unfortunate things indirectly affecting Russia and the new NATO members, first by not
limiting itself to stopping Serbian excesses in Bosnia-Hercegovina but attacking Serbia directly and sponsoring
the transfer in Kossovo to an Albanian mafia. And it abandoned restraint and good sense in speaking of
membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Russia's response was of the sort likely to make Ukrainians and Georgians
want to join NATO, but for the time being at least the issue is not alive.
The responsibility borne by the West in these matters consists mostly of its embrace of neoliberalism and
the neolib world order. "Shock therapy" gave Russia a miserable decade (the 1990s) and a distaste for Western
democracy. It also made EU membership unattractive to Ukraine. But when Yanukovych moved to join Putin's
Eurasian Union instead, the Ukrainians saw their country on the path to becoming a Russian satellite state. The
future they wanted was exemplified by Poland, which had weathered the Great Recession better than most and was
a free country in most respects. The future they saw looming was exemplified by Bielarus, ruled for a
generation by a bloody-handed thug and economically almost where it had been in the Soviet period. Victoria
Nuland and the CIA could not possibly have brought the numbers to the Maidan that actually appeared there. She
should certainly have kept a lower profile, but Yanukovych was overthrown by the Ukrainians, not by outside
agitators.
Oh, and then there is Harry Colin's assertion that "the Crimea has always been mostly Russian until
Khrushchev gave it away in the mid 50's . . . ." Well, the population there has not been mostly Ukrainian ever,
true. But always–apparently "always" now begins with the reign of Catharine II. Previously it was Greek,
Armenian, Tatar, and so on, but not Russian. Catharine sent in Russian settlers just so Mr Colin could make his
remark. What do the Tatars think of it?
On that note, I really think that my interview with Professor Richard Sakwa (Chatham House) titled "Between
the Cold War and the Cold Peace: How the West betrayed Russia" may also be of your interest.
Three current world Powers. The US, Russia, and China. Both armed to the gills as they say. Each with a
distinct model , which included starting wars if it serves their individual interest. The worrisome fact is
both Russia and China have chosen the leaders and support their intentions. We change foreign policy as often
as I change my underwear.
Not expanding NATO upon the demise of the USSR, would have been synonymous with the USA agreeing that Russia
has a right to a permanent "sphere of influence". Also, it would have revived the discredited "Enlightenment"
division of real Europe into "Europe" and "East of Europe";
At any rate, perhaps Mr. Bacevich can make his
case in Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Prague, Bratislava, Bucharest, Sofia, and also Minsk, Tbilisi, Yerevan,
and first and foremost, Kiev;
If the truth is on his side, then these peoples should see it as well, and accept their "permanent station
in life". But seriously, here is a worthwhile history lesson:
"Putin was not wrong to observe that the United States routinely exempted itself from any such [supposed post
Cold War international] norms when it perceived its own vital interests to be at stake," states Dr. Bacevich,
which suggests that there have been American foreign interventions since the end of the Cold War which have
been in American vital interests. I don't know which interventions these might have been, but Putin has
probably also observed that the U.S. feels free to intervene internationally even when its vital interests are
not at stake.
I am in favor of American Empire, as it is probably the best thing going, compared to all other possible
alternatives. However, in order to assert and enforce empire, Americans need to do the hard work of colonizing,
of actually going there to instill their way of life, their values, their language, their know-how, their
vision, their interests and control. The problem I see is that Americans are too unsure of themselves (too
lazy, too decadent, too exhausted, too weak, and too unprepared) to make the sacrifices necessary to be really
good colonizers, to be real leaders, and without this there can be no real Empire.
"Donald Trump has charged, not without cause, that our allies are playing us for suckers."
Appears we've all
but begged them to do so. Even if those allies commence paying "their fair share,"it's not clear how the US of
A benefits. We'll still do their fighting & jack up the defense funding accordingly.
& If the Trump biz career is any example, he'll happily shell out $5 of tax money for every $1 we get in
return. The NATO comic opera will not end its run even if those allies ceased playing us for suckers seconds
after this post.
"Americans need to do the hard work of colonizing, of actually going there to instill their way of life"
A
new Hard Core SJW Peace Corps! That's the ticket. Unpaid interns for corporate consumerist capitalism! It's gonna be a hard sell, so hardball will be required. The full faith and credit of the United States
Armed Forces, or less overt, the CIA and regime change?
"The worrisome fact is both Russia and China have chosen the leaders and support their intentions. We change
foreign policy as often as I change my underwear."
Deep State's durable foreign policy, which is always the
de facto policy, is remarkably resilient no matter which political party is elected to fill the chairs.
Elections and the will of the voters have virtually no influence on it, except in the tenor of the propaganda.
The designated enemies remain designated, no matter what any politician promises to get votes.
"I am in favor of American Empire, as it is probably the best thing going"
This sentiment is only vicarious,
unless you are of the tiny minority of Americans who benefit from the conflicts and deaths necessary to try to
establish rule of one country's economic elites by subjugating every other nation's people.
Even so, only those bribed in dollars in foreign satrapies to be puppet leaders, would agree that it is the
best of all possible worlds to be dominated by a foreign nation.
I tend to agree with the critics of this article. Firstly was a promise allegedly made to Gorbachev by the
Administration of Bush Senior(Republican) somehow binding on that of Bill Clinton(Democrat) and their
successors (Bush Junior, Obama and Trump)? I think NOT!
Secondly the issue should be WHAT DO the former Soviet Republics and peoples of Eastern Europe want? If they
wish to join NATO, then surely that is their right as free and independent sovereign states. Whether the
Kremlin likes or lumps it is neither here or there. Contrary to what the likes of Nigel Farage (in my own
country) may think, Eastern Europe is NOT some kind of dependency of Muscovy's in perpetuity!
This article is fully consistent with what my family in Germany holds. NATO is needed to control a revival of
dangerous German nationalism and relationships with Russia must be peaceful.
Bacevich seems to have missed Gorbachev's denial that there were any promises made on NATO expansion, and
second, such commitments would have been to a country that ceased to exist prior to NATO expansion. Or does he
think Europe still has commitments to the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
I am amazed at all of the commenters who think expanding NATO up to the borders of Russia is a great idea. How
would you like for Russia to form a military alliance with Mexico and for the Russian military to be conducting
exercises along our southern border with Mexico?
If Russia attacks a member of NATO along its border that
means that the US is at war with Russia which means a draft. Would any of the people who think NATO expansion
is a great idea be willing to fight the Russians over Eastern Europe or have a member of their family go and
fight?
Fighting the Russians on their own turf didn't work out to well for Napoleon and Hitler and I don't think it
would work out for us too well either. We haven't been in a major war since World War 2 and I don't think our
general population is ready for a big war with Russia.
The "safe space" generation is going to have a hard time fighting in the Russian winter. To think otherwise
is foolhardy.
It is clear that Bacevich started with a political conclusion -- that Russia's sphere of influence encompasses
all of Eastern Europe -- and then tried to muster historical/legal arguments to support that conclusion.
In the process, he has distorted history and left out anything that damages his conclusion.
Among them:
The Russo-Ukraine border treaty of November 1990, signed by Yeltsin, guaranteed the existing borders between
Russia and Ukraine;
The Minsk Agreement. December 8, 1991,obligated "The high contracting parties (Russia/Ukraine/Belarus) [to]
recognize and respect one another's territorial integrity and the inviolability of existing borders within the
Commonwealth."
The Russian – Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, Ratified in 1998 by Ukraine and 1999 by
Russia, fixed the principle of strategic partnership, the recognition of the inviolability of existing borders,
respect for territorial integrity.
Putin later affirmed that "Every nation has an inalienable, sovereign right to its own path of development
Russia always has and always will respect that. This applies fully to Ukraine, the brotherly Ukrainian nation."
There were also obligations under the COE, the OSCE and the UN Charter. Russia ignored all of those in
forcibly annexing Crimea.
Lavrov later lied about the Budapest Memorandum, claiming it contained only one obligation, not to use
nuclear weapons.
Fair points, ScottA, but let's clarify your position:
(a) Should NATO defend Western Europe, if it is ever
attacked by Russia? Alternately, are the people of Eastern Europe intrinsically different from Western
Europeans? Retreating to the position that such an attack is unlikely is an evasion – so, da or nyet?
(b) It is true that Russia was attacked by Napoleon, and the USSR, while an ally of Nazi Germany, was then
betrayed and attacked by Hitler. Does this give Russia today a right to a permanent sphere of influence in
Eastern Europe? Da or nyet?
(c) If da, how would a Westerner make that case to Eastern Europeans? Please give it a try;
In my opinion, both NATO in the west and China's New Silk Roads (One Belt and One Road Initiative) in the
east and south, exert a calming influence on any imperial stirrings of the Rulers of Muscovy. I also believe
that the majority of the Russian people would prefer a peaceful and prosperous Russia, over momentary euphorias
over this or that conquest;
What I admire about Russia is her spiritual and cultural powerhouse: Orthodox Liturgy and architecture,
icons, chants, Sugar Plum Fairies, Brothers Karamazov, fairy tales – to mention just a random fraction of the
Russian treasure. Imperialism, nyet.
"... You see? Lally's gloating, smug colonialist triumphalism was the norm in expat circles. That was what we were fighting. And sometimes the outrage got out of control. But it's beyond grotesque that our outrage should be picked over for language crimes by a sloppy, inept, conscience-free writer like Lally. When the crimes of Western journalists during the Yeltsin era are chronicled, I kinda think it'll be the callous triumphalism with which she and her Clintonite buddies watched millions of Russians die that are condemned–not the tonal lapses of a low-budget dissident rag like eXile, shaking its puny fist at this corruption. ..."
"... "Each month thousands of Russians were dying prematurely. Such a drop in life expectancy, labeled 'excess deaths,' has always been a standard algorithm in demographers' calculations of the death toll of the great disasters -- whether Stalin's collectivization in the 1930s, Pol Pot's rule in Cambodia in the 1970s, or the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s. American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimated that the number of 'excess deaths' in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was as high as 3 million. By contrast, Eberstadt observed, Russia's losses in World War 1 were 1.7 million deaths." ..."
I lived in Moscow in the Nineties as well. I hugely enjoyed the Exile and read it whenever I had a chance to pick it up in
some restaurant or night club.
Let us put is like that: in 1992 CNN was so scared that they actually paid an East German female friend of mine with tolerable
Russian and less English to travel the subway!!!! Maybe in the US the subway tends to get even more dangerous when it is getting
dangerous above ground. Well possible. In Moscow though the metro was always the safest place you could be. That is because the
subway in Moscow is not just an ordinary means of getting from place to place. It is the marvel of the city, the pride of every
citizen (rightly so) and the very last thing that would turn chaotic.
CNN insanely decided to not let their US employees check out the metro. And their employees didn´t object !!! Not surprisingly
US journalism was bullshit. They had no idea of how ordinary people lived.
The Exile was the exact opposite. They lived like ordinary Muscovites and they knew what was really going on.
Mark Ames was referring to the default of 1998. I was earning money then a travelling engineer for a German tool machine factory.
. How anybody in his right mind could believe that the then merry go round of paying for maturing bonds by issuing ever higher
interest bonds (insanely high interest) could go on forever is beyond me. Everybody and his granny knew that this baby would go
bust. In the German paper of record – the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – their Moscow economic correspondent openly wrote about
the coming default.
Why didn´t their US colleagues? The exception being the exile? Because they believed their own propaganda. And the reason they
could believe it is because they lived in a secure, insulated bubble and as a rule had no or atrocious Russian.
Same like today. Nothing has changed. If you want to know what goes on in Russia don´t read the US press.
Great piece, Mark! I wrote a comment on the Washington Post piece I suspect nobody read. Even from Lally's hit job, and a little
background research, I picked up that Lally was working to call out the censors. You shouldn't be so modest about your prior paper:
the eXile did great work now and, I'm told by friends in the Moscow expat community, you remain the talk of the town, even if
the town has settled down a lot lately. The WaPo should feel ashamed running that piece but, after deciding to, they should have
approached you and Matt for a fact-check if not a rebuttal. That seems to be the way with a lot of older media though; the quality
control hasn't just gone in the tank – it's been long since flushed – and they don't admit they're wrong even when the mistakes
are blatant. It's why I'm pleased to write for and read NC (and thank you, Yves, for publishing this).
On the "sexism" related to her original allegations she's ignoring the context of Russia, especially back then. Even today
Russia is not a quiet, politically correct kind of place. The choices available to American expat reporters during the Yeltsin
and early Putin era was either try to sterilize, treat it like a zoo with the Russians starring as the animals, or contextualize
and explain. Choosing that last option produced the most accurate reporting while infuriating the highfalutin our-shit-don't-stink
"professional" American press corps. The gall of you and Matt to suggest the Russians aren't any worse obviously still stings,
a decade after you last drank vodka while watching the river in Moscow.
Lally complains about Taibbi being mean to her after she wrote a report in 1999 unironically starting a paragraph with "The
latest affirmation of the anarchy that lies deep in the Russian soul " This just after shock therapy has killed millions of Russians.
In this new screed she has the audacity to
link to it.
You see? Lally's gloating, smug colonialist triumphalism was the norm in expat circles. That was what we were fighting.
And sometimes the outrage got out of control. But it's beyond grotesque that our outrage should be picked over for language
crimes by a sloppy, inept, conscience-free writer like Lally. When the crimes of Western journalists during the Yeltsin era
are chronicled, I kinda think it'll be the callous triumphalism with which she and her Clintonite buddies watched millions
of Russians die that are condemned–not the tonal lapses of a low-budget dissident rag like eXile, shaking its puny fist at
this corruption.
I'm a bit underwhelmed by the explanation that many of the outrageous antics of eXile's authors could be classified as "fighting
smug colonialist triumphalism" or "shaking its puny fist", but I can agree with the fundamental point that it is absolutely shocking
that someone who lived through this:
"Each month thousands of Russians were dying prematurely. Such a drop in life expectancy, labeled 'excess deaths,' has always
been a standard algorithm in demographers' calculations of the death toll of the great disasters -- whether Stalin's collectivization
in the 1930s, Pol Pot's rule in Cambodia in the 1970s, or the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s. American demographer Nicholas
Eberstadt estimated that the number of 'excess deaths' in Russia between 1992 and 1998 was as high as 3 million. By contrast,
Eberstadt observed, Russia's losses in World War 1 were 1.7 million deaths."
could walk away thinking that THEY were unfairly victimized. Ames and Brecher/Dolan are providing an extremely important service
in highlighting similarly terrifying and shocking dynamics at work today with hacks like Michael Weiss broadcasting toxic garbage
with a big megaphone that helps provide an intellectual veneer for the mass starvation of Yemeni children or sectarian death squads
in Syria or a possible catastrophic war with Iran, so I hope people will continue to listen to them. The same goes for Taibbi
in highlighting systematic racism and abuse of power by banks and lobbyists.
"... And even IF Gorbachev would have had it in writing, it would not have made a bit of difference. ..."
"... There is, actually, no excuse for Gorbachev's giving away the store without an iron-clad treaty, ratified in both the USSR and the USA. ..."
"... The US has threatened the USSR/Russia since 1918 when the UK, USA and their allies including Australia invaded from 7 different directions in a 3 year campaign. ..."
"... That combined with US subversion and no doubt bribes and false promises leads to only one conclusion. Russia has good reason to be afraid of America. ..."
"... Maybe capitalism is the foundation of the problem, but the framework is militarism, weapons production and sales, attacking people around the world, spying on everyone, and imprisoning the underclass to keep them from attacking the wealthy. Take away those structural elements and the US will collapse. ..."
"... Are we not aware that the US foreign policy is by and for the economic benefit of Wall Street? Lies are the norm to hide WS involvement. National security is a scam to hide lies. ..."
"... Handing the territories of the USSR over to the US on a handshake, that is what Gorbachev will be known for. It was no mistake. ..."
"... The present demonization of Putin has been mainly continuation of business as usual. But Putin has stood up to the interests behind the IMF, the FED, the BIS, etc., making him a hero to the entire educated world. Maybe one day soon America will join the educated world. One can only hope. ..."
"... How could any nation trust the USA who has broken every treaty they have agreed to! England all through history has coveted Russia for their vast natural resources. England has always been a wicked nation. ..."
At a time when
the United States is convulsed by anti-Russian hysteria and demonization of Vladimir Putin, a
trove of recently declassified Cold War documents reveals the astounding extent of the lies,
duplicity and double-dealing engaged in by the western powers with the collapsing Soviet Union
in 1990. I was covering Moscow in those days and met some of the key players in this sordid
drama. Ever since, I've been writing that the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Foreign
Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, were shamelessly lied to and deceived by the United States,
Britain, and their appendage, NATO.
All the western powers promised Gorbachev and Shevardnadze
that NATO would not expand eastward by 'one inch' if Moscow would pull the Red Army out of East
Germany and allow it to peacefully reunify with West Germany. This was a titanic concession by
Gorbachev: it led to a failed coup against him in 1991 by Communist hardliners.
The documents
released by George Washington University in Washington DC, which I attended for a semester,
make sickening reading (see them online). All western powers and statesmen assured the Russians
that NATO would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat and that a new era of amity and
cooperation would dawn in post-Cold War Europe. US Secretary of State Jim Baker offered
'ironclad guarantees' there would be no NATO expansion. Lies, all lies. Gorbachev was a
humanist, a very decent, intelligent man who believed he could end the Cold War and nuclear
arms race. He ordered the Red Army back from Eastern Europe.
I was in Wunsdorf, East Germany,
HQ of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, and at Stasi secret police HQ in East Berlin right
after the pullout order was given. The Soviets withdrew their 338,000 troops and 4,200 tanks
and sent them home at lightening speed. Western promises made to Soviet leaders by President
George W. H. Bush and Jim Baker quickly proved to be empty. They were honorable men but their
successors were not. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush quickly began moving NATO into
Eastern Europe, violating all the pledges made to Moscow. The Poles, Hungarians and Czechs were
brought into NATO, then Romania and Bulgaria, the Baltic States, Albania, and Montenegro.
Washington tried to get the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The
Moscow-aligned government of Ukraine was overthrown in a US-engineered coup. The road to Moscow
was open.
All the bankrupt, confused Russians could do was denounce these eastward
moves by the US and NATO. The best response NATO and Washington could come up with was, 'well,
there was no official written promise.' This is worthy of a street peddler selling counterfeit
watches. The leaders of the US, Britain, France, Belgium and Italy all lied. Germany was caught
between its honor and imminent reunification. So even its Chancellor Helmut Kohl had to go
along with the West's prevarications.
At the time, I wrote that the best solution would be for
the demilitarization of formerly Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. NATO had no need or business
to expand eastward. Doing so would be a constant provocation to Russia, which regarded Eastern
Europe as an essential defensive glacis against invasions from the West. Now, with NATO forces
on its western borders, Russia's deepest fears have been realized. Today, US military aircraft
based on the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria, former Warsaw Pact members, probe Russian airspace
over the Black Sea and the vital strategic port of Sevastopol. Washington talks about arming
chaotic Ukraine. US and NATO troops are in the Baltic, on Russia's northwestern borders. Polish
right-wingers are beating the war drums against Russia. In 1990, KGB and CIA agreed to the
principal of 'not one inch' eastward for NATO.
Former US ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock,
confirms the same agreement. Gorbachev, who is denounced as a foolish idealist by many
Russians, trusted the Western powers. He should have had a battalion of New York City garment
district shyster lawyers to document his agreements in 1990. He thought he was dealing with
honest, honorable men, like himself. Is it any wonder after this bait and switch diplomacy that
Russia has no trust in the Western powers? Moscow watches US-run NATO oozing ever eastwards.
Today, Russia's leaders firmly believe Washington's ultimate plan is to tear apart Russia and
reduce it to an impotent, pauper nation.
Two former Western leaders, Napoleon and Hitler, had
similar plans. Instead of carrying on about Hitler's duplicity after Munich, we should look at
our own shameless behavior after 1990. Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally
syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International
Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times,
Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in
Asia. https://ericmargolis.com
There are enough articles at this website in any one week or month for one to realize we do
not live in a free country being led by people who intend to keep their oath of office.
... ... ...
Socrates pointed out that only honorable men can ever find
true happiness. But that insight only points out what necessary for happiness to occur, but
not what is sufficient. Freedom is also necessary, for in the absence of freedom people are
prevented from living honorably.
Honor requires the courage to tell the truth and live in
alignment with the truth. And without that, dignity too is lost. And what about compassion.
And what about love. All of that will be lost to our posterity if we are unable to gain our
freedom. And we will not gain our freedom without striving for it with every ounce of courage
and intelligence we can find within us.
Very well said. I have been saying as much for some time. Only President Putin actually lives
by those aphorisms. I shall visit your website. Thank you
Exactly! And Gorbachev was clearly a fool to have taken up US/Nato on a gentleman's promise.
It is equally probable he was bought off or was an absolute dunce.
There is, actually, no excuse for Gorbachev's giving away the store without an iron-clad
treaty, ratified in both the USSR and the USA.
It took years to get a treaty between Hungary and romania.
It took years to get a treaty between Ukraine and Romania.
It took years for Romania and other Eastern Bloc countries to be accedted into NATO. There
were numerous contingencies to be satisfied.
And Gorbachev just says, "OK, Whatever you say, I believe you!
It does not wash.
Gorbachev was no fool. He knew the West's promises were nothing, but he also knew his country
was bankrupt. He gave Russia a breathing space, which after the pillage under Yeltsin, has
proved beneficial.
The US has threatened the USSR/Russia since 1918 when the UK, USA and their allies including
Australia invaded from 7 different directions in a 3 year campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention...
Then there was the 1945 dropping of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima which were
more to threaten the Soviets than Japan.
Immediately following that was the occupation of South Korea and the stationing of more
atomic bombs there.
But the real clincher was the stationing of nuclear weapons in NATO countries right on the
border of the Soviet Union. The huge, highly realistic and nuclear armed Abel Archer war
games in 1983, not only nearly caused an actual nuclear war but also caused many in the
Soviet leadership to believe that resistance beyond its own borders against America was a
zero sum game.
That combined with US subversion and no doubt bribes and false promises leads to only one
conclusion. Russia has good reason to be afraid of America.
Yes, Russia has good reason to be afraid of the US on two fronts -- 1 - US terrorism and 2 -
imposition of depraved and destructive US political ideologies.
The enemy here is capitalism -- Russia (and China) pose threats to the dominance of U.S.
capital and therefore are demonized and lied to and for that matter treated in any manner
conducive to the continued dominance of U.S. capital. This is the nature of capitalist
relations between nations in its imperialist stage. It is a race to the death to crown the
chief exploiter and manipulator of collective human labor and the commodities it produces. In
this stage of capitalism if it isn't the U.S. who is scheming to rule it would be another.
The only solution is to put an end to the rule of capital.
Maybe capitalism is the foundation of the problem, but the framework is militarism, weapons
production and sales, attacking people around the world, spying on everyone, and imprisoning
the underclass to keep them from attacking the wealthy. Take away those structural elements
and the US will collapse.
Death and destruction are the only visible supports for the US as a
"country". Other countries are busily caring for refugees, addressing fossil fuel and methane
gas damage, providing health care, and advancing science and the arts. Not the US. The US
today is weapons + carnage +threatening other countries + internal political collapse.
Are we not aware that the US foreign policy is by and for the economic benefit of Wall
Street? Lies are the norm to hide WS involvement. National security is a scam to hide lies.
John Stinnett used the FOIA to obtain government documents that established FDR developed
a 17 month agenda with his Wall Street cronies to impose sanctions on Japan to force the
attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese codes were easily broken. WW One was also another false
flag operation to prevent default on huge loans WS had made to European nations.
You might also consult with John Perkin's CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN that details
his (concealed) employment by Wall Street to set up international loans with sovereign
nations designed to go into default using their control of the IMF and WB with enforcement by
the CIA and the US military. cf. Michel Chossudovsky's GLOBALIZATION OF POVERTY and his
GLOBALIZATION OF WAR.
For details on how one of the first arrangements with the CIA and Wall Street was arranged
by Allen Dulles, even before he was appointed Director of the CIA, you might read DEVILS
CHESSBOARD by Stephen Kinzer, THE BROTHERS by David Talbot, or CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME by
Douglass Valentine. Writings by Fletcher Prouty, Antony Sutton, Nomi Prins, and many more are
available. Let me know when you have finished these.
Even professor Michael Hudson has written that Wall Street's (Goldman Sachs) objective in
Greece is to destroy the nation. http://farmwars.info/?p=12078 NEW WORLD ORDER DEAD
AHEAD
Handing the territories of the USSR over to the US on a handshake, that is what Gorbachev
will be known for. It was no mistake. Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin are pieces of the same
$hit.
It's hard for me to consider that the Russians didn't assume the Americans were lying. By
withdrawing troops from a pointless deployment, they were saving resources. It was a spiritual
step up for the Russians. Since then, the Russian economy has improved substantially.
The
American government is, by my research, basically a puppet to the banking cabal that has been
profiting from wars since the 1700's.
They were behind and profited from the Russian revolution, the American Civil War, both world wars, the Cold War, the annexation of Palestine
for a Zionist state, and now present efforts to start a third world war, be it
Syria, Iraq, Libya, or wherever trouble can be stirred.
The present demonization of Putin has
been mainly continuation of business as usual. But Putin has stood up to the interests behind
the IMF, the FED, the BIS, etc., making him a hero to the entire educated world. Maybe one day
soon America will join the educated world. One can only hope.
The part of the story missing is what happened next? Hungary, Czech Republic and now Poland
are a bit miffed at the way things have gone. Other than turn their nations into a door mat
that NATO and Russia fight upon what did they get?
They got a missile launching pad that if
war breaks out will be targeted and most likely destroyed. They got an EU that if it
resembles anything, it most closely represents the old Supreme Soviet. Naw. This story has
just begun.
How could any nation trust the USA who has broken every treaty they have agreed to! England
all through history has coveted Russia for their vast natural resources.
England has always been a wicked nation.
Usually articles by Eric Margolis have more substance and are more objective. First, even
today the US cooperates with Russia on several fronts. Today Putin called Trump to thank him
for supplying to Russia by CIA of Info that led to the arrest of several Islamist terrorists
who wanted to explode a bomb in St. Petersburg. Clear example of cooperation.
As far as the promise to Gorbachev of not expanding NATO eastward, it was made to the
leader of the Soviet Union not the leader of Russia. When the Soviet Union collapsed, such
promise simply had no longer any effect since the country to which it was made no longer
existed.
Still the US and other western countries didn't want to expand NATO until Yeltsin
agreed to its expansion to Poland in August 1993 as reported for example in NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/26/world/yeltsin-u...
In that article, by the way, it is stated that even then there were big problems between
Russia and Ukraine. So to repeat all the time that the "government of Ukraine was overthrown
in a US-engineered coup" is something I didn't expect from Margolis.
I hardly think so Mr. Margolis. I would say that probably 98% of the population of Canada and
the USA are totally comatose and probably won't even hear the Last Trumpet
"... By George Washington. Originally published at Washington's Blog ..."
"... When Russian Supreme Soviet deputies came to Brussels to see NATO and meet with NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner in July 1991, Woerner told the Russians that "We should not allow [ ] the isolation of the USSR from the European community." According to the Russian memorandum of conversation, " Woerner stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13 of 16 NATO members support this point of view)." (See Document 30) ..."
"... Thus, Gorbachev went to the end of the Soviet Union assured that the West was not threatening his security and was not expanding NATO ..."
"... IIRC, the U.S. has, historically, not lived up to one treaty in its entire existence. Quite a remarkable accomplishment, no? Methinks the chickens are coming home to roost, yes? ..."
"... Trump's doubts about NATO, including his demands that European members pay more, are presented as evidence (it is hinted) of his collusion with the evil Putin. ..."
"... History is bunk, as ol' Henry Ford said: Americans live in the eternal now. Our PDS (Putin Derangement System) journos insist that Putin is bad to the bone, as all Russkis are, and there's just no reason for it except for their dark slavic hearts which contrast so painfully with our bright pure red white 'n blue ones. :-( ..."
"... first draft of history ..."
"... Zero acknowledgement by any of the deep permastate types that the consent of the governed is even necessary. We the people are simply the bobbleheads to be manipulated by the lying sociopaths in power. ..."
"... Any thing like this pretty much ignores the fact that all of the Visegad four (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) were pushing VERY strongly to get included in NATO, as for them at the time it was the one clear signal that they are not in the USSRs zone of dominion any more. Anything else would just not do ..."
"... The EU has been willing to say "no" to the much more geographically important Turkey for decades. Why does Poland have more clout? ..."
"... the whole treatment of Russia as a beaten country (when they very clearly didn't feel like that) was beyong stupid, it was , and the West should have learned from history (how it ended with Germany post WW1). ..."
"... My point is that way too often I have seen this as "America does this, America does that" – without considering the wider picture. Yes, ultimately it was US decision (because they could have just keep saying no, although polish minority in the US is large – it's larger than Jewish, although I suspect there is an overlap. Also, Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated after the communist takeover, so there you go, she might have played a role in turning Clinton around) – but it wasn't that they were rushing to do it from day 0 and forcing the V4 to get into NATO just to do one over Russia. ..."
"... I suspect one of the reasons they actually agreed to it in the end was because they thought Russia was done for (who in the world cared for Russia in 1995-1998? Apart from looters, that is, both foreign and domestic), and NATO was just a fomality that would be gone in a decade. ..."
"... My point is that way too often I have seen this as "America does this, America does that" – without considering the wider picture Also, Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated after the communist takeover, so there you go, she might have played a role in turning Clinton around) – but it wasn't that they were rushing to do it from day 0 and forcing the V4 to get into NATO just to do one over Russia. ..."
"... who in the world cared for Russia in 1995-1998? Apart from looters, that is, both foreign and domestic ..."
"... "Russia is finished" ..."
"... WW2 was "won" by Russia defeating Germany, while losing 30 million people. The US "won" WW2 by bombing a quarter million citizens at Hiroshima/Nagasake, while losing maybe 250,000 soldiers in the total war effort.. ..."
"... Gentlemen prefer jackboots ? ..."
"... The U.S. and its allies made a set of commitments to Gorbachev, and then Bill Clinton broke those promises. Full stop. Bush then doubled down. Obama and Trump added Albania, Croatia and Montenegro because I guess it's now a required machismo ritual. (interestinng coincidence that accessions just happened to be scheduled for the first six months after open-seat Presidential elections, no?) The consequences of those decisions are the responsibility of the inhabitants of the White House, and no one else's. ..."
"... The recent history, with savage civil wars in Yugoslavia, Moldavia and Ukraine, shows that there are enough wacky people imbued with detestation for their neighbours to overwhelm the sane ones. Echoes of what some Ukrainian groups tell about e.g. Poles make me think we should be wary of those old grievances. ..."
"... A century ago, Russians had a positive image amongst Eastern Europeans (except Poles). The ones who were the target of contempt and detestation were the Austrians and the Turks. Perhaps the next generation will have entirely forgotten about the Russians of the Warsaw Pact, the COMECON and the "limited sovereignty". ..."
"... Lost in your one-sided account of the brave Hungarians is the fact that a non-trivial contingent of those invading the USSR during the Second World War were Hungarians. There were a lot of fascists in Hungary, and no joke about it, and they willingly participated in the invasion. ..."
"... Instead the western powers got greedy, expanded up the the Russian border, lined it with Special Forces formations and future nuclear first-strike-missiles and holds NATO tank parades literally blocks away from the Russian border. Epic fail that. ..."
"... Nice thought but the military industry can't have peace and harmony. NATO was very quick to start talking about Islam as the next threat after the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The entrenched USG neocons will foster a demonization of Putin (and Russia) until they achieve WWIII; but an objective evaluation of Russian superiority in weapons suggests that theirs is a suicide mission. Peruse the saga of the USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea, and the US military fear of Soviet defense missile systems, to understand. ..."
"... except that it wasn't as bad as its immediate successor. ..."
"... the reneging of Baker's promise + regime change in Iraq + regime change in Libya + near regime change in Syria demonstrate to everyone outside of Nato that the US/the West can't be trusted to honor international law -- regardless of the administration (Dem or Rep). And other countries will act accordingly ..."
"... In the book "Who Lost Russia", the author, Peter Conradi, mentions a political lobby group funded by the defense contractors to promote NATO expansion to the East in the 1990s. Does anyone have information concerning this group and its influence? ..."
"... By the late 90s, with Yeltsin in charge, Russian opposition was less of an issue. In the end, NATO stumbled into enlargement, telling itself that it would be confined to the V3/4 and that would be it. But as a number of us pointed out at the time, once you start, there's no logical point at which you stop. And so Ukraine. ..."
"... tell it to the American Natives (Indians). The US lies to eveyone to gain land and leverage. ..."
"... Another problem, and much more significant one, was that Russia adopted capitalist at the very unfortunate moment of the domination of neoliberalism which led to many catastrophic decisions. ..."
"... I find it hard to believe that Gorbachev, or indeed anyone in international politics, would trust the US government or US ruling class absent some sort of material verification, guarantees, even hostages. That requires some explanation. ..."
"... The Warsaw Pact was USSR military colonialism. NATO was US military colonialism. What does an imperial power do when its "enemy" vacates a space, asking for neutrality? It takes over, demanding tribute. The tribute in this case was neoliberalism, to the benefit of US business, especially the MIC. ..."
Posted on
December 15, 2017 by Yves Smith Yves here. This
is a more purely geopolitical piece than we normally run. The reason for featuring it is that this bit of history is vital to understanding
current US/Russian relations.
Even though experts have acknowledged that Secretary of State James Baker promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the Western powers would
not move NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, they claimed that the Russians were naive to have taken this promise as meaningful.
The argument went that the US regarded only obligations committed to writing as binding, while the Soviets regarded firm, unambiguous
statement by parties authorized to negotiate as commitments.
As the post below describes in detail, the Russians have more basis for feeling abused by the US and its allies than the US defense
above indicates. Not only did Baker repeat his "not one inch eastward" declaration on three separate occasions, many national leaders
and top-level diplomats in NATO countries, such as Maggie Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterand, both affirmed that they
would respect the security interests of the former USSR and would also involve it in European "security structures."
And as we've said repeatedly, when the Clinton Administration broke these commitments by moving NATO eastward in 1997, cold warrior
George Kennan predicted that it would be the worst geopolitical mistake the US ever made.
The U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time it broke up and many other experts have
said that the West promised Gorbachev that – if the USSR allowed German re-unification – NATO wouldn't move "one inch
closer" to Russia.
While Western leaders have long denied the promise, newly-declassified documents now prove this.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University
reported Tuesday:
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's famous "not one inch eastward" assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders
to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified
U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University
( http://nsarchive.gwu.edu ).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in
NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were
not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being
misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates's criticism of "pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in
the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn't happen."
***
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn
(see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear "that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process
must not lead to an 'impairment of Soviet security interests.' Therefore, NATO should rule out an 'expansion of its territory
towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.'" The Bonn cable also noted Genscher's proposal to leave the East
German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September
12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about "closer to the Soviet borders" is written
down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors
(Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and
into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures . The two issues
were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve
all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The "Tutzing formula" immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in
1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved
Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east
***
The conversations before Kohl's assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries,
and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign
Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, "The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example,
the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next ." (See Document 2)
Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his
meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); and even more importantly, face to face
with Gorbachev
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting.
He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev
that "neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that
the Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have
guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present
military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6).
Baker reported: "And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside
of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO's
jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real
thought to all such options [ .] He then added, 'Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.'" Baker added
in parentheses, for Kohl's benefit, "By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable." ( See Document 8)
Well-briefed by the American secretary of state, the West German chancellor understood a key Soviet bottom line, and assured
Gorbachev on February 10, 1990: "We believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity." (See Document 9).
All the Western foreign ministers were on board with Genscher, Kohl, and Baker. Next came the British foreign minister, Douglas
Hurd, on April 11, 1990.
***
Hurd reinforced the Baker-Genscher-Kohl message in his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, April 11, 1990, saying that Britain
clearly "recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity." (See Document 15)
The Baker conversation with Shevardnadze on May 4, 1990, as Baker described it in his own report to President Bush, most eloquently
described what Western leaders were telling Gorbachev exactly at the moment: "I used your speech and our recognition of the need
to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners
and losers. Instead, it would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive." (See
Document 17)
Baker said it again, directly to Gorbachev on May 18, 1990 in Moscow, giving Gorbachev his "nine points," which included the
transformation of NATO, strengthening European structures, keeping Germany non-nuclear, and taking Soviet security interests into
account. Baker started off his remarks, "Before saying a few words about the German issue, I wanted to emphasize that our policies
are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. We had that policy before. But today we are interested in building
a stable Europe, and doing it together with you." (See Document 18)
The French leader Francois Mitterrand continued the cascade of assurances by saying the West must "create security conditions
for you, as well as European security as a whole." (See Document 19) Mitterrand immediately wrote Bush in a " cher George
" letter about his conversation with the Soviet leader, that "we would certainly not refuse to detail the guarantees that he would
have a right to expect for his country's security." (See Document 20)
At the Washington summit on May 31, 1990, Bush went out of his way to assure Gorbachev that Germany in NATO would never be
directed at the USSR : "Believe me, we are not pushing Germany towards unification, and it is not us who determines the pace of
this process. And of course, we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion. That is why
we are speaking in favor of German unification in NATO without ignoring the wider context of the CSCE, taking the traditional
economic ties between the two German states into consideration. Such a model, in our view, corresponds to the Soviet interests
as well." (See Document 21)
The "Iron Lady" also pitched in, after the Washington summit, in her meeting with Gorbachev in London on June 8, 1990. Thatcher
anticipated the moves the Americans (with her support) would take in the early July NATO conference to support Gorbachev with
descriptions of the transformation of NATO towards a more political, less militarily threatening, alliance . She said to Gorbachev:
"We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured . CSCE could be an umbrella for all
this, as well as being the forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future of Europe." (See Document
22)
The NATO London Declaration on July 5, 1990 had quite a positive effect on deliberations in Moscow, according to most accounts,
giving Gorbachev significant ammunition to counter his hardliners at the Party Congress which was taking place at that moment.
***
As Kohl said to Gorbachev in Moscow on July 15, 1990, as they worked out the final deal on German unification: "We know what
awaits NATO in the future, and I think you are now in the know as well," referring to the NATO London Declaration. (See Document
23)
In his phone call to Gorbachev on July 17, Bush meant to reinforce the success of the Kohl-Gorbachev talks and the message
of the London Declaration. Bush explained: "So what we tried to do was to take account of your concerns expressed to me and others,
and we did it in the following ways: by our joint declaration on non-aggression; in our invitation to you to come to NATO ; in
our agreement to open NATO to regular diplomatic contact with your government and those of the Eastern European countries; and
our offer on assurances on the future size of the armed forces of a united Germany – an issue I know you discussed with Helmut
Kohl. We also fundamentally changed our military approach on conventional and nuclear forces. We conveyed the idea of an expanded,
stronger CSCE with new institutions in which the USSR can share and be part of the new Europe." (See Document 24)
The documents show that Gorbachev agreed to German unification in NATO as the result of this cascade of assurances , and on
the basis of his own analysis that the future of the Soviet Union depended on its integration into Europe, for which Germany would
be the decisive actor. He and most of his allies believed that some version of the common European home was still possible and
would develop alongside the transformation of NATO to lead to a more inclusive and integrated European space, that the post-Cold
War settlement would take account of the Soviet security interests. The alliance with Germany would not only overcome the Cold
War but also turn on its head the legacy of the Great Patriotic War.
But inside the U.S. government, a different discussion continued , a debate about relations between NATO and Eastern
Europe. Opinions differed, but the suggestion from the Defense Department as of October 25, 1990 was to leave "the door ajar"
for East European membership in NATO . (See Document 27)
***
As late as March 1991, according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, British Prime Minister John Major personally
assured Gorbachev, "We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO ." Subsequently, when Soviet defense minister Marshal Dmitri
Yazov asked Major about East European leaders' interest in NATO membership, the British leader responded, " Nothing of the sort
will happen ." (See Document 28)
When Russian Supreme Soviet deputies came to Brussels to see NATO and meet with NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner in July
1991, Woerner told the Russians that "We should not allow [ ] the isolation of the USSR from the European community." According
to the Russian memorandum of conversation, " Woerner stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13
of 16 NATO members support this point of view)." (See Document 30)
Thus, Gorbachev went to the end of the Soviet Union assured that the West was not threatening his security and was not expanding
NATO
IIRC, the U.S. has, historically, not lived up to one treaty in its entire existence.
Quite a remarkable accomplishment, no?
Methinks the chickens are coming home to roost, yes?
Nice timing for the release of these archives on Dec 12th. Yesterday the WaPo posted an article "based on interviews
with more than 50 current and former U.S. officials" titled "Doubting the Intelligence: Trump Pursues Putin and Leaves a Russian
Threat Unchecked":
Axiomatic to the WaPohacks authors is that NATO ranks right up there with the 1776 Declaration and
the Constitution as a bedrock US principle. Trump's doubts about NATO, including his demands that European members pay more, are
presented as evidence (it is hinted) of his collusion with the evil Putin.
Naturally the new archives released by GWU play no part in the WaPo story two days later, since they aren't "fitted
to the narrative."
History is bunk, as ol' Henry Ford said: Americans live in the eternal now. Our PDS (Putin Derangement System) journos insist
that Putin is bad to the bone, as all Russkis are, and there's just no reason for it except for their dark slavic hearts which
contrast so painfully with our bright pure red white 'n blue ones. :-(
Any time you hear or read a Russian conspiracy theory in the MSM or elsewhere, substitute the words "Jews" for "Russians" and
the words "International Jewry" for "Russia". Then re-read the sentence.
See how ugly that sentence now looks?
So why should we rightfully decry such racism against Jews or others, but applaud the same sort of racism when it is directed
against Russians?
Interesting to see these first draft of history discussions come out. At roughly the same time, Jeanne Kirkpatrick
wrote an article directed more to a public discussion that the end of the 40-year Cold War could lead to America once again becoming
a normal country in normal times . With its implication that NATO's very existence might not even be necessary anymore.
Gotta say the thing that most disappoints me is that none of these conversations ever actually occurred in any public – anywhere.
There was absolutely zero public discussion about what a post-Cold War world and its mutual obligations might look like.
Zero
acknowledgement by any of the deep permastate types that the consent of the governed is even necessary. We the people
are simply the bobbleheads to be manipulated by the lying sociopaths in power.
You cannot read this alone – I said so before, and will again.
Any thing like this pretty much ignores the fact that all of the Visegad four (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary)
were pushing VERY strongly to get included in NATO, as for them at the time it was the one clear signal that they are not in the
USSRs zone of dominion any more. Anything else would just not do.
It was a symbol, more than anything else. You need to remember that all of those countries had Soviet troops (and nuclear weapons),
some since WW2, and ALL of them had their citizens killed by Soviet troops (Czechoslovakia 1968, Hungary 1956, Poland pre-and
post WW2) within living memory.
Clinton resisted this (for a time, and I believe on advice of his security advisors), but in the end was won over. I have actually
talked to a few people from V4 who were involved in this at a quite high level, so feel like I can comment.
Ignoring the above is to me just a sort of different American bubble that says "everything (for one group good, for another
bad) that happens in the world is because America wishes so". It entirely ignores the history and the political situation in the
area at the time.
That's not to say US couldn't have played it better – but it was not "America wake up and said "let's extend NATO for the kicks
of it"" either.
Maybe Poland has more clout because the rest of Europe and the US see Poland as part of their world. Not so much Turkey, which
didn't get into any European 'game' plan until the end of the Ottoman empire, especially beginning with Ataturk. Before that,
it was more an enemy if anything. And Russia then? Well Russia has always been seen as the big, bad freak who refuses to comply
and conform, submit, to the West's deepest wishes.
I'm reading a book about the Crimean War and even in the middle of the 19th cent. there was widespread sentiment in England
that the Russians were Slavic barbarians threatening the rest of Europe with their size, expansionist ambitions and different
version of Christianity. So perhaps the current Russophobia has deeper roots than we realize and may center on Old Blightey with
the cousins along for the ride. In this scenario Poland became the buffer zone against the Russians and was much quarreled over
by the great powers.
I can't answer that – but the reality is, that US was giving V4 "No" answer when they were lobbying for it, and it took them
years to get there.
If US was so keen to do it, it would have been done by Bush, not Clinton towards the end of hist first term. Clinton told Havel
(and I have it from a person who was in the room at the time) that his military/security advisors were telling him "No".
What difference would it make to the Russians if Clinton was told not to do it and then did it anyway? You are arguing in effect
that the US had good intentions and didn't want to break its word, but that is a secondary issue. The issue here is that not only
did the US break its word, but we have been misled about it.
I was thinking about this in connection with a story about Yemen in the Intercept a couple of days ago. It seems that our ambassador
to Yemen was more hawkish than some others in the Obama Administration. I think we should know as much as possible about how such
decisions ar made and I thought the story was useful, but I can imagine how it would be spun if the mainstream press were ever
pressured into covering our horrific role in Yemen with as much energy as they pour into Russiagate. They would look for a scapegoat
like the ambassador and do everything they could to show that overall the US had good intentions.
My point is not the Russian grievance – that stands. I'd even agree with that it was a dumb move – but the whole treatment
of Russia as a beaten country (when they very clearly didn't feel like that) was beyong stupid, it was , and the West should have
learned from history (how it ended with Germany post WW1).
My point is that way too often I have seen this as "America does this, America does that" – without considering the wider picture.
Yes, ultimately it was US decision (because they could have just keep saying no, although polish minority in the US is large –
it's larger than Jewish, although I suspect there is an overlap. Also, Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated after
the communist takeover, so there you go, she might have played a role in turning Clinton around) – but it wasn't that they were
rushing to do it from day 0 and forcing the V4 to get into NATO just to do one over Russia.
I suspect one of the reasons they actually agreed to it in the end was because they thought Russia was done for (who in the
world cared for Russia in 1995-1998? Apart from looters, that is, both foreign and domestic), and NATO was just a fomality that
would be gone in a decade.
TBH, I also suspect that the first expansion Russia could have lived with – but the second expansion, especially taking in
Baltics, and any suggestion of having NATO expand more towards Russia's borders was, is and will be seen as a provocation and
a direct threat by Russia. Russia feels safe only when it has a nice plump buffer, preferrably of aligned states.
The "wider picture" is that the US was the preeminent military power at that time. That is a reality that could have been leveraged
into a transition in the terms of competition between Russia and the West. Your suggestion that four small countries should bear
any responsibility for US' failure to follow through on its assurances and to use this opening to put an end to militarized competition
and brinksmanship is impossible to take seriously. It ignores major players, e.g. the good old military-industrial complex (which
here needs to be thought of in international terms), that were seriously threatened by the possibility of a wind-down in tensions.
My point is that way too often I have seen this as "America does this, America does that" – without considering the wider
picture Also, Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and emigrated after the communist takeover, so there you go, she might have
played a role in turning Clinton around) – but it wasn't that they were rushing to do it from day 0 and forcing the V4 to get
into NATO just to do one over Russia.
Trump came into office promising better relations w/Russia and look how that turned out. It "wasn't that Trump was rushing
into" worse relations w/Russia, but it still happened and in a very big hurry or "rush.".
I'd say the "Deep State" agenda was very much in a rush to start aggression against Russia.
Was Trump? Bill Clinton? Bush? Certainly Hillary was. But maybe they were/are just puppets of the Deep State.
who in the world cared for Russia in 1995-1998? Apart from looters, that is, both foreign and domestic
The general view of Russia as a goner was actually a post-1998 phenomenon because of the financial crash, bank failures, currency
depreciation, state bankruptcy -- and the realization of how corrupt, destitute and rotten the "new democratic Russia" was. The
(in)famous article "Russia is finished" by Jeffrey Tayler was published in 2001 -- at a time when Putin had just started
taking control of things.
My parents knew the Korbels in Denver in the 50's, as an interesting aside to the conversation.
I'm on the phone with my mom right now, and she relates that the idea that Madeleine didn't know she was Jewish until 1997
is a bit preposterous as her mother looked very much the part, but it was a different era way back when, and anti-semitism was
such that you might have been turned away on a hotel room when they asked your surname, in some quarters.
"The EU has been willing to say "no" to the much more geographically important Turkey for decades. Why does Poland have more
clout?"
In my opinion, there is some sort of European nationalism, by which I mean the idea that Europe should be a single big nation
state, in most of Europe. This view is not as strong and obvious as single nation state nationalism, but it exists: for example
Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the "founding fathers" of Italy, created two secret societies: the "giovine Italia" [young Italy] for
the unification of Italy, and the "giovine Europa" [young Europe] for the unification of Europe, already in the 19th century before
Italian unification.
The whole idea of a "united Europe" is part of the reason of the EU, so it's natural that Poland, which was already perceived
as an European country, was welcome in the EU; Turkey on the other hand is not generally perceived as European so it's less welcome
(you can see this as racism, or as sense of identity, the difference is quite blurry IMHO).
Russia too would have been welcome into the EU (in my opinion), but I don't think the Russians would have accepted the loss
of sovereignity that this entail.
I think that this has to do with the fact that many (most) European countries were beaten quite hard in WW2, and even the two
european "winners" of WW2 won only in the sense that the USA and the USSR won and they happened to be on the right side of the
war at that time.
So nationalistic identity and pride in most of Europe is, IMHO, a more complex thing than it is in the USA, and Europeans mostly
welcomed the idea of a United Europe.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the ones who appear to be the less attached to the idea of a "United Europe" are the British, who
are the one who still may think they won WW2.
WW2 was "won" by Russia defeating Germany, while losing 30 million people. The US "won" WW2 by bombing a quarter million citizens
at Hiroshima/Nagasake, while losing maybe 250,000 soldiers in the total war effort..
In 1990s, Soviets were the leaving occupants, who were there for 20+ years. They were thorougly despised – that's a fact. Soviets
in 1950s were still often seen as liberators by a majority of the population, but managed to squander that away with bloody suppression
of Hungarians in 50s, and less bloody, but not less jackbooted supression of Prague Spring in 68 (in a way more, since Hungarians
actually fought, while in Prague Spring the killed were unarmed civilians)
Yes, the Soviets were hated occupiers, but so what? The stakes on this are and were enormous, both in traditional Great Power
terms, and with the added dimension of nuclear confrontation.
There were many steps that the US, UK, Germany and France could have taken to provide reassurances and security to the Eastern
European states during the ensuing 20 years short of expanding NATO membership, beginning, of course, with economic integration.
EU membership doesn't necessarily require NATO membership.
Yes, there were domestic "Captive Nations" political pressures in the U.S., but they could have been finessed with smart policy
short of NATO expansion, and in fact, they were. I know it was a terrible strain, but US politicians heroically resisted that
pressure for a full decade -- the first expansion didn't happen until 1999, more than half-way through Clinton's second term.
The U.S. and its allies made a set of commitments to Gorbachev, and then Bill Clinton broke those promises. Full stop. Bush
then doubled down. Obama and Trump added Albania, Croatia and Montenegro because I guess it's now a required machismo ritual.
(interestinng coincidence that accessions just happened to be scheduled for the first six months after open-seat Presidential
elections, no?) The consequences of those decisions are the responsibility of the inhabitants of the White House, and no one else's.
Interestingly, Eastern Europeans detest each other as well: Romanians vs. Hungarians, Poles vs. Ukrainians, Bulgarians vs.
Serbs, etc. Their execration of the historically dominating and boorish Russians is what brings them together -- as well as their
wariness of the overbearing and historically dominating Germany.
Detest is a very strong word and not accurate in this case. There are historical grievances (such as Hungarians wanting to scrap
the Trianon treaty), but most sane people have moved on Same goes for "boorish" Russians – have you ever met a Russian or read
a bit of history about Eastern Europe? And yes, the struggle against German domination dates back to 800-900AD.
The recent history, with savage civil wars in Yugoslavia, Moldavia and Ukraine, shows that there are enough wacky people imbued
with detestation for their neighbours to overwhelm the sane ones. Echoes of what some Ukrainian groups tell about e.g. Poles make
me think we should be wary of those old grievances.
Yes, I did meet Russians. Actually, I worked with them. In fact, I hired some. Very nice guys and fun lads, very intelligent,
conscientious and imaginative (my branch is IT -- I view Russians as the elite there). Not boorish at all (but a bit cynical).
On the other hand, the anecdotes they kept telling about how things were going with police, "businessmen" and politicians back
home made it very clear that those are extremely boorish -- and they were mostly the ones Eastern Europeans had to deal
with. Those stories also explain why my Russian colleagues were so reserved initially, and opened up when they realized how different
the interactions were in Western Europe.
I also had Hungarians and Romanians working with me and the Russians -- and there was
absolutely no problem. All young generation though, they were schoolboys when the Eastern bloc collapsed. Time frame: early 2000s.
A century ago, Russians had a positive image amongst Eastern Europeans (except Poles). The ones who were the target of contempt
and detestation were the Austrians and the Turks. Perhaps the next generation will have entirely forgotten about the Russians
of the Warsaw Pact, the COMECON and the "limited sovereignty".
Want to induce a spitting mad Donald Duck meltdown in a Polish person?
Simply remind them that the only reason that there are Polish people alive in Poland today is because of the Red Army. Anyone
who thinks that the Germans were going to stop at Jews is not familiar with Mein Kampf or Generalplan Ost.
This is not to excuse anything else that the Soviets did in Eastern Europe, but at the same time, it is the only reason those
Polish people are alive to nurse their russophobia.
Lost in your one-sided account of the brave Hungarians is the fact that a non-trivial contingent of those invading the USSR
during the Second World War were Hungarians. There were a lot of fascists in Hungary, and no joke about it, and they willingly
participated in the invasion. If you think that the losses in life and property caused directly by the invading Hungarian fascists
to the Russian and Soviet peoples, both military and civilian, and the war crimes with which they were likely liberally festooned
were not remembered, well, think again. And when the uprising began, those memories probably informed the severity of the Soviet
response.
The Hungarians took up arms and participated in a brutal and genocidal attack against the USSR during the Third Reich's invasion.
This was only slightly more than 10 years before the Hungarian uprising. Realistically, what did you expect the Soviets' reaction
to be to the uprising? Soviet intelligence was surely aware of the Gladio program, and this would only be seen as part and parcel
of this western-guided and sponsored program.
Were the deaths and repression that followed regrettable? Of course they were; I am not maintaining otherwise. But times were
what they were largely due to what had gone before, and to elide that from the account is unbalanced.
I am wondering what would have happened if NATO had not only expanded east but had also let the Russian Federation itself become
part of NATO. Of course countries like Estonia and Lithuania would have squawked about that but they could have been simply told
to have a large cup of shut the **** up. Either that or they would have been neutral countries with NATO to the west as well as
the east (Russia). Can you imagine?
Instead of NATO merely being the military wing of the western powers it would be one that stretched from Vladivostok right through
to the Atlantic. Such an entity would have made it its job to stabilize all the Stans to the south of it as well as Afghanistan
itself. There would never be the scenario, as is the case now, where China and Russia have been forced into a defensive alliance.
Perhaps Russia would have become part of the EU. Imagine the trade possibilities.
Instead the western powers got greedy, expanded up the the Russian border, lined it with Special Forces formations and future
nuclear first-strike-missiles and holds NATO tank parades literally blocks away from the Russian border. Epic fail that.
Nice thought but the military industry can't have peace and harmony. NATO was very quick to start talking about
Islam as the
next threat after the fall of the Soviet Union.
UK even insisted that they needed their nuclear submarines to fight islam.
The entrenched USG neocons will foster a demonization of Putin (and Russia) until they achieve WWIII; but an objective evaluation
of Russian superiority in weapons suggests that theirs is a suicide mission. Peruse the saga of the USS Donald Cook in the Black
Sea, and the US military fear of Soviet defense missile systems, to understand.
except that it wasn't as bad as its immediate successor.
In so far as the major consequences of the policies and decisions taken by Clinton actually occurred during GWB's presidency,
there is little to choose between them.
Extraordinary renditions? Clinton. Military interventions without UNO resolutions? Clinton. Complete dismantling of the financial
sector leading to untrammeled speculation? Clinton. Bombing of foreign countries as a standard policy? Clinton (though with old-fashioned
aeroplanes and long-range missiles, not drones, so there was innovation with Bush).
At the time(clinton era), I was leery of Billary, but I couldn't put my finger on it I was too busy being young and wild and
crazy, as well as keeping body and soul together.
and it was preinternet.
so one had to find alternative narratives regarding the shape of the world where one could people on street corners in the Montrose(Houston)
handing out Lyndon Larouche newsletters, later street people on the Drag in Austin handing out Zines from Zendik Farms, still
wet with ink, or the odd John Bircher at the aa meeting, the closet Klansman at the beer joint as well as more respectable outlets(William
Greider comes to mind).
More to the point of this story, growing up listening to my Half Cherokee Grandad talk about perfidy on the part of the US, I
guess I have always been immune to the usual flagwaving superpatriotism the US gov is not to be trusted. Ever.
It's only since I finally got on the Web, circa 1999, that I've been able to sift through all the chaff, and look at things like
the foreign press and FOIA Docs, that that Feeling has hardened into Certainty.
The more I learn, the more I find that I loathe my country.(see: history of the CIA, for just one egregious crime spree in our
name)
That sucks especially since expressing such dislike is the quickest way to getting lynched in the places I've spent my life(Texas
and the South).
There has been a steady stream of articles and government disclosures that have shown the Clinton years were less than the
rosy picture commonly painted.
This just adds to that narrative. Nothing is being said that we should have had more Bush the elder. But perhaps Clinton wasn't
the answer either.
the reneging of Baker's promise + regime change in Iraq + regime change in Libya + near regime change in Syria demonstrate
to everyone outside of Nato that the US/the West can't be trusted to honor international law -- regardless of the administration
(Dem or Rep). And other countries will act accordingly
In the book "Who Lost Russia", the author, Peter Conradi, mentions a political lobby group funded by the defense contractors
to promote NATO expansion to the East in the 1990s. Does anyone have information concerning this group and its influence?
Olga, you mention the MICC, while to others, it's the MIC. What discourse or determination leads you to that difference? I'm
asking because I agree, and want further documentation, and the elimination of the last "C" is constant, and a great misperception.
I was there. I've never believed that western leaders were being deliberately deceitful about NATO expansion – they were as
much victims of events as anything else, and the situation was moving incredibly fast. Remember that the conversation with Gorbachev
(Document 9) dates from February 1990, barely three months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when western capitals were in shock,
and the priority was a peaceful reunification of Germany and the exit of Soviet forces stationed there. At that stage, as the
situation changed almost daily, nobody much was thinking about NATO expansion. Indeed, many were wondering if NATO would go on
at all.
Vlade is quite right that there was pressure from the V3 (later 4) for closer ties with the West, and this eventually turned into
membership, but this was not being discussed in early 1990, when the V3 themselves did not want to move from one military bloc
to another, and when it would have been seen as a gratuitous insult to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, there was a lot of
worry about the stability of some of the ex Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet successor states.
The real issue was the future of NATO itself. NATO had all sorts of pragmatic political advantages for all sorts of nations, including
many in Europe, and it was necessary to find something for it to do. In the absence of a threat, enlargement was more or less
all it could do, and so that was what it spent a long time doing.
By the late 90s, with Yeltsin in charge, Russian opposition
was less of an issue. In the end, NATO stumbled into enlargement, telling itself that it would be confined to the V3/4 and that
would be it. But as a number of us pointed out at the time, once you start, there's no logical point at which you stop. And so
Ukraine.
I'm grinding my teeth when I think about that time when it was possible to effect a genuine reset of relations between Russia
and the West.\
Another problem, and much more significant one, was that Russia adopted capitalist at the very unfortunate moment of the domination
of neoliberalism which led to many catastrophic decisions.
I find it hard to believe that Gorbachev, or indeed anyone in international politics, would trust the US government or US ruling
class absent some sort of material verification, guarantees, even hostages. That requires some explanation.
The article notes dishonesty originated in the Department of Defense. Why am I not surprised?
One the most attractive features of NATO is that it emasculates all its members before the most powerful one. The strongman
gets to know what the others can do militarily and adjusts for that. Its like a secret society – once in, you can't leave even
if you want to. So joining the NATO gang for security actually brings submission. Should the strongest one withdraw into domestic
contemplation the others will just wither away. Horror of horrors, peace might break out. Doubtful? What did we see in Serbia
and Bosnia? Remind me.
The Warsaw Pact was USSR military colonialism. NATO was US military colonialism. What does an imperial power do when its "enemy"
vacates a space, asking for neutrality? It takes over, demanding tribute. The tribute in this case was neoliberalism, to the benefit
of US business, especially the MIC.
NATO was formed in 1948 response to the Soviet refusal to withdraw from the Eastern European nations it continued to occupy
with Soviet troops and control with puppet governments after WWll. The Soviet response was to form the Warsaw Pact- consisting
of those very same nations: (East) Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The only time Warsaw
Pact troops were used militarily was to put down rebellions by its own members: Hungary in 1956; Czechoslavakia in 1968.
The collapse of the Soviet empire- its Eastern European "sphere of influence"- began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
and culminated in the collapse of the Soviet "union" in 1991. In subsequent years, all of the Warsaw Pact members, plus the illegally
annexed and occupied Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, having reclaimed their sovereignty, also made a point of
joining NATO- to ensure that a reawakened Russian bear did not return to do even more damage.
Western leaders in 1990, seeking to reassure Gorbachev regarding German unification, had no standing to negotiate away the
future foreign policies of those nations which had endured half a century of the failed Soviet experiment and were still within
the Soviet "sphere of influence". In any case, how do you keep a "promise" to a political entity- the USSR- which no longer exists?
The nations of Eastern Europe chose to join NATO; they were not coerced into doing so. Russian actions in Ukraine have validated
their pragmatism in joining NATO. Although Putin described the demise of the USSR as "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the
20th Century", Russia does not have some sort of divine right to rebuild the Soviet empire and it "sphere of influence". NATO
is not a threat to Russia; it is only a threat to those who would seek to rebuild its lost empire.
Sorry, NATO is a club, just like the EU, which has refused entry to Turkey. NATO decides who to let in. Outsiders don't have
any rights, any more than Quebec could demand to join France.
"NATO decides who to let in". Precisely! All of the former Warsaw Pact members, plus the Baltic states, asked to join NATO,
and were granted membership. Don't the nations of Eastern Europe- after fifty years of Soviet (Russian) domination, have the right
to decide their own future, and to decide which alliances to join?
Considering the post WWll history of Eastern Europe -- the Soviet domination until the Soviet collapse -- Russia complaining about
NATO expansion is tantamout to a burglar complaining that his victims have installed a burglar alarm.
Looks like Browder was connected to MI6. That means that intellignece agances participated in economic rape of Russia That's explains a lot, including his change of citizenship from US to UK. He wanted better
protection.
Notable quotes:
"... The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War. ..."
"... Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale. ..."
"... Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. ..."
"... Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy. ..."
"... That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along. ..."
"... By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump's son. ..."
"... But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post. ..."
"... There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past. ..."
"... Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen." ..."
"... So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War. ..."
"... Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about "Russian propaganda" and "fake news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false." ..."
"... First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue. ..."
"... From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was. I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available. ..."
"... Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you. ..."
"... Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the Russian financial crisis. ..."
"... Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes. ..."
"... Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it. ..."
"... I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and 1984 not so distant. ..."
"... Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews. I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into accurately reporting it. ..."
"... Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars. The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial, at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years. ..."
"... Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary film product. ..."
"... "[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row? ..."
"... "The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement. ..."
"... "The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic. The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD. ..."
"... Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern about Canada following the Cold War without examination. ..."
"... Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution (in name yes, but in fact not). ..."
"... I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could (with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a stop to them. ..."
"... backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All the plunder flowed into the Western Countries. ..."
"... I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of the crooks looting Russia. ..."
"... I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart. I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it up. ..."
"... The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/ ..."
Exclusive: A documentary debunking the Magnitsky myth, which was an opening salvo in the New Cold War, was largely blocked from
viewing in the West but has now become a factor in Russia-gate, reports Robert Parry.
Near the center of the current furor over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 is a documentary that
almost no one in the West has been allowed to see, a film that flips the script on the story of the late Sergei Magnitsky and his
employer, hedge-fund operator William Browder.
The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented
a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death
in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S.
Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called
the first shot in the New Cold War.
According to Browder's narrative, companies ostensibly under his control had been hijacked by corrupt Russian officials in furtherance
of a $230 million tax-fraud scheme; he then dispatched his "lawyer" Magnitsky to investigate and – after supposedly uncovering evidence
of the fraud – Magnitsky blew the whistle only to be arrested by the same corrupt officials who then had him locked up in prison
where he died of heart failure from physical abuse.
Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became
a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of
President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov
even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale.
However, the project took an unexpected
turn when Nekrasov's research kept turning up contradictions to Browder's storyline, which began to look more and more like a
corporate cover story. Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky
– rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme.
So, the planned docudrama suddenly was transformed into a documentary with a dramatic reversal as Nekrasov struggles with what
he knows will be a dangerous decision to confront Browder with what appear to be deceptions. In the film, you see Browder go from
a friendly collaborator into an angry adversary who tries to bully Nekrasov into backing down.
Blocked Premiere
Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for
a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats
– the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part,
brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy.
Film director Andrei Nekrasov, who produced "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."
As a lawyer defending Prevezon, a real-estate company registered in Cyprus, on a money-laundering charge, she
was dealing with U.S. prosecutors in New York City and, in that role, became an advocate for lifting the U.S. sanctions, The
Washington Post reported.
That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the
sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian
government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump
campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along.
By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky
Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One
source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump
Tower with Trump's son.
But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's
blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the
Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm
the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations
in the past.
Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams,
the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen."
In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times
added that "A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides." Heaven
forbid!
One-Time Showing
So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion
moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially
shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment
of the New Cold War.
Financier William Browder (right) with Magnitsky's widow and son, along with European parliamentarians.
After the Newseum presentation,
a Washington Post editorial branded Nekrasov's documentary Russian "agit-prop" and sought to discredit Nekrasov without addressing
his many documented examples of Browder's misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov
of using "facts highly selectively" and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin's "campaign to discredit Mr. Browder
and the Magnitsky Act."
The Post also misrepresented the structure of the film by noting that it mixed fictional scenes with real-life interviews and
action, a point that was technically true but willfully misleading because the fictional scenes were from Nekrasov's original idea
for a docu-drama that he shows as part of explaining his evolution from a believer in Browder's self-exculpatory story to a skeptic.
But the Post's deception is something that almost no American would realize because almost no one got to see the film.
The Post concluded smugly: "The film won't grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin's increasingly
sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television
networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky's family.
"We don't worry that Mr. Nekrasov's film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully
exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions."
The Post's gleeful editorial had the feel of something you
might read in a totalitarian
society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for
saying something that almost no one heard.
New Paradigm
The Post's satisfaction that Nekrasov's documentary would not draw a large audience represents what is becoming a new paradigm
in U.S. mainstream journalism, the idea that it is the media's duty to protect the American people from seeing divergent narratives
on sensitive geopolitical issues.
Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about
"Russian propaganda" and "fake
news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets
eagerly awaiting algorithms
that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false."
First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such
as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of
Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue.
In the meantime, there is the ad hoc approach that was applied to Nekrasov's documentary. Having missed the Newseum showing, I
was only able to view the film because I was given a special password to an online version.
From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was.
I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
But the Post's editors were right in their expectation that "The film won't grab a wide audience." Instead, it has become a good
example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story." The film
now, however, has unexpectedly become a factor in the larger drama of Russia-gate and the drive to remove Donald Trump Sr. from the
White House.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book
(from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't
Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You
did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give
us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you.
Rob Roy , July 13, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Parry isn't keeping the film viewing a secret. He was given a private password and perhaps can get permission to let the readers
here have it. It isn't up to Parry himself but rather to the person(s) who have the rights to the password. I've come across this
problem before.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 4:01 pm
Parry wrote: I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
Any link?? I am willing to buy it.
Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:28 pm
This may not be of much help, as the film is dubbed in Russian. If you want to look for the Russian versions on the internet,
search for: "????? ?????? ????????? "????? ???????????. ?? ????????"
Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain
in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the
Russian financial crisis.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes.
incontinent reader , July 13, 2017 at 6:24 pm
Well stated.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Mr. Parry,
Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding
Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the
film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it.
Is there any chance you can share information regarding a means of accessing the forbidden film?
I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding
back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America
and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and
1984 not so distant.
Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews.
I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into
accurately reporting it.
Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars.
The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial,
at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years.
Demonizing other countries is bad enough, but wilfully ignoring the potential for a nuclear war to end not only war, but life
as we know it, is appalling.
"After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson "
Am I the only one who thinks that Max Boot should have been institutionalized for some time already? He is not well.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 9:41 pm
Anna,
Perhaps Max can share a suite with John McCain. Sadly, the illness is widespread and sometimes seems to be in the majority. Neo
con/lib both are adamant in finding enemies and imposing punishment.
Finding splinters, ignoring beams. Changing regimes everywhere. Making the world safe for Democracy. Unless a man they don't
like get elected
Max Boot parents are Russain Jews who seemingly instilled in him a rabid hatred for everything Russian. The same is with Aperovitch,
the CrowdStrike fraudster. The first Soviet (Bolshevik) government was 85% Jewish. Considering what happened to Russia under Bolsheviks,
it seems that Russians are supremely tolerant people.
Anna, Anti-Semitism will get you NOWHERE, and you should be ashamed of yourself for injecting such HATRED into the rational
discussion here.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:03 pm
Dear orwell
re Anna
Its not anti Semitic if its true .and its true he is a Russian Jew and its very obvious he hates Russia–as does the whole Jewish
Zionist crowd in the US.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:02 am
orwell, I wonder why the truth always turns out to be so anti-semitic!?
Taras77 , July 13, 2017 at 11:17 pm
I hope you caught the preceding tucker interview with Ralph Peters, who says he is a retired us army LTC. He came off as completely
deranged and hysterical. The two interviews back to back struck me as neo con desperation and panic. My respect for Tucker
just went up for taking on these two wackos.
Zachary Smith , July 13, 2017 at 2:51 pm
The fact that the film is being suppressed by everybody is significant to me. I don't know a thing about the "facts" of the
Magnitsky case, and a quick look at the results of a Google search suggests this film isn't going to be available to me unless
I shell out some unknown amount of money.
If the producers want the film to be seen, perhaps they ought to release it for download to any interested parties for a nominal
sum. This will mean they won't make any profit, but on the other hand they will be able to spit in the eyes of the censors.
Dan Mason , July 13, 2017 at 6:42 pm
I went searching the net for access to this film and found that I was blocked at every turn. I did find a few links which all
seemed to go to the same destination which claimed to provide access once I registered with their site. I decided to avoid that
route. I don't really have that much interest in the Magnitsky affair, but I do wonder why we are being denied access to information.
Who has this kind of influence, and why are they so fearful. I'm really afraid that we already live in a largely hidden Orwellian
world. Now where did I put that tin foil hat?
The Orwellian World is NOT HIDDEN, it is clearly visible.
Drew Hunkins , July 13, 2017 at 2:53 pm
Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and
took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary
film product.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 3:30 pm
Drew – good comment. It's very hard to "turn", isn't it? I wonder if many people appreciate what it takes to do this. Easier
to justify, turn a blind eye, but to actually stop, question, think, and then follow where the story leads you takes courage and
strength.
Especially when your bucking an aggressive billionaire.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:49 am
BannanaBoat – that too!
Zim , July 13, 2017 at 3:11 pm
This is interesting:
"In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary
of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank!
for which he was paid $500,000.
"Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives
were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.
Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant
Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder,
a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance
officials, among others, participated in the fraud."
The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia
relations would suffer as a result."
"[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some
past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row?
Now I remember that Post editorial. I was one of only 20 commenters before they shut down comments. It was some heavy pearl
clutching.
afterthought couldn't the film be shown on RT America?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:11 am
Would that not enable Bowder's employees online to claim that this documentary is Russian state propaganda, which it obviously
is not because it would have been made available for free everywhere already just like RT. I believe that Nekrasov does not like
RT and RT probably still does not like Nekrasov. The point of RT has never been the truth then the alternative point of view,
as they advertised: Audi alteram partem.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 3:41 pm
"The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical
blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein
and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a
body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better
indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement.
Moreover, when one reflects on the fact much of this 'body of reporting' was shoehorned after the fact into an analytical
premise predicated on a single source of foreign-provided intelligence, that statement suddenly loses much of its impact.
"The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of
Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic.
The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and
decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed
in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD.
'President Putin has repeatedly and vociferously denied any Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Those
who cite the findings of the Russia NIA as indisputable proof to the contrary, however, dismiss this denial out of hand. And yet
nowhere in the Russia NIA is there any evidence that those who prepared it conducted anything remotely resembling the kind of
'analysis of alternatives' mandated by the ODNI when it comes to analytic standards used to prepare intelligence community assessments
and estimates. Nor is there any evidence that the CIA's vaunted 'Red Cell' was approached to provide counterintuitive assessments
of premises such as 'What if President Putin is telling the truth?'
'Throughout its history, the NIC has dealt with sources of information that far exceeded any sensitivity that might attach
to Brennan's foreign intelligence source. The NIC had two experts that it could have turned to oversee a project like the Russia
NIA!the NIO for Cyber Issues, and the Mission Manager of the Russian and Eurasia Mission Center; logic dictates that both should
have been called upon, given the subject matter overlap between cyber intrusion and Russian intent.
'The excuse that Brennan's source was simply too sensitive to be shared with these individuals, and the analysts assigned to
them, is ludicrous!both the NIO for cyber issues and the CIA's mission manager for Russia and Eurasia are cleared to receive the
most highly classified intelligence and, moreover, are specifically mandated to oversee projects such as an investigation into
Russian meddling in the American electoral process.
'President Trump has come under repeated criticism for his perceived slighting of the U.S. intelligence community in repeatedly
citing the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failure when downplaying intelligence reports, including the Russia
NIA, about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Adding insult to injury, the president's most recent comments were made
on foreign soil (Poland), on the eve of his first meeting with President Putin, at the G-20 Conference in Hamburg, Germany, where
the issue of Russian meddling was the first topic on the agenda.
"The politics of the wisdom of the timing and location of such observations aside, the specific content of the president's
statements appear factually sound."
Thanks Abe once again, for providing us with news which will never be printed or aired in our MSM. Brennan may ignore the NIC,
as Congress and the Executive Branch constantly avoid paying attention to the GAO. Why even have these agencies, if our leaders
aren't going to listen them?
Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 6:16 pm
Abe, I'm always amazed at how much you know. Thank you for sharing. If you have your comments in article form or on a site
where they can be shared, I'd really like to know about it. I've tried, but I garble the many points you make when trying to explain
historical events you've told us about.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 9:08 am
Thanks Abe. You are a real asset to us here at CN.
John V. Walsh , July 13, 2017 at 3:54 pm
Very good article! The entire Magnitsky saga has become so convoluted and mired in controversy and propaganda that it is very
hard to understand. I remember vaguely the controversy surrounding the showing of the film at the Newseum. it is especially impressive
that Nekrasov changed his opinion as fcts unfolded.
I will now try to get the docudrama and watch it.
If anyone has suggestions on how to do this, please let me know via a response. here.
Thanks.
A 'Magnitsky Act' in Canada was approved by the (appointed) Senate several months ago and is now undergoing fine tuning in
the House of Commons prior to a third and final vote of approval. The proposed law has the unanimous support of the parties in
Parliament.
A column in today's Globe and Mail daily by the newspaper's 'chief political writer' tiptoes around the Magnitsky story, never
once daring to admit that a contrary narrative exists to that of Bill Browder.
Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern
about Canada following the Cold War without examination.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Roger Annis – just little lemmings following the leader. Disgusting. I hope you posted a comment at the Globe and Mail, Roger,
with a link to this article.
Britton , July 13, 2017 at 4:05 pm
Browder is a Communist Jew, his father has a Communist past according to his background so I know I can't trust anything he
says. Hes just one of many shady interests undermining Putin I've seen over the years. His book Red Notice is just as shady. Good
reporting Consortium News. Fox News promotes Browder like crazy every chance they get especially Fox Business channel.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:06 pm
"Browder is a Communist " Hedge Fund managers are hardly Communist – that's an oxymoron.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 6:02 pm
Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also
a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state
assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution
(in name yes, but in fact not).
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 6:34 pm
ToivoS,
thank you for this background information.
My main intention had been to straighten out the blurring of calling a hedge fund manager communist. Nowadays everything gets
blurred by people misrepresenting political concepts. Either the people have been dumbed-down by misinformation or misrepresenting
is done in order to keep neo-liberalism the dominant economical model. On many occasions I had read comments of people seemingly
believing that Nationalsocialism had been some variant of socialism. Even the ideas of Bernie Sanders had been misrepresented
as socialist instead of social democratic ones.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 6:21 pm
Joe Average – Dave P. mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" the other day. I've been
reading a long synopsis of this book. What Britton says appears to be quite true. I don't know about Browder, but from what I've
read the Jews were instrumental in the communist party, in the deaths of so many Russians. It wasn't just the Jews, but they played
a big part. It's no wonder Solzhenitsyn's book has been "lost in translation", at least into English, for so many years.
I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could
(with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is
getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a
stop to them.
Dave P. , July 13, 2017 at 7:37 pm
backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and
construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial
institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work
place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going
on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All
the plunder flowed into the Western Countries.
In recent history, no country went through this kind of plunder on a scale Russia went through during ten or fifteen years
starting in 1992. Russia was a very badly ravaged country when Putin took over. Means of production, finance, all came to halt,
and society itself had completely broken down. It appears that the West has all the intentions to do it again.
I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of
the crooks looting Russia. Then he got to John McCain with all his lies and bullshit and was responsible for the sanctions
on Russia. All the comments aboutBrowders grandfather andCommunist party are all true but hardly important. Except that it probably
was how Browder was able to get his fingers on the pie in Russia. And he sure did get his fingers in the pie BIG TIME.
I am a Canadian and am aware of Maginsky Act in Canada. Our Minister Chrystal Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a
few months ago both of these two you could say are not fans of Putin, I certainly don't know what they spoke about but other than
lies from Browder there is no reason she should have been talking with him. I have made comments on other forums regarding these
two meeting. Read Browders book and hopefully see the documentary that this article is about. When I read his book I knew instantly
that he was a crook a charloten and a liar. Just the kind of folk John McCain and a lot of other folks in US politics love. You
all have a nice Peacefull day
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:38 am
Joe Average – "I guess that this book puts blame for Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further
rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's."
No, it doesn't put the blame entirely on the Jews; it just spells out that they did play a large part. As one Jewish scholar
said, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was too much of an academic, too intelligent to ever put the blame entirely on one group. But something
like 40 – 60 million died – shot, taken out on boats with rocks around their necks and thrown overboard, starved, gassed in rail
cars, poisoned, worked to death, froze, you name it. Every other human slaughter pales in comparison. Good old man, so civilized
(sarc)!
But someone(s) has been instrumental in keeping this book from being translated into English (or so I've read many places online).
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and his other books have been translated, but not this one. (Although I just found one site
that has almost all of the chapters translated, but not all). Several people ordered the book off Amazon, only to find out that
it was in the Russian language. LOL
Solzhenitsyn does say at one point in the book: "Communist rebellions in Germany post-WWI was a big reason for the revival
of anti-Semitism (as there was no serious anti-Semitism in the imperial [Kaiser] Germany of 1870 – 1918)."
Lots of Jewish people made it into the upper levels of the Soviet government, academia, etc. (and lots of them were murdered
too). I might skip reading these types of books until I get older. Too bleak. Hard enough reading about the day-to-day stuff here
without going back in time for more fun!
I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart.
I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia
was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it
up.
Keep smiling, Joe.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:58 am
Dave P. – I told you, you are a wealth of information, a walking encyclopedia. Interesting about your co-worker. Sounds like
it was a free-for-all in Russia. Yes, I totally agree that Putin has done and is doing all he can to bring his country back up.
Very difficult job he is doing, and I hope he is successful at keeping the West out as much as he can, at least until Russia is
strong and sure enough to invite them in on their own terms.
Now go and tell your wife what I said about you being a "walking encyclopedia". She'll probably have a good laugh. (Not that
you're not, but you know what she'll say: "Okay, smartie, now go and do the dishes.")
Chucky LeRoi , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 am
Just some small scale, local color kind of stuff, but living in the USA, west coast specifically, it was quite noticeable in
the mid to late '90's how many Russians with money were suddenly appearing. No apparent skills or 'jobs', but seemingly able to
pay for stuff. Expensive stuff.
A neighbor invited us to her 'place in the mountains', which turned out to be where a lumber company had almost terra-formed
an area and was selling off the results. Her advice: When you go to the lake (i.e., the low area now gathering runoff, paddle
boats rentals, concession stand) you will see a lot of men with huge stomachs and tiny Speedos. They will be very rude, pushy,
confrontational. Ignore them, DO NOT comment on their rudeness or try to deal with their manners. They are Russians, and the amount
of trouble it will stir up – and probable repercussions – are simply not worth it.
Back in town, the anecdotes start piling up quickly. I am talking crowbars through windows (for a perceived insult). A beating
where the victim – who was probably trying something shady – was so pulped the emergency room staff couldn't tell if the implement
used was a 2X4 or a baseball bat. When found he had with $3k in his pocket: robbery was not the motive. More traffic accidents
involving guys with very nice cars and serious attitude problems. I could go on. More and more often somewhere in the relating
of these incidents the phrase " this Russian guy " would come up. It was the increased use of this phrase that was so noticeable.
And now the disclaimer.
Before anybody goes off, I am not anti-Russian, Russo-phobic, what have you. I studied the Russian language in high school
and college (admittedly decades ago). My tax guy is Russian. I love him. My day to day interactions have led me to this pop psychology
observation: the extreme conditions that produced that people and culture produced extremes. When they are of the good, loving
, caring, cultured, helpful sort, you could ask for no better friends. The generosity can be embarrassing. When they are of the
materialistic, evil, self-centered don't f**k with me I am THE BADDEST ASS ON THE PLANET sort, the level of mania and self-importance
is impossible to deal with, just get as far away as possible. It's worked for me.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 8:10 pm
backwardsevolution,
thanks for the info. I'll add the book to the list of books onto my to-read list. As far as I know a Kibbutz could be described
as a Communist microcosm. The whole idea of Communism itself is based on Marx (a Jew by birth). A while ago I had started reading
"Mein Kampf". I've got to finish the book, in order to see if my assumption is correct. I guess that this book puts blame for
Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's.
The most known Russian Oligarchs that I've heard of are mainly of Jewish origin, but as far as I know they had been too young
to be commissars at the time of the demise of the USSR. At least one aspect I've read of many times is that a lot of them built
their fortunes with the help of quite shady business dealings.
With regard to President Putin I've read that he made a deal with the oligarchs: they should pay their taxes, keep/invest their
money in Russia and keep out of politics. In return he wouldn't dig too deep into their past. Right at the moment everybody in
the West is against President Putin, because he stopped the looting of his country and its citizens and that's something our Western
oligarchs and financial institutions don't like.
On a side note: Several years ago I had started to read several volumes about German history. Back then I didn't notice an
important aspect that should attract my attention a few years later when reading about the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Charlemagne
(Charles the Great) took over power from the Merovingians. Prior to becoming King of the Franks he had been Hausmeier (Mayor of
the Palace) for the Merovingians. Mayor of the Palace was the title of the manager of the household, which seems to be similar
to a procurator and/or accountant (bookkeeper). The similarity of the beginnings of both careers struck me. John D. Rockefeller
started as a bookkeeper. If you look at Bill Gates you'll realize that he was smart enough to buy an operating system for a few
dollars, improved it and sold it to IBM on a large scale. The widely celebrated Steve Jobs was basically the marketing guy, whilst
the real brain behind (the product) Apple had been Steve Wozniak.
Another side note: If we're going down the path of neo-liberalism it will lead us straight back to feudalism – at least if
the economy doesn't blow up (PCR, Michael Hudson, Mike Whitney, Mike Maloney, Jim Rogers, Richard D. Wolff, and many more economists
make excellent points that our present Western economy can't go on forever and is kept alive artificially).
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:50 am
Joe Average – somehow my reply to you ended up above your post. What? How did that happen? You can find it there. Thanks for
the interesting info about John D. Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. Some are good managers, others good at sales, while others
are the creative inventors.
Yes, Joe, I totally agree that we are headed back to feudalism. I don't think we'll have much choice as the oil is running
out. We'll probably be okay, but our children? I worry about them. They'll notice a big change in their lifetimes. The discovery
and capture of oil pulled forward a large population. As we scale back, we could be in trouble, food-wise. Or at least it looks
that way.
Thanks, Joe.
Miranda Keefe , July 14, 2017 at 5:48 am
Charlemagne did not take over from the Merovingians. The Mayor of the Palace was not an accountant.
During the 7th Century the Mayor of the Place more and more became the actual ruler of the Franks. The office had existed for
over a century and was basically the "prime minister" to the king. By the time Pepin of Herstal, a scion of a powerful Frankish
family, took the position in 680, the king was ceremonial leader doing ritual and the Mayor ruled- like the relationship of the
Emperor and the Shogun in Japan. In 687 Pepin's Austrasia conquered Neustria and Burgundy and he added "Duke of the Franks" to
his titles. The office became hereditary.
When Pepin died in 714 there was some unrest as nobles from various parts of the joint kingdoms attempted to get different
ones of his heirs in the office until his son Charles Martel took the reins in 718. This is the famous Charles Martel who defeated
the Moors at Tours in 732. But that was not his only accomplishment as he basically extended the Frankish kingdom to include Saxony.
Charles not only ruled but when the king died he picked which possible heir would become king. Finally near the end of his reign
he didn't even bother replacing the king and the throne was empty.
When Charles Martel died in 741 he followed Frankish custom and divided his kingdom among his sons. By 747 his younger son,
Pepin the Short, had consolidated his rule and with the support of the Pope, deposed the last Merovingian King and became the
first Carolingian King in 751- the dynasty taking its name from Charles Martel. Thus Pepin reunited the two aspects of the Frankish
ruler, combining the rule of the Mayor with the ceremonial reign of the King into the new Kingship.
Pepin expanded the kingdom beyond the Frankish lands even more and his son, Charlemagne, continued that. Charlemagne was 8
when his father took the title of King. Charlemagne never was the Mayor of the Palace, but grew up as the prince. He became King
of the Franks in 768 ruling with his brother, sole King in 781, and then started becoming King of other countries until he united
it all in 800 as the restored Western Roman Emperor.
When he died in 814 the Empire was divided into three Kingdoms and they never reunited again. The western one evolved into
France. The eastern one evolved in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually Germany. The middle one never solidified but became the
Low Countries, Switzerland, and the Italian states.
The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock
together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian
Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators:
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/
Since the inti-Russian tenor of the Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland is in accord with the US ziocons anti-Russian policies
(never mind all this fuss about WWII Jewish mass graves in Ukraine), "Chrysta" is totally approved by the US government.
Joe Average , July 14, 2017 at 11:32 pm
I'll reply to myself in order to send a response to backwardsevolution and Miranda Keefe.
For a change I'll be so bold to ignore gentleman style and reply in the order of the posts – instead of Ladies first.
backwardsevolution,
in my first paragraph I failed to make a clear distinction. I started with the remark that I'm adding the book "Two Hundred
Years Together" to my to-read list and then mentioned that I'm right now reading "Mein Kampf". All remarks after mentioning the
latter book are directed at this one – and not the one of Solzhenitsyn.
Miranda Keefe,
I'm aware that accountant isn't an exact characterization of the concept of a Mayor of the Palace. As a precaution I had added
the phrase "seems to be similar". You're correct with the statement that Charlemagne was descendant Karl Martel. At first I intended
to write that Karolinger (Carolings) took over from Merowinger (Merovingians), because those details are irrelevant to the point
that I wanted to make. It would've been an information overload. My main point was the power of accountants and related fields
such as sales and marketing. Neither John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs actually created their products from scratch.
Many of those who are listed as billionaires haven't been creators / inventors themselves. Completely decoupled from actual
production is banking. Warren Buffet is started as an investment salesman, later stock broker and investor. Oversimplified you
could describe this activity as accounting or sales. It's the same with George Soros and Carl Icahn. Without proper supervision
money managers (or accountants) had and still do screw those who had hired them. One of those victims is former billionaire heiress
Madeleine Schickedanz ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Schickedanz
). Generalized you could also say that BlackRock is your money manager accountant. If you've got some investment (that dates
back before 2008), which promises you a higher interest rate after a term of lets say 20 years, the company with which you have
the contract with may have invested your money with BlackRock. The financial crisis of 2008 has shown that finance (accountants
/ money managers) are taking over. Aren't investment bankers the ones who get paid large bonuses in case of success and don't
face hardly any consequences in case of failure? Well, whatever turn future might take, one thing is for sure: whenever SHTF even
the most colorful printed pieces of paper will not taste very well.
Cal , July 13, 2017 at 10:13 pm
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks on
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks . EVER SINCE THE Emperor Constantine established the legal
position of the church in the
Many Bolsheviks fled to Germany , taking with them some loot that enabled them to get established in Germany. Lots of invaluable
art work also.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 am
Cal – read about "History's Greatest Heist" on Amazon. Sounds interesting. Was one of the main reasons for the Czar's overthrow
to steal and then flee? It's got to have been on some minds. A lot of people got killed, and they would have had wedding rings,
gold, etc. That doesn't even include the wealth that could be stolen from the Czar. Was the theft just one of those things that
happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow in the first place, get some dough and run with
it?
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:22 pm
@ backwards
" Was the theft just one of those things that happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow"'
imo some of both. I am sure when they were selling off Russian valuables to finance their revolution a lot of them set aside
some loot for themselves.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:09 pm
Cal – thank you. Good books like this get us closer and closer to the truth. Thank goodness for these people.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 11:45 am
An autocratic oligarch would probably be a better description. He probably believes like other Synarchist financiers that they
should rightfully rule the World, and see democratic processes as heresy against "The Natural Order for human society", or some
such belief.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 12:13 pm
Looking up "A short definition of Synarchism (a Post-Napoleonic social phenomenon) by Lyndon LaRouche" would give much insight
into what's going on. People from the intelligence community made sure a copy of a 1940 army intelligence dossier labelled something
like "Synarchism:NAZI/Communist" got into Lyndon's hands. It speaks of the the Synarchist method of attacking a targeted society
from both extreme (Right-Left) ends of the political spectrum. I guess this is dialectics? I suppose the existence of the one
extreme legitimizes the harsh, anti-democratic/anti-human measures taken to exterminate it by the other extreme, actually destroying
the targeted society in the process. America, USSR, and (Sun Yat Sen's old Republic of) China were the targeted societies in the
pre-WWII/WWII yearsfor their "sins" of championing We The People against Oligarchy. FDR knew the Synarchist threat and sided with
Russia and China against Germany and Japan. He knew that, after dealing with the battlefield NAZIs, the "Boardroom" NAZIs would
have to be dealt with Post-War. That all changed with his death.The Synarchists are still at it today, hence all the rabid Russo-phobia,
the Pacific Pivot, and the drive towards war. This is all being foiled with Trump's friendly, cooperative approach towards Russia
and China.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Big Brother at work – always protecting us from upsetting information. How nice of him to insure our comfort. No need for us
to bother with all of this confusing stuff, he can do all that for us. The mainstream media will tell us all we need to know ..
(Virginia – please notice my use of irony.)
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Do you remember mike K when porn was censored, and there were two sides to every issue as compromise was always on the table?
Now porn is accessible on cable TV, and there is only one side to every issue, and that's I'm right about everything and your
not, what compromise with you?
Don't get me wrong, I don't really care how we deal with porn, but I am very concerned to why censorship is showing up whereas
we can't see certain things, for certain reasons we know nothing about. Also, I find it unnerving that we as a society continue
to stay so undivided. Sure, we can't all see the same things the same way, but maybe it's me, and I'm getting older by the minute,
but where is our cooperation to at least try and work with each other?
Always like reading your comments mike K Joe
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:09 pm
Joe,
when it comes to the choice of watching porn and bodies torn apart (real war pictures), I prefer the first one, although we
in the West should be confronted with the horrible pictures of what we're assisting/doing.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 5:27 pm
This is where the Two Joe's are alike.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 6:07 pm
I do remember those days Joe. I am 86 now, so a lot has changed since 1931. With the 'greed is good' philosophy in vogue now,
those who seek compromise are seen as suckers for the more single minded to take advantage of. Respect for rules of decency is
just about gone, especially at the top of the wealth pyramid.
Distraction from critical thinking, excellent observation ( please forget the NeoCon Demos they are responsible for half of
the nightmare USA society has become.
ranney , July 13, 2017 at 4:37 pm
Wow Robert, what a fascinating article! And how complicated things become "when first we practice to deceive".
Abe thank you for the link to Ritter's article; that's a really good one too!
John , July 13, 2017 at 4:40 pm
If we get into a shooting war with Russia and the human race somehow survives it Robert Parry' s name will one day appear in
the history books as the person who most thoroughly documented the events leading up to that war. He will be considered to be
a top historian as well as a top journalist.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:01 pm
"Browder, who abjured his American citizenship in 1998 to become a British subject, reveals more about his own selective advocacy
of democratic principles than about the film itself. He might recall that in his former homeland freedom of the press remains
a cherished value."
Abe – "never driven by the money". No, he would never be that type of guy (sarc)!
"It's hard to know what Browder will do next. He rules out any government ambitions, instead saying he can achieve more by
lobbying it.
This summer, he says he met "big Hollywood players" in a bid to turn his book into a major film.
"The most important next step in the campaign is to adapt the book into a Hollywood feature film," he says. "I have been approached
by many film-makers and spent part of the summer in LA meeting with screenwriters, producers and directors to figure out what
the best constellation of players will be on this.
"There are a lot of people looking at it. It's still difficult to say who we will end up choosing. There are many interesting
options, but I'm not going to name any names."
What the ..? I can see it now, George Clooney in the lead role, Mr. White Helmets himself, with his twins in tow.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:56 am
Is it not impressive how money buys out reality in the modern world? This is why one can safely assume that whatever is told
in the MSM is completely opposite to the truth. Would MSM have to push it if it were the truth? You may call this Kiza's Law if
you like (modestly): " The truth is always opposite to what MSM say! " The 0.1% of situations where this is not the case
is the margin of error.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:39 pm
"no figure in this saga has a more tangled family relationship with the Kremlin than the London-based hedge fund manager Bill
Browder [ ]
"there's a reticence in his Jewish narrative. One of his first jobs in London is with the investment operation of the publishing
billionaire Robert Maxwell. As it happens, Maxwell was originally a Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor who fled and became a decorated
British soldier, then helped in 1948 to set up the secret arms supply line to newly independent Israel from communist Czechoslovakia.
He was also rumored to be a longtime Mossad agent. But you learn none of that from Browder's memoir.
"The silence is particularly striking because when Browder launches his own fund, he hires a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel,
to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection
come about? Was it through Maxwell? Wherever it started, the origin would add to the story. Why not tell it?
"When Browder sets up his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management -- named for the famed czarist-era St. Petersburg art museum,
though that's not explained either -- his first investor is Beny Steinmetz, the Israeli diamond billionaire. Browder tells how
Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a
partner but also a mentor and friend.
"Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel's Shas party,
the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York's Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University,
the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it's surprising
that none of it gets mentioned.
"It's possible that Browder's reticence about his Jewish connections is simply another instance of the inarticulateness that
seizes so many American Jews when they try to address their Jewishness."
Abe – what a web. Money makes money, doesn't it? It's often what club you belong to and who you know. I remember a millionaire
in my area long ago who went bankrupt. The wealthy simply chipped in, gave him some start-up money, and he was off to the races
again. Simple as that. And I would think that the Jews are an even tighter group who invest with each other, are privy to inside
information, get laws changed in favor of each other, pay people off when one gets in trouble. Browder seems a shifty sort. As
the article says, he leaves a lot out.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 11:37 pm
In 1988, Stanton Wheeler (Yale University – Law School), David L. Weisburd (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; George Mason University
– The Department of Criminology, Law & Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law). Elin Waring (Yale University
– Law School), and Nancy Bode (Government of the State of Minnesota) published a major study on white collar crime in America.
Part of a larger program of research on white-collar crime supported by a grant from the United States Department of Justice's
National Institute of Justice, the study included "the more special forms associated with the abuse of political power [ ] or
abuse of financial power". The study was also published as a Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper
The research team noted that Jews were over-represented relative to their share of the U.S. population:
"With respect to religion, there is one clear finding. Although many in both white collar and common crime categories do not
claim a particular religious faith [ ] It would be a fair summary of our. data to say that, demographically speaking, white collar
offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews."
In 1991, David L. Weisburd published his study of Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts,
Weisburd found that although Jews comprised only around 2% of the United States population, they contributed at least 9% of lower
category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15% of moderate category white-collar crimes
(mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33% of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud).
Weisburg showed greater frequency of Jewish offenders at the top of the hierarchy of white collar crime. In Weisbug's sample of
financial crime in America, Jews were responsible for 23.9%.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:26 am
What I find most interesting is how Putin handles the Jews.
It is obvious that he is the one who saved the country of Russia from the looting of the 90s by the Russian-American Jewish
mafia. This is the most direct explanation for his demonisation in the West, his feat will never be forgiven, not even in history
books (a demon forever). Even to this day, for example in Syria, Putin's main confrontation is not against US then against the
Zionist Jews, whose principal tool is US. Yet, there is not a single anti-Semitic sentence that Putin ever uttered. Also, Putin
let the Jewish oligarchs who plundered Russia keep their money if they accepted the authority of the Russian state, kept employing
Russians and paying Russian taxes. But he openly confronted those who refused (Berezovsky, Khodorovsky etc). Furthermore, Putin
lets Israel bomb Syria under his protection to abandon. Finally, Putin is known in Russia as a great supporter of Jews and Israel,
almost a good friend of Nutty Yahoo.
Therefore, it appears to me that the Putin's principal strategy is to appeal to the honest Jewish majority to restrain the
criminal Jewish minority (including the criminally insane), to divide them instead of confronting them all as a group, which is
what the anti-Semitic Europeans have traditionally been doing. His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews.
I still do not know if his strategy will succeed in the long run, but it certainly is an interesting new approach (unless I do
not know history enough) to an ancient problem. It is almost funny how so many US people think that the problem with the nefarious
Jewish money power started with US, if they are even aware of it.
Cal , July 16, 2017 at 5:41 am
" His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews. "
The Jews have no power without their uber Jew money men, most of whom are ardent Zionist.
And because they get some benefits from the lobbying heft of the Zionist control of congress they arent going to go against them.
In this 2015 tirade, Browder declared "Someone has to punch Putin in the nose" and urged "supplying arms to the Ukrainians
and putting troops, NATO troops, in all of the surrounding countries".
The choice of Mozgovaya as interviewer was significant to promote Browder with the Russian Jewish community abroad.
Born in the Soviet Union in 1979, Mozgovaya immigrated to Israel with her family in 1990. She became a correspondent for the
Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 2000. Although working most of the time in Hebrew, her reports in Russian appeared in various
publications in Russia.
Mozgovaya covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, including interviews with President Victor Yushenko and his partner-rival
Yulia Timoshenko, as well as the Russian Mafia and Russian oligarchs. During the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Mozgovaya gave
one of the last interviews with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She interviewed Garry Kasparov, Edward Limonov, Boris
Berezovsky, Chechen exiles such as Ahmed Zakaev, and the widow of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
In 2008, Mozgovaya left Yedioth Ahronoth to become the Washington Bureau Chief for Haaretz newspaper in Washington, D.C.. She
was a frequent lecturer on Israel and Middle Eastern affairs at U.S. think-tanks. In 2013, Mozgovaya started working at the Voice
of America.
HIDE BEHIND , July 13, 2017 at 7:43 pm
Gramps was decended from an old Irish New England Yankee lineage and in my youth he always dragged me along when the town meetings
were held, so my ideas of American DEmocracy stem from that background, one of open participation.
The local newspapers had more social chit chat than political news of international or for that mstter State or Federal shenanigansbut
everu member in that far flung settled communit read them from front to back; ss a child I got to read the funny and sports pages
until Gramps got finidhed reading the "News Section, always the news first yhen the lesser BS when time allowed,this habit instilled
in me the sence of
priority.
Aftrr I had read his dection of paper he would talk with me,even being a yonker, in a serious but opinionated manner, of the Editorial
section which had local commentary letterd to the editor as large as somtimes too pages.
I wonder today at which section of papersf at all, is read by american public, and at how manyadults discuss importsn news worthy
tppics with their children.
At advent of TV we still had trustworthy journalist to finally be seen after years of but reading their columns or listening on
radios,almost tottaly all males but men of honesty and character, and worthy of trust.
They wrre a part of all social stratas, had lived real lives and yes most eere well educated but not the elitist thinking jrrks
who are no more than parrots repeating whatevrr a teleprompter or bias of their employers say to write.
Wrll back to Gramps and hid home spun wisdom: He alwsys ,and shoeed by example at those old and somrtimes boistrous town Halls,
that first you askef a question, thought about the answer, and then questioned the answer.
This made the one being question responsible for the words he spoke.
So those who have doubts by a presumed independent journalist, damn right they should question his motives, which in reality begin
to answer our unspoken questions we can no longer ask those boobs for bombs and political sychophants and their paymasters of
popular media outlets.
As one who likes effeciency in prodution one monitors data to spot trends and sny aberations bring questions so yes I note this
journalist deviation from the norms as well.
I can only question the why, by looking at data from surrounding trends in order to later be able to question his answers.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:07 am
Hide Behind – sounds like you had a smart grandpa, and someone who cared enough about you to talk things over with you (even
though he was opinionated). I try to talk things over with my kids, sometimes too much. They're known on occasion to say, "Okay,
enough. We're full." I wait a few days, and then fill them up some more! Ha.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 10:53 pm
Here's a thought; will letting go of Trump Jr's infraction cancel out a guilty verdict of Hillary Clinton's transgressions?
I keep hearing Hillary references while people defend Donald Trump Jr over his meeting with Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya.
My thinking started over how I keep hearing pundits speak to Trump Jr's 'intent'. Didn't Comey find Hillary impossible to prosecute
due to her lack of 'intent'? Actually I always thought that to be prosecuted under espionage charges, the law didn't need to prove
intent, but then again we are talking about Hillary here.
The more I keep hearing Trump defenders make mention of Hillary's deliberate mistakes, and the more I keep hearing Democrates
point to Donald Jr's opportunistic failures, the more similarity I see between the two rivals, and the more I see an agreed upon
truce ending up in a tie. Remember we live in a one party system with two wings.
Am I going down the wrong road here, or could forgiving Trump Jr allow Hillary to get a free get out of jail card?
F. G. Sanford , July 14, 2017 at 12:42 am
I've been saying all along, our government is just a big can of worms, and neither side can expose the other without opening
it. But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers like it's a game of chicken. My guess is, everybody is gonna get
a free pass. I read somewhere that Preet Bharara had the goods on a whole bunch of bankers, but he sat on it clear up to the election.
Then, he got fired. So much for draining the swamp. If they prosecute Hillary, it looks like a grudge match. If they prosecute
Junior, it looks like revenge. If they prosecute Lynch, it looks like racism. When you deal with a government this corrupt, everybody
looks innocent by comparison. I'm still betting nobody goes to jail, as long as the "deep state" thinks they have Trump under
control.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 1:29 am
It's like we are sitting on the top of a hill looking down at a bunch of little armies attacking each other, or something.
I'm really screwy, I have contemplated to if Petraues dropped a dime on himself for having a extra martial affair, just to
get out of the Benghazi mess. Just thought I'd tell you that for full disclosure.
When it comes to Hillary, does anyone remember how in the beginning of her email investigation she pointed to Colin Powell
setting precedent to use a private computer? That little snitch Hillary is always the one when caught to start pointing the finger
.she would never have lasted in the Mafia, but she's smart enough to know what works best in Washington DC.
I'm just starting to see the magic; get the goods on Trump Jr then make a deal with the new FBI director.
Okay go ahead and laugh, but before you do pass the popcorn, and let's see how this all plays out.
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
Joe
Lisa , July 14, 2017 at 4:22 am
"Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see."
Joe, where does this quote originate? Or is it a paraphrase?
I once had an American lecturer (political science) at the university, and he stressed the idea that we should not believe anything
we read or hear and only half of what we see. This was l-o-o-ng ago, in the 60's.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 10:59 am
The first time I ever heard that line, 'believe nothing of what you see', was a friend of mine said it after we watched Roberto
Clemente throw a third base runner out going towards home plate, as Robert threw the ball without a bounce to the catcher who
was standing up, from the deep right field corner of the field .oh those were the days.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 9:12 pm
JT,
Clemente had an unbelievable arm! The consummate baseball player I have family in western PA, an uncle your age in fact who remembers
Clemente well. Roberto also happened to be a great human being.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 pm
I got loss at Forbes Field. I was seven years old, it was 1957. I got separated from my older cousin, we got in for 50 cents
to sit in the left field bleachers. Like I said I loss my older cousin so I walked, and walked, and just about the time I wanted
my mum the most I saw daylight. I followed the daylight out of the big garage door, and I was standing within a foot of this long
white foul line. All of a sudden this Black guy started yelling at me in somekind of broken English to, 'get off the field, get
out of here'. Then I felt a field ushers hand grab my shoulder, and as I turned I saw my cousin standing on the fan side of the
right field side of the field. The usher picked me up and threw me over to my cousin, with a warning for him to keep his eye on
me. That Black baseball player was a young rookie who was recently just drafted from the then Brooklyn Dodgers .#21 Roberto Clemente.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:12 pm
You were a charmed boy and now you are a charmed man. Great story life is a Field of Dreams sometimes.
Zachary Smith , July 15, 2017 at 9:00 pm
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
My introduction to this had the wording the other way around:
"Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."
This was because the workplace was saturated with rumors, and unfortunately there was a practice of management and union representatives
"play-acting" for their audience. So what you "saw" was as likely as not a little theatrical production with no real meaning whatever.
The two fellows shouting at each other might well be laughing about it over a cup of coffee an hour later.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 am
Sanford – "But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers " That's funny writing.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:20 pm
yessir, love it
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:41 am
Absolutely, one of the best political metaphors ever (unfortunately works in English language only).
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:19 pm
BTW, they are flashing at each other not only can openers then also jail cells and grassy knolls these days. But the can openers
would still be most scary.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 2:13 am
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries, like binary options,
have been allowed to flourish here.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Despite his service as a useful idiot propagating the Magnitsky Myth, Bharara discovered that for Russian Jewish oligarchs,
criminals and scam artists, the motto is "Nikogda ne zabyt'!" Perhaps more recognizable by the German phrase: "Niemals vergessen!"
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 3:00 am
Abe – wow, what a story. I guess it's lucrative to "never forget"! Bandits.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
NCJRS Abstract
The document referenced below is part of the NCJRS Library collection. To conduct further searches of the collection, visit the
NCJRS Abstracts Database. See the Obtain Documents page for direction on how to access resources online, via mail, through interlibrary
loans, or in a local library.
NCJ Number: NCJ 006180
Title: CRIMINALITY AMONG JEWS – AN OVERVIEW
United States of America
Journal: ISSUES IN CRIMINOLOGY Volume:6 Issue:2 Dated:(SUMMER 1971) Pages:1-39
Date Published: 1971
Page Count: 15
.
Abstract: THE CONCLUSION OF MOST STUDIES IS THAT JEWS HAVE A LOW CRIME RATE. IT IS LOWER THAN THAT OF NON-JEWS TAKEN AS A WHOLE,
LOWER THAN THAT OF OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS,
HOWEVER, THE JEWISH CRIME RATE TENDS TO BE HIGHER THAN THAT OF NONJEWS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS FOR WHITE-COLLAR OFFENSES,
THAT IS, COMMERCIAL OR COMMERCIALLY RELATED CRIMES, SUCH AS FRAUD, FRAUDULENT BANKRUPTCY, AND EMBEZZLEMENT.
Index Term(s): Behavioral and Social Sciences ; Adult offenders ; Minorities ; Behavioral science research ; Offender classification
Country: United States of America
Language: English
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Cal – that does not surprise me at all. Of course they would be where the money is, and once you have money, you get nothing
but the best defense. "I've got time and money on my side. Go ahead and take me to court. I'll string this thing along and it'll
cost you a fortune. So let's deal. I'm good with a fine."
A rap on the knuckles, a fine, and no court case, no discovery of the truth that the people can see. Of course they'd be there.
That IS the only place to be if you want to be a true criminal.
Skip Scott , July 15, 2017 at 1:57 pm
Thanks again Abe, you are a wealth of information. I think you have to allow for anyone to make a mistake, and Bharara has
done a lot of good.
Longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz and his team have directed their grievance at Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior
White House adviser.
Citing a person familiar with Trump's legal team, The Times said Kasowitz has bristled at Kushner's "whispering in the president's
ear" about stories on the Russia investigation without telling Kasowitz and his team.
The Times' source said the attorneys, who were hired as private counsel to Trump in light of the Russia investigation, view Kushner
"as an obstacle and a freelancer" motivated to protect himself over over Trump. The lawyers reportedly told colleagues the work
environment among Trump's inner circle was untenable, The Times said, suggesting Kasowitz could resign
Second
Who thinks Jared works for Trump? I don't.
Jared works for his father Charles Kushner, the former jail bird who hired prostitutes to blackmail his brother in law into not
testifying against him. Jared spent every weekend his father was in prison visiting him.,,they are inseparable.
Third
So what is Jared doing in his WH position to help his father and his failing RE empire?
Trying to get loans from China, Russia, Qatar,Qatar
And why Is Robert Mueller Probing Jared Kushner's Finances?
Because of this no doubt:..seeking a loan for the Kushners from a Russian bank.
The White House and the bank have offered differing accounts of the Kushner-Gorkov sit-down. While the White House said Kushner
met Gorkov and other foreign representatives as a transition official to "help advance the president's foreign policy goals."
Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB, said it was part of talks with business leaders about the bank's development strategy.
It said Kushner was representing Kushner companies, his family real estate empire.
Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before http://www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Americas › US politics
2 days ago –
Jared Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500m loan from one of Qatar's richest businessmen, before pushing his father-in-law
to toe a hard line with the country, it has been alleged. This intersection between Mr Kushner's real estate dealings and his
father-in-law's
The Kushners are about to lose their shirts..unless one of those foreign country's banks gives them the money.
At Kushners' Flagship Building, Mounting Debt and a Foundered Deal https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html
The Fifth Avenue skyscraper was supposed to be the Kushner Companies' flagship in the heart of Manhattan -- a record-setting $1.8
billion souvenir proclaiming that the New Jersey developers Charles Kushner and his son Jared were playing in the big leagues.
And while it has been a visible symbol of their status, it has also it has also been a financial headache almost from the start.
On Wednesday, the Kushners announced that talks had broken off with a Chinese financial conglomerate for a deal worth billions
to redevelop the 41-story tower, at 666 Fifth Avenue, into a flashy 80-story ultraluxury skyscraper comprising a chic retail mall,
a hotel and high-priced condominiums"
Get these cockroaches out of the WH please.,,,Jared and his sister are running around the world trying to get money in exchange
for giving them something from the Trump WH.
The NYC skyline displays 666 in really really really HUGE !!!! numbers. Perhaps the USA government as Cheney announced has
gone to the very very very DARK side.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:16 pm
Yea 666 probably isn't a coincidence .lol
Chris Kinder , July 14, 2017 at 12:15 am
What I think most comments overlook here is the following: the US is the primary imperialist aggressor in the world today,
and Russia, though it is an imperialist competitor, is much weaker and is generally losing ground. Early on, the US promised that
NATO would not be extended into Eastern Europe, but now look at what's happened: not only does the US have NATO allies and and
missiles in Eastern Europe, but it also engineered a coup against a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, and is now trying to drive
Russia out of Eastern Ukraine, as in Crimea and the Donbass and other areas of Eastern Ukraine, which are basically Russian going
back more than a century. Putin is pretty mild compered to the US' aggressive stance. That's number one.
Number two is that the current anti-Russian hysteria in the US is all about maintaining the same war-mongering stance against
Russia that existed in the cold war, and also about washing clean the Democratic Party leadership's crimes in the last election.
Did the Russians hack the election? Maybe they tried, but the point is that what was exposed–the emails etc–were true information!
They show that the DNC worked to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination, and hide crimes of the Clintons'! These exposures,
not any Russian connection to the exposures, are what really lost Hillary the election.
So, what is going on here? The Democrats are trying to hide their many transgressions behind an anti-Russian scare, why? Because
it is working, and because it fits in with US imperialist anti-Russian aims which span the entire post-war period, and continue
today. And because it might help get Trump impeached. I would not mind that result one bit, but the Democrats are no alternative:
that has been shown to be true over and over again.
This is all part of the US attempt to be the dominant imperialist power in the world–something which it has pursued since the
end of the last world war, and something which both Democrats and Republicans–ie, the US ruling class behind them–are committed
to. Revolutionaries say: the main enemy is at home, and that is what I say now. That is no endorsement of Russian imperialism,
but a rejection of all imperialism and the capitalist exploitative system that gives rise to it.
Thanks for your attention -- Chris Kinder
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:58 am
Chris – good post. Thanks.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 11:35 am
Chris, I think most commenters here are aware of everything you summarized above, but we just don't put all that in each individual
post.
Paranam Kid , July 14, 2017 at 6:40 am
It is ironic that Browder on his website describes himself as running a battle against corporate corruption in Russia, and
there is a quote by Walter Isaacson: "Bill Browder is an amazing moral crusader".
http://www.billbrowder.com/bio
HIDE BEHIND , July 14, 2017 at 10:02 am
One cannot talk of Russian monry laundering in US without exposing the Jewish Israeli and many AIPAC connections.
I studied not so much the Jewish Orthodoxy but mainly the evolution of noth their outlook upon G.. but also how those who do not
believe in a G.. and still keep their cultural cohesiveness
The largest money laundering group in US is
both Jewish and Israeli, and while helping those of their cultural similarities, their ecpertise goes. Very deep in Eastern U.S.
politics and especially strong in all commercial real estate, funding, setting up bribes to permitting officials,contractors and
owners of construvtion firms.
Financials some quite large are within this Jew/Israel connections, as all they who offshore need those proper connections to
do so. take bribes need the funding cleaned and
flow out through very large tax free Jewish Charity Orgd, the largest ones are those of Orthodox.
GOV Christie years ago headed the largest sting operation to try and uproot what at that time he believed was just statewide tax
fraud and laundering operations, many odd cash flows into political party hacks running for evrry gov position electefd or appointed.
Catchng a member of one of the most influential Orthofox familys mrmbers, that member rolled on many many indivifuals of his own
culture.
It was only when Vhristies investigative team began turning up far larger cases of laundering and political donations thst msinly
centered in NY Stste and City, fid he then find out howuch power this grouping had.
Soon darn near every AIPAC aided elected politico from city state and rspecially Congress was warning him to end investigation.
Which he did.
His reward was for his fat ass to be funded for a run towards US Presidency, without any visibly open opposition by that cultural
grouping.
No it is not odd for Jewery to charge goyim usury or to aid in political schemes that advance their groups aims.
One thing to remenber by the Bible thumpers who delay any talks of Israel ; Christian Zionist, is that to be of their culture
one does not have to believe in G.
There are a few excellent books written about early days Jewish immigrant Pre Irish andblre Sicilian mafias.
The Jewish one remainst to this day but are as well orgNized as the untold history of what is known as "The Southern mafia.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Hide Behind – fascinating! I guess if we ever knew half of what goes on behind the scenes, we'd be shocked. We only ever know
things like this exist when people like you enlighten us, or when there's a blockbuster movie about it. Thanks.
Deborah Andrew , July 14, 2017 at 10:03 am
With great respect and appreciation for your writing about the current unsubstantiated conversations/writing about 'Russia-gate'
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts. Analysis and opinions,
that include the facts, may differ. However, it is the readers who will evaluate the varied analysis and opinions when they include
all the facts known. I raise this question, as it seems to me that we have a binary approach to our thinking and decision making.
Something is either good or bad, this or that. Sides are taken. Labels are added (such as conservative and progressive). Would
we not be wiser and would our decision making not be wiser if it were based on a set of principles? My own preference: the precautionary
principle and the principle of do no harm. I am suggesting that we abandon the phrase and notion of the 'other side of the story'
and replace it with: based on the facts now known, or, based on all the facts revealed to date or, until more facts are revealed
it appears
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts.
Replying to a question with another question isn't really good form, but given my knowledge level of this case I can see no
alternative.
How do you propose to determine the "facts" when virtually none of the characters involved in the affair appear trustworthy?
Also, there is a lot of evidence (displayed by Mr. Parry) that another set of "characters" we call the Mainstream Media are
extremely biased and one-sided with their coverage of the story.
Again – Where am I going to find those "facts" you speak of?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:52 am
Spot on.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:02 pm
Deborah Andrew – good comment, but the problem is that we never seem to get "the other side of the story" from the MSM. You
are right in pointing out that "the other side of the story" probably isn't ALL there is (as nothing is completely black and white),
but at least it's something. The only way we can ever get to the truth is to put the facts together and question them, but how
are you going to do that when the facts are kept away from us?
It can be very frustrating, can't it, Deborah? Cheers.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:52 pm
Nice comment.
None of us can know the exact truth of anything we ourselves haven't seen or been involved in. The best we can do is try to
find trusted sources, be objective, analytical and compare different stories and known the backgrounds and possible agendas of
the people involved in a issue or story.
We can use some clues to help us cull thru what we hear and read.
Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of
the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players,
or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.
1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public
figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.
2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the
topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors
and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially
well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can
associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which
can have no basis in fact.
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself
look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the
opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy
them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real
issues.
5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though
other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal',
'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and
so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before
an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments
where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning -- simply make an accusation
or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint.
7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal
agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.
8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon'
and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely
why or citing sources.
9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have
any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for
maximum effect.
10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man -- usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility,
someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with – a kind of investment for the future should
the matter not be so easily contained.) Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt
with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can
usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues
-- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.
11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the 'high road' and 'confess'
with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it
all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, 'just isn't so.' Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later,
and even publicly 'call for an end to the nonsense' because you have already 'done the right thing.' Done properly, this can garner
sympathy and respect for 'coming clean' and 'owning up' to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.
12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players
and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to lose
interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.
13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which
forbears any actual material fact.
14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which
works best with issues qualifying for rule 10.
15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions
in place.
16. Vanish evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue.
17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion
with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well
with companions who can 'argue' with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more
key issues.
18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them
into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat
less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses
the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what
material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for
the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed
or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically
deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made
by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.
20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations
-- as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies
for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.
21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and
effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to
be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful
evidence and that the evidence is sealed and unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the
matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be
used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim.
22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to
forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you
must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.
23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted
media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.
24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution
so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction
of theircharacter by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging
their health.
25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to
avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen. .
Note: There are other ways to attack truth, but these listed are the most common, and others are likely derivatives of these.
In the end, you can usually spot the professional disinfo players by one or more of seven (now 8) distinct traits:
Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
by H. Michael Sweeney
copyright (c) 1997, 2000 All rights reserved
(Revised April 2000 – formerly SEVEN Traits)
1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references
or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their
authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility.
2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators
supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. .
3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior
record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the
topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.
4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally
in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved.
Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute
opponent presentation strength.
5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe
JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a
single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone
on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain.Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior
motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do.
6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and
persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment,
ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will
deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms
of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek
to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.
7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really
knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep
within.
8) BONUS TRAIT: Time Constant. Wth respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen
to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation:
1) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players
can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFO IN A NG ONLY WORKS IF THE
READER SEES IT – FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth.
2) When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR – there will usually be a minimum
of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get
permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command.
3) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay
– the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important
with respect to potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin.
Michael Kenny , July 14, 2017 at 11:22 am
I don't really see Mr Parry's point. The banning of Nekrasov's film isn't proof of the accuracy of its contents and even less
does it prove that anything that runs counter to Nekrasov's argument is false. Nor does proving that a mainstream meida story
is false prove that an internet story saying the opposite is true. "A calls B a liar. B proves that A is a liar. That proves that
B is truthful." Not very logical! What seems to be established is that the lawyer in question represents a Russian-owned company,
a money-laundering prosecution against which was settled last May on the basis of what the company called a "surprise" offer from
prosecutors that was "too good to refuse". This "Russian government attorney" (dixit Goldstone) had information concerning illegal
campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr jumped at it and it makes no difference whether he was tricked
or even whether he actually got anything, his intent was clear. In addition DNC "dirt" did indeed appear on the internet via Wikileaks,
just as "dirt" appeared in the French election. MacronLeaks proves Russiagate and "Juniorgate" confirms MacronLeaks. The question
now is did Trump, as president, intervene to bring about this "too good to refuse" offer? That question cannot just be written
off with the "no evidence" argument.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 1:40 pm
God, you are persistent if nothing else. Keep repeating the same lie until it is taken as true, just like the MSM. You say
that Russia-gate, Macron leaks, etc can't be written off with the "no evidence" argument (how is that logical?), and then you
trash a film you haven't even seen because it doesn't fit your narrative. Maybe some evidence is provided in the film, did you
consider that possibility? That fact that Nekrasov started out to make a pro Broder film, and then switched sides, leads me to
believe he found some disturbing evidence. And if you look into Nekrasov you will find that he is no fan of Putin, so one has
to wonder what his motive is if he is lying.
I am wondering if you ever look back at previous posts, because you never reply to a rebuttal. If you did, you would see that
you are almost universally seen by the commenters here as a troll. If you are being paid, I suppose it might not matter much to
you. However, your employer should look for someone with more intelligent arguments. He is wasting his money on you.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 9:27 pm
Propaganda trolls attempt to trash the information space by dismissing, distracting, diverting, denying, deceiving and distorting
the facts.
The trolls aim at confusing rather than convincing the audience.
The tag team troll performance of "Michael Kenny" and "David" is accompanied by loud declarations that they have "logic" on
their side and "evidence" somewhere. Then they shriek that they're being "censored".
Propaganda trolls target the comments section of independent investigative journalism sites like Consortium News, typically
showing up when articles discuss the West's "regime change" wars and deception operations.
Pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda trolls also strive to discredit websites, articles, and videos critical of Israel and Zionism.
Hasbara smear tactics have intensified due to increasing Israeli threats of military aggression, Israeli collusion with the United
States in "regime change" projects from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and Israeli links to international organized crime
and terrorism in Syria.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:04 am
Gee Abe, you are a magician (and I thought that you only quote excellent articles). Short and sharp.
Abe , July 15, 2017 at 4:15 pm
When they have a hard time selling that they're being "censored" (after more than a dozen comments), trolls complain that they're
being "dismissed" and "invalidated" by "hostile voices".
exiled off mainstreet , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 pm
Aaron Kesel, in Activistpost documents the links between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the company engaged by the Clintons
to prepare the defamatory Christopher Steele Dossier against Trump later used by Comey to help gin up the Russian influence conspiracy
theory. In the article, it is true the GPS connection may have involved her lobbying efforts to overturn the Magnitsky law, not
the dossier, but it is also interesting that she is on record as anti-Trump and having associations with Clinton democrats. Though
it may have been part of the beginnings of a conspiracy, the conspiracy may have developed later and the meeting became something
they related back to to bolster this fraudulent dangerous initiative.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 pm
I think as you say Skip that most on this blog have seen through Michael Kenny's stuff. Nobody's buying it. He's harmless.
If he's here on his own dime, if we don't feed him, he will get bored and go away. If he's being payed, he may persist, but so
what. Sometimes I check the MSM just to see what the propaganda line is. Kenny is like that; his shallow arguments tell me what
we must counter to wake people up.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Yeah mike k, I know you're right. I don't know why I let the guy get under my skin. Perhaps it's because he never responds
to a rebuttal.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:14 am
Then you would have to waste more time rebutting the (equally empty) rebuttal.
The second thing is that many trolls suffer from DID, that is the Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka sock puppetry. There
is a bit of similarity in argument between David and Michael and HAWKINS, only one of them rebuts quite often.
Another excellent article! I wrote a very detailed
blog post
in which I methodically take apart the latest "revelation" about Donald Trump Jr.'s emails. I talk a lot about the Magnitsky
Act, which is very relevant to this whole story.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 4:43 pm
I always like reading your articles Philippe, you have a real talent. Maybe read what I wrote above, but I'm sensing this Trump
Jr affair will help Hillary more than anything, to give her a reprieve from any further FBI investigations. I mean somehow, I'm
sure by Hillary's standards and desires, that this whole crazy investigation thing has to end. So, would it not seem reasonable
to believe that by allowing Donald Jr to be taken off the hook, that Hillary likewise will enjoy the taste of forgiveness?
Tell me if you think this Donald Trump Jr scandal could lead to this Joe
PS if so this could be a good next article to write there I go telling the band what to play, but seriously if this Russian
conclusion episode goes on much longer, could you not see a grand bargain and a deal being made?
Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you like the blog. I wasn't under the impression that Clinton was under any particular
danger from the Justice Department, but even if she was, she doesn't have the power to stop this Trump/Russia collusion nonsense
because it's pushed by a lot of people that have nothing to do with her except for the fact that they would have preferred her
to win.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Excellent summary and analysis, Philippe. Key observation:
"as even the New York Times admits, there is no evidence that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr., Jared
Kushner and Paul Manafort for 20-30 minutes on 9 June 2016, provided any such information during that meeting. Donald Trump Jr.
said that, although he asked her about it, she didn't give them anything on Clinton, but talked to him about the Magnitsky Act
and Russia's decision to block adoption by American couples in retaliation. Of course, if we just had his word, we'd have no particularly
good reason to believe him. But the fact remains that no documents of the sort described in Goldstone's ridiculous email ever
surfaced during the campaign, which makes what he is saying about how the meeting went down pretty convincing, at least on this
specific point. It should be noted that Donald Trump Jr. has offered to testify under oath about anything related to this meeting.
Moreover, he also said during the interview he gave to Sean Hannity that there was no follow-up to this meeting, which is unlikely
to be a lie since he must know that, given the hysteria about this meeting, it would come out. He may not be the brightest guy
in the world, but surely he or at least the people who advised him before that interview are not that stupid."
Your own necpluribus article was one of the best I've seen summarising the whole controversy, and your exhaustive responses
to the pro-deep state critics was edifying. I am now convinced that your view of Veselnitskaya's role in the affair and the nature
her connections to the dossier drafting company GPS being based on their unrelated work on the magnitsky law is accurate.
"Bill Browder, born into a notable Jewish family in Chicago, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist
Party USA,[2] and the son of Eva (Tislowitz) and Felix Browder, a mathematician. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and attended
the University of Chicago where he studied economics. He received an MBA from Stanford Business School[3] in 1989 where his classmates
included Gary Kremen and Rich Kelley. In 1998, Browder gave up his US citizenship and became a British citizen.[4] Prior to setting
up Hermitage, Browder worked in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group[5] in London and managed the Russian
proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.[6]"
Rake , July 15, 2017 at 9:13 am
Successfully keeping a salient argument from being heard is scary, given the social media and alternative media players who
are all ripe to uncover a bombshell. Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks.
"Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks."
Agree.
P. Clark , July 15, 2017 at 12:01 pm
When Trump suggested that a Mexican-American judge might be biased because of this ethnicity the media said this was racist.
Yet these same outlets like the New York Times are now routinely questioning Russian-American loyalty because of their ethnicity.
As usual a ridiculous double standard. Basically the assumption is all Russians are bad. We didn't even have this during the cold
war.
Cal , July 15, 2017 at 8:10 pm
Yes indeed P. Clark .that kind or hypocrisy makes my head explode!
MichaelAngeloRaphaelo , July 15, 2017 at 12:17 pm
Enough's Enough
STOP DNC/DEMs
#CryBabyFakeNewsBS
Support Duly ELECTED
@POTUS @realDonaldTrump
#BoycottFakeNewsSponsors
#DrainTheSwamp
#MAGA
Wow, I just learned via this article that in US Nekrasov is labeled as "pro-Kremlin" by WaPo. That's just too funny. He's in
a relationship with a Finnish MEP Heidi Hautala, who is very well known for her anti-Russia mentality. Nekrasov is defenetly anti-Kremlin
if something. He was supposed to make an anti-Kremlin documentary, but the facts turned out to be different than he thought, but
still finished his documentary.
The lengths to which the Neo Conservative War Cabal will go to destroy freedom of speech and access to alternative news sources
underscores that the United States is becoming an Orwellian agitation-propaganda police state equally dedicated to igniting World
War III for Netanyahu, the Central Banks, our Wahhabic Petrodollar Partners, and a pipeline consortium or two. The Old American
Republic is dead.
Roy G Biv , July 15, 2017 at 4:38 pm
Interesting to note that each and everyone of David's comments were bleached from this page. Looks like he was right about
the censorship. Sad.
Duly noted Abe. But you should adhere to the first part of the statement that you somehow forgot to include:
From Editor Robert Parry: At Consortiumnews, we welcome substantive comments about our articles, but comments should avoid
abusive language toward other commenters or our writers, racial or religious slurs (including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia),
and allegations that are unsupported by facts.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:06 pm
My favorite was David's claim that he contributed to this zine whilst it was publishing articles not to his liking (/sarc).
I kindly reminded him that people pay much more money to have publishing the way they like it – for example how much Bezos paid
for Washington Post, or Omidyar to establish The Intercept.
Except for such funny component, David's comments were totally substance free and useless. Nothing lost with bleaching.
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:44 am
You're practicing disinformation. He actually said he contributed early on and had problems with the recent course of the CN
trajectory. Censorship is cowardly.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:53 pm
Consortium News welcomes substantive comments.
"David" was presenting allegations unsupported by facts and disrupting on-topic discussion.
Violations of CN comment policy are taken down by the moderator. Period. It has nothing to do with "censorship".
Stop practicing disinformation and spin, "Roy G Biv".
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:57 pm
I stopped contributing after the unintellectual dismissal of scientific 911 truthers. And it's easy for you to paint over my
comments as they have been scrubbed. There was plenty of useful substance, it just ran against the tide. Sorry you didn't appreciate
it the contrary viewpoint or have the curiosity to read the backstory.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 5:02 pm
The cowardly claim of "censorship".
The typical troll whine is that their "contrary viewpoint" was "dismissed" merely because it "ran against the tide".
No. Your allegations were unsupported by facts. They still are.
Martyrdom is just another troll tactic.
dub , July 15, 2017 at 9:44 pm
torrent for the film?
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:56 am
Here is the pdf of the legal brief about the Magnitsky film submitted by Senator Grassly to Homeland Security Chief. Interesting
read and casts doubt on the claims made in the film, refutes several claims actually. Skip past Chuck Grassly's first two page
intro to get to the meat of it. If you are serious about a debate on the merits of the case, this is essential reading.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the brief.
But forget the spin from "Roy G Biv" because the brief actually refutes nothing about Andrei Nekrasov's film.
It simply notes that the Russian government was understandably concerned about "unscrupulous swindler" and "sleazy crook" William
Browder.
After your finished reading the brief, try to remember any time when Congress dared to examine a lobbying campaign undertaken
on behalf of Israeli (which is to say, predominantly Russian Jewish) interests, the circumstances surrounding a pro-Israel lobbying
effort and the potential FARA violations involved. or the background of a Jewish "Russian immigrant".
Note on page 3 of the cover letter the CC to The Honorable Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the
Judiciary. Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco, to Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model, and Leon Goldman,
a surgeon. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburg family,
were from Saint Petersburg, Russia. While they were of German-Jewish ancestry, they practiced the Russian Orthodox faith as was
required for Jews residing in Saint Petersburg.
In 1980, Feinstein married Richard C. Blum, an investment banker. In 2003, Feinstein was ranked the fifth-wealthiest senator,
with an estimated net worth of US$26 million. By 2005 her net worth had increased to between US$43 million and US$99 million.
Like the rest of Congress, Feinstein knows the "right way" to vote.
David , July 16, 2017 at 1:50 pm
So you're saying because a Jew Senator was CC'd it invalidates the information? Read the first page again. The Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee is obligated to CC these submissions to the ranking member of the Committee, Jew heritage or not.
Misinformation and disinformation from you Abe, or generously, maybe lazy reading. The italicized unscrupulous swindler and sleazy
crook comments were quoting the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Washington screening of Nekrasov's film and demonstrating
Russia's intentions to discredit Browder. You are practiced at the art of deception. Hopefully readers will simply look for themselves.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm
Ah, comrade "David". We see you're back muttering about "disinformation" using your "own name".
My statements about Senator Feinstein are entirely supported by facts. You really should look into that.
Also, please note that quotation marks are not italics.
And please note that the Russian Foreign Minister is legally authorized to present the view of the Russian government.
Browder is pretty effective at discrediting himself. He simply has to open his mouth.
I encourage readers to look for themselves, and not simply take the word of one Browder's sockpuppets.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:55 pm
It won't last papushka. Every post and pended moderated post was scrubbed yesterday, to the cheers of you and your mean spirited
friends. But truth is truth and should be defended. So to the point, I reread the Judiciary Committee linked document, and the
items you specified are in italics, because the report is quoting Lavrov's comments to a Moscow news paper and "another paper"
as evidence of Russia's efforts to undermine the credibility and standing of Browder. This is hardly obscure. It's plain as day
if you just read it.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:59 pm
Also Abe, before I get deleted again, I don't question any of you geneological description of Feinstein. I merely pointed out
that she is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and it is normal for the Chairman of the Committee (Republican)
to CC the ranking member. Unless of course it is Devin Nunes, then fairness and tradition goes out the window.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:01 pm
It's plain as day, "David" or whatever other name you're trolling under, that you're here to loudly "defend" the "credibility"
and "standing" of William Browder.
Sorry, but you're going to have to "defend" Browder with something other than your usual innuendo, blather about 9-11, and
slurs against RP.
Otherwise it will be recognized for what it is, repeated violation of CN comment policy, and taken down by the moderator again.
Good luck to any troll who wants to "defend" Browder's record.
But you're gonna have to earn your pay with something other than your signature unsupported allegations, 9-11 diversions, and
the "non-Jewish Russian haters gonna hate" propaganda shtick.
David , July 16, 2017 at 5:07 pm
I wish you would stop with the name calling. I am not a troll. I have been trying to make simple rational points. You respond
by calling me names and wholly ignoring and/or misrepresenting and obfuscating easily verifiable facts. I suspect you are the
moderator of this page, and if so am surprised by your consistent negative references to Jews. I'm not Jewish but you're really
over the top. Of course you have many friends here so you get little push back, but I really hope you are not Bob or Sam.
Anonymous , July 16, 2017 at 10:26 am
We can see that it was what can be considered to be a Complex situation, where it was said that someone had Dirt on Hillary
Clinton, but there was No collusion and there was No attempted collusion, but there was Patriotism and Concern for Others during
a Perplexing situation.
This is because of what is Known as Arkancide, and which is associated with some People who say they have Dirt on the Clintons.
The Obvious and Humane thing to do was to arrange to meet the Russian Lawyer, who it was Alleged to have Dirt on Hillary Clinton,
regardless of any possible Alleged Electoral advantage against Hillary Clinton, and until further information, there may have
been some National Security Concerns, because it was Known that Hillary Clinton committed Espionage with Top Secret Information
on her Unauthorized, Clandestine, Secret Email Server, and the Obvious cover up by the Department of Justice and the FBI, and
so it was with this background that this Complex situation had to be dealt with.
This is because there is Greater Protection for a Person who has Dirt or Alleged Dirt on the Clintons, if that Information
is share with other People.
This is because it is a Complete Waste of time to go to the Authorities, because they will Not do anything against Clinton
Crimes, and a former Haitian Government Official was found dead only days before he was to give Testimony regarding the Clinton
Foundation.
We saw this with Seth Rich, where the Police Videos has been withheld, and we have seen the Obstruction in investigating that
Crime.
The message to Leakers is that Seth Rich was taken to hospital and Treated and was on his way to Fully Recovering, but he died
in hospital, and those who were thinking of Leaking Understood the message from that.
There was Also concern for Rob Goldstone, who Alleged that the Russian Lawyer had Dirt on the Clintons.
We Know that is is said Goldstone that he did Not want to hear what was said at the meeting.
This is because Goldstone wanted associates of Candidate Donald Trump to Know that he did Not know what was said at that meeting.
We now Know that the meeting was a set up to Improperly obtain a FISA Warrant, which was Requested in June of 2016, and that
is same the month and the year as the meeting that the Russian Lawyer attended.
There was what was an Unusual granting of a Special Visa so that the Russian Lawyer could attend that set up, which was Improperly
Used to Request a FISA Warrant in order to Improperly Spy on an Opposition Political Candidate in order to Improperly gain an
Electoral advantage in an Undemocratic manner, because if anything wrong was intended by Associates of Candidate Donald Trump,
then there were enough People in that meeting who were the Equivalent of Establishment Democrats and Establishment Republicans,
because we Know that after that meeting, that the husband of the former Florida chair of the Trump campaign obtained a front row
seat to a June 2016 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing for the Russian Lawyer.
There are Americans who consider that the 2 Major Political Party Tyranny has Betrayed the Constitution and the Principles
of Democracy, because they oppose President Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, because they think that the Establishment
Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupted Puppets of the Shadow Regime.
We Know from Senator Sanders, that if Americans want a Political Revolution, then they will need their own Political Party.
There are Americans who think that a Group of Democratic Party Voters and Republican Party Voters who have No association with
the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that they may be named The Guardians of American Democracy.
These Guardians of American Democracy would be a numerous Group of People, and they would ask Republican Voters to Vote for
the Democratic Party Representative instead of the Republican who is in Congress and who is seeking Reelection, in exchange for
Democratic Party Voters to Vote for the Republican Party Candidate instead of the Democrat who is in Congress and who is seeking
Reelection, and the same can be done for the Senate, because the American People have to Decide if it is they the Shadow Regime,
or if it is We the People, and the Establishment Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupt Puppets
of the Shadow Regime, and there would be equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats replaced in this manner, and so it will Not
affect their numbers in the Congress or the Senate.
There could be People who think that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was Unacceptability Biased and Unacceptability Corrupt during
the Democratic Party Primaries, and that if she wants a Democratic Party Candidate to be Elected in her Congressional District,
then she Should announce that she will Not be contesting the next Election, and there could be People who think that Speaker Paul
Ryan was Unacceptability Disloyal by insufficiently endorse the Republican Presidential nominee, and with other matters, and that
if he wants a Republican Party Candidate to be Elected in his Congressional District, then he Should announce that he will Not
be contesting the next Election, and then the Guardians of American Democracy can look at other Dinos and Rinos, including those
in the Senate, because the Constitution says the words: We the People.
There are Many Americans who have Noticed that Criminal Elites escape Justice, and Corruption is the norm in American Politics.
There are those who Supported Senator Sanders who Realize that Senator Sanders would have been Impeached had he become President,
and they Know that they Need President Donald Trump to prepare the Political Landscape so that someone like Senator Sanders could
be President, without a Coup attempt that is being attempted on President Donald Trump, and while these People may not Vote for
the Republicans, they can Refuse to Vote for the Democratic Party, until the conditions are there for a Constitutional Republic
and a Constitutional Democracy, and they want the Illegal Mueller Team to recuse themselves from this pile of Vile and Putrid
McCarthyist Lies Invented by their Shadow Regime Puppet Masters,
There are Many Americans who want Voter Identification and Paper Ballots for Elections, and they have seen how several States
are Opposed to President Donald Trump's Commission on Election Integrity, because they want to Rig their Elections, and this is
Why there are Many Americans who want America to be a Constitutional Republic and a Constitutional Democracy.
MillyBloom54 , July 16, 2017 at 12:31 pm
I just read this article in the Washington Monthly, and wish to read informed comments about this issue. There are suggestions
that organized crime from Russian was heavily involved. This is a complicated mess of money, greed, etc.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the article, which concludes:
"So, let's please stay focused on why this matters.
"And why was Preet Bharara fired again?"
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries have been allowed to
flourish in Israel.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Why was Bharara fired?
Any real investigation of Russia-Gate will draw international attention towards Russian Jewish corruption in the FIRE (Finance,
Insurance, and Real Estate) sectors, and lead back to Israel.
Ain't gonna happen.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Remember Milly that essentially one of the first things Trump did when he came into office was fire Preet, and just days before
the long awaited trial. Then, Jeff Sessions settled the case for 6 million without any testimony on a 230 million dollar case,
days after. Spectacular and brazen, and structured to hide the identities of which properties were bought by which investors.
Hmmmm.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:33 pm
By the way Milly, great summary article you have linked and one that everyone who is championing the Nekrasov film should read.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm
The "great" article was not written by a journalist. It's an opinion piece written by Martin Longman, a blogger and Democratic
Party political consultant.
From 2012 to 2013, Longman worked for Democracy for America (DFA) a political action committee, headquartered in South Burlington,
Vermont, founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Since March 2014, political animal Longman has managed the The Washington Monthly website and online magazine.
Although it claims to be "an independent voice", the Washington Monthly is funded by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation,
and well-heeled corporate entities http://washingtonmonthly.com/about/
Longman's credentials as a "progressive" alarmist are well established. Since 2005, he has been the publisher of Booman Tribune.
Longman admits that BooMan is related to the 'bogey man' (aka, bogy man, boogeyman), an evil imaginary character who harms children.
Vladimir Putin is the latest bogey man of the Democratic Party and its equally pro-Israel "opposition".
Neither party wants the conversation to involve Jewish Russian organized crime, because that leads to Israel and the pro-Israel
AIPAC lobby that funds both the Republican and Democratic parties.
"... Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death. ..."
"... New York Amsterdam News ..."
"... Le Monde Diplomatique ..."
"... Covert Action Information Bulletin ..."
"... Global Research ..."
"... Capitalism in the Web of Life ..."
"... An Inconvenient Truth ..."
"... Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death. ..."
Although the United States played a crucial role in WWII, it was slow to get involved and it
let the Soviet Union do much of the heavy lifting and suffer the heaviest losses. The United
States had a lot of help in achieving the victory Mr. Gore claims for America, and we could
assume he knows this, so the way he chose to describe historical events is telling.
Perhaps acknowledging the reality would have detracted from his second point about "bringing
down communism." Everyone knows that what he is referring to so proudly is the destabilization
and destruction of the USSR, the Warsaw bloc nations, and Yugoslavia, not the abstract notion
of communism. He is referring to a "victory" which precipitated civil wars and a disastrous
collapse of the economy and social welfare systems in these countries, one that killed and
impoverished millions. In China, Cuba and the DPRK, contrary to what he stated, these nations'
versions of socialism haven't been brought down at all. [1992]
Explicitly describing the "bringing down of communism" as America's deliberate actions to
dismantle the USSR might run the risk of reminding the audience about the illegality of
interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and it might have reminded people of
what a betrayal this was of America's WWII ally and partner in the détente of the 1970s.
The inconvenient truth is that the USSR was the WWII ally that played a crucial role in the
victory that Mr. Gore claimed solely for America.
Nonetheless, the comment about "bringing down communism" is refreshingly, and maybe
accidentally, very honest. Most descriptions of the Soviet collapse, even those done by
historians specializing in this field, pay little attention to American efforts to undermine
the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The political class always denied that America had a
plan to dismantle the USSR, and denied having any significant influence on events which they
claim arose from domestic causes. If America's influence is addressed at all, it is considered
as a matter of speculation, a mystery hardly worth thinking about when one can more easily look
at the dramatic events that occurred on the surface within the Soviet Union in the last decade
of its existence. The following transcript of the lecture by Sean Gervasi, delivered in 1992,
shortly after the collapse, is unique and valuable for what it reveals about the significant,
and perhaps decisive, American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gervasi came to this judgment:
The Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out,
extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling
through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it
was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that
Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation."
The journey to how he came to this conclusion is well worth the reader's time.
A final comment about Mr. Gore's remarks: He is oblivious to the inconvenient solution that
has been staring him in the face all these years: that the necessary reduction of carbon
emissions will require severe constraints on capitalism, a thesis developed by Jason W. Moore
in Capitalism in the Web of Life .[ii] Mr. Gore should know that a radical solution is
needed. In his recent sequel to An Inconvenient Truth he complains about the undue
influence of "money in politics" that has gotten so much worse over the last ten years, but
that's as deep as the class analysis and ideological exploration can go in America. He evinces
no awareness of the historical figures who developed answers to the problem of unaccountable
private control of a nation's government, resources and productive capacities. Gore is still
proud of having actively worked against a revolution in human affairs that aimed to curtail the
savage capitalism that led to the present ecological catastrophe.
In spite of the flaws one might see in what the Soviet Union actually became, flaws that
arose to a great extent because it had to fight against external threats throughout its
existence, the goals of the revolution of 1917 are still relevant to the crises of the 21st
century, and this is what makes Sean Gervasi's research so valuable now, after a quarter
century in which America doubled down on its "winning ways" and worsened the crises that were
evident long ago in 1992.
About Sean Gervasi
Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the
United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a
book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His
political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy
administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in the United States as an
economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London
School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school
refused to renew his contract in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the
Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational
corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN
Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from
the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique . He was a frequent
commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York. In 1976, Gervasi
broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the "full court
press," a basketball term for a highly aggressive "all in" strategy. In an article published in
the Covert Action Information Bulletin in early 1991[iii], when the breakup of the
USSR was imminent, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration's strategy of economic
isolation, a gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, overt funding of
internal dissent, and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR.
Gervasi backed up his analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left, but his views were
contrary to the fashionable dogma that attributed the USSR's collapse almost exclusively to
such things as failures of leadership, centralization of the economy, the black market,
Chernobyl, or independence movements, and not to external hostility. These are the subjects
which he addressed in the following lecture given to a small audience in January 1992. The
lecture can still be found on internet video sites, but the thesis of this lecture still
remains marginal and obscure two decades later, even though it is highly pertinent to the Cold
War replay that is underway in the second decade of the 21st century -- one in which Russia
stands accused of turning the tables and doing a comparatively very tame version of the
propaganda war waged on the USSR in the 1980s.
After 1992, Gervasi focused his attention on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which he discovered
was a replay of the strategy used to break up the Soviet Union. He became active in exposing
the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the
civil war in the Balkans. His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive
machinations these nations, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of
the liberal and progressive movement. Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would
no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the
Balkans, but some of his research on this topic can be found in the article "Why Is NATO In
Yugoslavia?"[iv] published by Global Research in 2001.[v]
Dennis Riches, November 2017
***
VIDEO Although the United States played a crucial role in WWII, it was slow to get involved
and it let the Soviet Union do much of the heavy lifting and suffer the heaviest losses. The
United States had a lot of help in achieving the victory Mr. Gore claims for America, and we
could assume he knows this, so the way he chose to describe historical events is telling.
Perhaps acknowledging the reality would have detracted from his second point about "bringing
down communism." Everyone knows that what he is referring to so proudly is the destabilization
and destruction of the USSR, the Warsaw bloc nations, and Yugoslavia, not the abstract notion
of communism. He is referring to a "victory" which precipitated civil wars and a disastrous
collapse of the economy and social welfare systems in these countries, one that killed and
impoverished millions. In China, Cuba and the DPRK, contrary to what he stated, these nations'
versions of socialism haven't been brought down at all. [1992]
Explicitly describing the "bringing down of communism" as America's deliberate actions to
dismantle the USSR might run the risk of reminding the audience about the illegality of
interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and it might have reminded people of
what a betrayal this was of America's WWII ally and partner in the détente of the 1970s.
The inconvenient truth is that the USSR was the WWII ally that played a crucial role in the
victory that Mr. Gore claimed solely for America.
Nonetheless, the comment about "bringing down communism" is refreshingly, and maybe
accidentally, very honest. Most descriptions of the Soviet collapse, even those done by
historians specializing in this field, pay little attention to American efforts to undermine
the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The political class always denied that America had a
plan to dismantle the USSR, and denied having any significant influence on events which they
claim arose from domestic causes. If America's influence is addressed at all, it is considered
as a matter of speculation, a mystery hardly worth thinking about when one can more easily look
at the dramatic events that occurred on the surface within the Soviet Union in the last decade
of its existence. The following transcript of the lecture by Sean Gervasi, delivered in 1992,
shortly after the collapse, is unique and valuable for what it reveals about the significant,
and perhaps decisive, American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gervasi came to this judgment:
The Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out,
extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling
through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it
was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that
Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation."
The journey to how he came to this conclusion is well worth the reader's time.
A final comment about Mr. Gore's remarks: He is oblivious to the inconvenient solution that
has been staring him in the face all these years: that the necessary reduction of carbon
emissions will require severe constraints on capitalism, a thesis developed by Jason W. Moore
in Capitalism in the Web of Life .[ii] Mr. Gore should know that a radical solution is
needed. In his recent sequel to An Inconvenient Truth he complains about the undue
influence of "money in politics" that has gotten so much worse over the last ten years, but
that's as deep as the class analysis and ideological exploration can go in America. He evinces
no awareness of the historical figures who developed answers to the problem of unaccountable
private control of a nation's government, resources and productive capacities. Gore is still
proud of having actively worked against a revolution in human affairs that aimed to curtail the
savage capitalism that led to the present ecological catastrophe.
In spite of the flaws one might see in what the Soviet Union actually became, flaws that
arose to a great extent because it had to fight against external threats throughout its
existence, the goals of the revolution of 1917 are still relevant to the crises of the 21st
century, and this is what makes Sean Gervasi's research so valuable now, after a quarter
century in which America doubled down on its "winning ways" and worsened the crises that were
evident long ago in 1992.
About Sean Gervasi
Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the
United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a
book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His
political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy
administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in the United States as an
economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London
School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school
refused to renew his contract in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the
Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational
corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN
Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from
the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique . He was a frequent
commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York. In 1976, Gervasi
broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the "full court
press," a basketball term for a highly aggressive "all in" strategy. In an article published in
the Covert Action Information Bulletin in early 1991[iii], when the breakup of the
USSR was imminent, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration's strategy of economic
isolation, a gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, overt funding of
internal dissent, and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR.
Gervasi backed up his analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left, but his views were
contrary to the fashionable dogma that attributed the USSR's collapse almost exclusively to
such things as failures of leadership, centralization of the economy, the black market,
Chernobyl, or independence movements, and not to external hostility. These are the subjects
which he addressed in the following lecture given to a small audience in January 1992. The
lecture can still be found on internet video sites, but the thesis of this lecture still
remains marginal and obscure two decades later, even though it is highly pertinent to the Cold
War replay that is underway in the second decade of the 21st century -- one in which Russia
stands accused of turning the tables and doing a comparatively very tame version of the
propaganda war waged on the USSR in the 1980s.
After 1992, Gervasi focused his attention on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which he discovered
was a replay of the strategy used to break up the Soviet Union. He became active in exposing
the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the
civil war in the Balkans. His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive
machinations these nations, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of
the liberal and progressive movement. Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would
no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the
Balkans, but some of his research on this topic can be found in the article "Why Is NATO In
Yugoslavia?"[iv] published by Global Research in 2001.[v]
The implication being that communism and Nazism is pretty much the same.
What is the reason for this idea that communism is evil or like Nazism and fascism and
aims to kill people?
Is it merely due to the propaganda during the Cold War? I find that doubtful as that was
quite a while ago. So why do Americans still commonly have this opinion?
This question is more of a philosophical one than about any specific policy, but it strikes
at the very heart of political thought and policymaking in general. I think it should be left
open. – Wes Sayeed
yesterday
Do you have any stats about how communism is viewed throughout the Western world? I always
get the feeling the hatred of communism isn't a "Western" thing, it's a "United States"
thing. – Erik
yesterday
The current most popular answers don't answer this question, but are explanations why the
answerer thinks that communism is evil. Even if everything in those answers is true, it only
shows that mass murders are an originally unintended consequence of communism, while the mass
murders of Nazism are part of the ideology. For me, Nazism is an evil idea, and Communism is
a bad idea because it leads to evil things. This is a big difference. I think this is a great
question, and I hope there will be a true answer to this question, because I don't know the
answer. – Pakk
11 hours ago
@Pakk - there's two competing philosophies (and no, they aren't communism and capitalism :).
One posits that things ought to be judged on the basis of intent. The other posits that
things ought to be judged on the basis of outcome (aka the road to hell is paved with good
intentions). – user4012
1 hour ago
Fundamental to communist ideology is the common ownership of the means of production and
abolishment of social classes and social hierarchy. In practice, that means no (or very few)
private property rights, and forced redistribution of wealth from those who are most able to
produce to those who are less able or unwilling to do so.
Private property and the exclusive access to the fruits of one's own labor are fundamental
human rights under natural law. In order for communism to be moral, it requires everyone to
voluntarily cooperate with each other towards a common goal. Unfortunately, people do not
work this way. They are different in their ambitions, in their capabilities, and in their
values. These differences cause different outcomes, cause some to be more successful than
others, and even cause differences by which success is measured in the first place. But
communism requires collectivism in order to work. Communism must eliminate those variations
of the individual in order to harmonize with the collective good. This is absolutely
counterintuitive to everything about human nature.
In order to realize communist goals, private property and the individual's right to their
own labor must be seized from them for the sake of the collective. And because this is
antithetical to individual freedom, communist governments must also work to eliminate
dissent. Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of
opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive
measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where
everyone lives in fear.
In light of the authoritarian oppression of every communist regime in the history of ever,
there are those who still make the argument that the idea of communism is good; it's
just been "done wrong" by every communist state that has attempted it. However, this is not
true. Communism is a fundamentally flawed ideology at its core. Its goals are attractive in
principle, but completely unworkable in practice.
Communist governments must necessarily use coercion to achieve the social harmony they
promise, depriving the individual of the right to choose their own destiny -- especially if
those choices lead to better outcomes for them than for others. This is why every communist
state has been a totalitarian nightmare replete with rampant and gross human rights
violations. That is the inevitable destiny of any communist regime because it is utterly and
completely incompatible with individual freedom and conscience.
Communists would argue that people already do not have full access to the result of their
labor (because capitalists own the means of production and thus collect a surplus value from
that labor). I also think that you make a pretty big jump from "right to their labor must be
seized" (which is already a reach) to "terror" and living in fear. If you make that jump, and
would agree that workers currently do not have full access to the result of their labor
(which is fair to say), you could also say that people in capitalist societies must live in
terror and fear (which is not generally the case). – tim
yesterday
@tim People living in capitalist societies who do not own 100% of their labor (per your
definition) give up the percentage to their employer so that they do not have to own the risk
of investing in equipment/office space/etc to be able to perform their labor and the risk of
having to actually turn the labor into something someone else is willing to buy.
Additionally, everyone is free to try to own 100% of their labor by investing in it and
selling it themselves. If anything, the only thing laborers have to fear is that they must
sell their labor to someone in order to pay taxes. – IllusiveBrian
yesterday
@IllusiveBrian Even if you calculate "risk" into the equation, there is still a surplus; it's
why large companies end up with billions in revenue. I don't see how say a coal miner could
bypass that by "selling it themselves"; it's not a realistic possibility. But my point was
that capitalist exploitation is comparable to the "no right to their labor" argument by OP.
Both have to be enforced, but saying that it has to be enforced with terror is a reach
(anti-communists might argue that it needs to be in communism, and anti-capitalists might
argue that the same is true for capitalism). – tim
yesterday
This answer is focussing more on why communism is bad (and is an opinion piece regardless of
the validity or not of said opinion). Perhaps focussing on why it is viewed in this
way instead of stating said view would make this a less controversial answer. –
wizzwizz4
10 hours ago
TL;DR: because communism did, in fact, kill people. Between 23 million (low estimate) and
100 million (high estimate) of them killed by regimes that collectively self-branded
themselves as led by "communist" parties.
The question contains two premises, both 100% false:
That the only reason Communism is seen as evil is "because propaganda" and "because the
people with that view are uneducated/stupid".
Contrary to that, as the answer below shows, there's objective evidence leading people
to consider Communism evil.
That Communism is universally unpopular in the West, especially USA.
Let's expand on both points:
Is it merely due to the propaganda during the Cold War? I find that doubtful. That was
so long ago, and the people who were subject to that propaganda are all old or dead now. So
why have Americans and other westerners not smartened up by now and understood what
Communism is?
It's a nice theory that is fully contradicted by the fact that among the most
anti-communist segments of population are those who know best - immigrants from "communist"
(well, socialist) states. People from former USSR, refugees from Castro's Cuba, Venezuelans
who escaped Chavez's regime - they are all far more anti-Communist than the average
Westerner. Because:
They know exactly what the reality of living in your "communist" dream entails.
They know their history. My grandmother was almost repressed because she happened to
study genetics when Lysenko was in power. Many members of my extended family were repressed
during Stalin's times. She also remembers "Doctor's Plot" (and the fact that Stalin
missed out on getting rid most Soviet Jews by a few weeks when he died unexpectedly).
Or, for less personalized history lessons:
The editor of the latter book quantifies the answer for why communism should be
considered as evil as nazism:
Communist regimes have killed approximately 100 million people in contrast
to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis
So yes, people who "understood what Communism is" are actually the ones most
anti-Communist.
Secondly, Communism is actually pretty popular in the US/West, especially
among millennials - who have been shown to not even know basic facts about history of
communism.
According to a new survey, one third of millennial, generation "X" and "Z"
respondents believe that more people were killed while Bush was US president than under
the dictatorship of former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin.
Only 5 per cent of millennials were unfamiliar with the former US president - his
decision to invade Iraq took place within recent memory - while 18 per cent were
unfamiliar with Stalin
Re: "My grandmother was almost repressed [...] Many members of my extended family were
repressed during Stalin's times": I think you may be using the wrong word here; Stalin's
regime was definitely repressive, but "repress" is very vague, to the point that "almost
repressed" is meaningless. Did you mean something more specific? – ruakh
6 hours ago
The poll says 7% prefer a communist country while 44% prefer a socialist country. The same
poll also says that most people don't know or misidentify what socialism or communism really
are. Is it not, then, misleading to say "51%... prefer to live in socialist or communist
country..." in support of the premise that "Communism is actually pretty
popular..." ? – canadianer
3 hours ago
Marx wrote about the inevitability of a paradise of post scarcity once communism is achieved,
but very strongly implied that we need to climb over some well dressed corpses to get there.
It seems pretty expected that the people currently wearing those clothes aren't going to want
that.
Negative news reports weren't that long ago. Whether this is propaganda or not is
increasingly hard to say, but:
Two of the countries Americans are most concerned about are still aligned with communism.
There are still reports of humans rights violations. Some fairly brutal suppressions happened
in the last 40 years, which is withing living memory (not everyone is a millennial no matter
what the internet says).
I remember watching The Wall being smashed and a man stopping a tank on TV. And they will
live on in the internet, forever counterrevolutionary, with commentary about why they are
important. These are events that stick with some people as strongly as One Small Step, I Have
A Dream, or a man burning as he falls.
Some of the none governmental propaganda against communism is still regularly used. 1984
and Animal Farm are fairly hard to avoid in American school and Ayn Rand is surprisingly
often mentioned.
@user4012 it's in many school libraries...or at least was. I had it as part of coursework in
college. My son had it as a book he could read (suggested, not required) in high school.
– blip
yesterday
Looked up Ayn Rand rom wikipedia: "In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as
immoral,[3] and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism, and instead supported
laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual
rights". What's so controversial about disliking oppressive regimes and supporting individual
rights? – Shautieh
3 hours ago
I don't particularly see how these reflect negatively on communism as an ideology. Rather,
they are examples of failed/inefficient policies by specific authoritarian governments, and
in some of the above might have even been politically motivated. If one were to ascribe these
failings to any particular form of government, I would personally attribute them to the
authoritarian underpinnings of the states in question, not their goals of communism.
Moreover, states like the USSR weren't communist in any form (they were socialist, both in
the constitution and in practice). – user41281
yesterday
user41281 The parent question asked "why it's so easy to ban Nazi symbols and so hard to ban
communist symbols" I thinks it's fair to say many evils have been done under those symbols,
it is strange they are seen in a positive light. The symbols represent specific
implementations of Communism. I personally think communism as an ideology is destined to lead
to tyranny but even if you don't think that's the case they symbols were used by some
horrific tyrannies. – Dan Walmsley
yesterday
@MoziburUllah Colonialism isn't required by capitalism. Communal farming is required by
communism. Also, tu
quoque is a logical fallacy. – Chloe
yesterday
Colonialism and slavery is historically linked with Capitalism in the same way that Communism
is historically linked with the atrocities you've mentioned; its part of a even-handed
critique to look at both sides of an argument, as opposed to criticism which is just
one-sided. – Mozibur Ullah
yesterday
@Mozibur Ullah: Linked by whom? Usually as propaganda by the left, no? Certainly we can find
colonialism and slavery in cultures that pre-date modern capitalism: Rome and Islam to pick
just two well-known instances. – jamesqf
yesterday
Why is communism considered as evil (like fascism and nazism) in western countries?
Simple answer is them vs us. This was previously nationality, but cold-war era saw this
them vs us line drawn more on economic lines as alliances spanned multiple nations. I'll try
to ignore the actuals behind why communism is evil and try to focus more on the perception of
why it's remained the big evil within western society.
It should be noted that if you include deaths from sweatshops, activities outlined in
'confessions of an economic hitman', and a handful of wars...capitalism likely has quite the
death toll behind it as well, but where do you draw the line between imperial ambitions and
capitalism...and if we're willing to draw that line for capitalism, where does that line lay
for the communists death toll? Ideal theory vs less than ideal implementation is always a
factor in this discussion, usually people have to wear pretty heavy blinders to declare why
our system is good and just while their system is corrupt and evil.
Much longer answer, a lot of this is generational. Younger generations are more and more
embracing a 'help your neighbor' viewpoint associating capitalism with a 'Individual at the
expense of everyone else' ala Martin Shkreli vs a communism 'collective looking out for the
good of one another', which seems to have caused a bit of a leftist tilt in the younger
generation (probably a bit to do with people get screwed over by capitalism as well and the
much greener grass of communism is a dream to address that). Of course, this is entirely a
dream world and has little to do with what communism actually is, yet a large number of
youths in capitalist nations have somehow come to the conclusion that communism is
preferable. Teaching this younger generation what the implementation of communism actually
looks like is often done in the 'communism is evil' standpoint, perpetuating the 'communism
is evil' viewpoint.
This is greatly exacerbated in the US, which shows a weird mix of misunderstanding and
political posturing...we've already got an answer claiming all socialism is communism (same
people that use 'liberal' as a curseword), which makes a pretty good example for this. Very
much an exercise of reductio ad absurdum in action, suggesting some social support is
countered by all social support is communism and therefore evil. Much of the wealthy within
the US is generally against using their money to finance social constructs (healthcare is a
big one here, but it's used against a pretty wide array of social programs) and a consistent
tactic to whip up support is to use the lines "this is socialism, all socialism is communism,
communism is evil, therefore "insert hot topic like universal healthcare" is evil. This
political posturing is a heavy reason this 'communism is evil!' argument continues in
America.
But with all that said...the key reason why Communism is regarded as evil can be reduced
to freedom. "communism = someone else/collective telling us what to do and how to behave" vs
"capitalism is the individual choosing what to do and how to behave". People who have had
their freedom denied will heavily resist what appears to be taking freedom away.
The catch with capitalism is that it can equally end up being someone else telling us what to
do and how to behave. It's not a simple contrast in that regard. – blip
yesterday
@blip - Agreed entirely, I'm tried to keep my talking points to perception and not the
reality...more often than not, perceptions are reduced down to the simplest form. –
Twelfth
yesterday
The base of socialism is higher tax and more control over the economy in order to "help the
poor". If one amplifies this to total [everything is taken away by tax, every economical
decision is controlled], then one gets exactly in a situation that is equivalent with
communism.
So "communism" is just the extreme of socialism. To be general, i will speak about
socialism mostly, but it applies to communism too.
Socialism, as any other social order : has a basic categorization : voluntary or enforced.
By the word "socialism" most people mean the one enforced by state, which is of course
violent, as laws of the state are mandatory, and enforced by violence. Such socialism is
really bad, even if not by intention, but at least by results.
In the enforced socialism : the state [hence, and more precisely the rulers] gain power to
take away the private property of the people and control economical activity. This has 2
notable results :
The rulers can decide who will get rich and who will get broke. This is enormous
political power. The big power tempts any ruler : even if it intended to do good with
socialism, the power corrupts it very soon and it becomes a tyrant.
It hurts the economy.
People are less motivated to produce if more of their product is taken away from
them.
Control disrupts the market mechanism. A healthy market is one that does not
produce externality and there is enough competition to prevent economical exploitation.
Most markets, absence of state regulation, work in such a healthy state. The prices
established by these competitive markets make demand and supply to equal, by this they
organize the economy into maximal efficiency. As state regulation changes the state of
the markets, distort prices : they move the economy into an other, hence a less
efficient state.
In short time : exploitation of the economy and distribution of the stolen assets to the
poor is popular. This also strengthens the political power of the socialist ruler. But in the
long time : the effect on the economy is felt by the people, who then start to want political
change. In this stage the ruler, who has by now established a tyranny : has 2 choices :
Use the tyranny to oppress the people.
Exploit the economy in a faster way, distribute to poor more heavily to temporarily
hide the economic problem. This only postpones and deepens the problem.
What makes socialism especially dangerous idea is that it gives high power to the ruler,
hence is prone to tyranny. I said "prone". Socialism does not necessarily leads to tyranny.
In fact : most democratic countries today are socialist for decades. If socialism is applied
in a sufficiently small dose then the negative consequences are small too and the country can
survive it, even prosper.
Socialism and hitlerism are the same in their core principle, which is : "I have an idea
about how people should live. It is so good that we should gain power and attack people to
force them to live that way."
It is very important to see where the problem is. It is not in the social ideology
itself.
Many people have nationalistic feelings, and they are still harmless, even good,
positive people.
There are a few small voluntary communist communities, which do not force others to
live such way.
Most people have some idea about how they and other people should live. That alone is
not dangerous.
The problem is the idea that people should be violently attacked to enforce an idea.
Violence itself may be even a good thing. For example it is good to kill a person who is
committing mass shooting. Not only because it saves more lives than it takes, but because it
saves innocent life and takes guilty life. Even it is good to shoot a group of criminals who
are killing a single innocent person. What is then really bad about violence? It is the
initiation of it ["attack", "aggression"].
More precisely we should condemn not only initiation of violence, but more generally :
initiation of harm. Harm also contains theft.
Economic freedom [voluntary exchange of goods and services] does not need violence at all,
but restricting economic freedom does. Defending property right does need violence, but
robbery needs more. Theft is initiation of harm, while using force against theft is violence
and therefore harm too, but not initiation of harm.
You've done a great job of illustrating how communism is erroneously conflated with
socialism. Not exactly the point of the question, unless you were going with irony. –
Twelfth
yesterday
"help the poor" - it's to help the people regardless of wealth, middle class still use the
social structures. But you are badly mixing the two topics up, communism is political while
socialism is economical and you seem to have this driving point to say that socialism cannot
be achieved without a dictator which is completely false. Democratic socialism already exists
proving your answer to be complete paranoia and a perfect example of the 'communism is evil,
flee while you can' mantra. Hence my +1 for ironic answer award – Twelfth
yesterday
@Andy - Can one have a capitalist economy without the use of force? ;) Private property
rights don't enforce themselves, you know. – Obie 2.0
yesterday
@Andy The Internet is not in America. There is no "they". The European socialists are already
here, in the comments with you. Hello! – owjburnham
9 hours ago
I found the following article to be reasonable and consistent with my admittedly imperfect
understanding of pre-WW II Russian/Soviet history. The consistency for me was was in finding
a balance with the typically hyper-exaggerated claims of Western historians (evident to this
day) and the demonstrated behavior of Slavic Orthodox who tend be be far less excessive than
the West when it comes to war and genocide.
Regarding Jews in Russia, the article maintains that many were associated with betrayal of
Russia and many fought valiantly against the Western invaders so its a mixed bag in that
regard.
The article suggests that the Soviet Union concluded that it had 10 years to prepare for
the Western invasion that was meant to murder them all. They had to collectivize to release
labor for rapid industrialization and had to eliminate the anti-Russian 5th column. Only the
foregoing allowed the Soviet Union to survive and then defeat the Western invasion. It seems
quite plausible.
The article also debunks (sorry) claims of multi-million deaths from the famine and more
from the purges although this seems to still be a point of contention even among Russian
historians not slavishly following the Western party line.
I do recall that Gorbechev himself caused ire in the West when he stated that the numbers
killed by the purges were in the tens of thousands and not millions.
I think that it is time for Russia to write its own history without the slightest regard
of what the West will think. That holds even more so for Serbia.
-- Согласно внешнеполитической доктрине США само существование Советского Союза было несовместимо с американской безопасностью.
Изменилось ли, на Ваш взгляд, отношение США к России после официальной констатации окончания "холодной войны" и распада СССР?
-- К 1991 году, если судить по документам МВФ и ряду документов внутри самих США, американцами было проведено глубокое изучение
нашей экономики и морально-политического состояния и настроения советского народа. Конгресс США рассмотрел эти материалы и в результате
был принят закон 102 от 1992 года под оскорбительным для России названием "Закон о свободе для России и новых независимых государств".
Одновременно, осенью 1992 года, Объединённый комитет начальников штабов США доложил президенту и Конгрессу оценку состояния Вооружённых
Сил США, где в первом же абзаце 11-й главы "Специальные операции" говорится, что, не смотря на то, что руководители России взяли
на себя обязательства реформировать свои Вооружённые Силы и правоохранительные органы, Россия всё равно будет оставаться нашим главным
противником, требующим самого пристального внимания.
( Читать дальше...Свернуть ) -- Но можно ведь и сказать, что это были только первые постсоветские годы, и США, быть может, ещё находились под впечатлением
недавнего милитаристского с их точки зрения прошлого нашей страны? Просто-напросто не спешили нам доверять.
-- Можно сказать, что тогда ещё было горячее время, "лихие 1990-е", но Несколько лет тому назад Норвежский институт стратегических
исследований опубликовал работу, написанную бывшим советским офицером, который, вероятно, когда-то "ушёл" на Запад (я специально
не исследовал это обстоятельство) под названием "Может ли территория бывшей сверхдержавы стать полем боя". В ней он, исходя из собственного
опыта и на основании анализа многих документов, даёт заключение, какое сопротивление на территории России могут встретить военные
подразделения стран НАТО: в каком месте их будут встречать камнями, в каком месте будут стрелять, а в каком будут приветствовать.
Насколько нам удалось понять, в дальнейшем наблюдая за судьбой этой работы, она прошла большой круг исследования в странах НАТО
и была очень серьёзно принята в США. Они, конечно, никогда в этом не признаются, но это так. Так что я полностью уверен, что со времён
крушения Советского Союза отношение США к нам не изменилось. Сегодняшнее внимание США к России -- это внимание к не поверженному
окончательно в 1991 году противнику. И США руководствуются этим принципом в осуществлении своей внешней политики.
-- Если США, по-прежнему нам не доверяют и, мягко говоря, не способствуют нашему развитию, то почему они не боялись возрождения
послевоенной Германии, своего реального врага на поле боя?
-- Возрождения послевоенной Германии американцы не боялись, как не боятся её усиления сейчас, потому что в 1949 году, прежде чем
окончательно сформировалась ФРГ, которой разрешили иметь Бундесвер, Германию по рукам и ногам связали соглашениями с США и другими
странами НАТО. Бывший начальник военной контрразведки Бундесвера генерал Камоса опубликовал книгу "Секретные игры тайных служб",
где прямо пишет, что согласно послевоенным германо-американским соглашениям каждый новый канцлер Германии, приходящий к управлению
страной, должен сразу после выборов приехать в США и подписаться под документом под названием "Канцлер-акт". Срок окончания "Канцлер-акта"
-- 2099 год.
Процитирую вам выдержку из "Секретных игр тайных служб":
"21 мая 1949 года Федеральная разведка опубликовала под грифом "Совершенно секретно" тайный государственный договор, в котором
были изложены основные принципы подходов победителей к суверенитету Федеральной республики до 2099 года "
Останется ли к этому времени немец немцем? Останется ли к этому времени Бундесвер способным воевать так, как он воевал во Второй
Мировой войне? Каково вообще конечное назначение "Канцлер-акта"? Вот какие вопросы возникают при чтении этой книги.
Кстати, генерал Камоса был очень осторожен, поэтому не осмелился издать "Секретные игры тайных служб" в Германии, а вынужден был
выпустить книгу в Австрии. Был небольшой шум. Наши корреспонденты, которые прочитали "Секретные игры тайных служб" в Австрии, опубликовали
маленькую заметку: отдаёт ли себе отчёт генерал Камоса какую "бомбу" он выдал? Вместе с тем они задались вопросом: а что подписали
в 1991 году наши руководители? Политический обозреватель "Независимой газеты" Фаенко полгода назад в одной из своих статей выложил
свою "бомбу" Он пишет, что в США очень многие видные политические деятели и крупные бизнесмены недовольны тем, что Россия не придерживается
негласных соглашений, которые были подписаны её руководителями.
-- Была ли, на Ваш взгляд, у СССР вообще хоть когда-нибудь пусть теоретическая возможность стать полноценным партнёром США?
Ну, хотя бы на пике советско-американского сотрудничества во Второй Мировой войне.
-- Нет, потому что вина за то, что немцы в 1941 году напали на СССР, в том числе лежит и на США. Об этом почему-то сейчас не вспоминают,
но ведь в 1940-м году советник английского премьер-министра Черчилля -- Монтгомери Хайд, который помогал Уильяму Доновану (один из
руководителей американских спецслужб -- авт.) создавать Управление стратегических служб, передал ему для вручения президенту США
Рузвельту письмо Черчилля, где тот писал: поскольку США не находятся в состоянии войны с Германией, то не могли бы вы побудить Гитлера
оставить в покое Балканы и ускорить мероприятия в отношении России. С той поры прошло уже много лет и многим на Западе кажется, что
про это письмо все забыли. Но забыть можно лишь тогда, когда ты не хочешь помнить о чём-то.
Сегодня никто не вспоминает так же, что на самом деле подготовка ко Второй Мировой войне началась в 1929 году со встречи американского
президента Герберта Гувера с виднейшими предпринимателями США из центра Рассела; есть у них такое тайное общество. Оно заявило Гуверу:
"Приближается кризис, попытаться избежать трудного положения, в котором могут оказаться США, можно лишь изменив расстановку сил
в мире. Для этого надо оказать помощь России, чтобы она окончательно избавилась от разрухи -- последствий гражданской войны, и помочь
Германии избавиться от тисков Версальского договора". "Но на это нужны деньги, -- возразил Гувер, -- несколько миллиардов. Да и для
чего нам это нужно, что будет потом?". "А потом надо столкнуть Россию и Германию лбами для того, чтобы, воспрянув после кризиса,
США оказались только один на один с оставшимся из этих противников".
Такие деньги в результате были выделены. И те же самые американские концерны, которые помогали России восстанавливать хозяйство
-- строили заводы, участвовали в создании Днепрогэса -- восстанавливали и оснащали Германию. Не зря же дед президента США Буша --
Прескотт Буш, который в 1930-е годы помогал немцам, сразу после начала войны был лишён права управлять своим имуществом, исходя из
того, что США в данный момент находятся в состоянии войны с Германией. Всё это документально зафиксировано, в том числе и в пятитомнике
американского экономиста и историка Энтони Саттона. А что было после войны известно: американцы на протяжении всего 20 века вели
очень серьёзную, продуманную работу по уничтожению оставшегося у них одного сильного противника в лице СССР.
Кстати, наглядно принцип выборочной памяти в отношении истории демонстрировал сегодня, например, Сванидзе в своей передаче "Суд
времени", где регулярно нарочно умалчивает о важных фактах, ну, а если собеседник ему о них напоминает, то он его быстро обрывает.
Смотреть эту передачу, конечно, было противно, но интересно, потому что она показывает глубину работы американцев по осуществлению
операции влияния на противную сторону. В Америке же разработана очень интересная система влияния на большие людские массивы, для
того, чтобы убедить их принять американскую точку зрения по тому или иному поводу.
-- С 1979 по 1991 год Вы возглавляли Управление нелегальной разведки КГБ СССР, поэтому наверняка лучше всех знаете, каковы,
кроме чисто гуманитарного навязывания американского взгляда на прошлое и настоящее той или иной страны, ещё цели деятельности "системы
влияния на большие людские массивы"?
-- Например, чтобы получить во взаимоотношениях с тем или иным государством какое-либо дипломатическое преимущество. Именно поэтому
политическая линия США по разрушению внутреннего спокойного содержания той или иной страны глубоко продумана, а не локальна и спонтанна,
как иногда кажется. Для этого во многих странах создаются прослойки людей, распространяющих те идеи, которые им диктуют на Западе,
чтобы облегчить ему овладение конкретной территорией. Ведь ещё Сунь Цзы говорил, что лучше покорить страну, не сражаясь. США, начав
серьезно изучать нас в 1917-м году, больше никогда не оставляли вне поля своего зрения, занимались не просто аналитической или научной
работой, а вели и очень серьёзную разведывательную деятельность.
Кстати, интересный факт. После взрыва башен-близнецов в Нью-Йорке американцы провели большую работу по изучению опыта борьбы советской
власти с басмачеством. Между прочим, и развитие терроризма в странах Ближнего Востока, Юго-Восточной Азии, и на нашей территории
-- явление отнюдь не случайное. Если внимательно посмотреть, кто учился в специальных школах на территории США и Великобритании,
то становится понятно, что именно там готовили моджахедов и ваххабитов, скажем, для подрывной деятельности в Уфе или на Северном
Кавказе.
А то, что происходило в Татарстане в районе Зеленодольска -- было, видимо, подготовлено англичанами, я имею в виду волнения среди
мусульман, спровоцированные ваххабитами, которых, к счастью, сами татары быстро подавили; люди, организовавшие эти волнения, ведь
ездили на подготовку в Англию, и очень много было таких людей. Или взять сложности, которые сейчас переживает Башкирия. Они тоже
имеют западные корни. И удивляться тут нечему, потому что американцы создали специальное учреждение -- Объединённый университет по
подготовке лидеров антитеррористических организаций, под эгидой которого и готовятся кадры для организации волнений в различных регионах
мира, а не только для реальной борьбы с террором.
Тут надо ещё сказать вот что Запад использует территорию Афганистана и территории наших Среднеазиатских республик для проникновения
в Россию. В Афганистане готовят людей, которые создают очаги напряжённости в Киргизии, Таджикистане, Узбекистане В данном случае
американцы осуществляют план, который изложен в работе "Задачи ВВС США на Северном Кавказе и в Средней Азии" -- разделять бывшие
республики СССР на куски, чтобы тут же подбирать то, что отвалится.
-- Вы несколько лет работали резидентом советской разведки в Нью-Йорке и знаете Америку и её политическое устройство, что называется,
изнутри. Скажите, может ли политика США в отношении России колебаться в зависимости от личностных особенностей тех или иных персон
американского правящего истаблишмента? Насколько независимы, по Вашему мнению, в принятии решений высшие государственные деятели
США?
-- Несколько лет назад Конгресс США возложил на президента в качестве одной из приоритетных его задач работу с общественными организациями,
а руководитель Госдепартамента США Кондолиза Райс незадолго до своего ухода с этого поста утвердила специальную директиву "О задачах
Госдепартамента при осуществлении специальных операций политического влияния", где расписаны функции каждого дипломатического сотрудника:
от посла до самого маленького драгомана.
В контексте ответа на ваш вопрос большой интерес представляет работа, подготовленная Rand Corporation (неофициальный мозговой
центр правительства США -- авт.) "Внешняя политика США до и после Буша", где дана оценка целому комплексу политических мероприятий
правительства США и выработана национальная стратегия в отношении стран, которые представляют для США большой интерес. Так что политика
США по отношению к России и к другим интересным им странам -- это тщательно продуманный подход при подготовке любых официальных или
неофициальных мероприятий. Другое дело, что выводы, которые делают те или иные американские аналитики из того же Rand Corporation,
не всегда воспринимаются администрацией США при разработке конкретных мероприятий -- и это святое право любого государственного деятеля
-- но то, что к ним внимательно прислушиваются, это точно.
-- Декларировали когда-нибудь вслух США свои интересы к недрам СССР или идея освоить природные богатства нашей страны стала
витать в воздухе только в постсоветское время?
-- В отношении экономических богатств нашей страны у США аппетиты были большими всегда. Мало кто знает, что в конце Великой Отечественной
войны, когда странами-участницами антигитлеровской коалиции обсуждалось будущее мира, были приняты два решения, цитирую:
"создать Организацию объединённых наций с Советом безопасности -- как прообраз мирового правительства" и -- на нём особенно настаивали
американские миллиардеры -- "создать трёхстороннюю комиссию для осуществления постепенных попыток слияния экономик США и СССР".
И такая комиссия была создана. Она существовала. Она действовала. Когда я работал в Америке, мне приходилось принимать участие
в некоторых встречах с Рокфеллером, и по его вопросам мне становилось понятно, что в результате хотят от СССР американцы.
Для них главной политической целью работы в этой комиссии было, конечно, полное поглощение нашей экономики, о чём некоторые люди
из ЦК КПСС, стоявшие тогда у руля нашей экономической политики, знали или догадывались, но участвовали в этой игре, надеясь в свою
очередь перехитрить противника и посредством этой комиссии усовершенствовать торговые контакты между СССР и Западом. В некоторых
случаях им это удавалось, в некоторых нет, а вот Западу, чтобы полностью реализовать свои замыслы понадобилось, как мы видим, около
50-ти лет.
-- Судя по тому, что Вы пишите в своей книге "Операция "Президент". От "холодной войны" до перезагрузки", всё ужасное для России
только начинается:
"Мир вступил в фазу наиболее опасного противостояния -- цивилизованного. Цена поражения в этом противостоянии -- полное исчезновение
с лица Земли одной из цивилизаций".
-В данном случае под словом "цивилизация" понимается система или системы ценностей, объединяющих людей разных национальностей,
живущих в разных государствах и исповедующих разные религии. Могущественные транснациональные олигархические кланы уже определили
будущее всего человечества, а академические круги Запада даже придали ему для большей убедительности научно-теоретическую форму.
Практический процесс глобализации уже идет, и с каждым годом мир неуклонно приближается к торжеству нового мирового порядка.
При этом история Запада не дает никаких оснований для надежды на то, что его правящие круги предоставят незападным странам и народам
необходимые ресурсы и материальные блага, которые западные государства целеустремленно отбирали у них на протяжении столетий. Вся
мировая история убедительно свидетельствует, что они никогда и ни при каких обстоятельствах не пойдут на уменьшение своего потребления
ради выживания незападных народов. В этих условиях России уготована участь тельца, который должен быть принесен в жертву "для блага
всего человечества", как и предлагал почти сто лет назад личный советник президента США Вильсона полковник Хауз.
-- Каково в этой ситуации будет значение органов госбезопасности, призванных охранять суверенитет страны?
-- Голландский ученый, лауреат Нобелевской премии Ян Тинберген прямо говорил:
"Обеспечение безопасности нельзя отдать на усмотрение суверенных национальных государств. < > Мы должны стремиться к созданию
децентрализованного планетарного суверенитета и сети сильных международных институтов, которые будут его осуществлять ".
Вот так. Глобальная структуризация и иерархизация мира при одновременном упразднении суверенитета национальных государств откроет
олигархии свободный доступ ко всем природным ресурсам планеты.
-- Давая оценку советскому политическому наступлению периода разрядки, администрация США делала вывод, что активность советских
разведывательных операций в пять раз превышает размеры деятельности ЦРУ и союзников. Но если иметь в виду, что могильщиком СССР всё-таки
стали США, то возникает резонный вопрос: а почему же мы проиграли?
-- Американский разведчик, бывший резидент США в Индии Гарри Розицки в своей книге написал, что если бы в США была такая нелегальная
разведывательная служба, как в Советском Союзе, численностью хотя бы человек в 100, то Америка могла бы чувствовать себя спокойно.
Так что, разведка не проиграла. Проиграла страна в целом. А проиграла, потому что у нас не было времени. Ведь практически весь период
первых пятилеток, когда нам удалось кое-что создать, и то происходил в условиях борьбы. Причём борьбы, как извне, так и в результате
очень серьёзных споров и разногласий в политическом руководстве СССР. Причём эти разногласия были и в последние годы существования
СССР.
В частности на примере взаимодействия разведки и политической власти СССР могу сказать, что работа наших руководителей по использованию
установленных нами связей в политических интересах государства в какой-то мере была ослаблена. Каждый из руководителей считал свою
точку зрения истинной в последней инстанции, у них были серьёзные споры друг с другом. Скажем, по делу Шевченко (в 1970-е годы зам
представителя СССР в ООН, сбежавший на Запад ) мне Юрий Владимирович (Андропов) прямо сказал:
"Я прочитал всё, что ты писал. Ты был прав, и никто тебя наказывать не будет".
Дело в том, что заподозрив Шевченко в измене, я, как резидент нашей разведки в США, стал сигнализировать об этом в Москву. А в
результате получил запрет на наблюдение за Шевченко! Тем не менее, я сам себе сказал: "Нет, так дело не пойдёт!" и продолжал отправлять
компрометирующие Шевченко материалы в центр.
-- Запрет трогать Шевченко был внутриведомственным конфликтом и нежеланием бросать тень на МИД или в Москве его берегли агенты
влияния во властных структурах?
-- Мне сложно сейчас сказать, почему мне не разрешали трогать Шевченко, но я знаю, что влияние самого Шевченко на наших руководителей
было достаточно высоким. Он и его семья были в очень близких отношениях с Громыко. Кроме этого у Шевченко была ещё группа хороших
знакомых на разных должностях и в разных позициях, которые могли ему подыгрывать, оказывая влияние на наших руководителей, которые
рассматривали мои материалы по Шевченко. Поскольку Шевченко проработал в Нью-Йорке большой промежуток времени, мои предшественники,
которые там с ним общались, тоже чувствовали себя немного связанными, боялись получить выговор, если что-то всплывёт, и не поехать
потом заграницу. Это естественные вещи Бывают в жизни, к сожалению, такие истории. (Вздыхает). Трояновский (советский дипломат, следующий,
после Шевченко, представитель СССР в ООН -- авт.) тогда меня прямо спросил:
"А что, разве не может советский человек выбрать себе новую родину?"
Я ему ответил:
"Родина -- одна, можно сменить место жительства".
И нажил ещё одного недруга.
-- Тогда, быть может, одной из внутренних причин гибели Советского Союза было то, что, как Вы выразились "работа наших руководителей
по использованию установленных нами связей в политических интересах государства в какой-то мере была ослаблена", что, говоря простым
языком означает: информацию разведчиков принимали к сведению, но использовать не спешили. Вы ощущали политический или дипломатический
эффект от своей работы?
-- В принципе, ощущал, и даже бывал на приёмах у наших руководителей, которые знакомились с результатами работы нелегальной разведки
и принимали на её основании решения, но, с другой стороны, скажем, в моём личном деле, как мне говорили, есть резолюция ещё самого
Никиты Сергеевича Хрущёва, которого в 1960-х годах я, как резидент советской разведки в Китае, предупреждал о готовящихся столкновениях
на Даманском, а Хрущёв на материале с этой моей информацией написал:
"Не верю".
А ведь мы тогда специально отправили людей в район сосредоточения китайских подразделений напротив Даманского, где тогда жили
бывшие белогвардейцы; эти люди встретились там с нашим древним "источником", который рассказал, что китайцы прогнали его с собственной
пасеки, построили на её месте гигантский ящик с песком, в котором воссоздали всю территорию по ту сторону границы, которая принадлежала
СССР, и проводят там военные учения.
После этой информации мы изучили положение дел на китайских железных дорогах -- какие и куда осуществляются перевозки, поговорили
с иностранцами, а окончательный вывод, к сожалению, оказавшийся верным, нам помогло сделать одно обстоятельство. У меня была встреча
с представителями концерна "Крупп", которым мы поставляли водку и которых по целому ряду вопросов обхаживали китайцы, и один из этих
представителей мне прямо сказал:
"Вы что -- слепые? Не видите, что китайцы делают? А я вижу, потому что я -- "Крупп", я -- сталь, а сталь -- это война!".
Вот и весь разговор, который тем не менее переполнил чашу наших догадок. Мы обобщили информацию и сделали вывод: следует ожидать
вооружённой провокации в районе Даманского. Но Хрущёв нам не поверил.
Заместитель покойного Александра Михайловича Сахаровского (в то время руководитель ПГУ КГБ СССР) генерал-лейтенант Мортин, который
в это время сидел на его месте, когда я приехал в отпуск и с ним встретился, сказал мне: "Слушай, ты меня в инфаркт вгонишь своими
телеграммами!" (Смеётся). Его можно понять, была ведь трудная обстановка. В Китае шла культурная революция, всё больше и больше приобретающая
антисоветский и антирусский характер, в которой, кстати, активно участвовали бывшие троцкисты, которых выкинули из США и почему-то
бросили в Китай; это произошло в разгар маккартизма в конце 1940-х годов. Я с некоторыми из них был знаком. Хорошо знал Анну Луизу
Стронг, Ванштейна. Все они хорошо говорили по-русски.
- Слушаю и не понимаю, за что же Вас тогда было поздравлять с днём рождения самому Мао Цзэдуну?
-- Мао Цзэдун не мог меня поздравить. Это была шутка моих коллег. Когда я справлял в Китае один из своих дней рождения, ребята,
которые входили в состав нашей резидентуры, изготовили "сообщение" сводки "Синьхуа" (китайское информационное агентство -- авт.)
по этому событию. (Смеётся). Спустя много лет после этого случая, когда я приехал на работу в Нью-Йорк, где встречал своё 50-летие,
то застал там несколько моих бывших сотрудников, которые хорошо помнили тот наш китайский период. Они-то и принесли и положили передо
мной рулон телетайпной ленты, где сообщалось, что Юрия Дроздова с юбилеем поздравил Мао Цзэдун. Я говорю:
"Опять сотворили провокацию?"
Тут надо понять, что "американцы" и "китайцы" были в разведке двумя внутренне доброжелательно соперничающими структурами, а эта
шутка дала мне понять, что большая легальная резидентура в США приняла меня за своего.
-- Возвращаясь к Китаю Как я понимаю, в 1960-е годы разглядеть истоки китайского экономического чуда было ещё нельзя? Разведке
не из чего было делать такие далеко идущие выводы?
-- Когда в 1968 году я заканчивал свою работу на посту резидента советской разведки в Китае, мне из центра прислали телеграмму:
"Не смотря на то, что ваша работа в Китае завершена, Юрий Владимирович просит вас задержаться на месяц и написать свои соображения
относительно положения в Китае и перспектив советско-китайских отношений".
В течении этого месяца я написал 103 страницы, где среди прочего было сказано, что ситуация, которая складывается в настоящее
время в Китае изменчива, китайцы решают вопрос создания новой общественной формации, но в этом нет ничего удивительного, к этому
надо относится терпимо и исходить из того, что китайцы будут использовать в интересах своей страны передовые элементы как социалистической,
так и капиталистической систем.
После моего возвращения из Китая прошло больше года, когда мне однажды позвонил Андропов: "Возвращаю тебе твой отчёт по Китаю"
и отдал мне мой материал. И добавил: "На нём есть пометки. Знаешь, чьи?" Пожимаю плечами:
"Нет, не знаю". "Эта пометка такого-то, эта такого-то, а вот эта такого-то -- называет Андропов фамилии высоких политических деятелей.
-- А вообще-то смело написано!"
-- Правда, что в кабинете одного из американских контрразведчиков висел портрет Андропова?
-- Да, правда. Это был начальник отделения ФБР в штате Нью-Джерси. Это было в середине 1970-х. Лично я этого портрета не видел,
его видел наш сотрудник, который поддерживал контакты с ФБР по обмену наших товарищей, которые тогда сидели в центральной нью-йоркской
тюрьме. Энгера и Черняева. Кстати, фактически их выдал как раз Шевченко, хотя, в принципе, их не должны были поймать, однако, во
время одной из операций Черняева и Энгера задержали, потому что мы не учли, что американцы пустят в воздух небольшой спортивный самолётик,
с которого и будут вести наблюдение за нашими разведчиками. Так вот. Когда наш сотрудник был в кабинете у начальника отделения ФБР,
он поднял глаза, увидел на стене портрет Андропова и страшно удивился. Был ответ:
"А чего ты удивляешься? Я что, не могу повесить портрет руководителя лучшей разведки мира?"
-- Было ли с Андроповым у СССР перспектив выжить больше, чем с любым другим советским лидером? Каковы Ваши впечатления об Андропове?
-- Помню, Семичастный (в начале 1960-х руководитель КГБ СССР -- авт.) впервые отправил меня на доклад к Андропову, как к заведующему
отделом социалистических стран ЦК. Я не ожидал, что встречу в ЦК абсолютно другого, нежели остальные партийные руководители человека,
с которым можно разговаривать, интересного; мы просидели с Андроповым тогда больше 4-х часов, он расспрашивал о Китае, а в это время
к нему в кабинет заходили и выходили люди, некоторых Андропов оставлял:
"Сиди, слушай, тебе это нужно".
Андропов, например, читал всё: и приятное, и неприятное, а ведь были и такие руководители, которые читали только приятную информацию.
Андропов никогда никому не мстил. Если видел, что у человека что-то не получается, то просто переводил его на другую работу, а
если, к примеру, он убирал чекиста совершившего какую-то ошибку в другое подразделение, то, получив дополнительное объяснение, почему
человек ошибся, мог и изменить свою точку зрения. Помню, как-то во время нашего доклада Андропову, Юрий Владимирович сказал, что
у него есть другая, отличная от нашей, информация. Я возразил: "Это не так". Андропов говорит:
"Сколько надо дней, чтобы проверить, кто прав: я или ты?" "Дней 40-50. Сложные условия".
Крючков меня потом упрекал, зачем я среагировал так грубо, но я сказал, что Андропов с давних пор просил меня говорить только
правду. Спустя срок меня встречает тот же Крючков:
"Ну как?" "К сожалению, прав оказался я". (Смеётся).
Сейчас ФСБ готовит к выходу книгу "Команда Андропова", куда я написал свои впечатления об отношениях с Юрием Владимировичем, которые
озаглавил "Ю.В.Андропов (на партучёте в нелегальной разведке)". (Улыбается). Он ведь действительно был членом нашей партийной организации.
Приходил. Но не каждый раз, человек он всё-таки был очень занятый.
-- Каковы были максимальные сроки пребывания разведчиков на нелегальном положении? И, кстати, когда нелегала было подготовить
проще: в Ваше время или сейчас?
-- В те годы, когда приходилось работать нам, будущий нелегал зачастую не имел тех качеств, которые имеют сегодня самые обычные
люди; у наших сотрудников, к примеру, изначально не было зубастой хватки людей, занимающихся бизнесом. Поэтому нередко приходилось
смотреть, какие личностные качества присущи конкретному человеку и фактически давать ему второе образование, от средней школы --
до высшего. У нас не было нелегалов, которые знали бы только один иностранный язык, минимум 2-3. То есть мы проделывали огромную
работу.
В одном случае, самый короткий срок подготовки нелегала для конкретной цели у нас составил 7 лет, после чего человек 3 года отработал
за рубежом и украсил свою грудь 2-мя орденами и знаком "Почётный чекист". Естественно, что срок подготовки нелегала зависит от поставленной
перед ним цели. А цель бывает разная: от хорошего места, где он может спокойно жить и работать, до сейфа какого-нибудь зарубежного
руководителя. В этом смысле самый длинный период от начала работы в нелегальных условиях до выполнения поставленного задания составил
17 лет; человек этот, к слову, вернулся Героем Советского Союза.
"... Kotz and Weir's "Russia's Path From Gorbachev to Putin" is decent as an explanation. ..."
"... To sum it up, laws in 1986-87 effectively criminalized the 'command departments' of the Central Committee in planning policy through Gosplan, Gossnab, and Gosbank. A national market was encouraged by individual activity laws, joint stock laws, cooperative laws, and the directive banning the federal monopoly on inter-state trade in 1988. ..."
"... Out of this top-down 'reform,' a minority of Soviet Enterprises began mimicking capitalist infrastructure: managers, directors, and ministers (of companies and banks) granting themselves larger wages or salaries, using the surpluses to buy up and monopolize the stocks and infrastructure of competing companies, using artificial resale of (monopolized) local goods or exclusively selling natural resources to Western clients, tripling the profits for a minority of private households. ..."
"... This nascent middle class used this newfound profit to privatize Soviet media, effectively monopolizing it by the end of the decade, shifting the narratives of Soviet society, bribing politicians to convince the Soviet population that 'market reform' wasn't total privatization of resources, stocks, and companies, and 'Russian autonomy' wasn't succession from the Union (neutral European Polls found clear majorities in the original nine Soviet Republics continued to support democratic socialism, social democracy, and preserving the Union in 1991). Political crisis, like the Moscow coup in August of 1991, was used to manipulate the passive public in accepting fundamental change. ..."
"... The Soviet Union effectively repeated the Yugoslav model: self-governed, democratically managed, or autonomous companies (and later republics) 'fairly competing' in an unregulated or semi-regulated national market. Both models produced middle classes pushing for the acceptance of IMF credits, total privatization of any state companies to repay Western debts, and seceding from a Union of socialist states. ..."
"... Fair competition in a 'socialist' market is a myth. ..."
I remember reading Shahak's translation of Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen
Eighties" and seeing other articles in the Zionist collection arguing nuclear war was the
ideological core of Marxism-Leninism, implying the Soviet Politburo and Soviet society would
never accept reform without it.
Do you think 'ideological readings' of foreign policy are always the best
interpretation?
Gently is the name of the game. The whole "movement" is probably based on a long-term
scenario. The Chinese think along those lines. So OK they won't blow the house down, but they
will move in incremental steps. It might take generations to fully exploit the gap left by
the US loosing influence.
"Save the US"? Maybe, if they can gain something in exchange - but it won't be cash.
Madderhatter67 @59
That was one of them, and another would have been the "rise" of the Nomenklatura (with only
one million card-carrying voters). Which just shows that an "elite", when in power, simply
won't look after anyone but themselves.
I presume that is what you meant by "internal contradictions", - having an unaccountable
elite in a supposedly socialist/egalitarian country. But it was for their egos that they
overspent on the immediately visble - and not on the infrastructure needed to keep the
country going.
(Tut tut, doesn't that remind you of somewhere?)
"Some Marxists, such as Ernest Mandel, have criticised Djilas and the theory of state
capitalism: "The hypothesis that the Soviet bureaucracy is a new ruling class does not
correspond to a serious analysis of the real development and the real contradictions of
Soviet society and economy in the last fifty years."
"The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System is a political theory book by
communist Yugoslav figure and intellectual Milovan Đilas about the concept of the new
class.[1][2] He proposed that the party-state officials formed a class which "uses, enjoys
and disposes of nationalised property".[3]"
It is an apologist work for Khrushchevite and Gorbachevite ideology, but
Kotz and
Weir's "Russia's Path From Gorbachev to Putin" is decent as an explanation.
The rate of Soviet GNP was uneven, but not consistently negative until after the
successions of Russia and the separation of Soviet Republics from the Union.
To sum it up, laws in 1986-87 effectively criminalized the 'command departments' of
the Central Committee in planning policy through Gosplan, Gossnab, and Gosbank. A national
market was encouraged by individual activity laws, joint stock laws, cooperative laws, and
the directive banning the federal monopoly on inter-state trade in 1988.
Out of this top-down 'reform,' a minority of Soviet Enterprises began mimicking
capitalist infrastructure: managers, directors, and ministers (of companies and banks)
granting themselves larger wages or salaries, using the surpluses to buy up and monopolize
the stocks and infrastructure of competing companies, using artificial resale of
(monopolized) local goods or exclusively selling natural resources to Western clients,
tripling the profits for a minority of private households.
This nascent middle class used this newfound profit to privatize Soviet media,
effectively monopolizing it by the end of the decade, shifting the narratives of Soviet
society, bribing politicians to convince the Soviet population that 'market reform' wasn't
total privatization of resources, stocks, and companies, and 'Russian autonomy' wasn't
succession from the Union (neutral European Polls found clear majorities in the original nine
Soviet Republics continued to support democratic socialism, social democracy, and preserving
the Union in 1991). Political crisis, like the Moscow coup in August of 1991, was used to
manipulate the passive public in accepting fundamental change.
While I come from a Yugoslav family, I have far less sympathy for market socialist
ideology. I've never understood the romanticism so many Westerners have always had for the
Old Country. Mind you, I'm not including you in this.
The Soviet Union effectively repeated the Yugoslav model: self-governed,
democratically managed, or autonomous companies (and later republics) 'fairly competing' in
an unregulated or semi-regulated national market. Both models produced middle classes pushing
for the acceptance of IMF credits, total privatization of any state companies to repay
Western debts, and seceding from a Union of socialist states.
Fair competition in a 'socialist' market is a myth.
"... Writing in the Financial Times , former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that London's AIIB decision and its aftermath "may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system." ..."
"... Summers was both right and wrong. The U.S. role as the hegemonic power in international politics and economics indeed is being challenged. But this did not start when Britain and the others decided to sign-up with the AIIB. America has been slowly, almost imperceptibly, losing its grip on global leadership for some time, and the Great Recession merely accelerated that process. China's successful launch of the AIIB and its OBOR offspring merely accentuates that process. ..."
"... While President Trump lacks any serious, coherent worldview, there are more than enough Republican members of the foreign policy establishment to ensure that he doesn't break with America's post-1945, bipartisan policy of primacy. And Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again'' certainly puts him in the camp of U.S. global dominance. ..."
"... But Paul Kennedy was correct when he noted in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that in the history of the modern international system (since around 1500) no state has managed to remain permanently atop the great power pyramid. "American exceptionalism" notwithstanding, the United States will not be an exception. ..."
"... Pax Americana was the product of a unique post-World War II constellation of power. As scholars such as Kennedy and Gilpin have pointed out, when World War II ended the United States accounted for half of the world's manufacturing output and controlled some two-thirds of the world's gold and foreign exchange. Only America could project air and naval power globally. ..."
"... the United States kept the Soviet Union at bay until that artificial regime collapsed of its own weight. ..."
"... today China's AIIB presents a double-barreled challenge to U.S. leadership of the global economy as well as to Pax Americana's institutional (and ideational) foundations. The AIIB aims at enhancing China's role both in managing the international economy and in international development. With AIIB China means to demonstrate its seriousness in demanding a share of decision-making power in the Bretton Woods legacy institutions, the IMF and World Bank, reflecting its current economic and financial clout. The AIIB's impact, however, transcends international economic affairs and reflects the shifting Sino-American balance of power. ..."
"... because of the AIIB, America's "international credibility and influence are being threatened." ..."
"... For their part, the Chinese regarded the U.S. stance as an attempt to counter China's rise and its ambition to become the dominant power in East Asia. As China's former Vice Minister of Finance, Wei Jianguo, put it, "You could think of this as a basketball game in which the U.S. wants to set the duration of the game, size of the court, the height of the basket and everything else to suit itself. In fact, the U.S. just wants to exclude China from the game." ..."
"... China's rise within the post-1945 international order doesn't mean it has any interest in preserving Pax Americana's core. On the contrary, the evidence suggests China wants to reshape the international order to reflect its own interests, norms, and values. As Martin Jacques puts it: ..."
"... The main plan of American soft power is democracy within nation-states; China by way of contrast emphasizes democracy between nation-states!most notably in respect for sovereignty!and democracy in the world system. China's criticism of the Western-dominated international system and its governing institutions strikes a strong chord with the developing world at a time when these institutions are widely recognized to be unrepresentative and seriously flawed. ..."
"... Rules and institutions do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they reflect the distribution of power in the international system. In global politics, the rules are made by those who rule. ..."
"... As E. H. Carr, the renowned English historian of international politics, once observed, a rules-based international order "cannot be understood independently of the political foundation on which it rests and the political interests which it serves." The post-World War II international order is an American order that, while preserving world stability for a long time, primarily privileged U.S. and Western interests. ..."
"... But Beijing, by all the evidence, does not see it that way. And OBOR and the AIIB prove the point. Instead of living within the geopolitical, economic, and institutional confines imposed by Pax Americana, an increasingly powerful China will seek to revise the international order so that it reflects its own political and economic interests. Thus are OBOR and the AIIB straws in the wind. And, as the great Bob Dylan said, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. ..."
"... Paradoxically the acceleration in the decline began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Incredible hubris followed, and we are reaping the usual results. ..."
No state stays on top of the great power pyramid forever.
August 8, 2017 In mid-May, leaders of 29 nations, and representatives from some 80 others, descended
on Beijing to discuss China's ambitious "One Belt One Road" (OBOR) development initiative!also known
to some as the "New Silk Road." This plan is the follow-on to China's creation several years ago
of the Asia Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB), a major new international financial institution
to foster economic development in "emerging market" nations.
OBOR, a signature policy of Chinese president Xi Jinping, calls for investing massive amounts
of money ($1 trillion, according to some reports) to promote trade and economic development by constructing
transportation links that will tie together East Asian manufacturing hubs with Southeast Asia, Central
Asia, Africa, and Southwest Asia. These new transportation routes also will connect China with the
participating nations and Europe. China's aim is twofold: to create new markets for the goods and
services it produces, and to extend its geopolitical influence. Some analysts see OBOR as a Chinese
version of the Marshall Plan, the important post-World War II American initiative that helped rebuild
Western Europe and laid the foundation for European economic unity that ultimately culminated in
the European Union.
With OBOR, China is following the example of Great Britain and the United States (as well as pre-World
War I European great powers such as Germany). In the 19th century, the expansion of the British empire,
including what scholars Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher describe as its "informal empire," was
driven by the perceived need to find outlets for the United Kingdom's "surplus" goods and capital!that
is, goods and capital that could not be profitably absorbed by the domestic economy. When the United
States burst onto the world stage as a great power in the late 19th century, acquiring Puerto Rico,
Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, it imitated Britain's pursuit of both informal and formal empire
for the same reason: the belief that America's continuing economic growth depended on exporting American
capital and goods. China today faces the problem of insufficient demand for its products and limited
prospects for profitable domestic investment. Beijing is responding to these problems pretty much
as Britain and the United States did in the latter part of the 19th century: by seeking new markets
and attractive investment opportunities abroad.
As both Britain and the United States demonstrated, economic expansion begets geopolitical expansion.
Economic clout can buy a lot of political influence. But the lines of communication linking the home
country to its overseas markets must be protected. And political stability must be maintained where
the home country is investing. For Britain and the United States, economic expansion resulted in
the inexorable expansion of their military power and diplomatic sway. We can expect OBOR to have
a similar effect on China. It is a powerful incentive for China to expand its military projection
capabilities. Beijing will be compelled to assume an increasingly active role in managing regional
security in places affected by OBOR!especially in Central Asia and Pakistan, which are plagued by
political instability and terrorism.
OBOR is a milestone on China's path to great power status and is one of several indicators of
receding American power!not just geopolitically, but also in matters involving the international
economy and international institutions. When discussing the Sino-American rivalry, attention is focused
on the military balance between the United States and China and to flashpoints between the two countries
that could spark a conflict!the South China Sea, the East China Sea, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula.
But these more intangible economic and diplomatic developments will be no less important in shaping
relations between Washington and Beijing as in determining the fate of the world order built by the
United States following World War II!that is, Pax Americana, or what is sometimes referred to as
"the liberal rules-based international order."
Since the early 2000s there has been an ongoing conversation among scholars, policymakers, and
members of the broader American foreign policy establishment about whether U.S. power is in decline.
The question actually extends back to the 1980s, with the publication of Yale historian Paul Kennedy's
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and other important books on the subject by scholars
David Calleo and Robert Gilpin. The controversy surrounding decline dissipated, however, when the
Soviet Union imploded and Japan's economic bubble burst. In one fell swoop, America's primary military
and economic competitors fell off the geopolitical chessboard.
The decline issue remained dormant through the "the unipolar moment" of the 1990s but was rekindled
with China's rapid great-power emergence in the early 2000s. China's rise is the flip side of American
decline. The central geopolitical question of the early 21st century is whether Pax Americana can
survive China's rise and the resulting shift of world geopolitical and economic power from west to
east. The U.S. foreign policy establishment is allergic to the word "decline." After all, as Jon
Huntsman declared during his brief presidential run in 2012: "Decline is un-American." Perhaps so,
but that doesn't mean that it's not happening.
Though Huntsman has plenty of company on this issue in the foreign policy establishment, we would
do better to heed the advice of the great Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige. "Don't look back,"
he said, "because something may be gaining on you." A glance at the rear-view mirror shows China
rapidly closing the gaps with the United States in all the dimensions of power upon which the Pax
Americana was built: military, economic, and institutional.
In the last decade, China has displaced the United States as the world's leading manufacturing
power. In 2014, according to the World Bank, China passed America as the world's largest economy
(measured by purchasing power parity). In 1980, the United States accounted for about 25 percent
of gross world product. Today it accounts for around 18 percent. Some analysts have come up with
clever arguments to discount the importance of these economic trends. They are unconvincing. But
the reality of U.S. decline is more than just a matter of numbers; it is also evident in Washington's
diminishing ability to manage the international economy and in the growing challenges to many legacy
institutions of Pax Americana.
A strain of thinking called hegemonic stability theory holds that a liberal, open international
economy requires an overarching power to manage and stabilize the system by creating a political
and security order that permits economic openness. The United States filled this role for half a
century, from 1945 until the Great Recession. The world's economic hegemon must provide public goods
that benefit the international system as a whole, including: making the rules for the international
economic order; opening its domestic market to other states' exports; supplying liquidity to the
global economy; and providing a reserve currency. Having declined to grasp the mantle of leadership
during the 1930s, Washington seized it decisively after World War II. Johns Hopkins professor Michael
Mandelbaum has argued that, following the Cold War, the United States essentially acted as a de facto
government for the international system by providing security and managing the global economy.
The Great Recession impaired the United States' ability to provide leadership for the international
economy. After all, an economic hegemon is supposed to solve global economic crises, not cause them.
But America plunged the world into economic crisis when its financial system seized up with the sub-prime
mortgage crisis. A hegemon is supposed to be the lender of last resort in the international economy,
but the United States became the borrower of first resort!the world's largest debtor. When the global
economy falters, the economic hegemon must assume responsibility for kick-starting recovery by purchasing
other nations' goods. From 1945 to the Great Recession, America's willingness to consume foreign
goods constituted the primary firewall against global economic downturns. During the Great Recession,
however, the U.S. economy proved too infirm to lead the global economy back to health.
At the April 2009 G20 meeting in London, President Barack Obama conceded that, in key respects,
the United States' days as economic hegemon were numbered because America is too deeply in debt to
continue as the world's consumer of last resort. Instead, he said, the world would have to look to
China (and other emerging market states plus Germany) to be the motors of global recovery.
Another example of how the U.S. has lost its grip on global economic leadership is its failure
to prevail over the Europeans (read: Germany) in the transatlantic "austerity versus stimulus" debate
that commenced in late 2009. Reflecting their different historical experiences, the United States
and Europe (more specifically, Germany and the European Central Bank, or ECB) adopted divergent fiscal
policies during the Great Recession. Obama administration economic policymakers were guided by the
Keynesian lessons learned from the 1930s Great Depression: to dig out of a deep economic slump, the
federal government should boost demand by pump-priming the economy through deficit spending, and
the Federal Reserve should add further stimulus through low interest rates and easy money. Obama
administration policymakers and leading American economists were haunted by the "1937 analogy"!FDR's
"recession within the Depression''!demonstrating that if stimulus is withdrawn prematurely, a nascent
recovery may be aborted.
On the other hand, Germany!the EU's economic engine!has long been haunted by the "1923 analogy":
the fear that inflation can become uncontrollable, with disastrous economic, social, and political
consequences. From the founding of post-World War II West Germany until the advent of the European
Monetary Union and eventually the Euro, Germany's central Bundesbank maintained a primary mission
of combatting inflation and preserving the Deutschmark's value. For the German government, assurance
that the new ECB would follow the Bundesbank's sound money policy was a sine qua non for Berlin's
decision to give up the Deutschmark in favor of the Euro.
This U.S.-European divide on austerity versus stimulus was apparent as early as the April 2009
London G20 summit, where the United States wanted to rebalance the international economy by inducing
the Europeans (most particularly, Germany, which, with China, was one of the two large surplus economies)
to lift the Continent out of the Great Recession by emulating Washington's use of deficit spending
to galvanize economic revival. Washington wanted Germany to export less and import more. Berlin flatly
refused. German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued that for states!especially ones already deeply in
debt!to accumulate more debt in an effort to spend themselves out of the Great Recession would only
set the stage for an even greater crisis down the road.
Washington's inability to prevail over Berlin in the stimulus vs. austerity debate highlighted
waning U.S. power in the international economy. Jack Lew, then Treasury secretary, implicitly said
as much at the October 2015 IMF-World Bank annual meeting when he stated that the United States could
not be the "sole engine" of global growth.
But America's inability to get Germany to give up austerity was not the only indicator of America's
decreasing ability to shape the international economic agenda. During the Obama administration's
first term, the United States was unable to persuade China to allow the renminbi to appreciate to
Washington's preferred level (which the United States hoped would reduce China's export surplus to
the United States while simultaneously boosting American exports to China).
U.S. economic and fiscal troubles have contributed significantly to the fraying of Pax Americana's
institutional global framework. The Great Recession spurred calls for a major overhaul of the international
institutional order as evidenced by the emergence of the G20, demands for IMF and World Bank reform,
and a push for expanded membership of the UN Security Council. The past decade or so also has seen
the creation of new international organizations and groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).
As American power wanes, a parallel or "shadow" international order is being constructed as an alternative
to Pax Americana. Perhaps the most dramatic example of his is Beijing's Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank.
As Beijing rolled out its AIIB plans, the Obama administration kicked into high gear diplomatically
in an attempt to squelch it. As the New York Times reported, Washington "lobbied against the
[AIIB] with unexpected determination and engaged in a vigorous campaign to persuade important allies
to shun the project." Washington's attempt to dissuade its allies from joining the AIIB failed. The
dam burst when, in an Ides of March 2015 decision, Britain announced it was going to become a member
of the AIIB ("Et Tu Britain?"). London's decision to join the AIIB set off a stampede as other states
on the fence rushed to sign up for membership. Those joining included U.S. allies such as France,
Germany, Italy, Australia, South Korea, even Israel and Taiwan. Beijing's diplomatic coup in attracting
widespread support for its AIIB initiative from long-standing U.S. allies was viewed as a direct
challenge to America's global geopolitical and economic leadership.
Writing in the Financial Times , former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that
London's AIIB decision and its aftermath "may be remembered as the moment the United States lost
its role as the underwriter of the global economic system."
Summers was both right and wrong. The U.S. role as the hegemonic power in international politics
and economics indeed is being challenged. But this did not start when Britain and the others decided
to sign-up with the AIIB. America has been slowly, almost imperceptibly, losing its grip on global
leadership for some time, and the Great Recession merely accelerated that process. China's successful
launch of the AIIB and its OBOR offspring merely accentuates that process.
Not surprisingly, U.S. policymakers and the wider foreign policy establishment brush off any possibility
of diminishing U.S. power. Recent books by leading foreign policy analysts (including Josef Joffe,
Robert Lieber, and Joseph S. Nye Jr.) assert that U.S. power is robust, and that the 21st century,
like the 20th, will be an "American century." Meanwhile, during the Obama administration U.S. foreign
policy officials never missed a chance to assert America's continuing role as a global hegemon (though
President Obama's own views on U.S. primacy seemed more nuanced). For example, the Obama administration's
2015 National Security Strategy, a twenty-nine page document, invoked the term "American leadership"
more than 100 times.
While President Trump lacks any serious, coherent worldview, there are more than enough Republican
members of the foreign policy establishment to ensure that he doesn't break with America's post-1945,
bipartisan policy of primacy. And Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again'' certainly puts him in
the camp of U.S. global dominance.
But Paul Kennedy was correct when he noted in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
that in the history of the modern international system (since around 1500) no state has managed to
remain permanently atop the great power pyramid. "American exceptionalism" notwithstanding, the United
States will not be an exception.
Pax Americana was the product of a unique post-World War II constellation of power. As scholars
such as Kennedy and Gilpin have pointed out, when World War II ended the United States accounted
for half of the world's manufacturing output and controlled some two-thirds of the world's gold and
foreign exchange. Only America could project air and naval power globally.
And, of course, the United States alone had atomic weapons. America used its commanding economic,
military, and political supremacy to lay the foundations of the post-World War II international order,
reflected in such institutions as the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which has morphed into the World Trade
Organization). Additionally, the United States kept the Soviet Union at bay until that artificial
regime collapsed of its own weight.
All this represented a remarkable achievement, ensuring relative peace and prosperity for more
than half a century. But today China's AIIB presents a double-barreled challenge to U.S. leadership
of the global economy as well as to Pax Americana's institutional (and ideational) foundations. The
AIIB aims at enhancing China's role both in managing the international economy and in international
development. With AIIB China means to demonstrate its seriousness in demanding a share of decision-making
power in the Bretton Woods legacy institutions, the IMF and World Bank, reflecting its current economic
and financial clout. The AIIB's impact, however, transcends international economic affairs and reflects
the shifting Sino-American balance of power.
Washington said it opposed AIIB because of doubts that it would adhere to the same environmental,
governance, lending, transparency, labor, and human rights standards practiced by the IMF, World
Bank, and Asian Development Bank. But Treasury's Lew was more candid when he said that, because
of the AIIB, America's "international credibility and influence are being threatened."
For their part, the Chinese regarded the U.S. stance as an attempt to counter China's rise
and its ambition to become the dominant power in East Asia. As China's former Vice Minister of Finance,
Wei Jianguo, put it, "You could think of this as a basketball game in which the U.S. wants to set
the duration of the game, size of the court, the height of the basket and everything else to suit
itself. In fact, the U.S. just wants to exclude China from the game."
The Obama administration's ballyhooed Asian pivot was based on the assumption that, although the
ASEAN nations of Asia, along with Australia and South Korea, are being pulled into China's economic
orbit, they will turn to the United States as a geopolitical counterweight. However, Beijing's ability
to get ASEAN, South Korea, and other neighboring states to jump on the AIIB bandwagon suggests this
assumption may be erroneous. The pull of Beijing's economic power may override security concerns
and draw these states into China's geopolitical orbit. The trajectory of ASEAN's trade flows is revealing.
In 1993, the United States accounted for 18 percent of ASEAN's total trade (imports and exports combined),
and China for only 2 percent. By 2013 the United States' share of ASEAN's total trade had shrunk
to 8.2 percent while China's had jumped to 14 percent. The trend lines indicate that in coming years
China's share of regional trade will continue to rise while that of the U.S. will decline.
Thus while OBOR and the AIIB don't get the same attention from U.S. grand strategists as does
China's military buildup, they are equally important in signaling the ongoing power transition between
the United States and China in East Asia. Among American security studies scholars, even those who
once firmly believed that unipolarity would last far into the future now grudgingly concede that
the era of American hegemony may be drawing to a close. They console themselves, however, with the
thought that the United States can cushion itself against future power declines and the loss of hegemony
by taking advantage of what they see as a still-open window to "lock in" Pax Americana's essential
features!its institutions, rules, and norms!so that they outlive unipolarity. As Princeton's G. John
Ikenberry puts it, the United States should act today to put in place an institutional framework
"that will safeguard our interests in future decades when we will not be a unipolar power."
Ikenberry argues that China, having risen within the post-1945 international system, has no incentive
to overturn it. His argument is superficially attractive because it posits that, even if the material
foundations of U.S. dominance wither, its institutional and ideational essence will live on. This
almost certainly is incorrect. China's rise within the post-1945 international order doesn't
mean it has any interest in preserving Pax Americana's core. On the contrary, the evidence suggests
China wants to reshape the international order to reflect its own interests, norms, and values. As
Martin Jacques puts it:
The main plan of American soft power is democracy within nation-states; China by way of
contrast emphasizes democracy between nation-states!most notably in respect for sovereignty!and
democracy in the world system. China's criticism of the Western-dominated international system
and its governing institutions strikes a strong chord with the developing world at a time when
these institutions are widely recognized to be unrepresentative and seriously flawed.
Thus the "lock-in" concept isn't likely to work because China, along with much of the developing
world, does not accept the foundations upon which the post-World War II liberal international order
rests.
For many American scholars and policy makers the notion of a "liberal, rules-based, international
order" has a talismanic quality. They believe that rules and institutions are politically neutral
and thus ipso facto beneficial for all. Many proponents of "lock-in" have constructed a geopolitically
antiseptic world, one uncontaminated by clashing national interests. In this world, great power competition
and conflict are transcended by rules, norms, and international institutions. The problem is that
this misconstrues how the world works. Great power politics is about power. Rules and institutions
do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they reflect the distribution of power in the international system.
In global politics, the rules are made by those who rule.
As E. H. Carr, the renowned English historian of international politics, once observed, a
rules-based international order "cannot be understood independently of the political foundation on
which it rests and the political interests which it serves." The post-World War II international
order is an American order that, while preserving world stability for a long time, primarily privileged
U.S. and Western interests.
Proponents of "lock-in" are saying that China will!indeed, must!agree to be a "responsible stakeholder"
(with Washington defining the meaning of "responsibility") in an international order that it did
not construct and that exists primarily to advance the interests of the United States. In plain English,
what those who believe in "lock-in" expect is that an increasingly powerful China will continue to
accept playing second fiddle to the United States.
But Beijing, by all the evidence, does not see it that way. And OBOR and the AIIB prove the
point. Instead of living within the geopolitical, economic, and institutional confines imposed by
Pax Americana, an increasingly powerful China will seek to revise the international order so that
it reflects its own political and economic interests. Thus are OBOR and the AIIB straws in the wind.
And, as the great Bob Dylan said, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is
blowing.
Christopher Layne is University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs, and Robert
M. Gates Chair in National Security, at Texas A&M University.
Thank you for a very interesting article. Still, I think there is a large issue not addressed:
Isn't China on the verge of a now unstoppable demographic catastrophe? How do you see that affecting
China's "rise" long term?
Professor Layne: You left out something very significantly causal re: decline of American power.
It is not mysterious or a deeply historic twist of inevitable fate.
Rather, we have spent TRILLIONS in vain military blood and treasure over the past 17 years,
with NOTHING to show for it – besides a destabilized region raining the most refugees since WW2
onto our allies, the Europeans (destabilizing THEM as well.)
This failure is not even being addressed, let alone changed. Policymakers responsible apparently
have clearance to continue this uselessness indefinitely.
A Chinese sage named Sun Tzu said it best, some 2500 years ago, in The Art of War:
" When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will
grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the
strain.
4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure
spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however
wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated
with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. "
No mystery here. America is proving not to be Exceptional enough to survive elite mismanagement.
No. The rest of the world is merely catching up. The wealth that the US enjoyed relative to the
rest of the world in the decades following WWII was unprecedented, and is probably not a repeatable
phenomenon. If we are declining, it is only because we fail to appreciate the multi-latereral
nature of our world, and stick our nose where it doesn't belong.
We're in decline not because of China but because of the decisions we make (or fail to make).
We devote too many resources towards wars and asset appreciation (financial bubbles) and not enough
into investing in ourselves (education and infrastructure). In the short run, the strong military
made us look strong to the world snd ourselves but we never examined whether that was the most
judicious use of our resources for the long run.
This is not anything new. Eisenhower spoke of this 50 some odd years ago.
If we are in decline and there are signs that is the case. It is by our doing. Over expanded strategic
goals and dismantling the very social structure(s) that maintains, sustains and protects longevity.
The abandonment of national identity by our leadership class. They claim in the national interests,
but upon examining their policy agendas, immigration, bailout, lobbying rules, domestic agendas
and management, there's plenty to be concerned about.
" For Britain and the United States, economic expansion resulted in the inexorable expansion of
their military power and diplomatic sway. We can expect OBOR to have a similar effect on China.
It is a powerful incentive for China to expand its military projection capabilities."
The trick here is managing the relational dynamics so that whatever mechanisms one uses in
maintaining that power don't backlash to the point of disruptive violence or using sufficient
force that such backlash doesn't occur.
The British/European model model of colonial rule was unsustainable. It might be wise to examine
Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, maybe Germany but comparing these socialist smaller states would
be a tricky comparison.
The idea that the US would maintain its world standing has been laughable for decades. A nation
cannot excel when you have a population as narcissistic and willfully ignorant like we have now.
The economic downfall is only a symptom of the ever deepening moral failures we find ourselves
fighting over and even clinging to. I am no fan of socialism or communism, but what we have created
here in America is an out of control monster set to destroy all in its path.
"The Obama administration's ballyhooed Asian pivot was based on the assumption that, although
the ASEAN nations of Asia, along with Australia and South Korea, are being pulled into China's
economic orbit, they will turn to the United States as a geopolitical counterweight. However,
Beijing's ability to get ASEAN, South Korea, and other neighboring states to jump on the AIIB
bandwagon suggests this assumption may be erroneous. The pull of Beijing's economic power may
override security concerns and draw these states into China's geopolitical orbit."
It is in this context -- South Korea, Japan, and other south Asian nations being drawn inexorably
into China's geopolitical orbit, thus overturning US post-WW2 hegemony in the region – that current,
much-exaggerated US concerns about North Korean nuclear weapons can best be understood.
The US is using North Korea's nuclear development – undertaken by North Korea as a defensive
measure against regime change by the US – as one of a series of pretexts aimed at preserving its
ever-diminishing post-WW2 hegemony in Asia.
At some point the US will begin to withdraw the 30,000 US troops stationed in South Korea and
the 30,000 US troops stationed in Japan – and will stop conducting military exercises and shows
of force near the Chinese border – and will sit down with China, North Korea, South Korea, and
Japan and begin the long process of negotiating the gradual, peaceful US acceptance of the new
geopolitical reality in east Asia.
The lesson I took from reading Paul Kennedy was, decline is a choice.
China, India and the Middle East could have competed with early modern Europe if centralized
multi-ethnic empires (Manchu, Mughal and Ottoman Empires) hadn't stifled the energy of those civilizations.
The Spanish could have stayed on top if, beginning in 1559, Philip II, III, and IV hadn't stubbornly
clung to ethnically dissimilar European territories such as the Netherlands, and if they hadn't
wasted their nation's strength in the wars of the Counter Reformation.
Beginning with the 1670 Treaty of Dover, the French under Louis XIV and XV fell into the same
trap, wasting their strength in the service of the Counter Reformation and territorial ambitions
in the Netherlands.
The British could have stayed on top if they hadn't alienated the Americans, wasted their strength
on tropical imperialism and balance of power wars, and then surrendered their industrial lead
to Germany and America via the dogmatic embrace of free trade.
Germany might have replaced Britain as the new leading power if they had maintained the peace
with a simply foreign policy based on a strong alliance with Russia, instead of the Byzantine
complexity of Bismark's diplomacy followed by the belligerent buffoonery of Kaiser Wilhelm.
Prior to the Cold War, Americans did everything right. We grew from a tiny settlement in 1607
to a colossas possessing half (!) the world's GDP in 1947. We maintained the homogeneity, without
stifling the energy, of our people. Most of our wars were fought to obtain sparsely populated
temperate zone land for the colonization of our people – not for tropical imperialism, balance
of power, or international ideological crusades. Pragmatism, not ideology, guided our economic
policy. During the Cold War, we began sacrificing the interests of the American nation to the
newfangled ideology of "Americanism". Tentatively under Truman, and definitively beginning with
Kennedy, we undermined the homogeneity of our people with mass immigration from the whole world,
undermined our traditional morality with liberal social engineering, became the policeman of the
world intent on exporting "Americanism", and assumed an attitude of lofty contempt for our own
trade interests.
The Chinese, on the other hand, chose ascent when they purged The Gang of Four and substituted
Chinese ethno-nationalism for feverish Maoism as their guiding principle.
It is obvious that we are now in the decline phase of the life cycle of empires. See the British
general Sir John Bagot Glubb's book "The Course of Empire" and other writings.
Blue chip stocks yield to blue chopsticks! Human civilisation is a forward-moving perpetual motion
machine. It never stops and it never goes back. There is no "end of history". There is no point
at which human civilisation just stops dead in its tracks and never moves again until the sun
implodes in 10 million years and roasts us all. The world has always had its revisionists and
reactionaries who want to take their countries back to some real or imagined golden age. If we're
lucky, such people eventually disappear into Trotsky's famous "dustbin of history". If we're not
lucky, they start a war, lose it and then disappear into said dustbin, destroying their country
in the process and opening up the way for a new dominant power to emerge. Just as Britain dominated
the world by 1850 and the US by 1950, China will dominate the world by 2050. I don't really see
what disadvantage there is in that for Americans and for us in Europe, it looks very positive.
Machiavelli said that as between two tyrants, always choose the most distant. China is Europe's
distant tyrant. OBOR seems to be very much to Europe's advantage, displacing American hegemony
and undermining US hegemonists' attempts to use Putin's Russia as an instrument to keep Europe
under their control.
Being a confirmed Realist and having researched Realism what is going on today between ourselves,
the Chinese Reds, and Russia is quite understandably. Few share our Democracy model, it is too
messy.
Let's not be obtuse. This order was put in place by individuals in the USA because it was to
their economic benefit to do so. That in no way means that this order benefits all Americans or
even a majority. And to the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have died maintaining this
order it was to their great detriment.
I personally have no allegiance to "the liberal rules-based international order". If the Chinese
can do better, let them have at it.
The important question is not whether America is in decline. It is whether the American people's
living standards are in decline.
Empire is not cost effective or beneficial to the general welfare of a country. It only serves
to enrich a few, while creating domestic corruption and inequality.
The post-WW2 American empire, allegedly to contain Communism, really didn't benefit America.
And the costs have been enormous.
It did benefit bankers, defense contractors, scoundrels, and the Wall Street Washington cabal
centered on the CFR.
We wasted the post Cold War era believing there was an "End to History". Anyone with decent
understanding would have considered that trying for a unipolar moment was a huge mistake and a
world with various Great Powers was a more likely outcome.
Unipolar attempts don't work. Acknowledging the US as the greatest Great Power, among many,
is a much better idea than trying to keep the US as the sole Superpower. That isn't decline but
breaking through illusion.
The Soviet Union sustained 20 Million causalities in the Second World War while it moved its factories
east to keep them out of German hands. Contrast this with the US imperial elite who simply handed
over our industrial base to China. The result is that China's economy is growing a rate three
times that of the United States.
What goes up must come down
Spinnin' wheel got to go 'round
Talkin' 'bout your troubles it's a cryin' sin
Ride a painted pony let the spinnin' wheel spin
This thoughtful article is followed by thoughtful comments. One commenter already mentioned demographics.
Due to immigration, America is the only advanced country not facing a population implosion.
Another ace-in-the-whole is geography. We are protected by two oceans with weak friendly neighbors
on our land borders.We are blessed with rich resources. This includes rich agricultural land reachable
by navigable rivers and mineral wealth.
We have rich political and social institutions that hopefully can survive Trump.
While we are doing our best to squander these they give us a cushion.
The U.S. is in an inevitable decline. The only question is the extent of the economic sabotage
and outright wars that the Deep State will instigate to try to forestall the collapse.
Washington will not tolerate a second axis of power arising even if it is strictly economic.
Consider how American Elites used subversion to catalyze the coup in Ukraine. They will stop at
nothing to sustain U.S. hegemony in the larger global sphere.
Should China, Russia and Europe seek to integrate into a huge, contiguous Eurasian economic
marketplace independent of United States hegemonic interference, the Deep State will use all of
its military power to prevent it. (Especially ironic since death and destruction are becoming
America's primary exports.)
The current rumblings of American power projection in the South China Sea and Russian borders
are a set up for future conflicts. The United States regime deluded by arrogance and stupidity
and saturated by the cult of military exceptionalism can't say no to military coercion and war
as its primary foreign policy instrument.
With the Neocon/Neoliberal militarists now running the show, it's only going to get worse
We are in decline because the decisions we made during and after the cold war.
– we tried to buy goodwill ("allies") by using the "most favored nation" clause – outsourcing
manufacturing jobs, starting at the bottom of the sophistication scale (apparel, appliances ).
And all we have left is defense manufacturing jobs. We have no more jobs to give away to buy goodwill.
– while reducing taxes, we kept increasing defense related spending by borrowing money.
With all the senseless wars, we have a huge debt, not exactly something which gives you clout.
– we wasted brainpower on financial gimmicks which have zero contribution to economic strength.
Such gimmicks might mess up the economy – and we did this, too – for the whole world.
China took the market driven part of communist economy which was viciously stamped out by Stalin
– the New Economic Policy (NEP) – and built an economic powerhouse, with money to spend.
The decline of the United States can be directly correlated to the decline in our spiritual fervor
and the absence of the fear of God. Falling morals precipitate the fall of the nation. It's not
a question of if at this point, but when. You can argue whatever other factors you wish, but there
is a direct correlation between strength of a nation and God throughout human civilization.
Lots to chew on as they say, but a couple key points from the article. A US President represents
how the world view's we Americans. From all the so called turmoil, with both political parties
sent packing, Trump may in fact represent real America. The fantasy the left markets, of a social
democratic welfare state is a myth. Next, we have grown up on a diet of our President elect, being
Commander in Chief, of the worlds most powerful military. So I ask, did Bill Clinton or Barack
Obama seem to Americans, like a commander in chief. Bush wasn't capable of responding to 9-11,
he tried and failed. Last Commander in Chief we had in our image was Ronald Reagan. Any wonder
our enemies are making hay while the sunshines. So now we have two very very admirable foes. China
and Russia neither with western values. How we now fit is up in the air. Getting Trump impeached
or forced to resign replaced with whoever won't change millions of Americans.
I would take exception to some of these comments about inevitable decline. The word decline suggests
to some end. That is very different than retraction or change.
When one examines China, Russia, Europe, these nations have been in play as states for 1500
years. And despite periods of retraction have maintained some semblance of their origins, more
than some. Their cores remain intact as to culture and practice despite differing polities What
is key for the US is her youth. We are unable to match the strategic long term strategies as the
states mentions because we have not been around long enough to seal our core existence as a nation.
Mistaking youthful exuberance for wisdom of age is where we are. There is no mistaking that
the US can remain a major player in world events and we should. But that process need not be at
the expense of who we are are becoming or in lieu of it.
I will have to dig out my Zsun Tsu. It is easy to apply those admonitions out of their intended
context. Because so many different environmental war scenarios are addressed. For example, Asia
plays the long game. They are not thinking merely about this century, this decade, this year,
month . . . but the next century. Hence the idea of long war. Consider how long they have been
on the Continent of Africa.
They are in a sense just waiting everyone else out. Iraq, blood in the water. Afghanistan,
blood in the water. They are not the least troubled that we are embroiled in the ME.
The size of our debt is troubling and the size of how much of that debt is owned by other states
is disturbing. China, some ten years ago, indicated that they are seeking a way around the power
of the dollar.
I am fully confident that we can survive the rise of any nation on earth. I believe we are
special unique, and endowed with an energy, ingenuity, vibrancy and psyche today's world. But
we are so inundated with a kind of can't do -- must accept attitude in social polity that undermines
sense of self. and that is where I think the force of a Pres Trump is helpful, reinvigorating.
Conserving a sense of self, identity is mandatory for survival.
And while I have opposed out latest military interventions as unnecessary, if we decide to
make war -- we had better do it to the full and be done with. This is more in line with what I
think Tzun Tzu -- destabilize the opponents psychology.
Here the importation of Doaist, Hindu, and other existentialist philosophies are upending western
thought. The humanities are tearing asunder our social and psychological meaning of self. Whether
it is soulmates, no anchored truth or reality or the notion of that human sexuality is malleable
and no right no wrong save as to individual minding and social circumstance . . . the system of
concreteness is being chiseled to nothingness.
"Such gimmicks might mess up the economy – and we did this, too – for the whole world."
Actually we did something else, we embraced the world's standards – Basel I and Basel II. Which
are major contributors to our economic system. When Pres Nixon pressed to go off the gold standard
. . . huge error.
Last week one of the toughest hurdles was to avoid getting into that ambulance I knew the minute
I did, I would be entering a system bent on bending me to its will.
Before we go about making the world -- we need a clear and clean sense of self and resist change,
regardless of the pressure by friend or foe.
" The United States filled this role for half a century, from 1945 until the Great Recession.
The world's economic hegemon must provide public goods that benefit the international system as
a whole, including: making the rules for the international economic order; opening its domestic
market to other states' exports; supplying liquidity to the global economy; and providing a reserve
currency."
Uhh you are playing fast and loose here with one overarching reality -- there really was no
one else left who could do so. And that lasted a good while. As those regions recovered, we continued
to provide without ever adjusting to the their own ability to provide. Prime example, our presence
in Europe, I would be interested in the ROI of defending the Europeans even as they make war on
others or encourage conflicts they themselves ave no intention of supporting, but are more than
happy that the US do so.
Paradoxically the acceleration in the decline began with the disintegration of the Soviet
Union. Incredible hubris followed, and we are reaping the usual results.
I think just the opposite. OBOR, AIIB and the Shanghai Group show China playing precisely by the
rules of the international, rules-based liberal order set up by the Western powers generally over
the last few centuries and particularly by the USA after WWII. China actually follows the international
rules. It hasn't invaded anyone since 1979. How many wars not authorized by the UNSC, and generally
either dubious or flat out in violation of international law, has the US engaged in since that
date? China does not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. As the article states,
China follows the rules of Westphalian sovereignty. But it also follows the rules of international
law. China does not abuse its veto power in the UNSC, the way the Western powers, particularly
the USA, does. China is not looking to impose its way of life on other countries. And its international
initiatives, including the international organizations it has created and sponsored, are all about
trade, tourism, and co operation and development, as opposed to the USA's, which are all about
domination, ever expanding "defensive" military alliances, military bases everywhere, demeaning
and degrading, not to mention hypocritical, "human rights report cards," endless "sanctions" and
"embargoes" on everyone who does not do its bidding, covering up for the sins of its aggressive,
horrible client states, particularly Israel and the KSA, handing out cookies to coupsters in the
process of overthrowing legitimate, and even democratically elected, governments, and generally
sticking its nose into the elections of other countries, and now, with Trump, threatening to upset
the apple cart when it comes to international trade and tourism and cultural exchange.
The USA is the rogue state, in regard to the very international order that it played a huge
role in establishing. The USA can't even seem to go through an Olympic Games without making a
fuss about something or another.
"Rules and institutions do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they reflect the distribution of
power in the international system. In global politics, the rules are made by those who rule international
politics 'cannot be understood independently of the political foundation on which it rests and
the political interests which it serves.' The post-World War II international order is an American
order that, while preserving world stability for a long time, primarily privileged U.S. and Western
interests. Proponents of 'lock-in' are saying that China will!indeed, must!agree to be a 'responsible
stakeholder' (with Washington defining the meaning of 'responsibility') in an international order
that it did not construct and that exists primarily to advance the interests of the United States.
In plain English, what those who believe in 'lock-in' expect is that an increasingly powerful
China will continue to accept playing second fiddle to the United States. But Beijing, by all
the evidence, does not see it that way. And OBOR and the AIIB prove the point. Instead of living
within the geopolitical, economic, and institutional confines imposed by Pax Americana, an increasingly
powerful China will seek to revise the international order so that it reflects its own political
and economic interests. Thus are OBOR and the AIIB straws in the wind. And, as the great Bob Dylan
said, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."
Of course the distribution of power matters. But China is using its power within the liberal,
rules-based framework established by the West. It actually already behaves in a "responsible"
manner. It didn't invade Hong Kong or Macao, rather it made deals with the declining colonial
powers which controlled them. It doesn't invade Taiwan. Rather it uses diplomacy to slowly advance
its cause with respect to "One China." It uses its economic clout to develop trading partners,
not to try to bully them into political submission, a la the USA. It is patient with regard to
North Korea. It is patient with regard to US sabre rattling and blustering right at its borders.
It is patient and rule-abiding in just about everything. Its organization are bypassing the USA.
Not confronting it. If China eventually eclipses the USA, it will be because China has beaten
it at its own game.
Our moral decline leads to the other decline mentioned in the article. There's a statement
that says :"America is great because she is good But, she will cease to be great because she ceased
to be good" We've been in decline since the '60's and are coming to our "bottom" ( and end ) ever
more quickly
One thing not mentioned in the article is how we lost our technological lead. This in large part
due to our H1B program, which is a conveyor belt to transfer tech and organizational knowhow abroad.
Most R&D operations seem to be staffed largely by guest workers from China and India. Yes, there
is a saving on salaries, leading to profits. But in addition to the knowledge transfer, there
is the discouragement to US natives from entering tech fields.
Margnistsky was an accountant. He never has been a laywer.
Notable quotes:
"... "Foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups" means absolutely different things than it is stated. We must read "foreign" as "American", "non-governmental" as "uncontroled by the Russian government, but sponsored by the US government", and "pro-democracy" as "pro-US". ..."
"... There is nothing democratic in these groups. Everything they say is a lie. They do not want at all democracy for Russians. Because if there were democracy in Russia, then Browder and other foreign carpetbaggers were shot dead by popular vote. Or at least they could never come to Russia and rob it as they have been doing. And they all know it. They do not want freedom and human right for Russians. By "freedom" these groups understand the freedom for THEM and THEIR friends, and by "human right" they understand the rights for THEM and THEIR friends. ..."
"... I've been reading the Western press for many years now, and when they write about Russia or the above-mentioned holy things, I constantly read only less than a dozen of names. Namely: Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky and a couple of others. Everything that concerns the human rights violations in Russia is just about that privileged dozen of people. Nothing else bad happens in Russia with anybody else. Believe me if all the problems with human rights in Russia were only with that dozen of people I would be really happy. ..."
"... The yankee imperium has evolved into the inverted totalitarianism structure. The mainstream press and those inside the beltway are no more free agents than politburo members were during the Soviet era. Why would Nekrasov, prior to this film a known enemy of the Russian state, change his views unless he was an honourable man convinced by the evidence? The treatment of this film reveals the true nature of the contemporary yankee power structure. ..."
"... The latest neocon line is to use Brexit as an excuse to (a) blame Putin even more (b) expand NATO. Today's Washington Post had an editorial demanding that NATO be strengthened to ward off the enhanced Russian threat now that Britain will be leaving the EU. ..."
"... Here is the perfect moment to remember that it was antisemitism to question the western narrative on Iran nuclear program. David Brooks will conform if his mind is still sharp enough that he once suggested attacking George Bush war of 2003 was a also antisemitic . ..."
"... Dr. Giraldi, do you know there is a Jewish organization in UK, which gives "Sergei Magnitsky Human Rights Awards"? Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim McGovern, a Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named after Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008). ..."
"... A famous quote springs to mind: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." CIA director William Casey (CIA director, 1981-1987) ..."
"... According to Israel Shamir, both Browder himself and the Jewish community consider him to be Jewish. http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-good-fortune-of-mr-browder/ ..."
"... Putin said 'enough!' And has stopped them in Syria (for now) when everyone else was wringing their hands, Putin showed them all how a man with integrity must act, when faced with a thug and a bully. You stand up to them. Or you cower, and place your fate in their hands, as Gadhafi had done. ..."
"... And from that you all have a problem. You get information about Russia either from the Washington-centric quasi-independent ("independent" in the American political doublespeak always means independent from everyone but Washington) outlets, like NYT, WP, Fox, CNN, you name it, and their view of Russia for the past 90 years is quite predictable if not annoying, and I understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite way, so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it as something is white. ..."
"... On the other hand you have the Kremlin propaganda state machine like RT who obviously do the same thing as the Washington propaganda machine, but in the opposite direction; or Russophilic individuals (usually emigres with nostalgia), lone wolf voices like the Saker or Karlin, but whose voice anyway is irrelevant and illusional because, as I've said, they are outsiders and know little about the actual Russian life, but they rather might be characterized as positive interpreters of open sources (and neither the sources nor their interpretations ought to be true). ..."
"... Also we have local "opposition" outlets either in Russian like the radio station "Ekho Moskvy", the TV station "Dozhd", "Novaya Gazeta" and so on, or in English like "The Moscow Times", but I do not even take them seriously, I consider them as virtually subsidiaries of the Western MSM (though there is one irony that furiously anti-government "Ekho Moskvy" is owned by Gazprom). ..."
"... What I wanted to say, that even if many who are not hopelessly brainwashed understand that the demonizing of Russia is a lie, it does not make the opposite view automatically right, and your over-positive opinion is generally illusional. I tried to bring you around, but seemed to fail, though to change anybody's opinion was not my goal, I was just trying to say my opinion, be it right or wrong. ..."
"... It works in the opposite direction as well. When people have not enough means, they have no much time left to think about and to follow good moral, they are simply surviving as they can, often doing very ugly things. In most cases a society in strong need ends up in a chaos as we can see it in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. ..."
"... And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave her hope, (and an ascendant middle class and pride in Russia's heritage). For the Fiend, this was an abomination, and ironically enough; Putin was now a new Hitler – especially when he jailed on of their own (and for hard labor -- It was another Holocaust!). But as long as he played ball with the West by letting most of the Jewish oligarchs keep their ill-gotten billions, and went along with atrocities like the savage rape of Iraq, the oligarchs were willing to ignore what Putin had done to their designs and fun up to a degree. ..."
"... I would say that Putin certainly does care about Iran. It doesn't take a genius to know which nations have been declared evil and targeted by the US, they are frequently named by traitorous whores like Hillary, Obuma, Biden etc, along with the treacherous neo-cons who bear responsibility for fomenting wars in the ME. ..."
"... Putin is smart enough to know that if any nation sits back and waits its turn to be attacked it will surely be destroyed. He went out on a limb to arrest the destruction of Syria and it has paid off. He appears to have played his cards remarkably well to date. I can't imagine that the stratospheric level of approval and support that he receives in Russia is fictional. ..."
"... I would believe RT News before I would the BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, DW, Fox and all the other discredited western "news" outlets. ..."
"... To like/dislike Putin is not a political stance but rather a personal opinion. But it does not explain nor imply any other view. To be precise, several persons can dislike Putin, but one may be a pro-Western ultra-liberal, another a Stalinist, other a National-Bolshevik, other a Christian Monarchist, other a racist Nazi, other a pro-Ukrainian Nazi, and so on. It is difficult to list them all. And they all may have totally different views on many subjects, but just one thing in common, as you said, a dislike to Putin. ..."
"... Russia is on the fall . The crisis of the past two years has just nullified any achievements of the previous 2004-2014 decade. Russia has practically returned to its starting position. And nothing says about its rise, everything says the contrary . Russians have entered a difficult time. They will be remembering 2000-2014 with bitter nostalgia. ..."
"... Actually, for the past 25 years Russia is becoming "a multi-culture, failing state, with grinding poverty where the different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent elite rules over them" . I will add that that elite is in the West in their minds, and they have to be physically located in Russia just for the sake of "earning" money. ..."
The documentary began with the full participation of American born UK citizen William Browder,
who virtually served as narrator for the first section that portrayed the widely accepted story
on Magnitsky. Browder portrays himself as a human rights campaigner dedicated to promoting the
legacy of Sergei Magnitsky, but he is inevitably much more complicated than that. The grandson
of Earl Browder the former General Secretary of the American Communist Party,
William Browder studied
economics at the University of Chicago, and obtained an MBA from Stanford.
From the beginning, Browder concentrated on Eastern Europe, which was beginning to open up
to the west. In 1989 he took a position at highly respected Boston Consulting Group dealing with
reviving failing Polish socialist enterprises. He then worked as an Eastern Europe analyst for
Robert Maxwell, the unsavory British press magnate and Mossad spy, before joining the Russia team
at Wall Street's Salomon Brothers in 1992.
He left Salomons in 1996 and partnered with the controversial Edmond Safra, the Lebanese-Brazilian-Jewish
banker who died in a mysterious fire in 1999, to set up Hermitage Capital Management Fund. Hermitage
is registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands. It is a hedge fund that was focused
on "investing" in Russia, taking advantage initially of the
loans-for-shares
scheme under Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir
Putin's ascendancy. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.
Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 and became a British citizen apparently
to avoid American taxes, which are levied on worldwide income. In
his bookRed Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice
he depicts himself as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to function in a
corrupt Russian business world. That may or may not be true, but the loans-for-shares scheme that
made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of corruption, an
arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy
of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along the way, Browder
was reportedly involved in making false representations on official documents and bribery.
As a consequence of what came to be known as the Magnitsky scandal, Browder was eventually
charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering Russia
in 2005, even before Magnitsky died, and began to withdraw his assets from the country. Three
companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities, though it is not
clear if any assets remained in Russia. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia
in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.
Browder has assiduously, and mostly successfully,
made his case that he and Magnitsky have been the victims of Russian corruption both during
and since that time, though there have been
skeptics regarding many details of his personal narrative. He has been able to sell his tale
to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman,
always receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians
and media outlets. But there is, inevitably, another side to the story, something quite different,
which Andrei Nekrasov presents to the viewer.
Nekrasov has discovered what he believes to be holes in the narrative that has been carefully
constructed and nurtured by Browder. He provides documents and also an interview with Magnitsky's
mother maintaining that there is no clear evidence that he was beaten or tortured and that he
died instead due to the failure to provide him with medicine while in prison or treatment shortly
after he had a heart attack. A
subsequent investigation
ordered by then Russian President Dimitri Medvedev in 2011 confirmed that Magnitsky had not received
medical treatment, contributing to this death, but could not confirm that he had been beaten even
though there was suspicion that that might have been the case.
Nekrasov also claims that much of the case against the Russian authorities is derived from
English language translations of relevant documents provided by Browder himself. The actual documents
sometimes say something quite different. Magnitsky is referred to as an accountant, not a lawyer,
which would make sense as a document of his deposition is apparently part of a criminal investigation
of possible tax fraud, meaning that he was no whistleblower and was instead a suspected criminal.
Other discrepancies cited by Nekrasov include documents demonstrating that Magnitsky did not
file any complaint about police and other government officials who were subsequently cited by
Browder as participants in the plot, that the documents allegedly stolen from Magnitsky to enable
the plotters to transfer possession of three Hermitage controlled companies were irrelevant to
how the companies eventually were transferred and that someone else employed by Hermitage other
than Magnitsky actually initiated investigation of the fraud.
In conclusion, Nekrasov believes there was indeed a huge fraud related to Russian taxes but
that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered
by Browder with Magnitsky, the accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme used
to carry out the deception.
To be sure, Browder and his international legal team have presented documents in the case that
contradict much of what Nekrasov has presented in his film. But in my experience as an intelligence
officer I have learned that documents are easily forged, altered, or destroyed so considerable
care must be exercised in discovering the provenance and authenticity of the evidence being provided.
It is not clear that that has been the case. It might be that Browder and Magnitsky have been
the victims of a corrupt and venal state, but it just might be the other way around. In my experience
perceived wisdom on any given subject usually turns out to be incorrect.
Given the adversarial positions staked out, either Browder or Nekrasov is essentially right,
though one should not rule out a combination of greater or lesser malfeasance coming from both
sides. But certainly Browder should be confronted more intensively on the nature of his business
activities while in Russia and not given a free pass because he is saying things about Russia
and Putin that fit neatly into a Washington establishment profile. As soon as folks named McCain,
Cardin and Lieberman jump on a cause it should be time to step back a bit and reflect on what
the consequences of proposed action might be.
One should ask why anyone who has a great deal to gain by having a certain narrative accepted
should be completely and unquestionably trusted, the venerable Cui bono? standard. And
then there is a certain evasiveness on the part of Browder. The film shows him huffing and puffing
to explain himself at times and he has
avoided being served with subpoenas on allegations connected to the Magnitsky fraud that are
making their way through American courts. In one case he can be seen on YouTube
running away from a
server, somewhat unusual behavior if he has nothing to hide.
A number of Congressmen and staffers were invited to the showing of the Nekrasov
Magnitsky was a sleazy accountant, not a lawyer and among his activities one was about getting
tax breaks for Browder, using fictitious hiring of disabled people to get a tax break.
Browder was one of the very bold and very suspicious "gold-diggers" in xUSSR space, who
tried to participate in the "economic rape of Russia".
During this time of gangster capitalism in Russia under drunk Yeltsin such a person, especially
a foreign one, could easily get a six grams of led if he stepped on some oligarchs foot, but
this did not stopped him. He was really reckless. I wonder why. Who protected him in Russia?
Here is pretty interesting and educational reading
"Ties with Russia run deep in his family; his grandfather was General Secretary of the US
Communist Party and, according to documents released in 1995, worked for the NKVD, running
a spy ring. Bill himself specialized in Eastern European markets, and when he felt the time
was right, he founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996, along with the main investor, Edmond
Safra."
His real connection and why he renounced US citizenship and is hiding in UK suggest that
some influential British structures were behind his activities.
In a way Browder was very interested in Magnitsky death as dead Magnitsky was much more
useful for him that alive. Magnitsky knew way too much about Brower activities in Russia and
already started talking.
It's a pity that doublespeak and doublethink rule the world. Every time you read something
you now must decipher.
"Foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups" means absolutely different things than
it is stated. We must read "foreign" as "American", "non-governmental" as "uncontroled by the
Russian government, but sponsored by the US government", and "pro-democracy" as "pro-US".
There is nothing democratic in these groups. Everything they say is a lie. They do not
want at all democracy for Russians. Because if there were democracy in Russia, then Browder
and other foreign carpetbaggers were shot dead by popular vote. Or at least they could never
come to Russia and rob it as they have been doing. And they all know it. They do not want freedom
and human right for Russians. By "freedom" these groups understand the freedom for THEM and
THEIR friends, and by "human right" they understand the rights for THEM and THEIR friends.
But the real problem is the Russian government do not want good for Russians as well. This
entire conflict is between the native colonial administration and the foreign carpetbaggers.
And the main point is who'll get the cash, either Browder and his friends or some unknown Russian
oligarchs and corrupt officials. But both the results are bad for Russians.
the Short Version: Putin's Russia is a large White pebble in the open-borders Judeo-globalist
shoe. The Zionists/neo-conz/cucks will do anything – even upbrink to a nuclear WW III – to
destroy Nationalist Russia
And something else about democracy, freedom, human rights and so on hypocritical demagogy
of the West.
I've been reading the Western press for many years now, and when they write about Russia
or the above-mentioned holy things, I constantly read only less than a dozen of names. Namely:
Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky and a couple of others. Everything that
concerns the human rights violations in Russia is just about that privileged dozen of people.
Nothing else bad happens in Russia with anybody else. Believe me if all the problems with human
rights in Russia were only with that dozen of people I would be really happy.
But the fact is that everyday for the last 25 years thousands of common Russians are faced
with the violations of their rights. But nobody in the West worry about them, nobody mention
them, they simply do not exist for the West. The only people that exist are those who are directly
or indirectly connected with the Western establishment. That is the Western establishment and
their tame press are concerned only about their personal interests.
And when another Western (or Russian) journalist or human rights "activist", while writing
another article about Russia, mention again and again just only that half a dozen of the names,
I just cannot help but despise those hypocrites.
The yankee imperium has evolved into the inverted totalitarianism structure. The mainstream
press and those inside the beltway are no more free agents than politburo members were during
the Soviet era. Why would Nekrasov, prior to this film a known enemy of the Russian state,
change his views unless he was an honourable man convinced by the evidence? The treatment of
this film reveals the true nature of the contemporary yankee power structure.
Sergei Magnitsky like the US and EU was a Zionist clown whose strings were held by the Organized
Jewry.
In November 2015, in an interview with UK's No.1 Israeli propaganda media outlet, 'Jewish
Chronicle', William Browder, the American-born Jewish tycoon who describes himself as Putin's
"number one enemy" in his book: Red Notice, claimed that though Putin had met Netanyahu, Avigdor
Lieberman, and local Jewish leaders; supports Israel and donated $1 million to Moscow's Holocaust
Museum – his heart is filled with hatred towards Jews. Why? Because he tortured and killed
Magnitsky and supports Iran's ally Assad.
Madeleine Albright, who found her Jewish family roots while holding post of US secretary
of state, in a recent interview she gave to Austrian newspaper DiePress.com called Russian
president Vladimir Putin "a smart but a truly evil man." She claimed that Putin is trying his
best to destroy European Union and NATO, two of Israel's allies.
"He is smart but truly an evil man. An officer of KGB, who wants to exercise power and believes
that every body has come together to conspire against Russia. This is not true. Putin is playing
bad cards well, for the time being at least. I believe his goal is to undermine and split EU.
He want NATO to disappear from his sphere of influence," She said.
Thanks. The latest neocon line is to use Brexit as an excuse to (a) blame Putin even
more (b) expand NATO. Today's Washington Post had an editorial demanding that NATO be strengthened
to ward off the enhanced Russian threat now that Britain will be leaving the EU.
You omit taking notice of the author's shrewd observation that there might still be available
some large amount of money that even Nekrasov might find irresistable as way to quickly achieved
financial independence. Even if he is basically an honest man he might be able to rationalise
selling out if he knows that Browder is, anyway, a crook.
But the real problem is the Russian government do not want good for Russians as well.
in your opinion, is the Putin government just as corrupt as the Zio-West? From here in the
(dying and looted) West, it looks like Russia's middle class is ascendant, while ours is being
systematically murdered off
Personally, for me, what it feels like is that the worst elements in the population that
were in Russia (and Eastern Europe) during the 20th century have now emigrated over to the
West. And that just as Russia and Eastern Europe suffered unimaginable horrors during the last
century, under cruel and sadistic Bolsheviks (and the Cheka and NKVD), they are now over here,
fomenting genocide and looting the place blind.
It's as if when Putin came to power, the Fiend slithered over the Berlin wall into the West,
where it now molders in the assorted banking houses and think tanks plotting its next iniquitous
atrocity, whether financial or military or social/cultural.
That's how it seems to me anyways.
(thank you PG for your superlative and informative articles. They're very much appreciated)
I guess he doesn't have to be anti Jewish ,but being a proponent of prosperity at home and
peace abroad does create a monster out of a decent man in today's garbage land which defines
the western minds . It sure doesn't help the warmongering war readiness war friendly Zio
In some way Zio are doing what they did to other peace makers through the ages. Being against
war and being for peace automatically ensures extended definition of antisemitism will be attached
Here is the perfect moment to remember that it was antisemitism to question the western
narrative on Iran nuclear program. David Brooks will conform if his mind is still sharp enough
that he once suggested attacking George Bush war of 2003 was a also antisemitic .
Dr. Giraldi, do you know there is a Jewish organization in UK, which gives "Sergei Magnitsky
Human Rights Awards"? Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim
McGovern, a Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named
after Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008).
During his acceptance speech Jim McGovern said that he was a staunch supporter of Israel
and supported the US-Iran nuclear agreement because it would be good for Israel in long-term.
During his stay in London, Jim McGovern was interviewed by Israeli mouthpiece, Jewish Chronicle
– published on November 27.
"I understand the security concerns, but I also believe that ultimately, the way forward
in Israel is for there to be real negotiations with the Palestinians -- a two-state solution.
People need to learn to live with each other -- that's the solution all over the world," McGovern
said.
When asked does that include Hamas? McGovern replied: "I don't need to negotiate with my
friends. I need to negotiate with the people I consider my adversaries and my enemies."
He also criticized Israel's human rights abuses and warned such actions are isolating Israel
from the international community. "I think Israel does not have a perfect human rights record.
I think the settlement policies are very troublesome," he said.
@Anonymous
As Anonymous says,"
Q: Who is guilty of lying, Nekrasov or Browder?
A: Which one is the Jew?"
Agreed. Frequently you will find that to find the truth just see what the Jew is saying
and the opposite will be the truth or what they say will be so convoluted as to twist the truth
into a blaspheme of some sort.
Last year, it awarded the honor on Israel-First Rep. Jim McGovern. Jim McGovern, a
Democrat who co-chairs the influential 'Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission' – named after
Jewish Rep. Tom Lantos (d. 2008).
God help us, that Jew jerk Lantos is still screwing over America. Wonder how many Palestinians
he is responsible for murdering?
@Anonymous
Are you just idly polluting UR with your prejudices or do you have some faintly relevant information?
The Browders who are descended from (non-Jewish) Communist Earl Browder seem to have good
mathematical brains which may be inherited from Earl Browder's Russian Jewish wife. But it
appears the Jewishness ended with her. The younger Bill Browder (who has a mathematician uncle
also called Bill) is the son of mathematician Felix who doesn't appear to have married a Jew.
Over to you to research Nekrasov. Will your brain suffer spasms or paraysis if you find that
neither of them are Jews.
A famous quote springs to mind: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when
everything the American people believe is false." CIA director William Casey (CIA director,
1981-1987)
If this is an accurate quote, and I assume that it is, .what is the point of it? I mean
what goals should the CIA have ? Shouldn't OUR CIA be doing everything in its power, (like
every other government agency which we employ) to shore up the health ,wealth and security
of our nation.? Every action it takes, clandestine or otherwise, should be designed to ensure
the safety, freedom , and prosperity of our nation and its citizens .
Period. End of story. If they are not doing that .Fire the bums.
I still don't get what the cute girl in the pic is all about? She doesn't look Jewish
or anything.
That cute girl is Elena Servettaz who edited the book, the cover of which is behind her.
Here's a lot more photos of her for your viewing pleasure. Including one with her and Crazy
John McCain, which probably tells you all you need to know.
@Greasy
William Without going into a lot of unnecessary detail, Elena Servettaz is a Russian Jew
who serves basically the same role in the international journalistic world as Pamela Gellar
serves in the right-wing talk-show host/U-tube world based in Jew York City.
@Wizard
of Oz Don't be ridiculous, Bill Browder is Jewish and has always strongly identified as
such. He has a mezuzah on his office door and only hires Jewish employees. I knew him personally
back in the 90s and 00s.
@Boris
N I agree with you wholeheartedly, Boris, with the comments you made on democracy in Russia,
as well as the role the foreign (US) carpetbaggers had played in Russian society.
However, you failed to mention Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had succeeded the drunken,
incompetent Boris Yeltsin, who had been installed by the Jewish Oligarchs, who were – during
his Presidency – looting the Russian Treasury and bleeding the nation dry. It was Putin who
salvaged the Russian economy by imprisoning and/or exiling these Oligarchs and seizing all
of their assets. He also restored Orthodox Christianity in Russia after 70 years of it being
underground under Bolshevik Communism. The magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, which
had been built in the 19th Century, then demolished by Lazar Kaganovich under Josef Stalin's
orders, was restored (rebuilt) after Yeltsin became President in the 1990′s.
Democracy also came to Russia under Putin, along with the revival of Orthodox Christianity.
As a result, the Russian people are experiencing more freedom than people are in Western countries,
including the US. In a way, these two nations – Russia and the US – have switched ideologies.
Even as I type this reply, Boris, Christianity in the US has just come under attack by the
Federal Courts which, btw, is a gross violation of the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution,
which guarantees, along with freedoms of speech, press and peaceable assemply, freedom of religion.
@Wizard
of Oz "as amongst the Jews what anti-Semites (and some Jews) would regard as "typically
Jewish"."
Don't be ridiculous. Jewish people define themselves as an ethnic group. The
fact that the ethnic group has considerably admixed is not the fault of those who merely observe
that fact.
@Eileen
Kuch A friend who ran a very big charity funded by Khodorkovsky told me that he is not
Jewish but Russian Orthodox and, indeed, his mother Marins seems to be Orthodox Christian,
so why would the Jerusalem Post online refer to him as Jewish? Did he convert?
I guess its just that, on balance, any group likes to claim the rich unless they are too
disreputable.
A related question is whether people with Jewish fathers, like K, got into the habit of
associating with others who were at least part Jewish because of the viciousness or at least
weight of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. After all one can get an idea of what it was like
from the mad snti-Semitism in UR comments where even Rupert Murdoch can be called Jewish out
of spite and envy even though he doesn't have a drop of known Jewish ancestry – pure Anglo-Celt
it seems in case some twisted mind picks on that "known".
in your opinion, is the Putin government just as corrupt as the Zio-West?
Yes, absolutely. It is not just my mere assumption, and it is not a conspiracy either, but
clear open facts that anybody can see if one wants to see. It is not "as corrupt as", it IS
controled by the West. We must not be deceived by the trickery red herring play of the official
Kremlin (I do not like the cliche "Kremlin propaganda", but this is exactly it; unfortunately
the Western MSM use this term for absolutely different things; the Western MSM play in the
same duo, by the way).
Who is Putin and where has he come from in the first place? Apart from that he is a former
KGB officer, and, as they say, "there aren't former KGB officers" (and this is important as
a great deal of Russian oligarchs came from that organization), he has not come from anywhere
and suddenly but fairly won the presidential campaign in 2000. During the 1990s he was moving
around in the Russian oligarchic and Kremlin circles, in fact he once was the right hand of
the first mayor of St.-Petersburg Sobchak, which in turn was a friend of Yeltsin. You think
Putin is different, but he is the same, he is from the same circles, you has been tricked by
the made-up image of Putin, a fiend for oligarchs and a friend of people, whereas he is, in
fact, a friend of oligarchs, literally.
Then, what is more important. Even if we know little about Putin's life in the 1990s (everything
is deliberately hidden), we know, hey, the entire world knows, how Putin has come to power.
Putin was a protege of Yeltsin, and this Yeltsin's protectionism was not hidden, but absolutely
public and official. Putin is the successor of Yeltsin, directly appointed by Yeltsin, a "legacy
president" whose main goal is to maintain the status quo from the 1990s. I would rater call
him a CEO under the control of the real masters, than an independent leader of the state. How
can one at all believe "Putin is not Yeltsin", when it is contrary to the facts. And again
we know which circles Yeltsin represented, and we know that those circles have had close connections
with the West if not controled by the West, and here we've come to the most interesting part.
The entire post-Soviet Russian elite (oligarchs and government officials) has come come
from the Communist nomenklatura, from the KGB and from the Soviet black market mafia structures
(usually run by Jews, Ukrainians and Asiatics like Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and Uzbeks).
And everybody of them have had many connections with the West, particularly with London, thousands
of Russian oligarchs, higher officials or at least their families live in London, London is
a second (true?) capital of Russia.
So there is no reason, why we must take the Kremlin and the West at face value. Why must
we believe there is a conflict of the planetary scale, when there is none.
Well, I've said much enough (I hope MI6 will not find me; joke), but you can dig further
yourself, everything is in open, the Russian ruling clique does not much hide itself, you do
not need to be a secret agent trying to acquire the secret Kremlin (or rather Westminster?)
documents, you just need to know the right directions of your searches. Just don't allow them
to confuse yourself with the information noise, both from the Kremlin and the West. Sift attentively
thousands of articles about a good Putin and a bad Putin from both the direction, because their
real goal is just to hide the real truth.
from here in the (dying and looted) West, it looks like Russia's middle class is ascendant,
while ours is being systematically murdered off
As for the Russian middle class. Of course, since 2000 the living standards of Russians
have improved greatly. We could argue if it is due magical Putin or high prices of natural
resources. But this only if we compare it with the Sovet pitiful existence and the extreme
poverty of the 1990s. But Even if Russians have now more money, cars, things and all, Russia
outside of Moscow and St.-Petersburg is still and will be for many decades a Second Word country,
in many places even a Third World one. I lived in Western Europe and I can tell the difference.
This is absolutely another different planet. Every bit there is better than in Russia, so Russia
seems quite backward. It is just simply pleasant to live in a First World country. You constantly
complain how bad the life in the West is, but you do not understand your luck that you were
born or live there.
And nothing much have changed since the 1990s, if not since the Soviet times. The entire
country is still ruled by the former Soviet nomenklature, the oligarchs of the 1990s and Western
companies still own and pwn Russia, gigantic bulks of the Russian wealth flow to off-shore
havens, the state budget still consist of >60% of the "natural rent", the high level corruption
is flourishing, a great deal of the budget is embezzled by officials. Maybe the reason why
the average Russians still live decent lives is Russia's wealth so immense, that even if half
of it is stolen by the upper 5-10%, the remaining half is enough for the well-being of the
other 90%. But imagine how well the Russians would live without the robbery by the Kremlin
oligarchic clique.
And don't take official Russian statistics at face value. The Russian middle class hardly
exists. And after 2014 the income of people has been dropping steadily. For the most provincial
cities the picture is following (at 70 roubles per USD):
Lowest 30% earn below $200 per month
Low Middle 40% – $200-$400
High Middle 20% – $400-$600
Upper 5% – $600-$1200
In Moscow, St.-Petersburg and some northern regions these number are 2 times higher, but
they comprise barely 15% of the population.
And we're left with 5%, the clique and their servants.
I can hardly name the people who earns under $400 the "middle class", and the country where
70% earns below that can hardly be called rich (though it is quite developed, comparing with
the Third World). So there are just 5%, max 25%, of the real middle class. And the average
pensions are around $200/month, so no less than 40 mln of senior Russians live for that small
amount of money, and with constantly rising prices it is very difficult to make both ends meet.
And the last. You will complain that Europe is being flooded with immigrants, but Russia
is a last stronghold. But I'll tell you what. Russia is on the second place by immigrant population
after the USA! And they are coming in. Russia has officially 10 mln and unofficially close
to 25 mln of immigrants from Asia. Moscow, in fact, must compete with London by the percentage
of Asiatic immigrants. The Muslim population is rising and the Kremlin openly favours Muslims
and Muslim immigrants.
@Eileen
Kuch You just reproduce the idealized image (either good or bad) of Putin that has been
created by the propaganda machine from both the sides during the past 15 years. As I said above,
Putin is hardly a threat to the oligarchs. Putin hardly persecute any oligarch. There are up
to 100 Russian billionaires, and some thousands of millionaires, but only Khodorkovsky, Lebedev
and maybe a couple of others were really imprisoned. No any other oligarchs have been persecuted.
Never the privatisation of the 1990s was questioned. Never the legacy of Yeltsin was questioned,
rather he is a "hero", an entire Yeltsin museum has been built. The very same oligarchs from
the 1990s, except for maybe some outcasts, are continuing to loot and rob Russian wealth. They
buy entire castles somewhere in England or France, they buy enormous luxury yachts, they have
bought a great deal of the London luxury realty, etc., etc. They roll in money, Russian money.
The only reason the average Russians still live decent is the enormous size of the Russian
wealth, that even scraps are enough for the entire nation to live.
And I'm not that religious, I do not think that the renaissance of religiosity in Russia
is any good, I rather agree with (a rare case) the Marx's opinion about "opium for the people".
It just makes Russian people stupid, superstitious and easy to manipulate. We live in the 21th
century, we do not need 2000-year old fairy tales to be good. Anyway, I have a great respect
for the PAST Russian Christian tradition, I think it is an important part of the Russian culture
and mentality, so I'm strongly against any destruction of it.
However, with both the economics and the culture you seem to present a false dilemma. You
imply that the only alternative to Yeltsin and Putin are Kaganovich and Stalin, whereas I strongly
believe there are many better alternatives.
@Boris
N The overall quality of life in any country and in any generation depends on much more
than annual income, reflected in the amount of money people have at their disposal. In fact,
it's becoming increasingly evident that the more money people have to spend on "toys" and other
unnecessary items, leads to major social problems including atomized families, wide-spread
drug addiction, high suicide rates, mental problems, obesity, and homelessness. Not to speak
of a lowering of moral standards that's simply off the charts – in the wrong direction. It's
obvious that rural Americans (in particular) in the 1920s and 30s, although having little money
at their disposal, enjoyed a much higher quality of life including extended and close knit
families, than the majority of Americans today. I could be mistaken, but I suspect the same
would be true for the average Russian today.
We all know Putin plays footsie with the oligarchs. We all know he pretends to like Bibi
and is a master at realpolitik. But the impression I get is of a man who wrested control of
Russia away from the worst of the oligarchs, while playing nice with the rest of them. That's
how it looked to us from thousands of miles away in the dying West, and firmly under the Zio/Rothschild
boot, that this was/is a great man. A world-class statesman and nationalist who crushed the
fanatical terrorists in Chechnya and mollified the moderate ones with reasonable policies,
and he returned the resources of Russia back the Russian state.
Sure there is massive corruption, and other problems, but considering what the Russian people
have endured with decades of (Jewish imposed) genocidal commie slavery, and then having it
all do a 180 and then being impoverished even worse under the cruel destitution of crony Jewish
'capitalism' that simply handed Russia over to a few Jewish and Russian minions of Rothschild-
to lord it over the dying and starving Russian people- for Putin to have turned this around
is incomprehensible. It's nothing less than an historic accomplishment of a truly great man.
A giant on the world's stage.
He has, it seems to me, nearly single handedly reined in the drooling, frothing Fiend, ripping
to shreds everything it could get its blood dripping teeth on. Libya was the final straw for
Putin, and he alone stood up to the beast when all of Europe were counting their shekels and
tossing their citizens and their nation's dignity onto the Moloch's pyres of war and slaughter
and cowardly appeasement of the Fiend.
Putin said 'enough!' And has stopped them in Syria (for now) when everyone else was
wringing their hands, Putin showed them all how a man with integrity must act, when faced with
a thug and a bully. You stand up to them. Or you cower, and place your fate in their hands,
as Gadhafi had done.
That's sort of how I see it. Yes, he plays ball with some very unsavory types, and corruption
is rampant. But he has done something wonderful Boris.. he has given the Russian people back
their dignity. They have something today that I don't think they've had for generations..
Hope. A shred of pride at being who and what they are; Russians.
How do you put a price on that? How do you quantify that kind of thing. Sure, Americans
may be able to afford more flat screen TVs, with which to watch their culture and heritage
being relentlessly maligned, their identities excoriated as evil, and their culture turned
into a sewer. Oh joy. But how do you put a value on giving to your people a quiet sense of
personal dignity? Vs. pitting them endlessly against each other with raging identity politics
and a race down to the moral abyss of spiritual feculence, writ large.
That is our lot over here in the West Boris, and the SUVs and flat screen TVs just aren't
all that, when you consider the soul and the doomed future of your people.
I will strongly disagree. We have a lot of examples all around the world where the lack
of money and low living standards lead to the same bad things that you have listed. You do
not need to go far, just look at your neighbour countries in Central America, or else you even
might go to your own American poor minority (Black or Hispanic) neighbourhood, where the people
will strongly disagree with you that their living on $10,000/year gives them a great virtue,
like if they have no money to buy "toys" (in fact, first-necessity goods) then they live better
"spiritual" lives. When the poor speak about the spirituality of poverty, this usually means
a getaway from the harsh reality with the help of self-illusion. When the rich speak about
the spirituality of poverty, this usually means they try to cheat the poor.
We all know he pretends to like Bibi and is a master at realpolitik .
1. He's not pretending. There is a reason that Russian nationalists absolutely despise him.
He completely betrayed Iran when he refused to sell them the s-300 until they accepted Obama's
deal.
2. He is extremely conscious of Russian public opinion, and yet still has no problem having
publicly good relations with Netanyahu. That tells you all you need to know about how indifferent
the Russian people are towards the Palestinians. Contrary to your delusions, Russia is not
some sort of alt right paradise as any of the nationalists who actually live in Russia would
be quick to tell you.
He completely betrayed Iran when he refused to sell them the s-300 until they accepted
Obama's deal.
Jesus Greasy, that the realpolitik I was talking about that you even highlighted
in your quote! What he doesn't want is an all out war with the Zio-West!
2. He is extremely conscious of Russian public opinion, and yet still has no problem
having publicly good relations with Netanyahu.
again, he's pretending to like Bibi because Bibi is the king of the Jews and therefore the
default king of the West today. He's Rothschild's number one stooge. Of course Putin has to
play nice with him. But be honest Greasy, no one on this planet actually likes Bibi. That's
like saying you like hemorrhoids. You deal with things like hemorrhoids or Bibi, as the case
may be, but sure as shit don't like them.
Russia is not some sort of alt right paradise as any of the nationalists
no, certainly not. But it's also not a cultural sewer of the Jewish id, that we in the West
all have to marinate in, thankyouverymuch.. not
Bibi rules purely by default. He's not the king of anything. Nasrallah knew what he was
talking about when he said that Sharon was the last King of Israel.
Jesus Greasy, that the realpolitik I was talking about that you even highlighted in your
quote!
But Putin is democratically elected. The only reason he can engaged in realpolitik in the
middle east is because the Russia public doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the Iranians
or Palestinians. The only people in Russia who care about those groups are the nationalists,
who, as I have said, hate Putin's guts.
@Boris
N Moral always come first, with money being secondary. Of course It takes a certain amount
of money for people to live, but in practically every case, the more money immoral people have
at their disposal the lower they sink and the sorrier they get. With Hollywood pukes being
living examples of what money without morals produces. I'm surprised you haven't figured this
out.
@Rurik
I can understand why you have a distorted view of Putin and the Russian life. Because Westerners
simply lack important sources of information about the reality in Russia, you simply do not
live in Russia, do not meet and hear the people everyday, you are not insiders. This is why
I always say that the voice for Russia in the Western media (at least in the non-mainstream
one, because I have no illusion about the MSM) must be given not to West-based either Russophobes
or Russophiles, who practically know nothing, but to middle-aged, middle-class Russians, who
love and understand best their own home. But even in such a case we must have many voices because
no two Russians have a similar point of view, for example, even if I become one of the voices
(I've written quite much here, that many of my comments deserve to become articles on their
own, ha-ha) many Russians will agree with me, many will disagree, and many may have totally
different third, forth, and so on views. The Russian political spectrum is much diverse, there
is no false dichotomy like in the West.
And from that you all have a problem. You get information about Russia either from the
Washington-centric quasi-independent ("independent" in the American political doublespeak always
means independent from everyone but Washington) outlets, like NYT, WP, Fox, CNN, you name it,
and their view of Russia for the past 90 years is quite predictable if not annoying, and I
understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite way,
so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it as something
is white.
On the other hand you have the Kremlin propaganda state machine like RT who obviously
do the same thing as the Washington propaganda machine, but in the opposite direction; or Russophilic
individuals (usually emigres with nostalgia), lone wolf voices like the Saker or Karlin, but
whose voice anyway is irrelevant and illusional because, as I've said, they are outsiders and
know little about the actual Russian life, but they rather might be characterized as positive
interpreters of open sources (and neither the sources nor their interpretations ought to be
true).
Also we have local "opposition" outlets either in Russian like the radio station "Ekho
Moskvy", the TV station "Dozhd", "Novaya Gazeta" and so on, or in English like "The Moscow
Times", but I do not even take them seriously, I consider them as virtually subsidiaries of
the Western MSM (though there is one irony that furiously anti-government "Ekho Moskvy" is
owned by Gazprom).
What I wanted to say, that even if many who are not hopelessly brainwashed understand
that the demonizing of Russia is a lie, it does not make the opposite view automatically right,
and your over-positive opinion is generally illusional. I tried to bring you around, but seemed
to fail, though to change anybody's opinion was not my goal, I was just trying to say my opinion,
be it right or wrong.
Maybe our opinions are heavily influenced by our lives, both you and I may have been disappointed
by our lives in our respective countries, but you believe that there is somewhere a better
land, and it's Russia, while I, in turn, believe the life in the West is better. But there
is one distinction. I've been in both the places and I can compare, but I bet if you come to
Russia and do not become one of the high-paid Western expats who live luxury lives in Moscow,
you'll very soon run off home and your Putinism will fade immediately (though your love to
Russia itself may strengthen, as it has been with many Westerners).
@Greasy
William I do not know what sort of Russian nationalists you are speaking about, simply
because there are not THE Russian nationalists, but one or two dozens of diffused different
small groups with different if not opposite views, who may call themselves or other may call
them "Russian nationalists". Not to mention thousands of common non-partisan Russians who may
call themselves nationalists as well but as well may have thousands of different personal opinions
about the past and the current affairs.
Among those nationalists I know personally, most of them absolutely do not care about Iran,
Israel and Palestine and about the Middle East in general. The interest has only aroused since
the Syrian intervention, but the general opinion about it is negative, because many think that
the war in Syria is utterly inappropriate, when just at the border there is an ongoing unfinished
war with Ukraine. And some nationalists even have a positive view of both Israel and Iran as
good examples of national states, of what Russia must become. And unlike many commenters here,
most (with some exemptions) are not so much obsessed with Israel and Jews, and they do not
care if Putin loves either Israel or Iran, they dislike Putin not for that, but for other mostly
internal problems.
I do not deny the need and the role of good moral, but I have a more materialistic
view of the world, an important if not the fundamental condition for good moral is the full
stomach. Again no need to go far for examples, there is Latin America where people theoretically
have good moral, they all are devoted Catholics, but they live in a chaotic criminal frenzy,
when Detroit would look like a safe haven compared to San Salvador. Do you really think that
if the USA will be as poor as but as "spiritual" as Latin America, the US life will improve?
It works in the opposite direction as well. When people have not enough means,
they have no much time left to think about and to follow good moral, they are simply surviving
as they can, often doing very ugly things. In most cases a society in strong need ends up in
a chaos as we can see it in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
In both the cases wealth does not guarantee good moral, but good moral is not an inevitable
result of poverty. Where do you choose to live, in wealthy but "immoral" Geneva or in poor
but "spiritual" San Salvador?
Where do you choose to live, in wealthy but "immoral" Geneva or in poor but "spiritual"
San Salvador?
But San Salvador is just as spiritually sick as the West, just in a different way. A spiritually
healthy society will have low corruption, low violence, respect for women's rights and concern
for the welfare of the weak (the poor, the disabled, the sick). Poverty *can* breed evil, but evil always ultimately breeds poverty.
I do not know what sort of Russian nationalists you are speaking about
The one's who show off their gorgeous girlfriends who have "88″ and bladed swastikas tattooed
on their asses.
And some nationalists even have a positive view of both Israel and Iran as good examples
of national states, of what Russia must become.
They want Russia to become multi culture, failing states, with grinding poverty where the
different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent elite
rules over them? That is what they want Russia to become?
Have you ever read the Kreutzer Sonata? It is the only piece of Russian literature I have
ever read and I really liked it a lot.
The Russian political spectrum is much diverse, there is no false dichotomy like in the
West.
well from what I can glimmer, the 'dichotomy' in Russia seems to go something like either
'we/I like Putin', or 'we/I don't like Putin'.
Perhaps it has something to do with hard politics on the ground, and the reality that it's
this guy that is running things today in Russia, for better or worse.
I understand why you do not believe them and interpret everything they say in the opposite
way, so you have formed a habit that when they say something is black you understand it
as something is white.
I wouldn't quite characterize it in this way. It's true I never believe them, but that doesn't
mean they never tell the truth. Sometimes they mix a little truth in with the lies,
and sometimes they say what's really going on, because by doing so it suits their agenda(s).
When they say the Olympics are happening in Sochi, I believe them. When they say Putin shot
down MH17, I think they're lying. And then with most things in between, I think it's a combination
of lies and truth, always with an agenda in mind. If Putin were assisting with the destruction
of Syria today, like they (the occupied West) did to Iraq and Libya, I think they'd be calling
him a great statesman, and partner in freedom and democracy. It all depends on if he toes the
line.
but you believe that there is somewhere a better land, and it's Russia, while I, in turn,
believe the life in the West is better. But there is one distinction. I've been in both
the places and I can compare
It's true I've never been to Russia, at least not yet. The closest I've came is Slovakia
and Hungary, (but I did meet a beautiful Russian girl when I visited Cuba a few years ago!)
I've never thought life was better in Russia. We do have many blessings in the West. But
today I consider the government of Russia (with all of it's well known corruption and
chicanery) as hands down a thousand times better than what we now have in the West. And the
trajectory of Putin's Russia vs. the US or Germany for instance, I consider as like a country
on the rise, vs. a civilization in rapid (free-fall) decline.
My short take is that after the revolution and the murder of the Tsar and his family, the
Fiend took control of Russia, and set about slaughtering the best of the Russians (and everyone
else they could get their feculent hands on), and imposing a genocidal slavery on those people
for generations. And then one day when they (Rothschild) decided that commie slavery was too
expensive (you had to feed and house the people), they decided to impose a system even more
cruel and fiendish. They'd simply use their puppet, quisling government in Moscow to loot the
wealth and resources of Russia outright, and make Rothschild's minions some of the richest
men in the world overnight, while impoverishing the Russian people to the point of near starvation.
(it's what the do ; )
And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave her
hope, (and an ascendant middle class and pride in Russia's heritage). For the Fiend, this was
an abomination, and ironically enough; Putin was now a new Hitler – especially when he jailed
on of their own (and for hard labor -- It was another Holocaust!). But as long as he
played ball with the West by letting most of the Jewish oligarchs keep their ill-gotten
billions, and went along with atrocities like the savage rape of Iraq, the oligarchs were willing
to ignore what Putin had done to their designs and fun up to a degree.
But then came Libya, and Putin saw that the Fiend was in absolute control of the
West, and must not be fed anymore, lest the Fiend grow and fester and become a dire threat
to Russia itself, (again). So Putin put the kibosh on Syria, and now he's locked in a death
struggle with the Fiend, who is insane with power-lust.
It's a difficult situation to be sure. And that's how I see the West vs. Putin's Russia,
and why I like Putin even with all his warts and faults. At least he's trying to make Russia
great again, and that's why there are many of us in the West who pine for a man like him to
take on the Fiend that has its fangs locked deeply into the jugular of the West.
The only reason he can engaged in realpolitik in the middle east is because the Russia
public doesn't give a rat's ass what happens to the Iranians or Palestinians.
I think they do care what happens to Iran, since it's a close trading partner. And the Palestinians
are just a distant, tragic people to the Russians. Why should they wring their hands, it isn't
them who're foisting the evils upon the Pals, it's us Americans that are doing that.
The only people in Russia who care about those groups are the nationalists, who, as I
have said, hate Putin's guts.
how many Russian nationalists do you know or speak to who are not Jewish, Greasy?
From what I understand, the IDF is chock full of Russian émigrés, and their take on things
must be skewed by Putin's thwarting of Israel's designs on the Golan.
here's a forum run by an ultra-Russian nationalist
Without spiritual health, economic health is not only meaningless, it's unsustainable.
As we here in America are about to learn the hard way.
having linked to the Pravda forum, I just took a moment to peruse the Pravda front page.
This from an article on Russia today:
Putin has saved the country before and he is saving the country now. We despise all the
fifth column "dissent" that is based on your taxpayer money. Russia will never behave like
Soros, who maintains institutions to overthrow governments, because our leaders are Orthodox
Christians. Capitalism is not our religion. You are addicted to a beautiful body, and we
are addicted to a beautiful soul.
more:
Our aggressiveness exists only in your imagination. The reunification of the Russian
people with the Crimea passed without one single shot, because Russia is more than just a country.
Russia is a territory, which shares a common language, history and culture. We see any attempt
to "reprogram" Russians in Ukraine as a hybrid warfare against us. One can welcome the Scottish
Premier and discuss the likelihood for the UK to fall apart, but one can not support the population
of southern lands of the former Russian Empire in their aspiration to withdraw from Ukraine?
Is this not a double standard?
.. we do not like your determination to make us be like you. We change. Moscow has become
one of the most beautiful capitals in Europe. We do not live up to Western lifestyles, and
we do not "give a damn" if you do not like our way.
I would say that Putin certainly does care about Iran. It doesn't take a genius
to know which nations have been declared evil and targeted by the US, they are frequently named
by traitorous whores like Hillary, Obuma, Biden etc, along with the treacherous neo-cons who
bear responsibility for fomenting wars in the ME.
Putin is smart enough to know that if any nation sits back and waits its turn to be attacked
it will surely be destroyed. He went out on a limb to arrest the destruction of Syria and it
has paid off. He appears to have played his cards remarkably well to date. I can't imagine
that the stratospheric level of approval and support that he receives in Russia is fictional.
I would believe RT News before I would the BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, DW, Fox and all the
other discredited western "news" outlets.
the 'dichotomy' in Russia seems to go something like either 'we/I like Putin', or 'we/I
don't like Putin'.
To like/dislike Putin is not a political stance but rather a personal opinion. But it does
not explain nor imply any other view. To be precise, several persons can dislike Putin, but
one may be a pro-Western ultra-liberal, another a Stalinist, other a National-Bolshevik, other
a Christian Monarchist, other a racist Nazi, other a pro-Ukrainian Nazi, and so on. It is difficult
to list them all. And they all may have totally different views on many subjects, but just
one thing in common, as you said, a dislike to Putin.
I cannot say for sure for the Western public but I hardly saw such a variety of views. Maybe
the reason why Russians cannot unite and change something, because they are so disintegrated
on many issues.
It's true I never believe them, but that doesn't mean they never tell the truth.
OK, I did not mean that. Of course, when they say that somewhere there has been a tornado,
or, as in your example, a sporting event, or some other trivial factual thing they simply cannot
not to say truth. But when they are trying to create some sort of analysis about hot global
political affairs they usually back up the agenda of their Washington-Brussels masters.
But the agenda of the Kremlin is hardly better . The best option is not to listen them
both.
But today I consider the government of Russia (with all of it's well known corruption
and chicanery) as hands down a thousand times better than what we now have in the West.
Again, you say this because you simply has a very limited range of sources of information.
You just repeat a made-up image of the Russian government or, precisely, of just one person,
Putin. But this is just an image for the outside (non-Russian) public . You need know
more, much more, form a variety of Russian sources, for a long period of time, and then you
might have not the right, but at least a less distorted view. The actual Russian government,
if we put Putin (pun) aside, is comprised of very ugly, greedy, treacherous, hypocritical people,
I simply cannot find the right words for those bastards. They are utterly disgusting. They
have been ruining the country for the past 25 years.
And the trajectory of Putin's Russia vs. the US or Germany for instance, I consider as
like a country on the rise, vs. a civilization in rapid (free-fall) decline.
Russia is on the fall . The crisis of the past two years has just nullified any achievements
of the previous 2004-2014 decade. Russia has practically returned to its starting position.
And nothing says about its rise, everything says the contrary . Russians have entered
a difficult time. They will be remembering 2000-2014 with bitter nostalgia.
And then out of the blue came Putin, who wrested Russia away from the Fiend, and gave
her hope,
Putin did not turn out of blue, he was a member of the 1990s robbing elite, he is a continuation
of Yeltsin, I explained it in my other comments colorfully. Not to mention Putin's "team"
are the very same people from the 1990s. Take anybody and they all were doing some ugly things
in the 1990s, but now they are "respected" officials and "businessmen". The only thing he has
done is to hide this ugly truth under the cover. And millions around the world believe his
deceit, how naive.
The one's who show off their gorgeous girlfriends who have "88″ and bladed swastikas
tattooed on their asses.
If you speaking seriously, what I doubt, then they are a very small, marginal minority.
Since the 2000s being 1488 is a mauvais ton in the Russian national circles, nobody take those
Racial Holy Warriors and fans of Hitler seriously, they are just nutheads.
They want Russia to become multi culture, failing states, with grinding poverty where
the different factions of the population hate each other while a corrupt and incompetent
elite rules over them? That is what they want Russia to become?
Actually, for the past 25 years Russia is becoming "a multi-culture, failing state,
with grinding poverty where the different factions of the population hate each other while
a corrupt and incompetent elite rules over them" . I will add that that elite is in the
West in their minds, and they have to be physically located in Russia just for the sake
of "earning" money.
Of course, no Russian nationalists want this, even the Nazi nuthead minority. When I said
Israel was taken as an example I meant something like
that .
lot's of chafe on that one but you can at least glimmer a nuanced inkling of what the
Russian nationalists are on about
(they love Putin ; )
No, you cannot accidentally pick up some obscure bulletin boards, hosted on a free-hosting
site, which boards nobody knows and cares about.
The actual whole Russian national movement has been being thought through, discussed and
constructed for many years entirely in Russian, in the Russian part of the internet, and not
in English by some pro-Russian foreigners or Russian emigres.
"... The problems that the Communist bloc countries developed in the 80ies were problems of growth. Liberalization of the regime was under way and clearly understood as necessary by the leadership – but that process failed – because it was taken advantage of, both internally and externally. ..."
"... "In what circumstances would you want the economy to be planned, and what sort of planning do you have in mind?" ..."
"... intellectual ..."
"... Aron was in some sense a "Marxian" ..."
"... the theorists of colonialism ..."
"... "were convinced that the USSR was a genuine incarnation of Left values." ..."
"... Roma Città Aperta ..."
"... would have thought ..."
"... Quaderni del carcere ..."
"... "understand the world" ..."
"... "to change the world" ..."
"... America's Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy ..."
"... Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900 ..."
"... Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America ..."
"... society in the process of formation ..."
"... A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed ..."
"... War In the Shadows, the Guerilla in History, Vol II ..."
It is awkward when – as has happened with me – a Russian comes to the West – fleeing our beneficient
"Shock Treatment" – and then shocks one by saying in anger at my casual derogatory comment about
Stalin, "Listen, Stalin wasn't all bad!"
And then goes on to bemoan the horrors of the West. He finished, in the corridor of the Department,
by insisting that contemporary Westen University Education Administration was "Worse than under
Brezhnev", and to accuse us – the West – of having sold them, the Soviets, a bag of ideological
nonsense about capitalism and freedom.
And then invited me to his home for borsch and table tennis.
Vlade would set him straight, but I went and had the borscht and played – and lost – the table
tennis.
I grew up in the Communist block in the 70-ies and 80-ies. I've now lived in the US for about
20 years. Comparing the lives of the people on minimum or low wages in the US with those similarly
placed in the Communist block economies is in my view indisputably in favor of the Communist bloc.
Free child care, education, provided at decent quality, and practically EVERYONE owned a home
– a small one, but nonetheless a normal home, that you paid off over 30 years with your state
guaranteed job. No interest loans from simple savings pools managed on rotational principle at
work (my parents used them extensively). Nearly everyone in the cities had a small summer cottage
and a small garden that produced vegetables – for recreation and added self-sufficiency, and not
to mention a boost to communities. Yeah, our family car was a Trabant – a laughable vehicle for
the US consumer, even absurd by today's standards. But we didn't have and didn't need 6-lane highways
either, so the Trabi was adequate. And yeah, many personal freedoms were severely limited, and
there was a lack of culture of law – but that was more attributable to historic backwardness,
because that culture of law is even more absent today.
As a middle class professional today in Silicon Valley earning way beyond the median income
in the US, I am struggling to provide a similar level or security for my family and a similar
quality of community life and good education. Bottom line, this level of security is probably
only achievable for under 5% of the US households.
So yeah, I agree with the statement.
So for all those focused on the committed atrocities, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There were good things and we have lost them. Probably forever.
Thanks for your comment – can you tell us a little more about which countries you lived in
(and, if possible, which ones you thought worked better than others)? As I said in my post, I'm
interested in learning more about the specificities of particular countries.
I grew up in Bulgaria. I also have memories from a summer camp and middle school exchange program
in Czechoslovakia in the 80ies, and the standard of living and the culture of people there seemed
much higher. For example, my Czech host family (the parents worked in an electronic watch factory,
in a small town east of Prague – they could have been engineers possibly and not line workers
as they seemed well educated) had a small two-story single family concrete house, with a small
rye-grass lawn and a barbeque – luxuries that we in Bulgaria did not have. They also had a bathtub
– again a luxury I was not familiar with in Bulgarian homes. I remember that the stores and pastry
shops in my hosts' town looked nicer and had more and better quality items.
One other thing I remember: the bread and tap water were not as good as in Bulgaria. I guess
not everything is explainable by the economic system alone :)
Nowadays reliable info about the standard of living of those times is harder and harder to
find – and it seems that any info is used to ridicule it rather than try to genuinely understand
how it was achieved. My relatives like to talk about it, and what they share is not all rosy.
But all of the baby boomer generation who came of age in the 60ies, 70ies and 80ies managed to
raise and educate 2 kids on average, and acquire a modest but adequate home – ALL. Note that people
needed a special permission to acquire a second home. Homelessness and crime virtually did not
exist. I think it can safely be said that 90% of society had a solid basic standard of living
– no vacations on the Bahamas, no diamonds on your wife's finger and no latest model BMW in your
garage, but you knew the big items were taken care of.
The problems that the Communist bloc countries developed in the 80ies were problems of
growth. Liberalization of the regime was under way and clearly understood as necessary by the
leadership – but that process failed – because it was taken advantage of, both internally and
externally.
I want to add one more thing: today, in my observation, the generation X and millennials in
Bulgaria can only afford to live on the meager incomes their jobs provide because they have a
free flat or house from their parents or grandparents. Gradually home ownership levels are eroding
and more and more people have to rent, just like in the mature "developed" economies. That is
a time bomb that will enslave all but few.
This is one factor that I see mentioned nowhere – how Communism, given its objections to private
property, actually allowed the vast majority of working people to build a base of wealth in their
homes – that is to this day supporting the economic balance of the country.
There is a program under way currently in Bulgaria to upgrade the insulation of Communist era
apartment blocs. There are discussions on TV and press about how many billions of euros this costs.
Well, I would say – then how about putting this in perspective to the cost of actually BUILDING
all of this housing fund which was done in the prior era?? Imagine the billions upon billions
that were spent by this society to build 100s of thousands of units, affordable units, with green
spaces around them, schools etc. Can you imagine a program of that magnitude anywhere today?
So these are the contrasts that emerge, and I would much rather have the discussion be about
that – and not about the horrors of Stalinism or other Communist totalitarianism. Those should
not be ever forgotten or concealed, but what would be really useful today in our Western society
is the good things that Communist regimes managed to achieve – because they are very illuminating
about what is economically possible to achieve.
kukuzel, thanks so much for all of this highly detailed information.
On your last point, what I actually think we should strive for is the ability not to have to
choose between the two kinds of discourses you indicate. It shouldn't be a playground contest
over "Well, your system's more horrible." It should be about us being able to say – for example
– I want to be able to have these positive aspects from the Bulgarian communist years
without having to have these negative ones.
Or to put it another way, not having to take societies as blocs.
That means having to tease apart the extent to which positive aspects were or were not achieved
through means that also led to the negative aspects. But this kind of analysis has to be done
anyway – even if the idea were to return to something like this or this other particular society,
it would still not work without adapting the earlier model to changed circumstances.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster for many Russians. The one Russian family I
know well were well-off prior to the collapse but for an extended period they could not provide
for their two daughters so they asked my wife and I to sponsor and serve as wards for one of them
who had lived with us under a student exchange program. Her mother had worked as an industrial
chemist and her father had worked in IT for financial institutions. The father died a death of
despair; he drank himself to death. The mother now teaches college level chem. The daughter who
remained with us now works for a well known US company making films, is married and has two children.
The daughter who remained in Russia is a marine biologist. This family, well educated and dedicated
to their work and each other did well under the Soviet system and their lot has improved immensely
under Putin.
I have read that Putin's economic policies are somewhat "right-wing" in their tendencies.
I don't know whether this is accurate although maybe some readers do. If it is, though, it
would suggest that what made the difference in Russia is not so much communism versus capitalism
but a strong state (Putin, communism) versus a weak state (the 90s).
Thanks for this. Perhaps the latest crime of "capitalism"–40,000 civilians may have died under
American and Iraqi bombs and shells as Mosul was "liberated." Rather than visit mass violence
on their own people the US and Britain have turned it outward and then claimed it was unfortunately
necessary.
As for the above post, I think it may be minimizing the degree to which capitalist opposition
shaped communism. This Stephen Cohen article that I linked the other day suggests that the Soviets
under Glasnost may have been moving toward a more democratic form of communism but that was subverted
by the greed of its own oligarchs and open US support for Yeltsin who crushed democracy and wrecked
the country.
The Stephen Cohen article is interesting and I'm puzzled as to why you think it is somehow
incompatible with anything that I said in the post.
When you say we should emphasize more the extent to which capitalist opposition shaped communism,
you fail to address my response that this argument proves too much. Every regime or institution
faces some sort of opposition. This opposition partly constrains how it can act. Why couldn't
you just as easily say, "Everything that Monsanto (or Uber, or Goldman, etc., etc.) does has to
be understood considering that they are operating in a fearsome competitive environment, where
at the first sign of weakness, their competitors were ready to crush them"?
Rossana Rossanda, who had every reason in the world to want to find extenuating circumstances
for the regime she had "loved," was unable to convince herself that the argument you are proposing
sufficed to conjure away the moral problem. See below (response to Ulysses) where I quote from
her book at length.
I also think you are engaging in sloppy reasoning when you attribute 40,000 deaths at Mosul
to "capitalism." That's the same kind of lack of concern to agents used in the Black Book when
it attributes massive numbers of war deaths to "communism."
If America had never invaded Iraq would those 40,000 still be alive? I'd say there's a persuasive
case that they would be. And there's also a persuasive case that George W. Bush's motives had
everything to do with capitalist imperatives, oil imperialism, the profits of the MIC etc.
And I'm not trying to defend Soviet communism since IMO both sides of the Cold War divide were
misguided. I'm just saying that from the very beginning the attitude of the capitalist countries
was that communism was something that couldn't be allowed to succeed lest the contagion spread.
So it's hard for us to know how, say, Cuba might have turned out absent so much US meddling.
Perhaps the latest crime of "capitalism"–40,000 civilians may have died under American and
Iraqi bombs and shells as Mosul was "liberated."
is this an indictment of capitalism or of US politicians delusion of "transformation" and the
inertia of the MIC?
correlation is not causation File under: crimes of Stalin, Mao, PolPot and Castro
The Brits starved something like 30 million Indians in the 19th century,
Source, please. Note that prior to 1857, the British control over India was incomplete. Many
of the famine deaths prior to that were unrelated to British rule. I think I've seen estimates
that about 5 million people died in 1876 and again in 1896. I'm not defending British rule -- they
had no right to be there, and they did not care about the needs of the people that they ruled.
I'm just wondering about the number 30 million.
if people accurately tallied up the deaths and inefficiencies under capitalism and imperialism,
Stalin and Mao were quaint.
False. In addition to what happened in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1931-1933, we need to consider
the catastrophe of Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The low estimate of deaths from
starvation is 30 million, and in Frank Dikötter's book
Mao's Great Famine
, the author estimates that at least 45 million died of starvation. That's just a 4 – 5 year period.
Perhaps the Russians could claim that the 20 million plus Russians who died during WW2 were
victims of capitalism not to mention all those who died in WW1. The point is that neither system
has clean hands when it comes to violence. They just have different targets.
There's a difference between deaths in wartime and deaths in peacetime. They're equally horrible,
but it's harder to pick an economic ideology to blame for wartime deaths. After all, Stalin helped
start the European portion of WWII with the Molotov Von Ribbentrop Pact. So one could say that
those 20 million deaths were partly caused by communism.
One reason many in the West were at first complacent about Hitler coming to power was the hope
that he would take out the Soviets. I'd say there's a case to be made that the whole second half
of the 20th century was shaped by the Russian Revolution and the reaction to it. Hitler was always
going to invade Russia. He hoped Britain and others would join him in his crusade. When WW2 was
over there were many who thought we should keep going and take out the Soviets too, even if with
nuclear weapons. Some people it seems still think that even though Russians are no longer communists.
So it's a power struggle of course, but in the 20th cent it was very much an ideological struggle.
Perhaps anti-communism was just an excuse but having been there I'd say the Cold Warriors were
true believers.
Very likely true. But first he had to invade Poland, and he would have done that later if it
had not been for his Nonaggression Pact with the Soviets. Meanwhile, if the invasion of Poland
had been delayed, Britain and France would have improved their military capabilities, because
they knew what Hitler was up to after he seized Czechoslovakia earlier in 1939. Stalin made it
easier for Hitler in 1939.
Could we just order summary execution for anyone who brings up mass deaths from the past ??
Only semi snarking
most wars seem to come from grandfathers telling their grandsons things that never were
Someone kills some trees and throws some ink on them to work on tenure 50 75..100 200 500 years
after the fact
Why does anyone believe anything anyone writes or says??
The dead are dead we can't bring them back and
they won't have noticed
we avenged them because they are dead
Can we even agree on what is going on around the world today as we speak & communicate ??
Trump being investigated by the watchful eye of the fool who was filling in crossword puzzle
books his first few weeks in office allowing the events of 9-11 to occur ??
How funny is that ??
We have the self proclaimed righteous (privately owned) 1$t amendment acela vanity press cutting
and pasting talking points while almost never publishing the contents of the federal register
or congressional research service reports and it's not just an american phenomenon most countries
have "official gazettes" none of the "great and brave journalists" bother actually reporting on
the business of government
The dead are dead nothing will bring them back and those who killed them are also probably
dead
For those who submit and do not resist, most leadership will seem benevolent for those with
other thoughts death will come sooner than originally planned
There is plenty of history when one is handed "atrocities" one should ask why this and why
now ??
By the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a European war was already unavoidable. The farce
of Non-Intervention in the Spanish Civil War, the Munich Agreement, and Poland's participation
in the partition of Czechoslovakia, had totally discredited Litvinov's pro-Western foreign policy.
Sources: Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis and Epidemics and History by Sheldon Watts
both deal with the staggering death toll of British rule in India (roughly 30 million).
Perilous Passage by Amiya Bagchi has a more rigorous count and analysis of India, China, and
other countries subjected to imperialism.
Regarding the Ukraine, the Best Sons for the Fatherland by Lynn Viola details the second civil
war that was collectivization. Peasants didn't want to give up grain, so they killed Party members,
killed their livestock, destroyed their equipment, etc.
I've read Dikotter. The problem with his death tolls is fertility and birth rates drop during
famine. You can't extrapolate pre-famine birth rates and say "oh, these people weren't born therefore
those count as deaths." They did the same thing with deaths in Kampuchea. And yes, millions did
die of famine in the Ukraine and Kazkhanstan. I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing this notion
that Stalin and Mao were worse than Hitler. They were not. It's misleading to say "Stalin killed
more of his citizens than Hitler did" because most of the killings by Nazis were of Slavs. The
Soviets lost well over 20 million people due to the Nazis genocidal plans.
Regarding China, you know the bloodiest civil war/famine in history? The Taiping Rebellion,
which was the result of the Brits shoving opium down China's throat. Mao was no saint, but mortality
rates in China were far higher before the 1949 revolution than after. See for instance Mobo Gao's
the Battle for China's Past or William Hinton's Through a Glass Darkly.
Ultimately, purges and famines miss another huge source of deaths: disease. Mao's China and
Stalin's Russia made astounding leaps in public health, eliminating smallpox for one. Conveniently,
these millions of lives saved are ignored by Western hysterics. This isn't to say Stalinism and
Maoism are desirable. It is to say that the picture requires nuance. There is a reason Mao and
Stalin are still revered by millions of people in China and Russia.
"I'm disputing this notion that Stalin and Mao were worse than Hitler."
I'm not sure who said that Stalin and Mao were worse than Hitler, but in my opinion they were
approximately the same.
Yes, I'm aware of the Taiping Rebellion. Much more deadly than World War I.
Why are Stalin and Mao still revered by some people? Probably for similar reasons as the reverence
that some Americans have for Reagan and Trump: people sometimes believe weird things. As for smallpox,
that's been eliminated everywhere (we hope); not just in Russia and China.
Dikotter is a grotesque neoliberal apologist for imperialist drug dealers. He is also a fabulist
in his treatment of the effects of heroin/opiate addiction in late 19th/early 20th century China.
Given that we in the US are now experiencing a staggering public health disaster with respect
to opiate consumption by the immiserated proletariat, Dikotter's attempts to minimize the impacts
of opiates on Chinese public health is ghoulish at best.
Well, that doesn't seem relevant to the artificial famine of the Great Leap Forward, but I'm
curious. What's your source for your claim that he is an apologist for drug dealers? Did he write
something bad about the opium wars? Clearly the behavior of Britain in that context was atrocious.
I would like to thank the author for taking such an open minded, non doctrinaire attitude to
this subject.
That's not to suggest I agree with all his conclusions. Nor does the Q & A approach always prove
enlightening.
"Q: Was Stalinism good?
A: No."
The question is easy & the answer is correct. Of course, there is a small wrinkle: most historians
agree that it was the USSR that made the primary contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Q: to what degree did "Stalinism" enable the USSR to defeat the Nazis ?
A: It's an open question. It's often forgotten that the USSR came very close to defeat in 41′-42′.
In part because of Stalin's interference in military matters. But, would the USSR have had ANY
chance of victory "but for" the "crash" industrialisation instituted by Stalin in the 30's ? If
you allow that crash industrialisation was a necessary, (not sufficient) condition for eventuaL
victory – can we give Stalin any credit ?
"Q: Is it at least true that a planned economy always fails?
A: Probably not." But is that the right question ? Isn't the right question, "to what degree/extent
can an economy be planned & succeed ?" (An "economy" is almost be definition "planned". The most
basic law on property, succession etc IS planning ).
Some of the author's Q & A's are very good:
"Q: Well, is it at least true that attempts to change a society consciously lead to catastrophe?
A: What does it mean for a society to change "unconsciously"? Aren't most social changes due
to human decisions? Often proclamations of this sort can function as code for certain groups of
people being allowed to change society in "natural" ways, free from "conscious" and "unnatural"
"interference" from others." I think the author probably means "programmatically" when he says
"consciously" but his point remains valid: change occurs because people have ideas which they
seek to implement.
A few responses: First, I agree that your question on whether the 30s industrialization was
crucial is worth posing. On Stalin's interference in 1941-1942, yes, and it's also true that Stalin
was initially blindsided by Hitler's attack – he was pretty faithful to Molotov-Ribbentrop while
it lasted.
On "programmatic" versus "conscious," I agree that your wording is more precise, but my purpose
there was to paraphrase standard ideological constructions.
The purpose of the Q & A was to illustrate how some questions can be answered even when we
don't know all the historical details. I can't provide a general answer to, "To what extent can
an economy be planned and succeed?" – can you? As I indicated in the article, I think the more
fundamental question is in any case, "In what circumstances would you want the economy
to be planned, and what sort of planning do you have in mind?"
"In what circumstances would you want the economy to be planned, and what sort of planning
do you have in mind?"
An answer was given in "Organizations", written by March and Simon in the 1950s: in case of
war.
The observation that during WWII every major player (UK, USA, Germany, Japan, USSR), no matter
which economic principles it followed, turned to and relied upon a planned economy, with central
resource allocation, dirigiste production schedules and centrally rationed consumption, led those
authors to analyze markets and planing entities, as well as participating organizations as problem-solving
mechanisms geared to processing information and reducing uncertainty. Interestingly, it appears
that in the USSR, WWII led to a moderate relaxation of planning in some sectors of the economy.
Basically, when the stakes are very high (of a survival nature), the resources to put into
use of a massive (i.e. national) and comprehensive scale, and there is no time to let multiple
entities experiment and find out a "best" approach through trial and error (through the market
and its creative destruction), then a centrally planned economy is simply more effective.
I presume that once climate change will really bite and massive, survival-level solutions will
be required really fast to mitigate or counter-act it, most countries will be forced to turn to
a planned economy modus -- no matter what proponents of markets, four-freedoms or free trade will
argue.
Yes, the Soviet Union contributed more to the defeat of Nazi Germany than any other country.
We are entering into an area where the discussion has sometimes been very angry in the past on
this site. In addition to their huge role in the defeat of the Nazis, the Soviets also enabled
the Nazi invasion of Poland. Indeed, the Soviets themselves invaded half of Poland under their
agreement with the Nazis.
The Soviets helped to win the war that they helped to start.
First off, thanks for introducing me to the concept of the 'motte and bailey' argument. Its
a great description of a particular type of argument from ideologues of all types that really
irritates me.
You've pointed out one of the reasons why I've never self-identified as communist, anarchist,
feminist or any other of the myriad 'isms' on the left. I even hesitate sometimes at 'socialist'.
There are too many assumptions built into any of those identifications which I'm not always comfortable
defending.
I think that constructing an 'ideal' fair and equitable society is an impossibility. There
are too many variables in history and sociology and human behavior. And democracy has a nasty
habit of producing answers that idealists don't like. I see it as a process, not an end – a messy
one of step by step building a world that is more equal, more fair, more environmentally sustainable,
with a deeper sense of justice, while accepting that the building blocks of that society might
not be very sturdy and will need constant maintenance and repair, and that sometimes you might
have to step back and start again. And sometimes, really unpleasant compromises will have to be
made in order to achieve a greater good.
One reason I love NC so much is that instead of starting from some sort of idealised notion
of how the world should work, is that it addresses how the real world of economics and sociology
actually exists, and asks us to think very hard about how to make it better. Its the articles
and discussions here which have forced me to question my own assumptions and idealisms and think
much harder about how a better society would actually function, not in a 'we'll all live together
in co-operatives and play guitar and draw from our Universal Income and guaranteed pensions',
but how it will really work.
"I think that constructing an 'ideal' fair and equitable society is an impossibility. There
are too many variables in history and sociology and human behavior. And democracy has a nasty
habit of producing answers that idealists don't like. I see it as a process, not an end – a
messy one of step by step building a world that is more equal, more fair, more environmentally
sustainable, with a deeper sense of justice, while accepting that the building blocks of that
society might not be very sturdy and will need constant maintenance and repair, and that sometimes
you might have to step back and start again. And sometimes, really unpleasant compromises will
have to be made in order to achieve a greater good."
Excellent points! Yet your last sentence raises a serious question– greater good for who? Very
often, neoliberals fudge the answer to this by reifying an abstraction they call "the economy."
"We know it's hard on the eight out of ten people in this de-industrializing nation who
will see their living standards decline, but globalization is "good for the economy" in the
long run."
The more honest version of this statement would replace the word "economy" with "obscenely
wealthy banksters and kleptocrats, and a small number of their enablers and servants to whom they
allow a bit of wealth to trickle down."
If you ask your children how a cake can be fairly distributed, all answers will probably be
different. Now imagine this negotiation across 7 billion people.
Guess who gets to cut? Usually the one already in power or the one with a more entitled attitude.
It's rarely the most fair individual who gets his/her way.
Actually, re the kids. If they have a handle on the idea of fairness – so 3ish and up – they
are remarkably sensitive to what fairness rerquires, and how this relates to everyone arround
the cake. You try it. It will be divided equally – unless, say, there is someone with an injury
or medical conditon or something rather awful – and they will then give that person a bigger slice,
and a smaller equal one for everyone else. I've had a fair bit of experience in this matter. (I
suspect this wonderfully cheering fact it is what Jesus was reminding us of when he said "Become
like little children".)
I suppose I don't disagree with your point in principle, but coming at this from the perspective
of labor organizing and what have you, solidarity of purpose quite often demands a certain degree
of (lax) identity signaling so you can easily identify who your comrades/fellow travelers are.
A management/worker framing of the dynamics at play in any given place of employment may not perfectly
reflect the nuances of that place's social organization but it does provide a handy rule of thumb
for action for those who don't want to write a graduate thesis simply in order figure who's on
their side and who isn't. Arnade's front row/back row works in a similar way. It's not perfect,
but it's been rather effective in identifying how certain educated groups are at least complicit
with the aims of plutocrats.
As for advocating for the "ideal," this could just as easily be understood as staking a strong
bargaining position. You always ask for more than you think you'll get. So, that doesn't mean
a group's utopian demands reflect an inability to see the practicalities of the here and now.
It could just as easily mean "we know where we are, but we're always striving for better."
I agree with you in general, but I'd make a distinction between pressing for specific aims
(for example, Union recognition), and aiming to transform society. Unity of purpose and 'signalling'
is vital if people are to unite for a specific aim. But its much harder if your aim is 'an equal
society'. You will spend more time arguing about what 'equal' means than actually doing things.
Which is of course why the establishment loves identity politics, because it provides an infinity
of possibilities for people to fall out arguing over split hairs.
Yes, there is a necessary dualism. On the one hand, as you say above, it is always a process,
not an end. On the other hand, making progress against entrenched power IMO generally requires
an image of a destination, even if that destination is always fragile and subject to undermining
(as it will always be).
Which I suppose is the issue with communism. It is conceived of as some kind of permanent end
point, a Fukuyama-esque end of history. That seems extremely dubious to me.
That is why I rarely reference my ideas in comments sections. When one does, many seem to think
that the reference means one supports the entire philosophy of the quoted pundit and then one
gets pigeonholed.
Lovely to find this here. Almost all the arguments have been rattling in my head for the past
couple of years. Work of this sort is crucial for the next phase, so thanks! Something is in the
air ..
Great article. As a first time commenter, I just want to thank you and everyone else for how
far ranging and thought provoking of a Blog Naked Capitalism is.
The questions you posed are ones that I often have struggled with as a philosophically inclined
leftist. As one who is as sympathetic to Anarchism as he his To Marx and his followers I have
to ask, do you think Anarchist critiques of Marx (those of Bakunin and Kropotkin, for example)
and Marxism are any more or less elucidating than the seemingly Liberalish ones you have mentioned
(from what I've heard of Camus he was more of a liberal existentialist and not one that was ever
exactly radical, but I've not read him yet so I could be very wrong). Also, do you feel that Rosa
Luxembourg's critiques of Lenin were also apologetics for Marx, if not necessary the Bolshevik
interpretation of Marx, or more than that.
As a side note, I also have to ask, Which students in the 60s thought the Soviet Union was the
be all, end all. I always thought that the SDS and Situationist type groups were more Anarchist
even if they sometimes thought they were Marxist.
I agree that the anarchist critiques are worth discussing. I'm not particularly interested
in liberal critiques per se , and to the extent that they get tangled up in their own
mantras, they can become pretty frustrating. Aron and Furet are a bit different – both books were
important historically, and both authors had read Marx very carefully. Aron was in some sense
a "Marxian," and Furet at one point went to the trouble of compiling a book on everything Marx
wrote about the French Revolution so people would stop reading stuff into him.
The advantage of looking at writers from far outside of the Marxist tradition is that you can
sometimes find critiques that problematize features that more "inside" writers are unlikely to
question. Of course, some of these critiques are more persuasive/original than others
On Rosa Luxemburg, it's true that she was pretty strongly Marxist. Her critique of Lenin, like
Kautsky's, is useful in showing how Lenin's form of Marxism was fairly marginal within the
intellectual Marxist world before the Russian Revolution provided Lenin with the mantle of
apparent success.
When you say that many student leaders "were more anarchist even if they sometimes thought
they were Marxist," I think you are onto something. However, in terms of professed beliefs,
I know that the Italian students used Marxist language very heavily. Re SDS, I once met a former
mid-level SDS leader who told me that when he expressed reservations about the Russian invasion
of Czechoslovakia, he was systematically ostracized by the high-level SDS leadership. Many of
those individuals wound up in the Weather Underground.
Thanks for the response. I am always looking for historically important books to further aid
my own investigations of political ideologies, their origins and their evolutions and corruptions
throughout time. I'll have to check Furet and Aron out to see what they have to say.
I didn't realize that Lenin was more on the outskirts of Marxism before the October revolution
took place. I always thought the he had to have had a higher profile, even before the revolution.
Human history seems to have a habit of pushing formally background characters to the forefront
I'd have never thought the SDS expelled people over Prague, but then again, I haven't looked that
much into the SDS history and what their changing political lines were. I guess it isn't that
surprising that the SDS had more Stalinist types in their ranks that were willing to excommunicate
rivals. Most socialist movements had similar issues with Stalinists in the 60s and 70s.
He was antifascist, anti-colonialist, and (at least in the early 50s) Keynesian. On Aron and
Marx, see here
(in French, sorry, that section doesn't exist in the English version).
Although I know less about his later trajectory, it may however be true that he became much
more of a neoliberal as time went on. This sort of thing happens for familiar reasons – people
solidify in their positions and lose initial nuances under the pressure of rhetorical combat.
Great to see another anarchist in the hood. And you bring up some great questions. To me, Bakunin
never had the philosophical grip that Marx had on capitalism. Bakunin DID ride Marx and the Communist
International on the meaning of the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
As for anarchists and the early Russian Revolution, have a look at "The Bolshevik Myth" by Alexander
Berkman, Emma Goldman's old bo.
Having been an old New Lefty of the 60's myself, everybody I knew of or read thought that the
Soviet Union was OLD, antique, almost quaint. The same went for the Communist Party USA. Then
again, the New Left never had an answer for why the Berlin Wall was around. Or why power freaks
like Enver Hoxha of the People Republic of Albania were given the time of day. And don't get me
going on how Che Guevara, before he went off to Bolivia, organized the Cuban state sugar farms
with political prisoners' free labor.
Thanks for chiming in.
I've been meaning to read Berkman for a while, and your recommendation sounds like a great place
to start. I didn't know that about Guevara, but honestly, the idea that slave labor was used in
the early days of the Cuban revolution sounds like an accurate description, as sad as that is.
I remember reading The Port Huron statement in an American Political Ideas I had recently.
What you say about the New left consider the USSR quaint does remind me of the tone in that and
other political statements from the 60s I have read.
I am also glad to know that there are other anarchists here at Naked Capitalism
". And don't get me going on how Che Guevara, before he went off to Bolivia, organized the
Cuban state sugar farms with political prisoners' free labor."
I don't subscribe to the cultish veneration of any individual, past or present, nor its flip-side
of obsessive demonization of any individual, past or present. However, in the spirit of this excellent
post and thread about "The Minefield of Historical Communism", I would be very much interested
in your adding context to this comment, e.g., their conditions pre-revolution, their conditions
at the time of your claim, and the lessons learned, that may be of value to others. As far as
legacy, they certainly don't seem to export as much sugar today, but they do seem to export a
lot of doctors.
What would one think of someone who tried to absolve the theorists of colonialism of any
responsibility for, say, British misrule in India, on the grounds that these theorists said
very clearly that they wanted to help the natives to become more civilized?
First, why does a discussion of British colonial misrule immediately turn to India, as opposed
to Ireland?
I'd say it is because ' the theorists of colonialism ' is at best a euphemism for
'psychopathic cheer-leaders of barbarism and genocide', and of course the Indian people are more
brown than the Irish.
There are no legitimate theories of colonialism, only rationalizations for what on it's face
is barbarous behavior, in short propaganda propagated by the perpetrators, not legitimate 'theorists'.
Second;
Large numbers of intellectuals in France and Italy, and also elsewhere, as well as much
of the leadership of the 60s student movements, were convinced that the USSR was a genuine
incarnation of Left values. What does this imply about their powers of discernment?
This question seems to me to be part of the never-ending effort to de-legitimise all resistance
to imperial capitalist barbarism by waving the Bloody-Shirt of Stalinism.
The way I remember it, the dynamism, and turmoil of the 1960's was not the result of naive,
and misguided intellectuals and student leaders pushing a communist agenda, it was rather, a clear
demonstration of the lengths to which the PTB will go to repress legitimate resistance to obviously
barbarous imperialism abroad, and systemic racism everywhere.
Socialism does not equal Communism, does not equal Stalinism, but this is the most useful fallacy
that the psychopathic cheer-leaders of barbarism and genocide have cooked up to thwart the efforts
of those who would teach/preach Solidarity.
As I recall, it was very effective in the 60s, and we just witnessed its efficacy in stopping
Bernie.
Lastly, and yes, this is much more than a 'quibble';
I find this baffling. It seems to suggest that left-leaning people continued to emotionally
identify with the USSR well into the 80s, and to be imprisoned within the idea that it constituted
a superior economic system.
I find it baffling that anybody takes this sort of bull*hit seriously.
On Ireland versus India, I have no quarrel with anything you are saying. I would have been
as happy to talk about Ireland as India.
When you say,
This question seems to me to be part of the never-ending effort to de-legitimise all resistance
to imperial capitalist barbarism by waving the Bloody-Shirt of Stalinism.
you are engaging in a breathtaking misreading of the article. The whole point of the article
is to open up ways to look radically beyond the existing system, without having to self-censor
about what did and did not happen during Stalinism. I specifically reject the idea that the history
of Stalinism implies that it is wrong to try to envision alternatives to capitalism.
When you say that the 1960s "was not the result of naive, and misguided intellectuals and student
leaders pushing a communist agenda" you are blatantly straw-manning. I did not say that. I did
say that many of the student leaders were willing to reflexively defend "really existing communism."
If you doubt that this is true, read any history of the SDS leadership, don't just make peremptory
statements about what you imagine the 60s "stood for."
When you claim that the article implies that "socialism equals communism," you are again responding
to a thesis that it doesn't argue for, and in fact takes precisely the opposite thesis.
If you don't think that people in the PCI and PCF continued to consider the USSR a good economic
model well into the 1980s, then why did those parties collapse with the Soviet Union? You can
say words like bullshit all you want, but vehemence is a poor substitute for critical thinking.
I've asked plenty of ex-members of those parties why they stopped believing in the possibility
of radical economic change and if I get an answer, it's along the one I gave. But more often,
the answer is just embarrassed silence.
I've asked plenty of ex-members of those parties why they stopped believing in the possibility
of radical economic change and if I get an answer, it's along the one I gave. But more often,
the answer is just embarrassed silence.
With this;
Large numbers of intellectuals in France and Italy, and also elsewhere, as well as much
of the leadership of the 60s student movements, were convinced that were convinced that the
USSR was a genuine incarnation of Left values.
to understand that you're trying to sell the notion that those who have striven for radical
economic change are folks who, in your words, "were convinced that the USSR was a genuine
incarnation of Left values."
This is not the case.
The notion that the USSR was a legitimate incarnation of "Left values" was set to rest with
the advent of Stalinism, that is, the embarrassed silence you speak of happened in the 1930s.
Because the tactic of associating progressive activists with the evil commies has been so successful
thus far, the PTB will never stop using it.
IMHO, that's exactly what you're engaged in this morning.
Your claims about my intentions are false. Nor do the quotes from me that you cite back up
your claims in any way.
The statement that I made about certain intellectuals in France and Italy and (e.g.) many SDS
leaders is a historical claim that can be verified or disputed. Is any hope of "striving for radical
economic change" dependent upon never mentioning it? Is it helpful when "striving for radical
economic change" to close oneself off from learning from the past?
Let's try something else. I'm going to respond by saying something that I think is far more
plausible than what you are saying.
* * * * *
"Your attempt to force anyone who wants to strive towards a radically different economic system
to tread very gently whenever saying anything critical of any society that has ever called itself
communist is a tried and true tactic of the PTB. By blocking thoughtful self-reflection among
people interested in living in a drastically different future, it cripples their intellectual
resources when trying to imagine such a future. Simultaneously, it facilitates the PTB's efforts
to discredit such efforts by making statements like "they won't even come to terms with how their
efforts led to disaster in the past" appear reasonable.
Because the tactic of forcing progressive activists into ideological rigidity has been so successful
thus far, TPTB will never stop using it.
IMHO, that's exactly what you're doing this morning."
Now, I don't actually believe that. IMHO, through various life experiences, you have acquired
the idea that open discussions of historical communism are an attempt to subvert attempts to envision
another future, and you are currently engaging in pattern-matching.
IMHO, through various life experiences, you have acquired the idea that open discussions
of historical communism are an attempt to subvert attempts to envision another future, and
you are currently engaging in pattern-matching.
I disagree.
What I am currently engaged in, is explaining that there is no logical need for any person
who wants to work towards a radically different economic system, to first take on the responsibility
of addressing the historical failures of soviet communism.
To my knowledge, the historical failures of communism are not seriously disputed, or ignored
by anyone currently working for a better economic system in the USA.
I'm not refusing to face embarrassing facts, I'm disputing the relevance of the whole topic
to current political discourse.
To insist that Bernie Sanders supporters, for instance, must, in order to be taken seriously,
first engage in discussion that addresses the historical failures of communism is ridiculous.
I agree with portions of this sentiment and disagree with others.
I agree that people shouldn't be held hostage to particular forms of historical inquiry. People
shouldn't be forced to "take responsibility" for a position on any topic they aren't ready to.
Bernie Sanders is not proposing a radically new economy. Reforms like the ones he's proposing
have actually been tried out in Western European countries. If I were claiming that no one should
be allowed to support Bernie without first taking responsibility for historical communism, that
would be silly – but I didn't. Suggesting that I did comes dangerously close to further straw-manning
of my position.
There's a difference between saying people should be obligated to talk about a certain
topic and saying that they should be allowed to talk about it without being immediately
blasted as an enemy agent.
When I read an experience like that of Rossanda's below, my reaction is not, "Ooh, those communists
sure were evil, ha ha ha." It's that she seems like a person who was very intelligent, who genuinely
wanted to change the world for the better, and still found herself fifty years later interrogating
herself, wondering how much of her life work was misguided, and whether she bears responsibility
for her role in providing some measure of support for a regime that is hard to excuse.
My reaction is, "That could be me. I don't want it to be me, but who's to say that I'm any
more insightful or moral than she was?" I don't want to be in the position of having provided
vocal support for a political program that makes the world worse, and if I were to do so, having
done it for "good motives" would be cold comfort. I'm not saying that anyone else has to learn
from her experience – there's only so much time in the world, and there's a lot of history that
might provide valuable lessons, not just the 20th century. But personally, I'd like to learn from
her experience, and not shy away from where it leads me.
I believe what I've been arguing is based in the American experience, which in this particular
means being immersed in a politically naive population marinated in anti-communist propaganda.
I'm not sure a citizen of any European country can appreciate the degree to which our people
have been trained to believe that the impulse to join together in solidarity for any purpose,
is evidence of a soft intellect or moral depravity.
Even before the fall of the USSR, any discussion of a political nature approaching a topic
that could be construed as being in favor of socialism in even the most limited context was apt
to be met with a chorus of derisive abuse.
I believe an invitation to discuss the reality of historical communism, in the USA at least,
is most often actually a thinly veiled invitation to shut the hell up, and it has been so for
close to one hundred years.
This situation has become incredibly worse in the last couple decades, this is especially evident
in the disquieting popularity of the 'ideas' championed in the writings of Ayn Rand.
I hope you'll excuse my misinterpreting your intent, and understand that I've never been honestly
invited to consider historical communism, I've only been invited to consider keeping my socialist
ideals to myself.
I am familiar with some of the American dynamics you bring up. One of my hopes is that if critically
thinking people can find spaces where they discuss these sorts of ideas without fear or favor,
it will gradually make it possible to develop antidotes to the kind of discussion-choking maneuvers
you mention.
There was a time in the 1970s when the popular comic Pilote wasn't just for kids,
despite running Astérix and Achille Talon . Then Jacques Lauzier ran some grueling
character studies (well, at least one, among other similar stories) of French ex-Communist intellectuals
facing the consequences of just such attitudes as Outis has described. Interesting to look up,
if you read French, or can find a translation.
The author's statement that "large numbers of intellectuals in France and Italy, and also elsewhere,
as well as much of the leadership of the 60s student movements, were convinced that the USSR was
a genuine incarnation of Left values." is more than a little disingenuous.
The many former sessantottini that I knew in Italy, SDS leaders, and other U.S. student
radicals from the sixties were all very strong supporters of the Prague uprising against Soviet
domination in 1968. This includes many who self-identified as Marxist!
And of course, the author's statement appears even more of a smear when one remembers this
historical reality:
"In 1969, Enrico Berlinguer, PCI deputy national secretary and later secretary general,
took part in the international conference of the Communist parties in Moscow, where his delegation
disagreed with the "official" political line, and refused to support the final report. Unexpectedly
to his hosts, his speech challenged the Communist leadership in Moscow . He refused to "excommunicate"
the Chinese communists, and directly told Leonid Brezhnev that the invasion of Czechoslovakia
by the Warsaw Pact countries (which he called the "tragedy in Prague") had made clear the considerable
differences within the Communist movement on fundamental questions such as national sovereignty,
socialist democracy, and the freedom of culture. At the time the PCI was the largest Communist
Party in a capitalist state, garnering 34.4% of the vote in the 1976 general election."
I am much less monolithically critical of the PCI than you assume (see also my next post on
this subject). It was much more independent of the Soviet Union than the French Communist party,
and there was a lot of opposition to Prague.
I think it's probably true that at least for a while, the leadership of the PCI was more open
to critical thinking about the historical role of the USSR than its broad membership was. Here
is a string of excerpts from Rossanda's autobiography:
[On November 4, 1956, she woke up to tanks marching through the streets of Budapest.] This
was the first time I said to myself – they hate us. Not the elites. The ordinary [Hungarian]
people, the ones on our side, they hate us. [ ]
The poor and oppressed are not always in the right. But communists who are hated [by them]
are always in the wrong. And this was a massive, sedimentary hatred, you don't get to this
level [of hatred] without having suffered from felt oppression for a long time. In those days,
all my hair turned white. Yes, it happens. [ ]
Was it therefore impossible to knock down the capitalist system, even a broken-down autocratic
mess [like Russia], and build a socialist one without paying an inhuman price? [She now rehearses
possible exculpatory arguments:] No, those were different times and circumstances, you have
to take into account the backward circumstances in which Lenin was operating, the civil war,
efforts that went nowhere, certain errors that weren't fixed, and so the skidding into authoritarianism.
But even if you grant that at the beginning repression was necessary, why had it lasted so
long? And even expanded? Was the dictatorship of the proletariat therefore a dictatorship like
any other? No – it was not established on behalf of just a small number of people; yes – it
treated human beings as tools. We debated means and ends, a debate that goes nowhere. Togliatti,
writing in Nuovi Argomenti, and also Isaac Deutscher, had a different response: The repressive
apparatus was an overgrowth, a massive fungus that had not infected the trunk – the revolution
had been immature, things had been forced, the tree will be healed. But it had taken so
long . And was it healthy even now?
Sorry, I need to take a break, will provide more of the text here later.
"It was much more independent of the Soviet Union than the French Communist party,"
Something which no one would have guessed from your original post, in which you lump together
French and Italian intellectuals as "convinced that the USSR was a genuine incarnation of Left
values."
You were free to write as long and accurate a post as you felt like writing. You chide me for
"assuming" that you are monolithically critical of the PCI. Am I supposed to be a mind reader?
No one reading your post would have any reason to doubt that the PCI was unwaveringly Stalinist.
It was not.
Now, in this backpedaling reply, you assert that the "broad membership" of the PCI was less
open to critical thinking about the USSR than its leadership. On what evidence? I lived in Italy
for several years in the eighties and early nineties. I met very few members of the PCI "leadership",
but many hundreds of its "broad membership." Not a single one of these PCI voters was even a little
bit supportive of the U.S.S.R.! I traveled from Genoa to Palermo, and all points in between.
Now who are you asking me to believe? You, or my lying eyes?
Just in case anyone here is interested in the facts of the PCI demise, here is an important
moment:
"Per decidere sulla proposta di Occhetto fu indetto un Congresso straordinario del Partito,
il XIX, che si tenne a Bologna nel marzo del 1990. Tre furono le mozioni che si contrapposero:
la prima mozione, intitolata Dare vita alla fase costituente di una nuova formazione politica
era quella di Occhetto, che proponeva la costruzione di una nuova formazione politica democratica,
riformatrice ed aperta a componenti laiche e cattoliche, che superasse il centralismo democratico.
Il 67% dei consensi ottenuti dalla mozione permise la rielezione di Occhetto alla carica di
Segretario generale e la conferma della sua linea politica.
la seconda mozione, intitolata Per un vero rinnovamento del PCI e della sinistra fu sottoscritta
da Ingrao e, tra gli altri, da Angius, Castellina, Chiarante e Tortorella. Il PCI, secondo
i sostenitori di questa mozione, doveva si rinnovarsi, nella politica e nella organizzazione,
ma senza smarrire se stesso. Questa mozione uscì sconfitta ottenendo il 30% dei consensi.
la terza mozione, intitolata Per una democrazia socialista in Europa fu presentata dal gruppo
di Cossutta. Costruita su un impianto profondamente ortodosso ottenne solo il 3% dei consensi.
Il XX Congresso, tenutosi a Rimini nel febbraio del 1991, fu l'ultimo del PCI."
Do you notice that 3% figure at the bottom? Those would be the people that O.P. characterizes
as the "broad membership" unwilling to criticize the U.S.S.R! Under what bizarre meaning of "broad"
does something opposed by 97% of a given group make any sense?
In 1991, the PCI voted to renounce "democratic centralism," i.e. the party being organized
internally along Leninist grounds.
This shows that up until two years after 1989, the PCI was still nominally in favor of Leninism.
On the other hand, the major losing motion, with 30% of the vote, was that of Ingrao and others,
was a vote for "the PCI to renew itself, politically and organizationally, while remaining faithful
to itself."
In other words, a motion for the PCI to remain faithful to its postwar heritage lost by a crushing
margin, 67-30.
If the broad membership of the PCI felt like the USSR was basically alien to their own political
aspirations, why would the USSR's implosion have led to this sort of radical renunciation? Surely
you don't think it was merely a coincidence that this motion passed in 1991 as opposed to, say,
1975 or 1985?
I'm open to other interpretations, but I don't see how the quote supports your argument.
I apologize for anything that was misconstrued as invective. You appeared to claim that the
broad membership of the PCI was staunchly Stalinist up until 1991. Having lived in Italy during
the late 1980s myself, I knew this claim to be false.
The reason the PCI collapsed after the fall of the U.S.S.R. (and not earlier) was best explained
to me by a friend who was himself a Christian Democrat, with a Communist girlfriend. He argued
that the triumphalism of western capitalists in the U.S. at the "fall of communism" after 1989
created an urgent need for "re-branding" for the people, like his girlfriend, who became the new
Democratic Party of the Left.
In other words, after the only major country in the world to have been at least nominally anti-capitalist
collapsed, Italian communists rightly feared that their attempts– to distance themselves from
the particular horrors of Stalinism– would be forgotten amidst the crowing by people like Fukuyama
over "The End of History."
My main objection to what you wrote, in your original post, was that it seemed to imply that
most Italian communists were like the 3% who, even in 1991, were proud to be known as Stalinist.
There's actually a pretty good discussion of this whole issue here, where, as your Rossanda
quotations might suggest, we see that the Stalinist orientation of the PCI was considerably weakened
after 1956.
"E la religione politica del Pci? Quella d'élite? Stalinista, sì. Almeno fino al 1956, "anno
indimenticabile" e nuovo inizio, costellato di sofferenze e ambiguità."
"Insomma la "doppiezza veritiera" di Togliatti stava in questo: immaginare il socialismo
radicalmente diverso dentro due ipotesi impossibili (tali almeno fino a Gorbaciov). L'ipotesi
di una cooperazione distensiva tra i blocchi. E quella di una riformabilità della casa madre
sovietica. Ma è nello spazio immaginario di quella ipotesi strategica "impossibile" che il
Pci – in definitiva – intimamente stalinista non fu. Fu semmai pedagogico, storicista, elitario
e altresì di massa. Capace di aprire malgrado tutto l'Italia della guerra fredda al mondo.
Alla cultura internazionale. All'etica dei diritti sociali e civili che inseriva i ceti subalterni
nello stato.
Strana giraffa il Pci. Esteriormente stalinista, interiormente no."
The article you linked to is quite good, thanks for sending it.
Let's see if I understand the theory you propose. It seems to suggest that the people who genuinely
believed in communism felt like they had to go underground for a while until their adversaries
had spent their fury, so that they could resurface later intact.
I've contemplated ideas along these lines. I think it's noteworthy that your friend was a supporter
of the DC – in fact, it's the kind of theory that anticommunists often hint at, because it implies
that their adversaries have "not changed" and instead have become like "sleeper cells," normal
on the outside but frightening inside.
But that doesn't necessarily make it false. In fact, if a whole group of people had decided
to shield each other by not talking about anything that might make their enemies suspicious, then
that would explain some of the behavior that I described in one of my other responses.
Still, I have a hard time entirely making sense of it. Back before 1956, the PCI really was
fairly Stalinist in its official allegiances. The "horrors of Stalinism" were much closer then,
and yet the PCI did not distance itself from them at the time despite plenty of people who were
willing to cast them in its teeth.
Why was Fukuyama so much more terrifying than anti-communists of the 50s?
I'll respond to another point you bring up in a separate post when I get a chance.
"The "horrors of Stalinism" were much closer then, and yet the PCI did not distance itself
from them at the time despite plenty of people who were willing to cast them in its teeth."
This is a very important point. My only information on why this was the case comes from people
who were already fairly old by the 1980s. They witnessed the partigiani acting as the
strongest actual resistance to the fascists– and they were reluctant to give credence to anything
said against anything communist.
Only long after Mussolini's execution (yet still before the fall of Franco) were Italian communists
open to seeing the events of 1956, 1968, etc. as revealing serious flaws in the Soviet system.
This certainly played a role. Consider, for example, a movie like Roma Città Aperta
(1945), where communists, together with Catholics, are placed at the foundation of the new Italian
identity, unified through the anti-Nazi struggle.
There is a lot of invective here, which I'm not interested in responding to.
There is, however, also some substance, which I think is worth discussing.
I don't have any particular stake in whether or not the PCI base was less skeptical of the
USSR than the leadership. I'm curious about the question. Here's what evidence I have,
pointing in various directions.
Let's start with the 50s. Rossanda herself didn't seriously question the USSR until 1956. In
the incident with Ortese she mentions (possibly later, maybe in the 60s), she was clearly worried
that Ortese's articles would lead PCI sympathizers to think negatively of the USSR. Since she
herself didn't find Ortese's experiences implausible, that means that she wanted for the PCI base
to think more positively of the USSR than she did. The fact that she isn't sure, in retrospect,
whether she would have censored Ortese if she had had the power to do so, means that she considered
maintaining this positive attitude on the part of the base to be quite important.
The PCI remained faithful to the general political directives of the USSR up into the 70s
and 80s, all the while developing over time an increasingly autonomous political line and full
acceptance of democracy already starting at the end of Togliatti's secretaryship.
So it was complicated. I've read quite a few documents from student groups in 1968 on, and
some did seem to me to leave the door open toward some sort of authoritarian political structure.
I don't remember what the Red Brigades' official attitude on the USSR was, but their own political
vision as per their comunicati , etc., was pretty reminiscent of Stalinism.
I don't doubt your personal experience in Italy. Here's mine (living there at various times
in the 90s and 00s). I was honestly interested in the PCI experience, and I didn't take a particularly
moralistic attitude toward it at all. I was hoping that Italians, given their history, would be
more interested in thinking about the possibility of radically different economic systems than
Americans were. I also hoped, given that I knew from having read Pasolini and others that the
Italian Left had not been consistently some sort of caricature of communism, that there had been
some room for criticism of the USSR, that they would not have overly identified with the fall
of the Soviet Union and so would not have been unduly discouraged by its collapse.
What I found was pretty disappointing. A lot of people acted like the PCI had never existed.
I talked to people who I knew had been strong supporters of the PCI back in the day (according
to their friends and family), and they assumed that I could not possibly be asking about their
experience in good faith. They tended to assume I was making fun of them, and for all intents
and purposes acted like they were embarrassed about their communist past.
Nor could I find people interested in talking much about alternative economic systems. There
were plenty of people eager to resist Berlusconi, but they were much more willing to make speeches
on how he was historically unprecedented and violated all sorts of basic constitutional guarantees
than to say much about radical alternatives. I would get frustrated and ask would-be left groups
why they didn't talk about fundamental questions, why the sorts of discussions that had happened
when the PCI was around didn't happen any more. I never got a straight answer besides, "Well,
with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it all looked like an illusion." I would point out why this
wasn't a sufficient argument. Shrug.
I honestly do not know what the reason was for all of this avoidance behavior. As I said in
my post, the only reason I can think of is that at least on some level, many PCI members still
saw the USSR as a flagship of communism. That would explain why they were so morally discouraged
afterwards. But I would have thought that a lot of PCI members should have been able
to see through that trap. So maybe the explanation is wrong.
But I don't know another. I would be thrilled to hear one.
Nothing stayed the same. Not even for those who insisted on seeing the secret report [of
Khrushchev] as a tissue of lies – for them, the USSR was in the hands of a clique of traitors,
led by Khrushchev. Others fell back on the thesis that, sure, Stalin had been a tyrant but
he had been great, because the revolution had been great and its internal and external enemies
great as well. What was this supposed to mean, evil but great? That much should be forgiven
to greatness? That pain and horror are inevitable [byproducts]? I couldn't accept the esthetic
of history. Then there were those like the French Communist Party who thought that, true or
not, Khrushchev should have kept his mouth shut.
And Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia? There the excuse of backwardness wasn't applicable.
The PCI stood fast within the trenches: yes, there had been mistakes, fault by communist governments,
but the revolutions were themselves problematic, and [so] there was fault on their part, too.
[ ] The PCI shifted about with a perpetual "It could have been worse" and "Let's avoid pushing
things to the brink." [ ]
Leaving [the PCI] would have meant turning one's back not just on the USSR but on ourselves,
and to resign ourselves to existing society. Or start over again, but very, very profoundly,
abandoning this party, erase it, obliterate it – give the communists up as lost. But they weren't
all nothing but Stalinism. And in any case, what had the dissident groups from the 20s on managed
to accomplish? At most to leave a witness. [ ]
What the USSR had become gave me no peace, and I had difficulty finding a reasonable way
to assess it. It had to be hard, even the tedious manual of the PCB didn't deny it, far from
it. But why so many enemies? With the sector of society hostile to the revolution, the struggle
had been cruelly resolved during the civil war. But afterward? Why so many arrested and shot
among their own people? The hatred that communism had accumulated terrified me. The model of
power that had made it possible to succeed had turned out to be a mortal trap. But then in
what sense was it a model? Political liberalism implies social slavery and social liberalism
implies political slavery? [ ]
It will soon be 50 years since that 1956 that forced me to look squarely at the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics – a name I had loved – and I still don't find a full explanation.
I refuse to give in to the oft-repeated idea that without the profit motive, there is no democracy.
Our [democracy] is depressing. It is. But it doesn't finish you off with two bullets to the
brain in a cellar. [ ] If I talk about this, even with my closest friends, I lower my voice,
I apologize, I become annoying. We in the PCI at least didn't have bloody hands. Because we
had not managed to take power? No, we were different. How different? And me, what was I like?
I had not cracked down on anyone, I had always covered for people. At least I think so. You
would have to ask those who worked with me, who had less power or rank than I did. I never
humiliated anyone. Or did I? I had a lofty idea of what I did, therefore of myself, how to
exclude that I had trampled others, without even noticing?
I remember one minor episode. Anna Maria Ortese, a reserved woman, always dressed in black,
her hair held tightly in a black fillet over her pretty face, spent her days in silence at
the House of Culture because she didn't have a real house of her own. In one of her first reports
on the Soviet Union that a weekly magazine had asked her to write, she had spoken of immense
poverty and loneliness, and it sounded like an unending accusation. It was Ortese, it was her
empathy with the suffering of the wretched, but it exasperated me because I suspected it was
true. I ripped into her: "Don't you understand the toil, the isolation of that country? Why
don't you write also that everyone has a job, everyone can go to school, everyone has health
care? And don't you see that it's under attack?" We saw each other every day, we had something
of a relationship, she never asked anything of me – and I hurt her. The next day, she came
to my house with a ridiculous bouquet of flowers and as I opened the door, I was unable to
say a word. We hugged each other, crying. With tears in my eyes, I went to find some cognac
to cheer her up, she was white as a sheet. We didn't say hardly anything to one another, and
we left there arm in arm. I haven't forgotten that moment. If I had had the power to repress
her articles, would I have done so? Maybe I would have. I don't know. And what would I have
done when faced with more serious choices?
[ ] It does not comfort me that the Black Books have manipulated numbers, that with the
archives open, the number of political trials comes out to less than five million, the number
shot less than a million. "Only" five million?!
One can't look at these philosophies without accounting for the productive capacities of the
land.
Monarchs of the last couple of centuries were essentially trying to one-up each other and planning
marriages according to needed and desired resources.
One can imagine that the limits were not the same in France, England and Russia.
French Monarchs were obviously in the best position resource speaking. France was one great
piece of land. Russian monarchs probably had to squeeze its population way more than French royalty
to maintain the same quality of life. It's no surprise that the UK ended up colonizing. How could
it compete on an overpopulated island?
At the beginning of the early 1900s, Germany was hitting productive limits vs. the size of
its population without the exploitative capacities of the UK or France propped up be their own
colonies.
Communism would be easier to implement in a closed economy . hard to see this happening in
countries that depend on imports or with colonies to exploit.
Russia was in a good position to try it enough resources to be autarkic and a population used
to poor
and harsh conditions where materialism would not be receding if trying it out.
While I enjoy reading about economic and political philosophies, I find it annoying how most
of the time these never account for the physical limitations that drive countries into specific
directions.
Most of humanity has always been blind to 3 things:
– the planet's physical limits
– its own technological limitations in exploiting the planet's bounty at each epoch
– the problem of redistribution when a system hits a wall.
And none of the philosophies seem to address all three.
agree. ' Spring cleaning' is my favorite change metaphor. It's more benign than 'rat-killing'.
But the point is always a practical one. We get rid of stuff that no longer works. That's the
first step. So why won't vested interests and ideologues see the logic? Or more accurately, why
are they so slow? If we do not change it is gonna go from farce to tragedy pretty fast this time.
If I recall correctly your background you're far too intelligent to believe that stuff!! C'mon
now. Physical limits???? In Russia??? Russia is yyyuuuuge.
Maybe this is an artifact of your MIT eduction in reductive materialism. :-)
Newton and Leibniz were very very smart guys. Engineering is pretty cool! I would not argue
with things like computers and TVs and Youtube. I couldn't watch Adele and Bruce Springsteen on
Youtube if it wasn't for engineers. I'm just being honest. I won't criticize engineers. But they
are mostly boneheads. Hahahaha.
I'm not sure reading all these political crackpots is useful either. There's a point where
things are obvious just by direct observation. I understand the impluse to expand one's mind and
it's not at all obvious how to do that. The strangest thing of all though is that all this supposed
erudition reduces itself to things that are completely obvious simply from solitary contemplation.
Of course engineering is not that way at all.
First, I agree with Ulysses that lumping French and Italian intellectuals together with regard
to acceptance of the Soviet Union as an emanation of leftist values is dubious. Look at the differences
between the traditional French Communist Party, which was more or less Stalinist, and the Italian
Communist Party, which was animated by Gramsci and Berlinguer, two highly skeptical Sardinians.
And that's for starters.
I recommend reading Gramsci: I am currently reading his letters from prison. He had a very
broad view of politics, events, and culture. As a newspaper editor, he also wrote tremendous numbers
of articles, including theatrical criticism (and he was a pretty good theater critic), all worth
reading.
I note that Outis mentions Rossana Rossanda above, and I suspect that she has some skepticism
about exercise of power, too.
I agree with you that the French and Italian communist party experiences are extremely different.
The purpose of this article was not to get too much into the details, but my subsequent post on
this subject is all about the Italian situation, which is in my opinion fascinating.
Your explanation of why the PCI was different from the PCF leaves me a little unconvinced.
Gramsci probably played a role, more in terms of the pattern of wide-ranging critical thought
seen in the Quaderni del carcere (which I agree are well worth reading) than in anything
particularly groundbreaking he did as a leader before the fascists imprisoned him. Berlinguer
was a very significant figure, but I think the fact of the the PCI being less hermetically closed
than the PCF predates his leadership by a couple decades.
On Rossanda's skepticism about the exercise of power, yes, that's right. I haven't finished
yet, but in the next part of the excerpt quoted in my reply to Ulysses she will express sentiments
along those lines.
Thanks for the interesting passages from Rossanda. I do sincerely hope that you will find the
time to also respond to the questions raised in my two comments currently under moderation.
Some cultural differences between Italy and France that may have affected how communism evolved:
–France has strong centralizing tendencies. Until recently, Paris dominated thoroughly. Italy
is indeed a federal republic, with strong decentralizing tendencies. As a friend from Piedmont
said, Every village speaks its own form of the Piedmontese language. In France, the communist
party seems to have wanted Stalinist centralization.
–In France, the state created lay society (the secular state). In Italy, secular society, arguably,
was created by the communists. (Although the Savoys (weirdly) and the Republic of Venice also
created secular states, I suppose. But they did not dominate as thoroughly as the French Republic
and its message of laicité does.)
–Italian Catholicism is rather mystical and oddly unpuritanical. French Catholicism is much more
rigid.
–Because the arts in Italy tend to be somewhat more democratic, communist artists existed / exist.
Pasolini. Nanni Moretti. It's a long way from Jean-Paul Sartre to Nanni Moretti.
These are all great points. Yes, it's a long way from Sartre to Pasolini as well.
On Italian versus French Catholicism, I hadn't thought of this. But it also makes a great deal
of sense in terms of the particular history of French Catholicism under the FR, with the clerical
oath.
I agree with this line of thought. What's always bothered me by previous discussions of "communism"
have been 1) the absence of the roots of communism, ( ie hunter gatherer societies, and the teachings
of the Buddha and Christ), and 2) the cultural and tribal influences of each group attempting
this quest.
To the first point, it seems to me that various religious groups within the United States have
attempted their version of communism with varying degrees of success, from 1800s farming communities
to self proclaimed demagogues of the Jim Jones variety. I think the notion of the battle between
humanistic traits of altruism vs narcissism are instrumental in understanding the roots of the
success of each group.
From my little understanding of China and Russia, both have historically had autocratic cultures
for multiple reasons, so an autocratic form of top down society would be a natural progression
from the then status quo.
Regarding the "Horrors of Communism" I am reminded of the types of regimes that were overthrown
in the cases of the China and Russia, and how the degree of external threat to the fledgling attempts
may have influenced their courses. Interesting current examples include the continually externally
besieged and totalitarian regime of North Korea, as opposed to the "Communist" regime of North
Vietnam. I can only wonder what will result in the United States should our Lords and Masters
decide to use all means necessary to quell a popular uprising, but then the current control of
the media is proving quite successful.
In any case from my perspective the more democratic and successful attempts at economic equality
have been exemplified in smaller homogeneous tribal societies such various Nordic countries. My
observation of history tells me that the larger the entity one tries to democratically control,
the more likelihood of corruption by narcissistic players irrespective of the type of governmental
system proposed.
Q: Are the problems of historical communism explainable in terms of the opposition that communism
experienced from reactionaries?
No, but many of them ARE explained by the opposition–wars, bombings, sabotage, etc.–of international
capitalism to almost every socialist experiment that has arisen, 1917-Venezuela. We'll never know
about what kind of success they would have experienced in a petri dish, but we do know that when
you have to devote much of your economy to building arms to defend yourself–live on the defensive–that
can distort your project, distort your vision, distort your economy, make you paranoid–hey–end
up making you murderous and worse. And (no small thing) that improving the lot of the great mass
of people can be very handy for capitalism once you have finished the heavy lifting.
See Rossana Rossanda's take on this argument below.
I actually take Venezuela's experience as supporting the point that there was historical contingency
involved and therefore Stalinism was not simply historically necessary. Venezuela was geopolitically
weaker than Russia and Chavez faced substantial opposition from very well-organized forces and
foreign-supported forces. And still, it's completely clear that whatever else you think of Chavez
and his legacy, he did not institute the sort of repression that some people claim is inseparable
with communism. He came very close to losing power in 2002 (if I remember correctly, the US had
even already started to recognize the coup directors as legitimate), but he held on.
"From the standpoint of living standards the Soviet Union were improvements over Imperial Russia."
This is a point I can agree with in reference to Russia. Communism served as a way to quickly
sever the serf system that had partially survived in Russia into the 20th century.
However, the central planning aspect of communism is its great problem. It centralizes absolute
power in a small group; the guy who said "absolute power corrupts absolutely" seems to have been
absolutely correct. In Cuba, if you decided you wanted to sell sandwiches to your friends to make
a little extra, that was prohibited and you would be been arrested and jailed – heard they're
starting to allow some of that recently. I've heard the Russian system wasn't quite as extreme
in those economic cases, don't know, although it was worse in its repressive excesses. Even the
Pharaohs of Egypt didn't try to stop the bread makers and fisherman from making some extra income
so their families could have socks – only Marx managed to develop a worse system. Also, communism
didn't work anywhere; the experiment failed everywhere.
There is no difference between everybody working for the government and everybody working for
Walmart/Amazon. .. the same dynamic is at work. Limiting government power and reach, and limiting
Corporate power and reach is the only antidote to repression.
Thanks for this as someone who started out as a Dem Socialist but now am becoming more open
to further left positions. I agree with some of the basic philosophies of the hard left even "tankies"
but I hate when they gloss over atrocities committed.
The way I see it, there is plenty of criticism of Stalin from the left. I think the idea that
leftists refuse to criticize Stalin is a bit of a trope. However, I think it is correct to point
to the lack of good information on Stalinist USSR. It is hard to logically critique something
when you are drowning in propaganda and disinformation. All that being said, if the left has one
flaw regarding Marxist theory and communism, it is that they often fail to apply Marxist theory
TO communism (this is less of a problem among anarchists, of course).
One of the big (maybe biggest) takeaways of Marx is that class war is eternal, and that class
war exists in all systems, including communism. I have been reading Marx in fits and starts for
20 years, and although I have never read any specific statement on class war in communist type
societies, I have no doubt that Marx would agree. Lenin/Stalin were simply the leaders of the
elite class in the Soviet Union, and like other members of the elite class, they worked to increase
or cement their power at the expense of the lower classes. Class war is eternal and universal.
As far as the fall of the Soviet Union, my view is that there were many complex drivers, however
the biggest one was the fundamental difference between the Soviet and American Empires. The Soviet
core (Russia, basically) exploited its own resources and subsidized it's subordinate nations (such
as Eastern Europe and Cuba), which weakened the Soviet Empire over time economically. The US Empire
(I include western Europe as part of the core here) did the opposite, exploiting the resources
of the subordinate nations on it's periphery (think Africa and South America), subsidizing and
enriching itself. Of course this isn't absolute, since the US had some anomalies such as the Marshal
Plan, and the Soviets did have some populations they exploited such as those in the "stan" republics,
but I think it explains a lot.
Just a few quick points on some of the issues raised by the article.
All economies are planned, just depends on WHO they are designed to benefit. In the US, the
DOD and associated entities are the clearest example of government directing economic resources
to certain ends. Those ends happen to be the lining the pockets of well connected grifters, but
its still a "planned economy".
The thing that always struck me about people who believe(d) in Communism is that it's just
another form of religion. The idea of History as having end its working towards is Christian or
Jewish millenarianism recast in terms of political economy. The historical determinism of Marxism
is totally laughable in the face of the randomness and capriciousness of human existence.
Stalinism and Maoism replaced one set of elites with another, neither of which cared one bit
about the impact their grand schemes had on the people they ruled. But at the same time the millions
they murdered says more about the dangers of unquestioned top down control in any system rather
than the faults of one -ism over another.
The capitalist system has killed millions. It's just harder to pin the mass murder on one person.
The dirty jobs just get passed on along the global trade chain.
One could easily argue that many countries have been forced into bad implementations of communism
because of the stronghold of existing capitalist empires on resources.
If the capitalist developed countries had been less exploitative, perhaps a gentler form of
communism could have emerged.
I find the stuff Marx did in the "understand the world" dept – specifically the "labour
theory of value" immensely valuable and is, like Newton's work, outside of history. The equation
for profit i.e. s/(s+v) all functions of time, and that it tends to zero as time tends to infinity
is for the ages. And since profit is the prime motive for production in capitalism, then
His stuff on (the point is) "to change the world" ? – i.e. class struggle – is definitely
best understood as history, as in history of ideologies, best to be understood as something coming
from a man of his times – one can distill stuff from it to apply it to our own time but only like,
say, Julius Caesar's use of chance – " the die is cast " come "Lights, Camera, Action"
time.
Why did that part or not so much the "labour theory of value" part catch the imagination of
the rebellious of my gen of the 60s, 70s ? That too reflects that we were partly creatures of
our times.
Ante Ciliga was a Croatian communist who wrote 'The Russian Enigma' which is a smart and evocative
account of his experiences there during the 1920s and 1930s.
His political conclusions are best summarised in the French title of his book: 'Au Pays du
Grand Mensonge' i.e. In the Land of the Great Lie!
If there's going to be an honest critique of "historical communism," then first we need to
be honest in identifying what it is we're talking about, which in this case is really Marxist-Leninism
(Stalinism just being the same but with more gulag). There's two ways of looking at M-L's record,
which is, what was it's real world impact, pro and con? And, did it achieve what it set out to
do? On the former, there's many well-worn arguments trotted out: rapid industrialization, extreme
poverty prevention, but also the atrocities, limited civil rights, etc.The typical leftist apologia
seems to hinge on pointing out the blood on the hands of capitalism, which is both valid and not.
Yes, it's important to criticize the right on its tendency to either outright deny the death caused
by capitalism or to ideological explain it away as the fault of something else, and to make people
aware that death by capitalism usually comes in more subtle forms, but that doesn't magically
make what Stalin, Mao, etc. did okay.
However, more important on the practical level is that the trend for the M-L has been in the
long haul to shift towards market economies. The USSR was making motions towards this right before
the sudden liberalization of their economy. China has shifted from state capitalism to state-managed
capitalism, Vietnam has allowed for more market-based co-ops and small business, Cuba has set
up limited markets. So M-L works for the rapid expansion period, but once that singular drive
and goal gives way, the central planning needs to acquiesce to market economies.
What really should give the left the cause to abandon M-L to the historical dustbin, is on
the second question. M-L gets us war communism and state capitalism, but it has failed in all
cases to transition to the final stage of true communism. Give a small group of politicos absolute
control over the economy while still collecting that capitalist cut off the top, of course they're
not going to hand that over to the workers. It doesn't achieve its goal of workers controlling
the means of production, so if the left wants that, then they need to follow the lead of the Kurds
and look elsewhere.
A thoughtful friend in the 70s called Marx "a historian of the future." He created a vision,
a ramp, a consolidation of dreams and efforts that converged possibilities toward realities. Like
most Enlightenment/Romantic religious movements, this vision was cast as science, not faith (as,
to be fair, was the book of Genesis). His aim was for something more than sociology or political
science, and I think he should be both defended and criticized on those broader grounds. The ultimate
question isn't whether he was right or wrong, but whether and how he moved human possibilities
forward.
Leaving aside the rich and varied strands of socialism that have occurred and been acted upon
(cooperatives, syndicalism, democratic socialism, or even the thoughts of Veblen) that don't involve
Marx or communism, I have more than a quibble with the entire methodology employed.
It is acknowledged that the history and uniqueness of communism, let alone socialism, are not
easily compressed into small tales to be stored and later related to explain very complex historical
processes.
So a neat Alexandrian solution is found to cut through the numerous Gordian knots of distinct
historical events and the specific people who acted upon circumstance and reacted to historical
circumstance.
We are provided with "the sword" of our supposed common knowledge of human nature to explore
and answer the various strands of socialist thought and action. Hell, we can ask simple questions
and come up with a monosyllabic answer.
However,
1. Do we really know that much about "human nature" and especially about how human nature reacts
during specific historical events of which we most of us do not have experience?
2. Is human nature always the same throughout history? How much do material circumstances of
any given historical period "colour" our perception of human nature? Or is our view of human nature
dictated by our material circumstances, including the political and social spheres which often
cloud our view given an ongoing process of unique historical circumstances?
3. Can an approach which relies solely upon insights of human nature explain complex phenomena
just because humans where involved in the phenomena? Does the conjecture of human nature provide
a omniscient viewpoint?
I would suggest that socialism, like capitalism, isn't quite so easy to pigeon hole via an
all encompassing theory of human nature.
I really don't have any quibbles with the article itself or of the conclusions drawn by the
author. As I am not a communist , I really don't have fish to fry. Since I am nothing more more
than a student of politics, I can both appreciate and critique Marx in equal measure.
I don't see socialism as an alternative to capitalism but as a manner in which I wish to strive
for in my life. It's just that capitalism, especially as it is currently practised, has been planned
and is being planned in such a manner that seems to ensure that the individuals and groups of
individuals are being limited in the scope of their responses to life's circumstances.
Just because capitalism doesn't mostly involve central planning, as in the Soviet Unions, doesn't
mean the economy/society isn't being planned with consequences that have impacts centrally upon
all our lives.
And I suspect the plans aren't being planned in my interests or in the interests of most of
humanity, and certainly not in the interest of many creatures and flora of which we share this
plant.
Unlike Marx, I can't buy the dialectic of historical determinism, nor am I willing to be curtailed
by an other imperative determinisms – such as human nature must follow upon predetermined train
tracks leading in one inexorable direction.
And as always with NC, thanks for bringing these subjects into a public domain. Upon such stuff
might common grounds be found.
There's also the issue of whether or not "Human Nature" should be considered a singular or
a plural. It's neat and convenient to think of humans as all sharing one set of underlying "code,"
with the differences merely being ornamentation thrown on by circumstance, but there's been a
change of thinking in psychology that we really have multiple natures within the species (e.g.,
we are not a monolithically monogamous nor a polygamous species, but rather contain both monogamous
and polygamous individual). So some people's nature is in line with capitalism, others within
socialism, others with fascism, etc. Which would explain why some Russians adapted easily to neoliberal
capitalism and others descended into alcoholism.
I hadn't even considered this idea at all. And as a general explanation of the nature of "human
nature", it's well worth exploring. Might explain much about our species.
I may be mis-reading but this seems like pseudo-science with a taxonomy obsession with slovenly
implied spillovers into id-politics as pigeonhole fetish no need to engage, just label and tuck
away. " [N]eat and convenient" for the pigeonholer, but much less so for the pigeonho[led], who
consequently AND inconsequentially can be easily ignored, and eventually extinguished with alcohol
{either-or} opioids.
Michael Hudson has pointed ou t that Marxism and the classical economics of Smith/Malthus/Ricardo
are but two of three schools of political economy which developed in the 18th through 19th centuries.
There was a third school which congealed as first USA Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton
explicitly rejected Smith and went about the task of building a new republic. It became called
the American System or American School after a
speech by Henry Clay in February 1832 .
The clear answer is the American School. The major proponents of the American School were Henry
C. Carey (who advised Abraham Lincoln, so get transcontinental railroads and telegraph and the
USDA at the same time the Union is fighting the Confederacy), Friedrich List (who leads the unification
of Germany), and E. Peshine Smith (whose ideas guide the industrialization of Japan). Why do we
never hear of these economists and their American School of political economy?
In December 1993, James Fallows rattled the economics profession with an article in The Atlantic,
How the World Works :
The more I had heard about List in the preceding five years, from economists in Seoul and
Osaka and Tokyo, the more I had wondered why I had virtually never heard of him while studying
economics in England and the United States.
Fallows goes on to describe the historical importance, not of British opium-trade apologist
Adam Smith, but of the American School, in guiding the early industrial development of Tokugawa
Japan, late imperial China, czarist Russia, Germany, South Korea, and other countries.
In a nutshell, the American School is the only body of economic thought which has actually
resulted in national industrial development along with a large degree of general prosperity and
political freedom. A partial exception is Marx, but, as Lawrence Goodwyn, the late historian of
the American agrarian revolt and populist movement of the late 1800s, pointed out, no system of
Marxism has been implemented without the coercive power of a red army behind it.
What Carey could not forgive in the English school of political economy, which after all
must historically be called the capitalist school, and what he particularly could not forgive
in Ricardo and Malthus, whom Marx so profoundly respected, was that they assigned to civilization
the role of pursuing not happiness but wealth and power; that they debased man by directing
him toward an aim that was beneath him, since power and physical satisfaction are also the
aim of the beast; that they forgot to take man and man's nature into consideration when they
established their so-called laws which reduced him to the level of the beast.
The link above includes two excerpts from Carey himself that I think very concisely condemns
the market fundamentalism of modern economic neoliberalism and conservatism:
Such is the course of modern political economy, which not only does not "feel the breath
of the spirit" but even ignores the existence of the spirit itself, and is therefore found
defining what it is pleased to call the natural rate of wages, as being "that price which is
necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and perpetuate their race without
either increase or diminution" (Ricardo)!that is to say, such price as will enable some to
grow rich and increase their race, while others perish of hunger, thirst, and exposure. Such
are the teachings of a system that has fairly earned the title of the "dismal science."
And,
Such being the tendency of all its teachings, it is no matter of surprise that modern English
political economy sees in man only an animal that will procreate, that must be fed, and that
can be made to work [Carey's emphasis]!an instrument to be used by trade; that it repudiates
all the distinctive qualities of man, and limits itself to the consideration of those he holds
in common with the beast of burden or of prey; that it denies that the Creator meant that every
man should find a place at His table, or that there exists any reason why a poor laborer, able
and willing to work, should have any more right to be fed than the cotton-spinner has to find
a market for his cloth; or that it assures its students that "labor is a commodity."
Why do we never hear of Carey and the American School? Why does it appear the only left alternative
to laissez faire capitalism is Marx? The answer is: Carey and the American School have
been written out of economic history, Here are the results of of some time spent in the stacks
of the library at the University of North Carolina looking through the indexes of introductory
economics textbooks. These are the number of pages on which there citations (for example, a citation
in the index of pp. 145-147, is counted as three pages, not one) of Henry Carey, Alexander Hamilton,
Friedrich List, Thorstein Veblen (American School); Milton Friedman, David Ricardo, Adam Smith
(British school), and Karl Marx.
Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An Introduction to Modern Economics (McGraw Hill, 1973)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 3
List 1
Friedman 1
Ricardo 18
Smith 20
Marx 28
Lloyd C. Atkinson, Economics: The Science of Choice (Richard D. Irwin, 1982)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 4
Ricardo 0
Smith 3
Marx 0
Allen W. Smith, Understanding Economics (Random House, 1986)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 1
Ricardo 0
Smith 4
Marx 3
Roger N. Waud, Economics, 3rd Edition (Harper and Row, 1986)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 9
Ricardo 6
Smith 5
Marx 7
Bradley R. Schiller, The Economy Today, 4th Edition (Random House, 1989)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 6
Ricardo 3
Smith 3
Marx 6
William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics: Principles and Policy, 5th Edition (Harcourt
Brace Jovanovitch, 1991)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 5
Ricardo 5
Smith 13
Marx 7
Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics (McGraw Hill, 1995)
Carey 0
Hamilton 4
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 5
Ricardo 2
Smith 8
Marx 2 (plus 2 on "Marxism")
Robert J. Barro, Macroeconomics (MIT Press, 1997)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
List 0
Veblen 0
Friedman 9
Ricardo 0
Smith 0
Marx 0
Julian L. Simon, Economics Against the Grain, Volume 2 (Edward Elgar, 1998)
Carey 0
Hamilton 1
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 5
Ricardo 3
Smith 11
Marx 1
Frank Stilwell, Political Economy: The Contest of Economic Ideas (Oxford University Press,
2006)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 11
List 1
Friedman 9
Ricardo 12
Smith 16
Marx 19
N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics, Instructor's Edition, Sixth Edition (Southwestern,
2012)
Carey 0
Hamilton 0
Veblen 0
List 0
Friedman 9
Ricardo 1
Smith 9
Marx 0
In a nutshell, the American School is the only body of economic thought which has actually
resulted in national industrial development along with a large degree of general prosperity
and political freedom.
If we're talking about the economics of America as set up in the late 18th and 19th centuries,
wouldn't we be talking about economics that include and assume the existence of slavery, and later
Jim Crow laws? That doesn't strike me as being politically free.
You raise a very important question; important, because it forces us to deal with the fact
that human history is quite messy. When a nation of 50 million people acts, does it act in accord
with the wishes and intent of all 50 people? Of course not. Look at the American Civil War, and
the men who fought on the Union side. Where they all of like mind in willing to risk their limbs
and lives in way because they all shared a desire and intent to destroy slavery? No. Most actually
fought to preserve the Union, though there were many who fought motivated by abolitionism. Many
more served because of social pressure in their towns or locales, or simply because the accompanied
family members or neighborhood fronts into the army.
It is easy to be confused by American history, because at the same time that the American System
was being built and practiced, the British system was competing with it for control of the domestic
economy and polity. To the extent that people today mistakenly believe that the American economy
was founded on the ideas of Adam Smith (it most emphatically was not:
Hamilton explicitly rejected the ideas of Smith ) the British system is winning. Michael Hudson
has written at least two excellent overviews of this fight within the USA between the American
and British systems:
A similar contest rages in USA today (and around most of the world, for that matter). There
are proponents of conservatism, mostly classical British laissez faire economics. There are proponents
of libertarianism, the even more extreme Austrian school of economics (and there is a recent book
out, which I have not acquired yet, Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep
History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America , on James Buchanan and "public choice
theory). There are proponents of neoliberalism (it is interesting to peruse this,
Everyone Hates Neoliberals, So We Talked to Some , and note the astonishing lack of historical
knowledge, and the complete absence of any notion of republicanism or Enlightenment political
ideals). There are proponents of Marxism. Most readers of NC will probably agree that conservatism
and neoliberalism are practically indistinguishable in the realm of economic policies, and have
been the dominant school in our lifetimes. Conservatives and libertarians argue vehemently that
the dominant school has been liberalism and Keynesianism, which they disparage as "statism." There
are proponents of other economic schools as well, probably some I do not know, and perhaps even
some that don't even have names yet. Out of this stew of contending interests and beliefs, how
do you pick out one coherent set of ideas and attribute to it the policy direction of USA for
the past half century?
In answer to your question: The simplified version of USA economic history at the period you
point to is that the British system was dominant in the slave South, and fought for free trade
in opposition to the American System's protective tariffs, which dominated the North.
If William Hogeland's analysis in The Whiskey Rebellion is correct, one of Alexander Hamilton's
major policy innovations was a deliberate exercise in rigging the economy in favour of the 1%
of his day.
In his reading, Hamilton pushed for the Federal Government to assume the debts of the States
in order to guarantee that bondholding speculators got paid, and to allow for the creation of
a Federal tax system. The tax in question, the whiskey excise, was deliberately set up in order
to drive small producers out of business and to bring the whiskey market under the control of
large producers in the cities. The whole thing was a massive transfer of wealth from western farmers
to Wall Street.
I disagree with Hogeland completely and vehemently. He appears to have made no attempt whatsoever
to understand republicanism and its place in the Enlightenment, and his understanding of political
economy and matters of national and international finance are laughably facile.
Hogeland also completely ignores the crucial contribution Hamilton made in developing the constitutional
theory of implied powers. As Supreme Court Justices John Marshall and Joseph Story noted, the
opposing theory of enumerated powers -- which conservatives and libertarians are promoting today -- would cripple the national government.
What Hamilton actually accomplished financially, was to free the infant United States from
a complete dependence on borrowing from European oligarchs, by creating a domestic system open
to the much smaller fortunes of American bankers and merchants. It boggles my mind that anyone
can not see or ignores this obvious historical fact.
I cannot account for the malice Hogeland and others on the left, such as Matt Stoller, bear
toward Hamilton; though it is obvious to me why certain concentrations of economic wealth revile
Hamilton: they have become increasingly powerful as the USA abandoned Hamiltonian political economy
(such as a protective tariff) and deindustrialized and financialized. Destroy Hamitonian political
economy, and the USA is destroyed from within by increasingly concentrated economic power. The
left is shooting itself in the head by failing to understand Hamilton.
In regards to the Whiskey Tax: I think it cannot be truly understood without the historical
context of the idea of that time of a sumptuary tax. Classical republican ideology has always
held that luxury was the vanguard of rot and corruption in a state. In fact, during the Constitutional
Convention, it was argued that one reason a new, stronger national government was needed was so
that sumptuary taxes could be imposed over the opposition of individual states.
The general view, discernible in contemporaneous literature, was that the responsibility
of government should involve enough surveillance over the enterprise system to ensure the social
usefulness of all economic activity. It is quite proper, said Bordley, for individuals to "choose
for themselves" how they will apply their labor and their intelligence in production. But it
does not follow from this that "legislators and men of influence" are freed from all responsibility
for giving direction to the course of national economic development. They must, for instance,
discountenance the production of unnecessary commodities of luxury when common sense indicates
the need for food and other essentials. Lawmakers can fulfill their functions properly only
when they "become benefactors to the publick"; in new countries they must safeguard agriculture
and commerce, encourage immigration, and promote manufactures. Admittedly, liberty "is one
of the most important blessings which men possess," but the idea that liberty is synonymous
with complete freedom from restraint "is a most unwise, mistaken apprehension." True liberty
demands a system of legislation that will lead all members of society "to unite their exertions"
for the public welfare. It should therefore be the policy of government to aid and foster certain
activities or kinds of business that strengthen a nation, even as it should be the duty of
government to repress "those fashions, habits, and practices, which tend to weaken, impoverish,
and corrupt the people." –Johnson, E.A.J., The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government
and Enterprise in the Age of Washington (University of Minnesota Press, 1973), J194-195
Aside from Hamilton, Veblen is the only member of the American School I've heard of – and I
took economics in college and have followed it ever since. Amazing.
"[Friedrich] List argued, a society's well-being and its overall wealth are determined not
by what the society can buy but by what it can make."
"In strategic terms nations ended up being dependent or independent according to their ability
to make things for themselves. Why were Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians subservient to
England and France in the nineteenth century? Because they could not make the machines and
weapons Europeans could."
In the 1500s Spain became the richest nation in Europe because it had accumulated the gold
wealth of the America's. By the next century it had become among the poorest nations of Europe.
Spain had so much gold it could afford to simply buy anything it wanted, until the gold ran out,
while the Germans developed craft industries to supply Spain with products and became wealthy
and powerful .. the Arab nations are in this situation today, so resource rich that they haven't
focused on developing industry, so that when oil runs they'll be impoverished.
Your data does not mean a thing. Data, to be meaningful as to the reality one is trying to
show, must be preceded by a true knowledgable understanding of such reality. I conducted with
two other colleagues a study about 15 years ago. This study was never published as we ran out
of funds and we could not complete it. Nevertheless, the evidence from most colleges was overwhelming.
Marx was not read. Marx was not fairly taught. This is the way it works, in case you are not aware.
That a textbook includes chapters on Marxism and socialism does not imply that they are given
attention too. In a large percentage of cases, if they are included in the syllabus by the teacher
or department-I am saying teacher because in some colleges the professor ends up in practice applying
his own particular syllabus-they are relegated to the end of the semester, with the tacit rule,
"we will get too it, if we have time". It goes without saying that very rarely "we end up having
time for it". Also, our team collected recordings from actual college economics and sociology
classes. I vividly remember a professor who used for his Sociology 101 class James Henslin's textbook.
Henslin suggested the students to learn three sociological views, functionalism, (interaction)
symbolism and marxism. The first day of class the professor put it very clearly in his own words
how Marx's dismissal was in order: "We are not going to use the Marxist approach. Marx was a workers'
liberator who had never worked in a plant". It was not uncommon, in practice, to obliterate Marx,
despite textbooks, syllabus or otherwise. Direct readings for the economics 100s and 200s classes
systematically excluded Marx works, with Smith's The Wealth of Nations as #1 reading.
Your reply involves some interesting information, but it is unnecessarily vehement and it in
fact misreads pretty seriously what Tony Wikrent said.
Wikrent claims that the American School of economics is not taught in universities, and so
that if you are looking for an alternative to laissez-faire, you tend to assume the only one is
Marxism. All of his data is aimed, not at showing that Marxism is taught, but that Carey and the
American School are not.
From my experience as well, economics professors don't teach Marx. But that doesn't invalidate
Wikrent's point. Even if students never hear about Marx from their economics professor, they will
still have heard of Marx as a radical economist because his existence as such is generally known
in mainstream culture. Whereas, Wikrent is saying, they will not have heard of Carey and the American
School in other venues, so if they don't hear about them in economics departments, it will be
like they never existed.
True. But I could mention several important political economy schools which are ignore across
the board. This is what happens when orthodoxy pervades institutions. Now, specific to the comment,
when one lays data out and makes it a reflection of practice, the least one and others can do
is to point out that it is only a valid partial representation of that practice (here just valid
for Wikrent's particular aims) and that the full data does not reflect the entire practice -and
indeed provides an illusion of it.
Yes, but please try to apply more interpretive charity. You could have made the same point
by just saying, "One thing I'd like to add," and it wouldn't have come off as a personal attack.
Are we again looking for "the theory of everything"? You know, that one "ism" or theory or
form of government that will explain everything and make everything right?
Bad news. It doesn't exist.
No "ism" or form of government will solve and explain everything. No "ism" or form of government
is completely wrong and no "ism" or form of government is completely right and never has been.
I'm a student of history and I love reading how ideas got started and how civilizations fail
– and I've found the two are very related .
For those who wish to call the collapse of Russia a failure of communism, I ask when was the
theory of communism practiced in Russia? Certainly what Lenin and Stalin created had nothing in
common with the "commune" systems (from whence Communism gets its name) the peasants put in place
to protect themselves.
And Capitalism? Even Adam Smith (of whom I am no great fan) understood that Capitalism (he
didn't call it that but he did lay the basis for that system) understood that all members of the
system had to have the same knowledge and act morally to be able to work best in their self interest.
Does what Adam Smith proposed even resemble the Capitalism we have today?
I'll ignore Marx since it is such a touchy subject today, but I will ask: When were the theories
of Marx ever really put into practice within the boundaries Marx set up? Do Marxists actually
understand what those boundaries are?
And Democracy? Shall we again excoriate Athens for their failures in attempting to practice
the theory?
Even something as reviled as feudalism had its roots in something good. Certainly, at the time,
the peasants preferred it to being the victims of the Vikings and every other attacker that came
along. But those who gained power from it couldn't give it up, even when it was no longer useful
for protection .
The problem isn't the "isms" or even the forms of government- each "ism" and type of government
has its value in a particular setting – but that does not mean it applies to every setting. "Isms"
, like all theories, have boundaries within which they work – and "isms", like theories, will
fail when applied to areas outside those specific boundaries. For a quick example, Democracy works
when you have an educated and involved populace who understands that in order for their form of
government to survive, power must never be completely centralized – it fails when the people do
not understand or recognize that boundary.
It would be much better for us all if humans if they had the ability to recognize the boundaries
of their "ism" and the ability to switch to a different theory when the times demanded – but they
don't. Sadly I see throughout history that there have always be those people who rise to power
during an "ism" and can't let go of it, even when it doesn't work (when the "ism" or theory is
used outside its specific boundaries), because of their fear of losing control. And then the societal
destruction begins but that isn't the fault of the "ism" – or the form of government
Perhaps instead of just deriding those theories that aren't currently popular, we really should
be asking ourselves: What are the boundaries of each "ism" and when will that "ism" work and when
will it not, and how do we learn to switch between them as necessity dictates?
Err .my last sentence should have read: "What are the boundaries of each "ism" and when will
that "ism" work and when will it not, and how do we learn to switch peacefully between them as
necessity dictates?"
While I respect the author for raising this topic, he seems to fall into "assessment of the
Soviet Experiment" mode in a careless way. I realize I tend to repetition about this, but it is
terribly misleading -- perhaps "disorienting" would be a better term -- to discuss theses questions
without any reference to the tremendous impact external pressures -- call it "intersystemic conflict,"
"international conflict," whatever -- had on the course of the Soviet Union's development. While
it could be argued that capitalist economies also faced external pressures, that would miss the
question of how such pressures impact on a society in the process of formation . We're
talking about questions of constrained path dependence of a fundamental order that the experimentalist
mode of thinking misses. Etc, etc.
Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the choice
by significant sections of the Soviet elite to engage in looting instead of developing a transitional
program that would protect viable sections of the Soviet economy under market socialism. What
from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over was in fact
a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of the elite seizing
an opportunity to enrich themselves.
While it is essential to try to determine the viability of alternative economic systems in
comparison what we've got now, doing so without taking into account the tremendously destructive
opposition a transition would face is, in a way, to blithely continue on in a "Soviet Experiment"
mentality. It's obvious that people can enjoyably engage in cooperative behavior, but if they
can do so under a barrage is another matter. The one thing that we can be certain of is that if
capitalist elites aren't thoroughly demoralized they will do whatever they can to 'prove' TINA.
I was a little confused by this comment. I'm not opposed to looking at the impact
of external pressures, but I am opposed to treating them as monocausal.
Your preferred pattern of historical explanation shifts during the course of your comment.
When discussing the USSR in the process of formation, you concentrate on bringing out external
pressures and therefore considering the choices of the leadership as highly constrained. When
discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union, you instead stress the choices of the leadership
elite to "seize an opportunity to enrich themselves."
I'm not even sure why you would assume that your thesis about the elite choosing to engage
in looting is opposed to anything that I'm saying.
I agree with you on is that it is possible to think both about what a self-sustaining better
society might look like, and also the extent to which it's hard to get there within the constraints
of current power structures. They are not the same question, and I think both are worth pondering.
Although I only understood 33% of this, I'm thankful for how the author points out the common
forms of cherry-picking BS that both sides use when talking about communism.
If your only knowledge of communism came from the online left, you'd believe that it's never
once been tried before!
They talk about it like some religious Rapture that will someday come and fix all the problems,
not like a system that already has a proven track record. And it drives me nuts.
I mean, be a commie if you want to, but at least don't be a weasel about it.
Either say, "All those countries were awful dictatorships and that wasn't real communism anyway,"
(in which case it's on you to explain why YOUR post-revolutionary society will turn out different!)
or say, "Those countries were pretty rad actually, and I own the actions of the leaders," and
take the pushback that will result from THAT.
But whatever you do, please, don't just duck the issue by saying, "Well capitalism is bad too,
so whatever LOL"
p.s. thanks for explaining the Motte and Bailey argument – wish I'd known about it in college!
I enjoyed this post, Outis, even though I'm going to be a bit critical of it. I am pleased
to just to be able to talk about this stuff from time to time.
In Asimov's original Foundation stories, Hari Seldon devised an actual plan for the
future history of an empire.
But historical dialectical materialism is not a plan. It is a theory which one may use to develop
hypotheses.
Does Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection determine which species happen to survive?
Would evolution by natural selection fail to happen, if nobody ever wrote about it?
So why would Marx's theory of class struggle alter the course of history?
If one reads the Communist Manifesto , one finds that the work is almost entirely devoted
to the bourgeoisie and to the history of capitalism.
The bourgeoisie, after centuries of struggle against the nobility, the clergy, and the petty
bourgeoisie, at length became the dominant class in society. Obviously the bourgeoisie didn't
need Marx to help them do that!
Marx hypothesizes that for as long as the bourgeois class is what it is, and does what it does,
a class struggle will result in which proletarians will assume power.
Marx points out that the vast majority of the job of obliterating private property is actually
being performed by the bourgeois class themselves. Marx points out that most of the job of reducing
differences between nations is actually done by the bourgoisie. Marx points that it's the bourgeoisie
who dissolve traditional family institutions.
But that's observation and extrapolation, not a plan. For a revolutionary programme of the
proletariat, Marx only offers a short list of points to consider.
Little of the Manifesto is devoted to the subject of the proletariat. That's not surprising,
since proletarian history had scarcely begun.
For the sake of argument, ask yourself how much could one write about bourgeois history, or
bourgeois political prospects, in the 12th century? At that time the Occidental bourgeoisie was
in its political infancy. Few would imagine that these harried, oppressed, vulgar little burghers
would eventually become the dominant class in society. I mean, the whole notion would seem "not
even wrong."
It was difficult for Marx, and it is still difficult for us, to contemplate what a society
would look like, or what life would feel like, if the proletariat were the politically and culturally
dominant class. One only gets tantalizing glimpses, half-fanciful, such as Orwell's first impression
of Barcelona.
To extend my 12th century bourgeois analogy, it would be like trying to envision Planet Bourgeois,
based on a day trip to 12th century Venice.
Marx does offer brief critiques of those socialist programmes which do not focus on the proletarian
class.
For our present purposes, the most interesting of them is Marx's anticipation of the welfare
state, which he refers to as "bourgeois socialism."
For decades after WWII, many in the developed nations thought that the welfare states had solved
the worst problems of capitalism. I used to be one of them. But it took Marx just a single page
of the Communist Manifesto to raise, evaluate, and dismiss the idea.
"But historical dialectical materialism is not a plan. It is a theory which one may use
to develop hypotheses. Does Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection determine which
species happen to survive? Would evolution by natural selection fail to happen, if nobody ever
wrote about it?"
Well said! This is very close to the sort of defense that most MMT theorists deploy– when critics
decry the possible negative consequences of "adopting" their theory. "We are not proposing, merely
describing" is the refrain. I myself have never been a Marxist, yet I find the historical analysis
of some Marxist scholars quite perceptive. In my former life as a medievalist I often relied heavily
on excellent work, authored by conservative Catholics, without ever feeling the urge to become
one myself!
Thanks, Roland. Actually, I think your summary is pretty good, and it provides an opportunity
to clarify some things.
The Hari Seldon analogy is based on an idea of Marx that was often found in communist political
cultures. It's true that they didn't imagine that Marx had seen the precise path of the future
with the kind of mathematical precision that Seldon was supposed to have done.
However, I think the analogy still captures some noteworthy elements of how Marx was perceived.
If a key feature of Marxism is the idea that people do not understand the history they are building,
then Marx's role is to bring understanding into a world where it had been lacking. Whereas the
same scientific principles regulating the class struggle are supposed to have operated both before
and after Marx, before humanity was in the dark, but now it can choose to see. Similarly, Seldon's
psychohistory is supposed to have operated as a sort of natural principle both before and after
his lifetime, but once Seldon has revealed it, it becomes possible for an appropriate elite not
only to understand what is happening (the First Foundation, to some extent) but also to midwife
the process of bringing a new society into existence (the Second Foundation).
All of this touches on a point I made in the article. Once you describe the role of Marx as
it was often imagined within historical communist culture, it doesn't sound very Marxist. Nevertheless,
people did often imagine him that way. Systems of beliefs as actually held by people can often
be more complex and contradictory than their theoreticians would claim.
It was a long read to get to this point in the discussion. I would like to point out that all
economies are planned. The question is: what class is doing the planning? If the workers are not
doing the planning, then the first step toward socialism, a workers' state, does not exist or
it is degenerating rapidly. A workers' state must by it very nature be democratic when it is in
formation. If history kills the worker's state, then some other class based on private property,
share holding capitalism or a singular private property based on the state itself replaces the
workers' rule. You cannot get to socialism with our first having a workers state and you cannot
get to communism without first attaining socialism. This is basic Marxism. If you do not understand
this you will end up talking endlessly but get no where with in a truly Marxist frame work.
A little outside the box but I would recommend: The English and their History, by Robert Tombs.
Why? Because in Marx's own time England was the most industrialized and trade unionized country
in the world and Marx spent a lot of time there proselytizing to limited effect. Tombs makes a
wide ranging and sensitive study of Marx's intersection with British liberalism. It's a fascinating
read!
Outis, thanks for raising all of these issues for public discussion. There is no question that
a solid historical consideration of the communist experience in the 20th century is critical to
how we think about Marxism and many other leftist ideas and it a decidedly fraught terrain where
greater nuance is desperately needed.
I am surprised that you don't mention more recent historical scholarship on the Soviet Union
and the Eastern bloc countries, however. In your brief note on what you are currently reading
it seems that nearly all of the works are more than a half-century old. While such dustier tomes
are often invaluable, none of them benefited from the archival access, oral histories, and other
sources that have become much more widely available in the last 25 years. There was certainly
a lot of dogmatic work that came out in the years after communism fell–something like Fukuyama's
The End of History comes to mind as a quintessential example of that–but there were also many
serious scholars who did not necessarily have a strong ax to grind for or against communism, historical
or otherwise.
For example, I find the historian Stephen Kotkin's work to be quite nuanced without taking
a strong ideological stance. Originally a scholar of Stalinism who wrote on the construction of
a major steel plant in the Urals (Magnetic Mountain, 1995), he went on to also write books on
the collapse of the Soviet Union (Armageddon Averted) and the Eastern European bloc (Uncivil Society).
He has a new biography of Stalin coming out in phases, though I haven't read it yet. All of these
works emphasize what was in fact the close integration in many ways of the capitalist and communist
worlds. In the 1930s it was the crisis of capitalism that largely helped to preserve the appeal
of communism even as it was largely American firms that were being contracted to build socialist
factories and import equipment. In the later postwar years the price of oil was critical to understanding
some of the early successes and later extreme difficulties of the Soviet and Eastern bloc economy.
The collapse of the Eastern bloc had much to do with the comparison that socialism itself encouraged
people to make with capitalism by an increasing focus on consumer goods that the communist system
was woefully unable to produce.
All of this is by way of saying that the good historical work out there does not try to see
the communism of the 20th century as some kind of pure or corrupted manifestation of any ideological
system but, like every other kind of political upheaval, a complicated venture that was inseparable
from its many contexts–chief among them its place in a world global economic system and its self-definition
vis-a-vis the actually existing capitalism of its time. Susan Buck-Morss makes some of these points
in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe on the similarities between the U.S. and USSR.
In any case, I hope my brief thoughts might help move the discussion of the minefield of historical
communism more firmly onto the terrain of actual history.
Thanks, etnograf. Furet's book is from 1995, and the interview with Castoriadis is from that
time, but as you say, some of the other books I'm interested in are from the 50s or earlier. I
enjoy reading books written in the heat of events, and so from far in the past, since you often
get plunged into a worldview that is curiously alien from the present. But often modern historical
scholarship is incredibly helpful, and I greatly appreciate your suggestions.
However, one thing that I hope was clear from the post is that I think that while looking into
some problems requires wide and careful reading, there are some fundamental questions that it
isn't wrong for people to discuss even if they aren't experts on current scholarship.
It is evident this writer has not even been close to live and understand many failed European
attempts by real grassroots leftists to significantly shape socioeconomic dynamics.
A excerpt: "Large numbers of intellectuals in France and Italy were convinced that the USSR
was a genuine incarnation of Left values (this implies nothing good about the historical left"
From the very 60s and 70s a good number of activists and intellectuals in several European
countries did not call the USSR communist, socialist or Marxist. There was a very clear term for
the USSR regime: Sovietism.
Also what most people do not realize is that Marx was extremely generous to capitalism from
many important angles. If you want me to illustrate, let me know.
Also the author would need to clarify his reference to Latin America, just in case he has forgot
what took place there in the 70s and 80s.
When I mentioned Latin America, I was referring specifically to the coup against Arbenz in
Guatemala (1973) and the coup against Allende in Chile (1973). I brought them up as genuine cases
where attempts to carry out left-oriented reforms were thwarted by external pressures and interventions.
The fact that Marx had good things to say about capitalism and saw a key role for it in the
way history moves forward is not disputed by anyone serious.
You do not understand the quote you are criticizing. If I say that large numbers of intellectuals
in France and Italy saw the USSR as part of the Left, you don't achieve anything for your argument
by claiming that there were "a good number" of "activists and intellectuals" who referred to the
USSR's regime as "Sovietism." The two statements aren't inconsistent in any way.
"When I mentioned Latin America, I was referring specifically to the coup against Arbenz in
Guatemala (1973) and the coup against Allende in Chile (1973). I brought them up as genuine cases
where attempts to carry out left-oriented reforms were thwarted by external pressures and interventions"
Yes, Kissinger knows one thing or two about it. I think that makes your, "one thinks of Latin
American countries that tried to institute various left-leaning social programs, and then, between
economic pressure and the threat of military subversion, ended up being pushed into the arms of
the USSR", much comprehensive. I appreciate it
"as well as much of the leadership of the 60s student movements, were convinced that the USSR
was a genuine incarnation of Left values."
Why do you think it was called the "New Left"? I was there, and that's not what I remember.
For one thing, most of us were very anti-authoritarian. Communism was seen archaic.
No, I wasn't a "student leader," nor was I close enough to any of the famous ones to know what
they thought. But I was immersed in the zeitgeist, and that wasn't it. For one thing, the Hungarian
and Tibetan uprisings were formative for a lot of us.
Not old enough! But see my comments addressing this point elsewhere (do a search on this page
on SDS). I can also provide more references if you're interested.
People have different experiences. I know some people who did live through that time and who
were pretty radical then. According to them, as they gradually over time grudgingly accepted that
the USSR/China/Cuba etc. were not everything they had imagined, their own politics became less
and less radical, more "liberal" or even "neoliberal." This is a kind of trajectory that I think
is not logically necessary, but important to understand.
I wasn't directly involved with SDS – just read about it.
I became a Green – arguably the tail of the New Left. I gather the German party has moved in
a more neoliberal direction, but the US and British parties have moved the opposite way.
I attended a college whose unofficial motto was "Atheism, Communism, and Free Love." Epate
les bourgeoisie, IOW. I don't remember much interest in actual communism, but I could be just
projecting. Free love, now, that was another matter. But that was 50 years ago.
So this is how one SDS leader at Stanford, Martin Bresnick, recalled his visit to Prague in
1970:
"Standing near the Charles Bridge we saw a worker whitewashing over a name that had been
painted on the pedestrian side of the bridge. It was the name of Jan Palach, the young student
who had burned himself to death the year before protesting the Soviet invasion. Whenever I
passed by I saw that someone had again painted Palach's name on the bridge during the night
and each day another worker was sent to whitewash over it.
In the evening we went to concerts at the Smetana Hall in the immense Municipal building.
It is difficult to describe what music meant to the Czechs then. The audience listened to everything
with the most focused attention imaginable and musicians played with a passion I had never
experienced.
In Prague, in 1970, all music seemed to be a testament of freedom, filled with unspoken
messages of defiance and resistance. When a work ended, the audience broke into wild applause,
wept, cheered, then eagerly spoke to each other in Czech, guessing the Soviet soldiers scattered
in the crowd could not understand them ."
Here is an excerpt from an email that a reader sent me, about an incident that happened two
years before the one you describe (with the brackets to protect his privacy):
In the summer of 1968 the SDS national office in Chicago sponsored a trip to Cuba (Met in
Houston Texas (Todd Gitlin was then the President of SDS) flew to Mexico City and then flew
to Havana/ ended up returning via Russian Freighter to Saint Johns Canada and then drove across
Canadian border back into U.S) [I and a friend] jointly decided to take advantage of this opportunity
to see up-close the Cuban revolution and also meet fellow SDSers Two years earlier I had helped
set-up an SDS chapter on my campus and had engaged in a series of demonstrations, and organizing
activities both on and off campus, primarily around anti-war protests of one type of another.
I would call my two previous years of organizing on my campus quite successful and I was personally
excited about meeting other members of SDS chapters from across the country from different
local campus or local community organizations, in order to swap organizing experiences and
gain and exchange political insights. A significant number of SDS members who were on that
trip to Cuba in the summer of 1968 had just been involved in the takeover of buildings at Columbia
University (April of 1968).
That Columbia grouping would later make up a significant portion of the Weatherman faction
that eventually took over and destroyed SDS.
A foreshadowing of that groupings increasingly rigid ideological politics took place during
on our trip in Cuba. Shortly after arriving in Havana in mid-August of 1968 the Russians invaded
Czechoslovakia and our SDS group got into a political debate about what our collective stance
was toward the Russian invasion. About 6 of us condemned the invasion, while the vast majority
of the approximately 45 SDSers (including most of the Columbia University faction supported
the Russian invasion). The next morning when our entire group was supposed to leave Havana
to begin our trip throughout Cuba–the six of us were told by a member of our SDS group that
we were to stay in Havana because we were considered politically unreliable by the majority
of our "comrades."
Our Cuban guides didn't appear to know what to do with us but after meeting with the Cubans
and explaining our political infighting they allowed us to rejoin the trip. Needless to say
most of the other SDS members were not happy to see us when we returned to the trip but there
was nothing they could do about it. The supreme irony about that incident was that one of the
most ideologically militant SDS members on that trip turned out to be an undercover FBI agent
who later gave testimony to Congressional committee about what had taken place during that
trip to Cuba.
I have zero first hand knowledge, but my impression is that the NewLeft romanticized Castro
and Ho Chi Minh and possibly Mao, but saw the Soviet Union as a failure.
No links offhand– it's just the impression I long have had. There were exceptions– the historian
who wrote some famous books o American slavery ( I am blanking on his name and his books) was
an admirer of the Soviet Union. This is all very fuzzy, but I think it is correct and fits in
with what others have said about New Left attitudes towards the Russian suppression of the Czech
revolt.
"Why do you think it was called the "New Left"? I was there, and that's not what I remember."
Well said! This huge discrepancy between the broad generalization that "much of the leadership
of the 60s student movements" were Soviet apologists, and the actual lived experience of those
of us born before 1965 is jarring, to say the least.
I remember well the years 1968 to 1975. My parents were strong anti-war activists and academics,
who hosted numerous student radicals at many social gatherings. I have no memory of any Soviet
apologists, yet recall distinctly many condemnations of 1956, 1968, and both sides in the Cold
War.
What are your recollections about attitudes toward Mao? As I recall from David Barber's book
A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed , the Black Panthers were certainly Maoists and
there were also others who preferred China to the USSR.
pre-internet, there was simply a great vacuum in marxist materials.(I looked). Late 80's one
could find a lot of post-punk nihilism in the head shops and vintage record stores in houston,
but nobody talked about marx or, really, even economics and politics.
Now, 35 years later, and out in the rural hill country of texas, I find that nobody wants to
talk about such things .aside from those who replace discourse with simple declaratory sentences.
The Taboo larded onto all things marx is still in the process of falling away. Reckon this
should be remembered and accounted for in all such discussions.
Marx and Engels were democrats first and then attached a theory of capitalism and socialism
to their democratic beliefs. They were right that the new industrial proletariat would become
the main social force in the fight for democratic rights against the autocratic and aristocratic
regimes of Europe, but their theory of capitalism and socialism was mistaken.
Lenin was also a democrat for thirty years and fought for a democratic republic before the
catastrophe of WWI and the Russian Revolution. Luxemburg's critique of Lenin's and Trotsky's authoritarianism
identifies the tragic ideological turning point in the history of Marxism.
To find what is still useful in Marxism, go back to its democratic values, not its theory of
history or theory of socialist revolution and economic planning. For Marx and Engels' role in
the democratic struggle in Europe, August Nimtz's recent work is clear and straightforward. For
Lenin's early democratic strategic thinking, Neil Harding's Lenin's Political Thought, Vol 1,
is essential. Finally, Barrington Moore's The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy provides
a better framework for understanding modern history than Marxism.
The central conflict in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries was not between capitalism and
socialism but between democracy and an authoritarianism rooted in agricultural elites dependent
on unfree labor. The Old Regime in Europe was finally destroyed by the Allied armies in WWII.
However, the struggle for democracy is not over and Moore's title is not quite accurate.
Moore's title should have been The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Constitutional Liberalism
because the United States is not a representative democracy based on one person one vote, the
monstrosity of the Senate being the main expression of this undemocratic structure. The primary
political goal in the United States is to establish democracy, and the history of Marxism is useful
in understanding the ideological and strategic aspects of that goal because for over seventy years
that was also the primary political goal of Marxism
I wish I had time to respond fully to this, because I think I helped trigger it in a prior
discussion and because I have, let's say, extensive priors.
Let me briefly state what I failed to make clear before: I think that society evolves in much
the same way that organisms do – that is, variation followed by "natural" selection. The big difference
results from the mode of transmission: genetics, in the case of biology, which evolves fairly
slowly; and culture, in the case of societies, which can evolve very quickly. Culture is learned,
so acquired traits are retained, unlike genetics (biologists have now discovered epigenetics,
a big exception to that rule), and furthermore are transmitted independent of reproduction.
Evolution, like life itself, is a feedback-controlled system that can appear to have a "mind
of its own." It's in that sense that I think most social change is "unconscious," even though
it depends on the conscious decisions of many participants. Note that markets, when they operate,
have the same characteristic. And because it's a characteristic of life itself, they can't be
eliminated, as the communist countries discovered.
On the other hand, I'm very materialist, in Marx's sense (if I understand it): livelihood and
survival are the ultimate determinants of social evolution – within bounds set by the initial
state (because that's how evolution works).
For me, all that goes back to a thesis I was working on in college. Unfortunately, I broke
down and dropped out, not because of the thesis, so it wasn't finished, and I don't know what
anthropologists presently think. Social evolution is the reason Dawkins invented the term "meme":
the unit of cultural transmission.
That's what I meant when I wrote that Darwin – evolution – had superseded the dialectic.
I'll try to come back and respond to some of the economics questions (yeah, I know, everybody's
holding their breath), but I right now I need to go to work.
Robert Asprey's War In the Shadows, the Guerilla in History, Vol II might be good
survey reading for your project. He has a thesis of historical Leninism and Maosim as method applied
in partisan struggles that might prove enlightning; especially on the Eastern Front of WWII and
in Yugoslav history (Vol I is a long tactical and strategic evaluation of the conflict and police
action in Vietnam that set the question Vol II tried to answer, and won't help you with your questions).
Carl Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan is a very accessible and serious theoretical
look at internationalist communism, particularly during WWII. This work of Schmitt's later deeply
influenced Laclau and Mouffe's work on building left populism in Latin America and Europe.
For a little lighter, but still useful, reading, Gary Brecher's The War Nerd collects
his irreverent, proto-dirtbag left columns from the Russian alternative rag The Exile. Some of
his work on Chechen history under Stalinism, Nepali Maoist guerillas, and Albanian bunkers might
be instructive.
I'm left, but often the left has a poor understanding of itself. Asprey was a US career army
officer who was deeply concerned about the Vietnam police action, Schmitt an influential Weimar
and Nazi German conservative jurist and legal scholar, "Dolan" a satirist and former rhetoric
professor expat from the US in '90s Russia.
Historical minefield, for sure. This is anecdotal about 60's 70's US new left, but I think
generally accurate. One core group was the red diaper babies, children of CPUSA or sympathizers.
Inheriting aspects of parents experience, frequently in the leadership of the left CIO unions.
Ahead of everyone else in terms of understanding Marxism due to anti-communist era. Splits in
this group vis a vis Kruschev outing Stalin.
SDS split along Progressive Labor and anti-imperialist lines. PL evolved out of Teamsters labor
struggles in Minneapolis and had Trotskyist bent. The imperialism thesis derived from the Lenin
work.
By the mid 70's you had a terrorist bent and what was generally conceived as a new party building
movement (CP) that was Maoist oriented. The big dog in the Bay Area was the Revolutionary Union
who established proletarian cred by getting the still widely available industrial jobs in the
area. Then there were a bunch of sects with various core beliefs.
This is leaving aside the black struggles of the period. Naturally the polntless nature of
the party building got to most people, though some still soldier on. Obviously no such group has
anywhere near the influence that CPUSA had.
"... While I respect the author for raising this topic, he seems to fall into "assessment of the Soviet Experiment" mode in a careless way. I realize I tend to repetition about this, but it is terribly misleading -- perhaps "disorienting" would be a better term -- to discuss theses questions without any reference to the tremendous impact external pressures -- call it "intersystemic conflict," "international conflict," whatever -- had on the course of the Soviet Union's development. While it could be argued that capitalist economies also faced external pressures, that would miss the question of how such pressures impact on a society in the process of formation ..."
"... Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the choice ..."
"... What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of the elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves. ..."
"... It's obvious that people can enjoyably engage in cooperative behavior, but if they can do so under a barrage is another matter. The one thing that we can be certain of is that if capitalist elites aren't thoroughly demoralized they will do whatever they can to 'prove' TINA. ..."
"... West had spent several billion dollars in cash to bribe significant portions of the Soviet elite (Soros, via his foundation, was especially active). And large part of the elite war already poisoned by neoliberalism and wanted to become rich. So while pre-conditions for the collapse of the USSR were internal (communist ideology was actually discredited in early 70th; economic stagnation started around the same time, Communist Party leadership completely degraded and became a joke in 80th ), external pressures and subversive activity played the role of catalyst that made the process irreversible. ..."
While I respect the author for raising this topic, he seems to fall into "assessment of
the Soviet Experiment" mode in a careless way. I realize I tend to repetition about this, but
it is terribly misleading -- perhaps "disorienting" would be a better term -- to discuss theses
questions without any reference to the tremendous impact external pressures -- call it "intersystemic
conflict," "international conflict," whatever -- had on the course of the Soviet Union's development.
While it could be argued that capitalist economies also faced external pressures, that would miss
the question of how such pressures impact on a society in the process of formation .
We're talking about questions of constrained path dependence of a fundamental order that the experimentalist
mode of thinking misses. Etc, etc.
Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the
choice by significant sections of the Soviet elite to engage in looting instead of developing
a transitional program that would protect viable sections of the Soviet economy under market socialism.
What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over
was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of the
elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves.
While it is essential to try to determine the viability of alternative economic systems in
comparison what we've got now, doing so without taking into account the tremendously destructive
opposition a transition would face is, in a way, to blithely continue on in a "Soviet Experiment"
mentality.
It's obvious that people can enjoyably engage in cooperative behavior, but if they can
do so under a barrage is another matter. The one thing that we can be certain of is that if capitalist
elites aren't thoroughly demoralized they will do whatever they can to 'prove' TINA.
I was a little confused by this comment. I'm not opposed to looking at the impact
of external pressures, but I am opposed to treating them as monocausal.
Your preferred pattern of historical explanation shifts during the course of your comment.
When discussing the USSR in the process of formation, you concentrate on bringing out external
pressures and therefore considering the choices of the leadership as highly constrained. When
discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union, you instead stress the choices of the leadership
elite to "seize an opportunity to enrich themselves."
I'm not even sure why you would assume that your thesis about the elite choosing to engage
in looting is opposed to anything that I'm saying.
I agree with you on is that it is possible to think both about what a self-sustaining better
society might look like, and also the extent to which it's hard to get there within the constraints
of current power structures. They are not the same question, and I think both are worth pondering.
"Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the choice
by significant sections of the Soviet elite to engage in looting instead of developing a transitional
program that would protect viable sections of the Soviet economy under market socialism.
What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over
was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of the
elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves. "
West had spent several billion dollars in cash to bribe significant portions of the Soviet
elite (Soros, via his foundation, was especially active). And large part of the elite war already
poisoned by neoliberalism and wanted to become rich. So while pre-conditions for the collapse
of the USSR were internal (communist ideology was actually discredited in early 70th; economic
stagnation started around the same time, Communist Party leadership completely degraded and became
a joke in 80th ), external pressures and subversive activity played the role of catalyst that
made the process irreversible.
The fact that neoliberalism was rising at the time means that this was the worst possible time
for the USSR to implement drastic economic reforms and sure mediocre politicians like Gorbachev
quickly lost control of the process. With some important help of the West.
The subsequent economic rape of Russia was incredibly brutal and most probably well coordinated
by the famous three letter agencies: CIA (via USAID and "Harvard mafia") ) and MI6 and their German
and French counterparts. See
Brain drain, especially to the USA and Israel was simply incredible. Which, while good for
professionals leaving (although tales of Russian Ph.D swiping malls are not uncommon, especially
in Israel ) , who can earn much better money abroad, is actually another form of neocolonialism
for the countries affected:
It was a tragically missed opportunity to try genuine socialism. Instead of essentially selling
the state enterprises to the Mafia, they could have been GIVEN, probably broken up, to the workers
in them. It would have been instant worker-owned, market regulated – what? We don't have a familiar
name for it, but it might be what Marx meant by "socialism."
Ironically, the Bolsheviks first set up such co-operatives, called soviets, but soon seized
them in favor of state ownership. End of the socialist experiment. It's quite possible they were
far more Russian than Marxist.
The US economy hit a wall in the 70s. Instead of readjusting internally, it used its reserve
currency and global exploitation to gain an extra few decades of consumerism. If exploitation
is acceptable, then we could say that capitalism wins. However, capitalism will work until there
is nothing left to exploit.
In the meantime, the USSR was set up in a way where it could not follow
IMO, left leaning theoretical communism would have trouble surviving when in competition with
a system based on short-termism such as capitalism. This competition against short-termism would
force the communist country to turn into a form of fascism just to stop the opportunists which
happen to have the skills from defecting.
While in the Peace Corps serving in Africa (after 2010), I had a former military doctor (originally
from Moldavia) who I'd see due to ongoing health issues. He served in Angola as a doctor during
the civil wars and had pictures of the people he helped who were injured in the war. He was hands
down the most competent doctor I saw who was employed by the PC. This was by a wide margin of
competence too. I had not illusions about the Peace Corps and it purpose (to put the kind face
on US empire?). We'd talk quite a bit, and he was still bitter about the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and Gorbachev who he blamed for its demise, due to the lower standards of living and hardships
now faced by many in the Eastern bloc and in Russia itself. In all honesty, though I identify
with the far Left, this was new to me since I never realized that anyone would long for those
days since all I ever heard about as a youth (due to propaganda of course) was about long bread
lines and the gray world of the lives of those in the Soviet Union. Kukezel's comments above,
and other information I have gained over the time had somewhat expanded my ideas and understanding
regarding the system, as have my growing understanding of just how unjust our system in the US
is becoming more unjust year after year.
I am not knowledgeable enough, possibly not smart enough, to understand the finer points of
the discussion here concerning Marx, but I do think it possible for we as a species to create
better systems to organize our world other than one predicated on the profit motive. Besides being
unsustainable in a world of finite resources and the possibility that we humans will destroy the
possibility to exist, we need to creatively try new forms of organization. The problem with the
concentration of power of present day capitalism is that it seems so adaptable to new ways to
effectively change. I know some Marx but am limited, but he was very impressed with capitalism's
way to adapt to preserve itself.
Unfortunately, at times I become too cynical about the ability of the human species intellect
and abitlity to go beyond short-term solutions. We just may not be able to get past our limitations
as a creature. In short, I just don't know if we are smart enough to do what is best for survival.
Like my Peace Corps doctor, I too sometimes wax nostalgic for a past that will never return, back
to the sixties when it seemed the distribution of wealth was more egalitarian, unions brought
about some economic justice, and the concentration of power and wealth was not so dramatic as
it is today. I just never know if I was too blind, or deluded, at the time to see that maybe those
weren't actually better times in that the system itself was built upon the same exploitation has
existed in all of US history. So all this good discussion at times brings me back to the question–is
our historical evolution not far enough along a continuum for us to change before it is too late?
That's a bummer of a thought, I know, but the present political manifestations keep blunting any
optimism I still possess.
I too sometimes wax nostalgic for a past that will never return, back to the sixties when
it seemed the distribution of wealth was more egalitarian, unions brought about some economic
justice, and the concentration of power and wealth was not so dramatic as it is today.
That was "white priveledge" back then. It's passing is what led to Trump and the epidemic of
homelessness.
"... All of these works emphasize what was in fact the close integration in many ways of the capitalist and communist worlds. In the 1930s it was the crisis of capitalism that largely helped to preserve the appeal of communism even as it was largely American firms that were being contracted to build socialist factories and import equipment. In the later postwar years the price of oil was critical to understanding some of the early successes and later extreme difficulties of the Soviet and Eastern bloc economy. ..."
Outis, thanks for raising all of these issues for public discussion. There is no question
that a solid historical consideration of the communist experience in the 20th century is
critical to how we think about Marxism and many other leftist ideas and it a decidedly
fraught terrain where greater nuance is desperately needed.
I am surprised that you don't mention more recent historical scholarship on the Soviet
Union and the Eastern bloc countries, however. In your brief note on what you are currently
reading it seems that nearly all of the works are more than a half-century old. While such
dustier tomes are often invaluable, none of them benefited from the archival access, oral
histories, and other sources that have become much more widely available in the last 25
years. There was certainly a lot of dogmatic work that came out in the years after communism
fell–something like Fukuyama's The End of History comes to mind as a quintessential
example of that–but there were also many serious scholars who did not necessarily have
a strong ax to grind for or against communism, historical or otherwise.
For example, I find the historian Stephen Kotkin's work to be quite nuanced without taking
a strong ideological stance. Originally a scholar of Stalinism who wrote on the construction
of a major steel plant in the Urals (Magnetic Mountain, 1995), he went on to also write books
on the collapse of the Soviet Union (Armageddon Averted) and the Eastern European bloc
(Uncivil Society). He has a new biography of Stalin coming out in phases, though I haven't
read it yet.
All of these works emphasize what was in fact the close integration in many ways of
the capitalist and communist worlds. In the 1930s it was the crisis of capitalism that
largely helped to preserve the appeal of communism even as it was largely American firms that
were being contracted to build socialist factories and import equipment. In the later postwar
years the price of oil was critical to understanding some of the early successes and later
extreme difficulties of the Soviet and Eastern bloc economy.
The collapse of the Eastern bloc had much to do with the comparison that socialism itself
encouraged people to make with capitalism by an increasing focus on consumer goods that the
communist system was woefully unable to produce.
All of this is by way of saying that the good historical work out there does not try to
see the communism of the 20th century as some kind of pure or corrupted manifestation of any
ideological system but, like every other kind of political upheaval, a complicated venture
that was inseparable from its many contexts – chief among them its place in a world
global economic system and its self-definition vis-a-vis the actually existing capitalism of
its time. Susan Buck-Morss makes some of these points in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe
on the similarities between the U.S. and USSR.
In any case, I hope my brief thoughts might help move the discussion of the minefield of
historical communism more firmly onto the terrain of actual history.
"... After the processes of industrialization and urbanization had completely, there was nowhere for the economy to go, and the low growth combined with the ossification of bureacratic structures and the entrenchment of the World War II generation in power meant a lack of job opportunities. All of this contributed to the malaise that killed productivity and increased alcoholism, creating a self-feedback loop. Yeltsin and his cronies calculated that if the USSR transitioned to a capitalist economy, they stood to make a lot of money, so they met in secret and agreed to its dissolution. The public wanted reform, but they didn't want full-blown capitalism, certainly not of the variety Russia saw in the 90's. ..."
"... Especially considering the fact that Marx was arguably the greatest thinker of the modern era and his contributions were not at all limited to the 'isms' that people fought for in his name, I think a much better topic for a post would have been "common Cold War misconceptions about Russia and Marxism." ..."
I would rather live in Cuba than in Haiti, and the country's economic performance is all
the more impressive considering the economic warfare wrought upon it by the US.
48% of Russians regret the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the second largest political
party in Russia after Putin's is the Communist Party (article from The Nation circa 2012).
And this isn't a political party claiming to bring about a new socialist society but rather
one that promises to bring back the communism of the Brezhnev era.
Russia was a backwards country at the beginning of World War I and saw its industry
annihilated by the war. The peace treaty ceded its industrial heartlands, and then it was
ripped apart by the civil war of the 1920's. But this didn't compare to World War II, which
wiped out an entire generation of Russians.
Yet within 12 years of the war's end, they were the first to put an object into space, and
four years later they were the first to put a human into orbit. They Americans, who had been
unscathed by the war, were blessed with nearly unlimited natural resources and had the most
powerful economy and military in in history, saw their attempt blow up on the launchpad.
At this time in America, people actually thought socialism might win out. The Soviets
certainly thought so. In the first two decades after World War II, their economy was probably
the fastest growing in history. They were so confident that their system was superior that
they assumed they could beat the American capitalists in every way, including providing the
general populace with consumer goods. This promise, made during the "Kitchen Debates" and
throughout the 60's and 70's, when the government officially embraced consumerism, was a
horrible miscalculation that eventually contributed greatly to the public's discontent with
the regime.
After the processes of industrialization and urbanization had completely, there was
nowhere for the economy to go, and the low growth combined with the ossification of
bureacratic structures and the entrenchment of the World War II generation in power meant a
lack of job opportunities. All of this contributed to the malaise that killed productivity
and increased alcoholism, creating a self-feedback loop. Yeltsin and his cronies calculated
that if the USSR transitioned to a capitalist economy, they stood to make a lot of money, so
they met in secret and agreed to its dissolution. The public wanted reform, but they didn't
want full-blown capitalism, certainly not of the variety Russia saw in the 90's.
Especially considering the fact that Marx was arguably the greatest thinker of the modern
era and his contributions were not at all limited to the 'isms' that people fought for in his
name, I think a much better topic for a post would have been "common Cold War misconceptions
about Russia and Marxism."
This is supposed to be a heterodox economics blog but it's always from the Keynesian
perspective and never from the Marxist. Considering Keynes's thoughts on the Labour Party,
for one, I think more perspectives are needed in informing discussion on how to approach
questions of social justice. Marxian economists predicted the crisis just as well as the
Keynesians. Let's listen.
"... What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of the elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves. ..."
While I respect the author for raising this topic, he seems to fall into "assessment of
the Soviet Experiment" mode in a careless way. I realize I tend to repetition about this, but
it is terribly misleading -- perhaps "disorienting" would be a better term -- to discuss theses
questions without any reference to the tremendous impact external pressures -- call it
"intersystemic conflict," "international conflict," whatever -- had on the course of the
Soviet Union's development. While it could be argued that capitalist economies also faced
external pressures, that would miss the question of how such pressures impact on a
society in the process of formation
. We're talking about questions of constrained
path dependence of a fundamental order that the experimentalist mode of thinking misses. Etc,
etc.
Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the
choice
by significant sections of the Soviet elite to engage in looting instead of
developing a transitional program that would protect viable sections of the Soviet economy
under market socialism. What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a
necessary start-over was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended
outcome, of a section of the elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves.
While it is essential to try to determine the viability of alternative economic systems in
comparison what we've got now, doing so without taking into account the tremendously
destructive opposition a transition would face is, in a way, to blithely continue on in a
"Soviet Experiment" mentality. It's obvious that people can enjoyably engage in cooperative
behavior, but if they can do so under a barrage is another matter. The one thing that we can
be certain of is that if capitalist elites aren't thoroughly demoralized they will do
whatever they can to 'prove' TINA.
I was a little confused by this comment. I'm not
opposed
to looking at the impact
of external pressures, but I am opposed to treating them as monocausal.
Your preferred pattern of historical explanation shifts during the course of your comment.
When discussing the USSR in the process of formation, you concentrate on bringing out
external pressures and therefore considering the choices of the leadership as highly
constrained. When discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union, you instead stress the choices
of the leadership elite to "seize an opportunity to enrich themselves."
I'm not even sure why you would assume that your thesis about the elite choosing to engage
in looting is opposed to anything that I'm saying.
I agree with you on is that it is possible to think both about what a self-sustaining
better society might look like, and also the extent to which it's hard to get there within
the constraints of current power structures. They are not the same question, and I think both
are worth pondering.
"Then, as far as the "collapse of the Soviet Union" goes, there's no mention about the
choice by significant sections of the Soviet elite to engage in looting instead of
developing a transitional program that would protect viable sections of the Soviet economy
under market socialism.
What from the standpoint of the Times editorial board looks like a necessary start-over
was in fact a sloppily-carried decision, or merely an unintended outcome, of a section of
the elite seizing an opportunity to enrich themselves.
"
West had spent several billion dollars in cash to bribe significant portions of the Soviet
elite (Soros, via his foundation, was especially active). And large part of the elite war
already poisoned by neoliberalism and wanted to become rich. So while pre-conditions for the
collapse of the USSR were internal (communist ideology was actually discredited in early
70th; economic stagnation started around the4 same time, Communist Party leadership
completely degraded and became a joke in 80th ), external pressures and subversive activity
played the role of catalyst that make the process irreversible.
The fact that neoliberalism was rising at the time means that this was the worst possible
time for the USSR to implement drastic economic reforms and sure mediocre politicians like
Gorbachev quickly lost control of the process. With some important help of the West.
The subsequent economic rape of Russia was incredibly brutal and most probably well
coordinated by the famous three letter agencies: CIA (via USAID and "Harvard mafia") ), MI6 and their German and French counterparts. See
Brain drain, especially to the USA and Israel was simply incredible. Which, while good for
professionals leaving (although tales of Russian Ph.D swiping malls are not uncommon,
especially in Israel ) , who can earn much better money abroad, is actually another form of
neocolonialism for the countries affected:
"... The reasoning was simple and is not hard to understand: Carthago delenda est. ..."
"... In a way McCain can be viewed now as a caricature of the Roman senator Cato the Elder, who is said to have used it as the conclusion to all his speeches. ..."
Your discussion just again had shown that there is no economics, only a political economy.
And all those neoliberal perversions, which are sold as an economic science is just an apologetics
for the financial oligarchy.
Apologetics of plunder in this particular case.
In a way the USSR with its discredited communist ideology, degenerated Bolshevik leadership
(just look at who was at the Politburo of CPSU at the time; people much lower in abilities then
Trump :-) and inept and politically naïve Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm had chosen the most inopportune
time to collapse :-)
And neoliberal vultures instantly circled the corpse and have had a feast. Geopolitical goals
of the USA also played important role in amplifying the scope of plunder.
No comparison of performance of Russia vs. China makes any sense if it ignores this fact.
While I would argue with the economic advice given the Russian government after 1988, I am simply
trying to understand the reasoning behind the advice, no more than that.
The reasoning was simple and is not hard to understand: Carthago delenda est.
In a way McCain can be viewed now as a caricature of the Roman senator Cato the Elder,
who is said to have used it as the conclusion to all his speeches.
History repeats "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
"... If America were a free and democratic country, with a free press and independent publishing houses (and assuming, of course, that Americans were a literate people), Williamson's book would topple the Clinton regime, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the rest of the criminal cabal that inhabits the world of modern corporate statism faster than you could say "Jonathan Hay." ..."
"... Hay, for those who need an introduction to the international financial buccaneers who control our lives, was the general director of the Harvard Institute of International Development (HIID) in Moscow (1992-1997), who facilitated the crippling of the Russian economy and the plundering of its industrial and manufacturing infrastructure with a strategy concocted by Larry Summers, Andre Schliefer (HIID's Cambridge-based manager), Jeffrey Sachs and his Swedish sidekick Anders Aslund, and a host of private players from banks and investment houses in Boston and New York - a plan approved and assisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. ..."
"... These third-generation Bolsheviks - led by former Pravda hack Yegor Gaidar, grandson of a Bolshevik who achieved prominence as the teenage mass murderer of White Army officers, now heads the Moscow-based Institute for Economies in Transition - became instant millionaires (or billionaires) and left the Russian workers virtual slaves of them and their new foreign investors. ..."
"... Ironically, when Harvard's Sachs and Hay started identifying Russians they could work with, they ignored - or shunned - the most capable talent at hand: those numerous Russian economists who for 20 years had been studying the Swiss economist Wilhelm von Roepke and his disciple, Ludwig Erhard, father of Germany's "economic miracle" in anticipation of the day when Communism would collapse. Somewhat sardonically, Williamson notes that one, probably unintended, benefit of Gorbachev's perestroika was the recruitment of these Russian economists by top U.S. universities. ..."
"... On another level, Contagion is about the workings of international finance, the consolidation of capital into fewer and fewer hands, and the ruthless, death-dealing policies it inflicts on its target countries through currency manipulation, inflation, depression, taxation and war - with emphasis on Russia but with attention also given to Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, the Balkans, and other countries, and how it uses its control over money to produce social chaos. ..."
"... Those who read Williamson's book will find particularly interesting her treatment of the Federal Reserve, and how this "bank" was designed to plunder the wealth of America through war, debt, and taxation, in order to maintain what is nothing more nor less than a giant pyramid scheme that depends on domination of the earth and its resources. ..."
"... The policies inflicted on Russia by the banks were cruel to the Nth degree; but the policy implementers - Williamson employs the derogatory Russian word m yakigolovy ("soft-headed ones") applied to the Americans - were a foppish lot, streaming into Russia by the thousands (the IMF, alone, with 150 staffers) with their outrageous salaries and per diem allowances, renting out the finest dachas, bringing in their exotic consumer goods, driving up prices for goods and rents, spurring a boom in the drug and prostitution businesses, and then watching, cold-heartedly, the declining fortunes of their hosts as they lost everything - including the artistic heritage of the country. ..."
"... Gore, who was raised to be President, has impeccable Russian connections. His father, of course, was Lenin financier Armand Hammer's pocket senator, and it was Hammer who paid for Al Jr.'s expensive St. Alban's Prep schooling; and, as Williamson reports, Al Jr.'s daughter married Andrew Schiff, grandson of Jacob, who, as a member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., underwrote anti-czarist political agitation for two decades before Lenin's coup, and congratulated Lenin upon his successful revolution. ..."
"... By March 1999, Russia was now a financial basket case, and billions, if not tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer-backed loans had vanished into the secret bank accounts of both Russian and American gangster capitalists, and the news was starting to make little vibrations on Capitol Hill. "The U.S. administration's response to the debacle was repulsively similar to a typical Bill Clinton bimbo-eruption operation: Having ruined Russia by cosseting her in debt, meddling ignorantly in her internal affairs, and funding a drunken usurper, his agents denied all error and slandered ('slimed') her," writes Williamson. ..."
"... The cost to the American taxpayers of Clinton regime bailouts in a three-and-a-half-year period, Williamson notes, is more than $180 billion! The "new financial architecture" Clinton has erected, she writes, "isn't new at all, but rather something the international public lenders have been wanting for decades, i.e., an automatic bailout for their own bad practices." ..."
"... As the extent of the corruption of the Clinton-Yeltsin "reform" plan for Russia unfolded last year, with the attendant Bank of New York scandal, the mysterious death of super banker Edmond Safra in his Monte Carlo penthouse, the collapse of the Russian stock market, and the whiplash effect in Southeast Asia, Congress was pressed to hold hearings. ..."
"... What resulted, as Williamson accurately narrates it, was just a smoke screen, show hearings that barely rose above the seriousness of a Gilbert and Sullivan farce - though they did result in proposed new domestic banking laws that, if passed, will effectively make banks another federal police force responsible for reporting to the U.S. government the most minute financial transactions of U.S. citizens. ..."
"... In this regard, it is instructive to quote Williamson at length: "If the FBI, [Manhattan District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau, or Congress were serious about getting to the bottom of the plundering of Russia's assets and U.S. taxpayers' resources, they would show far more professional interest in exactly what was said and agreed in the private meetings [U.S. Treasury secretary] Larry Summers, Strobe Talbott, and [former Treasury Secretary] Robert Rubin conducted with Anatoly Chubais [former Russian finance minister, who oversaw the distribution and sale of Russian industries], and Sergie Vasiliev [Yeltsin's principal legal adviser, and a member of the Chubais clan], and later Chubais again in June and July of 1998. ..."
"... And why did Michel Camdessus [who left the presidency of the IMF earlier this year] announce his sudden retirement so soon after Moscow newspapers reported that a $200,000 payment was made to him from a secret Kremlin bank account? . . . ..."
"... You see, as this book explains, the Clinton's Russia policy did not just plunder Russians, leaving them destitute while creating a new and ruthless class of international capitalist gangsters at U.S. taxpayer expense; it had the double consequence of bringing all Americans deeper into the bankers' New World Order by increasing their debt load, decreasing their privacy, and restricting their civil rights. If only Americans cared. ..."
After 1991 Eastern Europe and FSU were mercilessly looted. That was tremendous one time transfer
of capital (and scientists and engineers) to Western Europe and the USA. Which helped to secure
"Clinton prosperity period"
China were not plundered by the West. Russia and Eastern Europe were. That's the key difference.
For Russia this period was called by Anne Williamson in her testimony before the Committee
on Banking and Financial Services of the United States House of Representatives "The economic
rape of Russia"
How Clinton & Company & The Bankers Plundered Russia by Paul Likoudis
May 4, 2000
The other day I was surprised to learn that Jeffrey Sachs, the creator of "shock therapy"
capitalism, who participated in the looting of Russia in the 1990s, is now NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo's
top adviser for health care. So we in NY will get shock therapy, much as the Russians did two
decades ago. Here is a story I wrote for The Wanderer in 2000:
===
How Clinton & Company & The Bankers Plundered Russia
by Paul Likoudis
In an ordinary election year, Anne Williamson's Contagion would be political dynamite, a
bombshell, a block-buster, a regime breaker.
If America were a free and democratic country, with a free press and independent publishing
houses (and assuming, of course, that Americans were a literate people), Williamson's book
would topple the Clinton regime, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the rest
of the criminal cabal that inhabits the world of modern corporate statism faster than you could
say "Jonathan Hay."
Hay, for those who need an introduction to the international financial buccaneers who
control our lives, was the general director of the Harvard Institute of International Development
(HIID) in Moscow (1992-1997), who facilitated the crippling of the Russian economy and the
plundering of its industrial and manufacturing infrastructure with a strategy concocted by
Larry Summers, Andre Schliefer (HIID's Cambridge-based manager), Jeffrey Sachs and his Swedish
sidekick Anders Aslund, and a host of private players from banks and investment houses in Boston
and New York - a plan approved and assisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Contagion can be read on many different levels.
At its simplest, it is a breezy, slightly cynical, highly entertaining narrative of Russian
history from the last months of Gorbachev's rule to April 2000 - a period which saw Russia
transformed from a decaying socialist economy (which despite its shortcomings, provided a modest
standard of living to its citizens) to a "managed economy" where home-grown gangsters and socialist
theoreticians from the West, like Hay and his fellow Harvardian Jeffrey Sachs, delivered 2,500%
inflation and indescribable poverty, and transferred the ownership of Russian industry to Western
financiers.
Williamson was an eyewitness who lived on and off in Russia for more than ten years, where
she reported on all things Russian for The New York Times, Th e Wall Street Journal, and a
host of other equally reputable publications. She knew and interviewed just about everybody
involved in this gargantuan plundering scheme: Russian politicians and businessmen, the new
"gangster" capitalists and their American sponsors from the IMF, the World Bank, USAID, Credit
Suisse First Boston, the CIA, the KGB - all in all, hundreds of sources who spoke candidly,
often ruthlessly, of their parts in this terrible human drama.
Her account is filled with quotations from interviews with top aides of Yeltsin and Clinton,
all down through the ranks of the two hierarchical societies to the proliferating mass of Russian
destitute, pornographers, pimps, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Some of the principal characters,
of course, refused to talk to Williamson, such as Bill Clinton's longtime friend from Oxford,
Strobe Talbott, now a deputy secretary of state and, Williamson suspects, a onetime KGB operative
whose claim to fame is a deceitful translation of the Khrushchev Memoirs. (A KGB colonel refused
to confirm or deny to Williamson that Clinton and Talbott visited North Vietnam together in
1971 - though he did confirm their contacts with the KGB for their protests against the U.S.
war in Vietnam in Moscow. See especially footnote 1, page 210.)
The 546-page book (the best part of which is the footnotes) gives a nearly day-by-day report
on what happened to Russia; left unstated, but implied on every page, is the assumption that
those in the United States who think what happened in Russia "can't happen here" better realize
it can happen here.
Once the Clinton regime and its lapdogs in the media defined Russian thug Boris Yeltsin
as a "democrat," the wholesale looting of Russia began. According to the socialist theoreticians
at Harvard, Russia needed to be brought into the New World Order in a hurry; and what better
way to do it than Sachs' "shock therapy" - a plan that empowered the degenerate, third-generation
descendants of the original Bolsheviks by assigning them the deeds of Russia's mightiest state-owned
industries - including the giant gas, oil, electrical, and telecommunications industries, the
world's largest paper, iron, and steel factories, the world's richest gold, silver, diamond,
and platinum mines, automobile and airplane factories, etc. - who, in turn, sold some of their
shares of the properties to Westerners for a song, and pocketed the cash, while retaining control
of the companies.
These third-generation Bolsheviks - led by former Pravda hack Yegor Gaidar, grandson
of a Bolshevik who achieved prominence as the teenage mass murderer of White Army officers,
now heads the Moscow-based Institute for Economies in Transition - became instant millionaires
(or billionaires) and left the Russian workers virtual slaves of them and their new foreign
investors.
When Russian members of the Supreme Soviet openly criticized the looting of the national
patrimony by these new gangsters early in the U.S.-driven "reform" program, in 1993, before
all Soviet institutions were destroyed, Yeltsin bombed Parliament.
Ironically, when Harvard's Sachs and Hay started identifying Russians they could work
with, they ignored - or shunned - the most capable talent at hand: those numerous Russian economists
who for 20 years had been studying the Swiss economist Wilhelm von Roepke and his disciple,
Ludwig Erhard, father of Germany's "economic miracle" in anticipation of the day when Communism
would collapse. Somewhat sardonically, Williamson notes that one, probably unintended, benefit
of Gorbachev's perestroika was the recruitment of these Russian economists by top U.S. universities.
In the new, emerging global economy, it's clear that Russia is the designated center for
heavy manufacturing - just as Asia is for clothing and computers - with its nearly unlimited
supply of hydroelectric power, iron and steel, timber, gold and other precious metals.
This helps explain why America's political elites don't give a fig about the closing down
of American industries and mines. As Williamson observes, Russia is viewed as some kind of
"closet."
What is important for Western readers to understand - as Williamson reports - is that when
Western banks and corporations bought these companies at bargain basement prices, they bought
more than just industrial equipment. In the Soviet model, every unit of industrial production
included workers' housing, churches, opera houses, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, etc.,
and the whole kit-and-caboodle was included in the selling price. By buying large shares of
these companies, Western corporations became, ipso facto, town managers.
Another Level
On another level, Contagion is about the workings of international finance, the consolidation
of capital into fewer and fewer hands, and the ruthless, death-dealing policies it inflicts
on its target countries through currency manipulation, inflation, depression, taxation and
war - with emphasis on Russia but with attention also given to Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia,
the Balkans, and other countries, and how it uses its control over money to produce social
chaos.
Those who read Williamson's book will find particularly interesting her treatment of
the Federal Reserve, and how this "bank" was designed to plunder the wealth of America through
war, debt, and taxation, in order to maintain what is nothing more nor less than a giant pyramid
scheme that depends on domination of the earth and its resources.
Williamson is of that small but noble school of economics writers who believe that the academic
field of economics is not some esoteric science that can only be comprehended by those with
IQs in four digits, and she - drawing on such writers as Hayek and von Mises, Roepke and the
late American Murray Rothbard - explains in layman's vocabulary the nuts and bolts of sound
economic principles and the real-world effects of the Fed's policies on hapless Americans.
Contagion also serves up a severe indictment of the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, and the other international "lending" agencies spawned by the Council on Foreign Relations
and similar "councils" and "commissions" which are fronts for the big banks run by the Houses
of Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, et al.
The policies inflicted on Russia by the banks were cruel to the Nth degree; but the
policy implementers - Williamson employs the derogatory Russian word m yakigolovy ("soft-headed
ones") applied to the Americans - were a foppish lot, streaming into Russia by the thousands
(the IMF, alone, with 150 staffers) with their outrageous salaries and per diem allowances,
renting out the finest dachas, bringing in their exotic consumer goods, driving up prices for
goods and rents, spurring a boom in the drug and prostitution businesses, and then watching,
cold-heartedly, the declining fortunes of their hosts as they lost everything - including the
artistic heritage of the country.
Williamson describes brilliantly that heady atmosphere in Moscow in the early days of the
IMF/USAID loan-scamming: a 24-hour party. There were bars like the Canadian-operated Hungry
Duck, which lured Russian teenage girls into its bar with a male striptease and free drinks,
"who, once thoroughly intoxicated, were then exposed to crowds of anxious young men the club
admitted only late in the evening."
The Third Level
At a third and more intriguing level, Contagion is about America's criminal politics in
the Clinton regime, and, inevitably, the reader will put Williamson's book down with the sense
that Al Gore will be the next occupier of the White House.
Gore, who was raised to be President, has impeccable Russian connections. His father,
of course, was Lenin financier Armand Hammer's pocket senator, and it was Hammer who paid for
Al Jr.'s expensive St. Alban's Prep schooling; and, as Williamson reports, Al Jr.'s daughter
married Andrew Schiff, grandson of Jacob, who, as a member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., underwrote
anti-czarist political agitation for two decades before Lenin's coup, and congratulated Lenin
upon his successful revolution.
Williamson also documents Gore's intimate involvement with powerful Wall Street financial
houses, and his New York breakfast meeting with multibillionaire George Soros (a key Russian
player) just as the Russian collapse was underway.
Williamson tells an interesting story of Gore's response to the IMF/World Bank/USAID plunder
of U.S. taxpayers for the purpose of hobbling Russia.
By March 1999, Russia was now a financial basket case, and billions, if not tens of
billions of U.S. taxpayer-backed loans had vanished into the secret bank accounts of both Russian
and American gangster capitalists, and the news was starting to make little vibrations on Capitol
Hill. "The U.S. administration's response to the debacle was repulsively similar to a typical
Bill Clinton bimbo-eruption operation: Having ruined Russia by cosseting her in debt, meddling
ignorantly in her internal affairs, and funding a drunken usurper, his agents denied all error
and slandered ('slimed') her," writes Williamson.
"Pundits and academics joined government officials in bemoaning Mother Russia's thieving
ways, her bottomless corruption and constant chaos, all the while wringing their soft hands
with a schoolmarm's exasperation. Russia's self-appointed democracy coach Strobe Talbott ('Pro-Consul
Strobe' to the Russians) would get it right. An equally sanctimonious Albert Gore - the same
Al Gore who'd been so quick to return the CIA's 1995 report detailing Viktor Chernomyrdin's
and Anatoly Chubais' personal corruption with the single word 'Bullshit' scrawled across it
- took the low road and sniffed that the Russians would just have to get their own economic
house in order and cut their own deal with the IMF. . . ."
The cost to the American taxpayers of Clinton regime bailouts in a three-and-a-half-year
period, Williamson notes, is more than $180 billion! The "new financial architecture" Clinton
has erected, she writes, "isn't new at all, but rather something the international public lenders
have been wanting for decades, i.e., an automatic bailout for their own bad practices."
As the extent of the corruption of the Clinton-Yeltsin "reform" plan for Russia unfolded
last year, with the attendant Bank of New York scandal, the mysterious death of super banker
Edmond Safra in his Monte Carlo penthouse, the collapse of the Russian stock market, and the
whiplash effect in Southeast Asia, Congress was pressed to hold hearings.
What resulted, as Williamson accurately narrates it, was just a smoke screen, show hearings
that barely rose above the seriousness of a Gilbert and Sullivan farce - though they did result
in proposed new domestic banking laws that, if passed, will effectively make banks another
federal police force responsible for reporting to the U.S. government the most minute financial
transactions of U.S. citizens.
Double Effect
In this regard, it is instructive to quote Williamson at length: "If the FBI, [Manhattan
District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau, or Congress were serious about getting to the bottom
of the plundering of Russia's assets and U.S. taxpayers' resources, they would show far more
professional interest in exactly what was said and agreed in the private meetings [U.S. Treasury
secretary] Larry Summers, Strobe Talbott, and [former Treasury Secretary] Robert Rubin conducted
with Anatoly Chubais [former Russian finance minister, who oversaw the distribution and sale
of Russian industries], and Sergie Vasiliev [Yeltsin's principal legal adviser, and a member
of the Chubais clan], and later Chubais again in June and July of 1998.
"Instead of allowing Larry Summers to ramble casually in response to questions at a banking
committee hearing, the Treasury secretary should be asked exactly who suckered him - his Russian
friends, his own boss [former Harvard associate Robert Rubin, his boss at Treasury who was
once cochairman at Goldman Sachs], or private sector counterparts of the Working Committee
on Financial Markets [a White House group whose membership is drawn from the country's main
financial and market institutions: the Fed, Treasury, SEC, and the Commodities & Trading Commission].
. . . Or did he just bungle the entire matter on account of wishful thinking? Or was it gross
incompetence?
"The FBI and Congress ought to be very interested in establishing for taxpayers the truth
of any alleged 'national security' issues that justified allowing the Harvard Institute of
International Development to privatize U.S. bilateral assistance. It too should be their brief
to discover the relationship between the [Swedish wheeler-dealer and crony of Sachs, Anders]
Aslund/Carnegie crowd and Treasury and exactly what influence that relationship may have had
on the awarding of additional grants to Harvard without competition. On what basis did Team
Clinton direct their financial donor, American International Group's (AIG) Maurice Greenberg
(a man nearly as ubiquitous as any Russian oligarch in sweetheart public-funding deals), to
Brunswick Brokerage when sniffing out a $300 million OPIC guarantee for a Russian investment
fund. . . .
And why did Michel Camdessus [who left the presidency of the IMF earlier this year]
announce his sudden retirement so soon after Moscow newspapers reported that a $200,000 payment
was made to him from a secret Kremlin bank account? . . .
"American and Russian citizens can never be allowed to learn what really happened to the
billions lent to Yeltsin's government; it would expose the unsavory and self-interested side
of our political, financial, and media elites. . . . Instead, the [House] Banking Committee
hearings will use the smoke screen of policing foreign assistance flows to pass legislation
that will effectively end U.S. citizens' financial privacy while making them prisoners of their
citizenship. . . . The Banking Committee will use the opportunity the Russian dirty money scandal
presents to reanimate the domestic 'Know Your Customer' program, which charges domestic banks
with monitoring and reporting on the financial transactions in which middle-class Americans
engage. This data is collected and used by various government agencies, including the IRS;
meaning that if a citizen sells the family's beat-up station wagon or their 'starter' home,
the taxman is alerted immediately that the citizen's filing should reflect the greater tax
obligation in that year of the sale. . . . Other data on citizens for which the government
has long thirsted will also be collected by government's newest police force, the banks. .
. ."
You see, as this book explains, the Clinton's Russia policy did not just plunder Russians,
leaving them destitute while creating a new and ruthless class of international capitalist
gangsters at U.S. taxpayer expense; it had the double consequence of bringing all Americans
deeper into the bankers' New World Order by increasing their debt load, decreasing their privacy,
and restricting their civil rights. If only Americans cared.
"... You see, as this book explains, the Clinton's Russia policy did not just plunder Russians, leaving them destitute while creating
a new and ruthless class of international capitalist gangsters at U.S. taxpayer expense; it had the double consequence of bringing all
Americans deeper into the bankers' New World Order by increasing their debt load, decreasing their privacy, and restricting their civil
rights. If only Americans cared. ..."
The other day I was surprised to learn that Jeffrey Sachs, the creator of "shock therapy" capitalism, who participated in the
looting of Russia in the 1990s, is now NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo's top adviser for health care. So we in NY will get shock therapy, much
as the Russians did two decades ago.
Here is a story I wrote for The Wanderer in 2000:
===
How Clinton & Company & The Bankers Plundered Russia
by Paul Likoudis
In an ordinary election year, Anne Williamson's Contagion would be political dynamite, a bombshell, a block-buster, a regime breaker.
If America were a free and democratic country, with a free press and independent publishing houses (and assuming, of course, that
Americans were a literate people), Williamson's book would topple the Clinton regime, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, and the rest of the criminal cabal that inhabits the world of modern corporate statism faster than you could say "Jonathan
Hay."
Hay, for those who need an introduction to the international financial buccaneers who control our lives, was the general director
of the Harvard Institute of International Development (HIID) in Moscow (1992-1997), who facilitated the crippling of the Russian
economy and the plundering of its industrial and manufacturing infrastructure with a strategy concocted by Larry Summers, Andre Schliefer
(HIID's Cambridge-based manager), Jeffrey Sachs and his Swedish sidekick Anders Aslund, and a host of private players from banks
and investment houses in Boston and New York - a plan approved and assisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Contagion can be read on many different levels.
At its simplest, it is a breezy, slightly cynical, highly entertaining narrative of Russian history from the last months of Gorbachev's
rule to April 2000 - a period which saw Russia transformed from a decaying socialist economy (which despite its shortcomings, provided
a modest standard of living to its citizens) to a "managed economy" where home-grown gangsters and socialist theoreticians from the
West, like Hay and his fellow Harvardian Jeffrey Sachs, delivered 2,500% inflation and indescribable poverty, and transferred the
ownership of Russian industry to Western financiers.
Williamson was an eyewitness who lived on and off in Russia for more than ten years, where she reported on all things Russian
for The New York Times, Th e Wall Street Journal, and a host of other equally reputable publications. She knew and interviewed just
about everybody involved in this gargantuan plundering scheme: Russian politicians and businessmen, the new "gangster" capitalists
and their American sponsors from the IMF, the World Bank, USAID, Credit Suisse First Boston, the CIA, the KGB - all in all, hundreds
of sources who spoke candidly, often ruthlessly, of their parts in this terrible human drama.
Her account is filled with quotations from interviews with top aides of Yeltsin and Clinton, all down through the ranks of the
two hierarchical societies to the proliferating mass of Russian destitute, pornographers, pimps, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Some
of the principal characters, of course, refused to talk to Williamson, such as Bill Clinton's longtime friend from Oxford, Strobe
Talbott, now a deputy secretary of state and, Williamson suspects, a onetime KGB operative whose claim to fame is a deceitful translation
of the Khrushchev Memoirs. (A KGB colonel refused to confirm or deny to Williamson that Clinton and Talbott visited North Vietnam
together in 1971 - though he did confirm their contacts with the KGB for their protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam in Moscow.
See especially footnote 1, page 210.)
The 546-page book (the best part of which is the footnotes) gives a nearly day-by-day report on what happened to Russia; left
unstated, but implied on every page, is the assumption that those in the United States who think what happened in Russia "can't happen
here" better realize it can happen here.
Once the Clinton regime and its lapdogs in the media defined Russian thug Boris Yeltsin as a "democrat," the wholesale looting
of Russia began. According to the socialist theoreticians at Harvard, Russia needed to be brought into the New World Order in a hurry;
and what better way to do it than Sachs' "shock therapy" - a plan that empowered the degenerate, third-generation descendants of
the original Bolsheviks by assigning them the deeds of Russia's mightiest state-owned industries - including the giant gas, oil,
electrical, and telecommunications industries, the world's largest paper, iron, and steel factories, the world's richest gold, silver,
diamond, and platinum mines, automobile and airplane factories, etc. - who, in turn, sold some of their shares of the properties
to Westerners for a song, and pocketed the cash, while retaining control of the companies.
These third-generation Bolsheviks - led by former Pravda hack Yegor Gaidar, grandson of a Bolshevik who achieved prominence as
the teenage mass murderer of White Army officers, now heads the Moscow-based Institute for Economies in Transition - became instant
millionaires (or billionaires) and left the Russian workers virtual slaves of them and their new foreign investors.
When Russian members of the Supreme Soviet openly criticized the looting of the national patrimony by these new gangsters early
in the U.S.-driven "reform" program, in 1993, before all Soviet institutions were destroyed, Yeltsin bombed Parliament.
Ironically, when Harvard's Sachs and Hay started identifying Russians they could work with, they ignored - or shunned - the most
capable talent at hand: those numerous Russian economists who for 20 years had been studying the Swiss economist Wilhelm von Roepke
and his disciple, Ludwig Erhard, father of Germany's "economic miracle" in anticipation of the day when Communism would collapse.
Somewhat sardonically, Williamson notes that one, probably unintended, benefit of Gorbachev's perestroika was the recruitment
of these Russian economists by top U.S. universities.
In the new, emerging global economy, it's clear that Russia is the designated center for heavy manufacturing - just as Asia is
for clothing and computers - with its nearly unlimited supply of hydroelectric power, iron and steel, timber, gold and other precious
metals.
This helps explain why America's political elites don't give a fig about the closing down of American industries and mines. As
Williamson observes, Russia is viewed as some kind of "closet."
What is important for Western readers to understand - as Williamson reports - is that when Western banks and corporations bought
these companies at bargain basement prices, they bought more than just industrial equipment. In the Soviet model, every unit of industrial
production included workers' housing, churches, opera houses, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, etc., and the whole kit-and-caboodle
was included in the selling price. By buying large shares of these companies, Western corporations became, ipso facto, town managers.
Another Level
On another level, Contagion is about the workings of international finance, the consolidation of capital into fewer and fewer
hands, and the ruthless, death-dealing policies it inflicts on its target countries through currency manipulation, inflation, depression,
taxation and war - with emphasis on Russia but with attention also given to Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, the Balkans, and other countries,
and how it uses its control over money to produce social chaos.
Those who read Williamson's book will find particularly interesting her treatment of the Federal Reserve, and how this "bank"
was designed to plunder the wealth of America through war, debt, and taxation, in order to maintain what is nothing more nor less
than a giant pyramid scheme that depends on domination of the earth and its resources.
Williamson is of that small but noble school of economics writers who believe that the academic field of economics is not some
esoteric science that can only be comprehended by those with IQs in four digits, and she - drawing on such writers as Hayek and von
Mises, Roepke and the late American Murray Rothbard - explains in layman's vocabulary the nuts and bolts of sound economic principles
and the real-world effects of the Fed's policies on hapless Americans.
Contagion also serves up a severe indictment of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the other international "lending"
agencies spawned by the Council on Foreign Relations and similar "councils" and "commissions" which are fronts for the big banks
run by the Houses of Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, et al.
The policies inflicted on Russia by the banks were cruel to the Nth degree; but the policy implementers - Williamson employs the
derogatory Russian word m yakigolovy ("soft-headed ones") applied to the Americans - were a foppish lot, streaming into Russia by
the thousands (the IMF, alone, with 150 staffers) with their outrageous salaries and per diem allowances, renting out the finest
dachas, bringing in their exotic consumer goods, driving up prices for goods and rents, spurring a boom in the drug and prostitution
businesses, and then watching, cold-heartedly, the declining fortunes of their hosts as they lost everything - including the artistic
heritage of the country.
Williamson describes brilliantly that heady atmosphere in Moscow in the early days of the IMF/USAID loan-scamming: a 24-hour party.
There were bars like the Canadian-operated Hungry Duck, which lured Russian teenage girls into its bar with a male striptease and
free drinks, "who, once thoroughly intoxicated, were then exposed to crowds of anxious young men the club admitted only late in the
evening."
The Third Level
At a third and more intriguing level, Contagion is about America's criminal politics in the Clinton regime, and, inevitably, the
reader will put Williamson's book down with the sense that Al Gore will be the next occupier of the White House.
Gore, who was raised to be President, has impeccable Russian connections. His father, of course, was Lenin financier Armand Hammer's
pocket senator, and it was Hammer who paid for Al Jr.'s expensive St. Alban's Prep schooling; and, as Williamson reports, Al Jr.'s
daughter married Andrew Schiff, grandson of Jacob, who, as a member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., underwrote anti-czarist political agitation
for two decades before Lenin's coup, and congratulated Lenin upon his successful revolution.
Williamson also documents Gore's intimate involvement with powerful Wall Street financial houses, and his New York breakfast meeting
with multibillionaire George Soros (a key Russian player) just as the Russian collapse was underway.
Williamson tells an interesting story of Gore's response to the IMF/World Bank/USAID plunder of U.S. taxpayers for the purpose
of hobbling Russia.
By March 1999, Russia was now a financial basket case, and billions, if not tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer-backed loans had
vanished into the secret bank accounts of both Russian and American gangster capitalists, and the news was starting to make little
vibrations on Capitol Hill. "The U.S. administration's response to the debacle was repulsively similar to a typical Bill Clinton
bimbo-eruption operation: Having ruined Russia by cosseting her in debt, meddling ignorantly in her internal affairs, and funding
a drunken usurper, his agents denied all error and slandered ('slimed') her," writes Williamson.
"Pundits and academics joined government officials in bemoaning Mother Russia's thieving ways, her bottomless corruption and constant
chaos, all the while wringing their soft hands with a schoolmarm's exasperation. Russia's self-appointed democracy coach Strobe Talbott
('Pro-Consul Strobe' to the Russians) would get it right. An equally sanctimonious Albert Gore - the same Al Gore who'd been so quick
to return the CIA's 1995 report detailing Viktor Chernomyrdin's and Anatoly Chubais' personal corruption with the single word 'Bullshit'
scrawled across it - took the low road and sniffed that the Russians would just have to get their own economic house in order and
cut their own deal with the IMF. . . ."
The cost to the American taxpayers of Clinton regime bailouts in a three-and-a-half-year period, Williamson notes, is more than
$180 billion! The "new financial architecture" Clinton has erected, she writes, "isn't new at all, but rather something the international
public lenders have been wanting for decades, i.e., an automatic bailout for their own bad practices."
As the extent of the corruption of the Clinton-Yeltsin "reform" plan for Russia unfolded last year, with the attendant Bank of
New York scandal, the mysterious death of super banker Edmond Safra in his Monte Carlo penthouse, the collapse of the Russian stock
market, and the whiplash effect in Southeast Asia, Congress was pressed to hold hearings.
What resulted, as Williamson accurately narrates it, was just a smoke screen, show hearings that barely rose above the seriousness
of a Gilbert and Sullivan farce - though they did result in proposed new domestic banking laws that, if passed, will effectively
make banks another federal police force responsible for reporting to the U.S. government the most minute financial transactions of
U.S. citizens.
Double Effect
In this regard, it is instructive to quote Williamson at length: "If the FBI, [Manhattan District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau,
or Congress were serious about getting to the bottom of the plundering of Russia's assets and U.S. taxpayers' resources, they would
show far more professional interest in exactly what was said and agreed in the private meetings [U.S. Treasury secretary] Larry Summers,
Strobe Talbott, and [former Treasury Secretary] Robert Rubin conducted with Anatoly Chubais [former Russian finance minister, who
oversaw the distribution and sale of Russian industries], and Sergie Vasiliev [Yeltsin's principal legal adviser, and a member of
the Chubais clan], and later Chubais again in June and July of 1998.
"Instead of allowing Larry Summers to ramble casually in response to questions at a banking committee hearing, the Treasury secretary
should be asked exactly who suckered him - his Russian friends, his own boss [former Harvard associate Robert Rubin, his boss at
Treasury who was once cochairman at Goldman Sachs], or private sector counterparts of the Working Committee on Financial Markets
[a White House group whose membership is drawn from the country's main financial and market institutions: the Fed, Treasury, SEC,
and the Commodities & Trading Commission]. . . . Or did he just bungle the entire matter on account of wishful thinking? Or was it
gross incompetence?
"The FBI and Congress ought to be very interested in establishing for taxpayers the truth of any alleged 'national security' issues
that justified allowing the Harvard Institute of International Development to privatize U.S. bilateral assistance. It too should
be their brief to discover the relationship between the [Swedish wheeler-dealer and crony of Sachs, Anders] Aslund/Carnegie crowd
and Treasury and exactly what influence that relationship may have had on the awarding of additional grants to Harvard without competition.
On what basis did Team Clinton direct their financial donor, American International Group's (AIG) Maurice Greenberg (a man nearly
as ubiquitous as any Russian oligarch in sweetheart public-funding deals), to Brunswick Brokerage when sniffing out a $300 million
OPIC guarantee for a Russian investment fund. . . . And why did Michel Camdessus [who left the presidency of the IMF earlier this
year] announce his sudden retirement so soon after Moscow newspapers reported that a $200,000 payment was made to him from a secret
Kremlin bank account? . . .
"American and Russian citizens can never be allowed to learn what really happened to the billions lent to Yeltsin's government;
it would expose the unsavory and self-interested side of our political, financial, and media elites. . . . Instead, the [House] Banking
Committee hearings will use the smoke screen of policing foreign assistance flows to pass legislation that will effectively end U.S.
citizens' financial privacy while making them prisoners of their citizenship. . . . The Banking Committee will use the opportunity
the Russian dirty money scandal presents to reanimate the domestic 'Know Your Customer' program, which charges domestic banks with
monitoring and reporting on the financial transactions in which middle-class Americans engage. This data is collected and used by
various government agencies, including the IRS; meaning that if a citizen sells the family's beat-up station wagon or their 'starter'
home, the taxman is alerted immediately that the citizen's filing should reflect the greater tax obligation in that year of the sale.
. . . Other data on citizens for which the government has long thirsted will also be collected by government's newest police force,
the banks. . . ."
You see, as this book explains, the Clinton's Russia policy did not just plunder Russians, leaving them destitute while creating
a new and ruthless class of international capitalist gangsters at U.S. taxpayer expense; it had the double consequence of bringing
all Americans deeper into the bankers' New World Order by increasing their debt load, decreasing their privacy, and restricting their
civil rights. If only Americans cared.
What Caused the Russian Revolution? | The Nation
---
The Sealed Train
A century later, historians still disagree about what
caused the Russian Revolution.
By
Sophie Pinkham
By
--
June 13, 2017
2 Comments
--
On February 23, 1917, an unseasonably warm day, women
at the Vyborg cotton mills in the Russian city of Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg)
marked the recently created International Women's Day. The meeting became a mass
walkout; as the women headed for the Neva River, other people-men and women-joined
their ranks. By noon, about 50,000 protesters were participating in a spontaneous
strike. The police boarded streetcars, expelling anyone with calloused hands, and
blocked the bridges across the frozen river, but the workers walked across the ice.
The next day, nearly 75,000 people were on strike.
Czar Nicholas II sent Cossack horsemen to put the rebellion down, but they simply
cantered through the crowds without using their swords or whips; they had chosen not
to fight the people. Workers flocked into Petrograd for a three-day general strike.
Demonstrators in homemade helmets and padded jackets waved red banners demanding an
end to Russia's involvement in the world war. When police arrived, the Cossacks
defended the protesters.
Revolutionary organizers were convinced that it was time to stop the strikes,
believing that such action could never succeed without the support of the army. They
were surprised by a mutiny in the elite Pavlovsky Regiment, whose cadets rebelled
when they heard that their fellow soldiers had shot civilians. Mutiny in several
other regiments ensued, with the mutineers killing their officers. By February 27, an
estimated 25,000 garrison troops had defected. Workers, acting on their own, raided
the armory and stormed the Kresty Prison, the courts, and the main artillery depot.
The city was on fire. One English observer wrote: "As the streets cleared, little
heaps, some very still, some writhing in agony, told of the toll of the machine
guns."
Protesters stormed the Tauride Palace, home of the Duma, the consolation-prize
parliament formed after the 1905 revolution. Panicked liberal politicians formed a
provisional committee, hoping to maintain order as the imperial administration
dissolved. The revolutionaries set up the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers'
Deputies. Orthodox Marxists did not want this workers' council to attempt to take
power immediately and begin building full socialism; in their view, that would have
meant skipping a stage in the revolutionary process, since parliamentary
democracy-the "bourgeois phase"-had to precede communism. However, the Duma committee
wasn't eager to take responsibility for the increasingly volatile situation. Its
members couldn't decide on what they wanted, either, with some hoping for a
social-democratic system and others a constitutional monarchy. By March 2, it was
clear that the existing system was untenable. Nicholas II abdicated, passing the
throne to his brother, who took fright and refused the next day. The provisional
government and the workers' council settled on an uneasy system of "dual power."
As its members hadn't been elected, the Duma committee had no claim to democratic
authority, and it was clear that workers felt a greater allegiance to the Soviet. The
people, most of whom had little understanding of the finer points of Marxism, wanted
socialism, and quickly. From his exile in Zurich, Lenin expressed his disgust at the
new arrangement. He sent a telegram to his Bolshevik comrades, declaring: "No trust
in and no support for the provisional government. Kerensky especially suspect; arming
the proletariat is the only guarantee no rapprochement with other parties." Lenin was
virtually alone in his insistence that power pass into the hands of the workers
immediately.
For a few brief months, Russia became one of the freest countries in the world.
The provisional government granted amnesty to political prisoners, abolished the
death penalty, banned flogging in prisons, ended the practice of deportation to
Siberia, and dissolved the czarist secret police. It proclaimed equal rights and
legal status for all nationalities and religions, ending the Jewish Pale of
Settlement, and granted unlimited freedom of the press and public assembly.
Russia remained a nation at war, though the war had been the catalyst for
revolution and peace was one of the primary demands of the strikers and
demonstrators. The provisional government, the Petrograd Soviet, and others argued
over whether the country should continue fighting the war-and, if so, on what terms.
Many of the socialists had abandoned pacifism, insisting that the war had to be won
and the motherland defended, and that allies could not be abandoned. Here again,
Lenin was in a tiny minority. He had long called for an immediate end to the war. It
was, in his view, "a struggle for markets and for the freedom to loot foreign
countries," and its effect was "to deceive, disunite and slaughter the proletarians
of all countries by setting the wage-slaves of one nation against those of another so
as to benefit the bourgeoisie." But it wasn't peace that Lenin had in mind when he
called for Russia's disengagement. Instead, he was plotting a civil war, the next
step on his road map to international communism.
O
ne hundred years after the Russian
Revolution, historians are still arguing about what made this seismic political shift
possible. For the most part, the crises, reversals, and surprises, along with the
long strings of names, places, and deaths, are consistent from one account to
another. But different historians-often with distinct political allegiances-offer
very different answers to the question of why many of these events happened in the
way they did. How historians narrate the story of the Russian Revolution tells us
much about their philosophy of history, as well as about their attitude toward the
revolutionary project and the politics of the left.
As its title suggests, Catherine Merridale's
Lenin on the Train
places
Vladimir Ilyich at the center of the narrative, building toward his arrival at the
Finland Station in April 1917. When Lenin, who had been living in Western Europe for
17 years, received the news of the February Revolution, he was desperate to return to
Russia. It wasn't easy: Britain and France, which were relying on their alliance with
Russia, had no wish to help a fierce opponent of the "imperialist war" return home.
Lenin found that his only viable route back was through Germany, Sweden, and Finland,
but traveling through Germany would leave him vulnerable to accusations that he was
on the German payroll.
In fact, he and other Russian revolutionaries
were
being financed by the
German government, which hoped that they would destabilize Russia and weaken its
military efforts. The German government was also willing to arrange for Lenin's
journey back to Petrograd. With his typical pragmatism, Lenin decided to make the
trip, but he insisted on a "sealed train"-a fiction that would allow him to plausibly
deny charges of collusion with the German enemy. (Germany's support would remain a
closely guarded secret throughout the Soviet period.)
The Petrograd Soviet's executive committee was less than overjoyed at Lenin's
return, fearing that he would further destabilize the situation. They were right.
Upon his arrival in the Finland Station's waiting room, Lenin told the festive crowd,
"The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe." When
he arrived at the headquarters of the Bolshevik central committee, he lectured for
two hours straight, though it was already in the early morning and he'd just spent
eight days on a train. Lenin denounced the provisional government and "revolutionary
defencism" (the socialist argument for staying in the war). The Menshevik Nikolai
Sukhanov wrote of Lenin's speech: "It seemed as if all the elements had risen from
their abodes, and the spirit of universal destruction, knowing neither barriers nor
doubts, neither human difficulties nor human calculations, was hovering above the
heads of the bewitched disciples."
Lenin on the Train
is full of vivid details like these, taken from the
memoirs and letters of Lenin's contemporaries. In keeping with her cinematic
approach, Merridale presents Lenin's train ride as the starting point of everything
from the "infant Soviet state to world Cold War." She quotes Winston Churchill: "Full
allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were
already committed. Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon
Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like
a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia." Though Merridale is sympathetic to the
desire for social equality that motivated the Russian left, she writes that
Churchill's bacillus comparison has its merits, and she likens the German support to
today's "global games," in which great powers finance local rebellions in order to
destabilize their opponents. For Merridale, the story of Lenin's train journey is
partly "a parable about great-power intrigue, and one rule there is that great powers
almost always get things wrong."
Churchill's image of Lenin is clearly linked to his loathing of communism, the red
plague. But the notion of Lenin, or communism, as a bacillus betrays a willful
blindness to the larger constellation of factors that make profound social change
possible. Merridale acknowledges as much in her book, but her narrative is
nevertheless structured on the idea that Lenin brought with him a new social and
political world.
Lenin on the Train
is often engaging and evocative, but as
historical analysis, it is not entirely satisfying. Lenin was not Zeus, with the
revolution bursting, fully formed, from his head. Charismatic, gifted, passionate,
and ruthless though he was, Lenin was only one man, and one man is not enough to
foment or sustain a revolution.
I
n
The Russian Revolution
, Sean
McMeekin strips Lenin of his usual role as central protagonist. McMeekin writes that
Lenin was merely "an afterthought" in 1905 and "barely worth the attention of tsarist
police agents" until he returned to Russia in April 1917. Dismissing him as
"out-of-touch," McMeekin argues that Lenin would have had "little impact on the
political scene had he not been furnished with German funds to propagandize the
Russian army." Lenin and the Bolsheviks, he adds, "played no role worth mentioning in
the fall of the tsar."
McMeekin's Lenin is neither brave nor diabolically clever; his main characteristic
is unscrupulousness. The story of the revolution is not the story of a terrifyingly
powerful Lenin, but rather of the failure of the czarist administration and the
provisional government to kill him and other key revolutionaries. It is also the
story of the disastrous decision by Russian liberals to convince Nicholas II to enter
what would become the First World War.
McMeekin's account of the longer-term causes of the Russian Revolution also
deviates from the standard narrative. He argues that the growth of revolutionary
tendencies was not primarily the result of autocracy, Russian economic backwardness,
the land question, labor politics, or socialist theories. In the early years of the
20th century, McMeekin writes, Russia was expanding its territory, modernizing, and
increasing its population at breakneck speed; he compares it to China in the 21st
century. Though the lot of the Russian worker was difficult, it was nevertheless
comparable to that of workers throughout Europe. Russia was unusual only in that it
had few intermediary institutions to buffer popular resentment of the czar. The
famous bread shortages of Petrograd in the winter of 1917 were "mostly mythical."
Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, he even argues that in 1916–17, morale
in the army was on the rise, and that Russian soldiers were better fed than their
German counterparts.
McMeekin also points out that the czarist secret police was small, though very
efficient, and rather lenient. The death penalty was meted out rarely-in some cases,
not even to political assassins-and most revolutionaries were sent into
administrative exile, where they were free to work and agitate, albeit in Siberia.
Exiles received a living allowance for clothes, food, and rent, and they could bring
along family members or hire domestic servants. (Lenin brought his wife and mother
along and hired a maid when he arrived.) Nothing was inevitable, in this telling; the
tide could have turned at any moment. The Bolsheviks' victory was brought about by
Lenin's skillful but risky effort, at a moment of Russian vulnerability, to transform
the "imperialist war" into a civil war by infiltrating the armed forces and "turning
the armies red," spurring mutinies and mass desertions by soldiers who took their
weapons with them.
Upon his arrival at the Finland Station, Lenin was virtually alone in his
insistence that society was already passing to the second stage of the revolution,
when power would be placed in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest peasants.
At the time, even many of his fellow Bolsheviks thought this was madness: There was
no way that Russian workers were ready to form a dictatorship of the proletariat. But
Lenin was unrelenting and, with his gift for oratory, he was able to persuade many
ordinary people that he was right, turning them against the provisional government.
Protests and counterprotests exploded into violence. Lenin's refusal to compromise
with the provisional government or the pro-war "revolutionary defencists" made the
Bolsheviks the only political party offering an alternative to dual power, which came
to seem like a form of impotence or treachery in its failure to end the war, food
shortages, and general disorder.
Lenin's liability was his history of German support, which Kerensky and others
tried to use against him. (Indeed, throughout the Russian Revolution, Germany
continued to send large sums to the revolutionaries.) Accused of treason and
espionage, Lenin fled to Finland in July, and many of his comrades were imprisoned.
Meanwhile, the foolish, foppish Kerensky unwittingly smoothed the way for the
Bolsheviks, remaking himself as a dictator, moving into the Winter Palace, sleeping
in the czar's bed, and traveling in the czar's train carriage. He reinstated the
death penalty in an effort to get the armed forces under control, provoking much
outrage.
After an absurd series of scandals and intrigues involving his own generals and
officers, Kerensky released most of the Bolshevik prisoners, whose comrades had
already made substantial progress in indoctrinating the rank and file of the army and
navy. In September, the Bolsheviks won a major electoral victory, a sign of their
surging popularity. In October, Lenin returned to Petrograd in disguise and argued
forcefully that the Bolsheviks should seize power before the November elections. He
feared that the Bolsheviks would never be able to win an election that included
peasants, who were much more likely to support the Socialist Revolutionary Party than
urban workers were. Lenin's arguments prevailed, though Trotsky managed to delay the
seizure of power so that it happened two weeks later, on the day of the next meeting
of the Second Congress of the Soviets. The planned coup was an open secret: Kerensky
begged the British to help him negotiate an armistice in the war, understanding at
last that peace offered his only hope of remaining in power.
In the early hours of October 25, 1917, armed Bolsheviks approached cadets
guarding key choke points in Petrograd and told them that they were being relieved.
Other Bolsheviks walked into the Central Telegraph Office and disconnected the phone
lines to the Winter Palace. Kerensky sent a telegram summoning two Cossack regiments,
but they refused to come to his aid; they were loyal to a general whom Kerensky had
accused of treason. That same morning, Kerensky escaped Petrograd in a US embassy
car. The Bolshevization of the armed forces had paid off, giving Lenin and his
comrades the muscle they needed to finish off the Kerensky government.
But the economic situation was deteriorating rapidly, with factory closures and
rampant inflation. Though they hadn't liked the Kerensky government much, civil
servants went on strike to protest the Bolshevik coup, shutting down the trains until
January 1918. Telegraph and telephone workers walked out on November 7, with
transportation workers, schoolteachers, and Moscow's municipal workers following
close on their heels. On November 8, the Union of Unions called for a general strike
of government employees. As McMeekin puts it, "The world's first proletarian
government was thus forced to devote its primary energies to strikebreaking."
Banks refused to release funds to the Bolsheviks; Lenin's commissars began taking
bank employees hostage and demanding ransom. It was largely to break the bank strike
that the Bolsheviks formed the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat
Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage, better known as the Cheka, predecessor
to the KGB. The Cheka was also responsible for containing the damage done by the
Bolsheviks' defeat in the November 1917 elections, in which the party won only 24
percent of the vote, as opposed to 40 percent for the Socialist Revolutionaries, who
had indeed maintained the loyalty of the peasants. The unfavorable result was
explained away with allegations of electoral abuse and fraud, while the Cheka closed
the Tauride Palace to prevent the opposition from gathering there.
The Bolsheviks' abandonment of democratic principles and their cavalier approach
to coercion and violence played a central role in their victory, at least over the
short term. McMeekin's focus on historical contingency and Bolshevik ruthlessness
suggests that revolution is less about large-scale historical processes and more
about cold-blooded political opportunism. At times, his adamant rejection of
historical determinism looks like an overcorrection for Marxist orthodoxy. No
revolution is inevitable, but it feels perverse to minimize longer-term factors so
energetically. McMeekin's insistence that czarist Russia was doing well economically,
and that workers and peasants had no more reason for complaint than their Western
European counterparts, bears an unpleasant resemblance to today's attempts to dismiss
the economic and social grievances of the masses with statistics showing that the
economy is still expanding. McMeekin displays plenty of sympathy for the murdered
czar and his family, but less for the millions of Russians who suffered under the
czarist regime.
S
.A. Smith's
Russia in Revolution
takes
a more familiar line than McMeekin's, linking the origins of the revolution to
czarist abuses. Smith emphasizes the agency of ordinary people in determining the
trajectory of Russian history, devoting particular attention to workers, who did so
much to further the revolution, and to the peasants, who rose up against the old
order and then rebelled against the new one.
Smith marshals extensive economic, social, and cultural evidence to help explain
the nature of the social transformation that led to the revolution and then to the
Soviet order. Rejecting the Western tendency to see 1917 as the precondition that
made the nightmare of Stalinism inevitable, Smith reminds us of the inspiring hope of
socialism, the justified rage at an unjust order, and the roads not taken that might
have led to a happier result.
If the tragedy for McMeekin is that the czarist regime and the liberal provisional
government failed to stop the rise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the tragedy for Smith
is the corruption of Russian revolutionary ideals. He takes the long view,
privileging large-scale economic, social, and political trends over individual actors
and contingent circumstances. He enumerates the ways in which violence was ingrained
in the czarist order, especially for the lower classes. For him, as for the
revolutionaries, violence wasn't only a matter of floggings or executions; it
included poverty, malnutrition, workplace exploitation, preventable disease, and
gender-based abuse. (His consistent attention to the experience of Russian women is
laudable.)
THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.
For Smith, the February Revolution was the result of a crisis brought about by
economic and social modernization and aggravated by the world war. Even as Russia
attempted to keep up with the rest of the world-and maintain its status as a great
power-the social system underpinning the autocracy was eroding with the emergence of
new classes like industrial workers and a professionalized middle class. While
McMeekin stresses the economic gains under Nicholas II, Smith focuses on the
suffering caused by the demands of wartime, which angered the workers as well as a
peasantry already disappointed by earlier land reforms. In Smith's view, the failure
of Russian democracy in 1917 is best explained by the willingness of moderate
socialists to continue the country's involvement in World War I, in keeping with
their belief that the bourgeoisie was next in line for political power. Workers and
peasants were told to wait their turn. It wasn't a surprise that these latter groups
welcomed the more radical Bolshevik position.
Smith takes pains not to cast the Bolsheviks as the only perpetrators of violence
in the revolution and ensuing civil war; the White armies, nationalists, peasants,
and anarchist bandits also committed atrocities. In times of social disintegration,
displacement, and starvation, mass violence is a familiar result and should not be
viewed as the inevitable outcome of a socialist revolution. Rather than seeing
Stalinism as predetermined by the Bolshevik seizure of power, Smith argues that after
the Bolshevik regime began to stabilize Russian society, it veered back toward the
violent, antidemocratic czarist order, itself a product of the country's distinctive
geography, lack of capital, bloated bureaucracy, and religious and peasant
traditions. Stalinism was thus the deformed offspring of Marxism and Russian
political culture, warped by larger social, economic, and political factors that
often had little to do with ideology.
Perhaps the hardest thing to understand about Lenin and the Bolsheviks is their
insouciant attitude toward mass death, despite their adherence to a utopian
philosophy that sought to eradicate human suffering. Smith explains that Lenin's
philosophy was far from a pure Marxism; it was rooted in the nihilist-terrorist
strain of Russian revolutionary thought as well as the millenarian ideas that were
popular in Russia at the turn of the century. Lenin did not seek to make the lives of
those already living better; he believed that revolution would cleanse the world of
injustice and create an entirely new society.
This philosophy produced one of many historical examples indicating that while
violence is often the most effective way of seizing power, antidemocratic coups do
not usher in utopia; more often, they devolve into terror. Transformation born of
violence is likely to end in violence. As the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès,
assassinated in July 1914, warned, "If the social revolution emerges from this chaos
instead of coming about as the supreme expression of progress, as a higher act of
reason, justice, and wisdom, it will be part of this universal mental crisis, an
excess of the contagious fury brought about by the suffering and violence of war."
T
he lessons of 1917 also testify to the risks
that accompany any political position that sees progress as a by-product of history.
The movement from capitalism to socialism (and vice versa) is not inevitable and can
be reversed; teleological thinking leads to strategic blunders and gross
misinterpretations of reality. Still, politics and economics have their patterns; if
these patterns can be understood, they can be adjusted or controlled. After a long
banishment, Marx is returning to mainstream political discourse, as a new generation
discovers that many of his observations about the predatory logic of capitalism still
hold startlingly true.
Of the three books under review, Smith's is the most sympathetic to emancipatory
politics, and it offers the most persuasive explanation of the Russian Revolution's
origins and terrible failures. Smith's approach to history, with an emphasis on
long-term factors and the experience of ordinary people, also feels the most relevant
to our own historical moment. As in the early 20th century, we are living in an age
in which mass movements and popular fury have a new currency. Politics cannot be
contained in the sealed train cars of superpowers, and social movements cannot be
treated as simple instruments in great games. Once again, economic inequality is a
pressing political issue around the world. In American political discourse, Russia's
cautionary tales are still used as blunt instruments to assert the impossibility of
any kind of socialist revolution. A new generation of democratic socialists may glean
more complicated lessons from 1917: not only about the dangerous magnetism of power
and violence, but about the possibility of achieving a political transformation that
spans continents.
n
"... Soros was deeply immersed in the quicksand of corruption which engulfed Russia in the '90s. After years of preparation, he began his big power play in May 1989, when he began funding a young Harvard economist named Jeffery Sachs to develop an economic reform plan for Poland. Soros paid Sachs and his team through his newly founded Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw. The young economist favored "shock therapy", a sudden lifting of price controls, currency controls, trade restrictions and investment barriers that would plunge the country instantly into the icy waters of free-market competition. The idea was to get the pain of the transition over with as quickly as possible. Poland implemented Sach's plan on 1 January 1990. Hyperinflation immediately soared out of control. It was very tough on the population, but people were willing to take a lot of pain to see real change ", Soros wrote later. Ultimately, Poland's "Big Bang" was deemed a success. ..."
"... Gorbachev set out to achieve this but he went about things the wrong way and attempted to make too many radical changes too fast. Some of his hair brained schemes (whether this was done deliberately to cripple the country or just out of stupidity) like the alcohol ban lead to major discontent and unrest. Furthermore, and far worse, Gorbachev and many in his circle somehow got into bed with Western Globalists . I don't know where and how exactly this started, and I don't have much information to source this claim, but if one looks at how the Soviet Union ended up by the 1990's it's the only logical explanation. ..."
"... Gorbachev and his people - through a combination of idiocy, incompetency, delusions of grandeur and treachery - screwed the Soviet Union. The West moved quickly to pay off the leadership in former Soviet Republics (Ukraine in particular) to not remain in a Union State with Russia. In Russia, Yeltsin and the Jewish Oligarchy (funded by Rothschild & Globalist Kikery, just like the Communists were in the 1917 Revolution) somehow got into power after Gorbachev lost his grip on power and the rest is history. ..."
From the beginning Pres Clinton chose to deal with Russia and the former Soviet States through
private back channels, circumventing normal State Dept procedures. He appointed what became known
as a "troika", three officials endowed with extraordinary authority over US-Russia relations.
This troika included Strobe Talbott at the State Department, Lawrence Summers at the Treasury
and Vice Pres Al Gore. Talbott had been Bill Clinton's roommate and fellow Rhodes Scholar at Oxford
University. He was the first of the troika to be appointed, and was the leader of the group. On
19 January 1993, Clinton invented a new title for Talbott, naming him Ambassador-at-large to Russia.
Business Week accordingly dubbed Talbott the Clinton Admin's "Russia Policy Czar".
To guide him through the mysterious byways of the former Soviet States, Talbott turned to a
businessman with experience in the regio: George Soros. Talbott added that he considered Soros
"....a National treasure".
The period of Soros' financial and political suzerainty coincided with Russia's wholesale collapse
into corruption and anarchy. David Ignatius of The Washinggton Post held the Clinton Admin largely
to blame. "Let's call it Russiagate", he wrote in an article of 25 August 1999, in which he decried,
"the lawlessness of modern Russia and the acquiescence of the Clinton Admin in the process of
decay and decline there". Ignatius concluded, "What makes the Russian case so sad is that the
Clinton Admin may have squandered one of the most precious assets imaginable, which is the idealism
and goodwill of the Russian people as they emerged from 70 years of Communist Rule. The Russian
debacle may haunt us for generations".
Soros was deeply immersed in the quicksand of corruption which engulfed Russia in the '90s.
After years of preparation, he began his big power play in May 1989, when he began funding a young
Harvard economist named Jeffery Sachs to develop an economic reform plan for Poland. Soros paid
Sachs and his team through his newly founded Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw. The young economist
favored "shock therapy", a sudden lifting of price controls, currency controls, trade restrictions
and investment barriers that would plunge the country instantly into the icy waters of free-market
competition. The idea was to get the pain of the transition over with as quickly as possible.
Poland implemented Sach's plan on 1 January 1990. Hyperinflation immediately soared out of control.
It was very tough on the population, but people were willing to take a lot of pain to see real
change ", Soros wrote later. Ultimately, Poland's "Big Bang" was deemed a success.
Soros and Sachs went to Moscow next, seeking to persuade Gorbachev to try shock therapy in
the Soviet Union. Gorbachev rejected their plan which angered soros. Later, when Gorbachev tried
to secure loans from Western Lenders, Soros undermined him, denouncing the Soviet Leader. Soros'
attack damaged Gorbachev's reputation in the West, impeding his access to foreign aid. As the
soviet economy faltered, Gorbachev's power weakened. Kremlin hardliners attempted a coup in august
1991, setting off a chain of reactions that resulted in Gorbachev's ouster. The coup itself failed,
but the soviet Union split up, and Gorbachev was obliged to resign. Boris Yeltsin became Russia's
new leader.
Yeltsin proved more cooperative than his predecessor. Now Soros and Sachs could finally get
down to the serious business of implementing their shock therapy plan. Russia lifted its price
controls on 2 January 1992. The life savings of ordinary Russians went up in smoke as inflation
hit 2,500%. That was only the beginning. What followed was one of the greatest economic catastrophes
in history.
Over the next four years, a cabal of corrupt officials and businessman, both Russian and American,
used their govt connections to hijack Russia's privatization process for their own personal gain.
They bought up the Crown Jewels of Russia's Economy for a fraction of their worth in rigged elections
and stole billions of dollars from foreign aid loans earmarked for economic development projects.
Russia scholar Peter Reddaway estimates that between 1992 and 1996, "although 57% of Russia's
firms were privatized, the State budget received only $3-5 billion for them, because they were
sold at nominal prices to corrupt cliques". By 1996, a group of 7 Russian businessman had managed
to gain control of 60% of Russia's natural resources, including its precious oil and gas reserves.
Through their manipulations behind the scenes, , this group exercised de facto control
over the Russian gov , for which reason the Russians called them the "oligarchs". It is largely
due to widespread disgust with the corrupt reign of the oligarchs that so many Russians today
look favorably to Putin's iron fisted but orderly rule.
Throughout the 90s, Sachs and Soros wielded enormous influence in Russia. From 1995 to 1999,
Sachs headed the Harvard Institute For International Development, through which Harvard University
provided economic development assistance to needy countries. Much as Strobe Talbott delegated
important aspects of US-Russia diplomacy to George Soros in the 90s, the US agency Intl Development
likewise delegated to the Harvard Institute the job of overseeing Russia's transformation to a
market economy. They put Sachs and his team in the position of official economic advisors to Boris
Yeltsin, representing the US Govt. Russians called them the "Gavardniki"- the Harvard boys.
The Gavardniki could make or break Russian officials by deciding who would get foreign aid
grants and who would not. Their influence over Yeltsin was such that he frequently bypassed the
Russian Parliament, issuing Presidential decrees to enact the Harvard team's reforms. At times,
the men from Harvard would even draft Yeltsin's decrees with their own hands. All of this meddling
in Russia's internal affairs might have been excusable and even commendable, had the Gavardniki
proved wise and trustworthy counselors. All too often, however, they used their influence to push
bad policy for selfish reasons. The Harvard Institute's Russian operations quickly became a hotbed
of corruption, as its envoys exploited its access to Yeltsin and the Russian Oligarchs for personal
gain.
Jeffrey Sachs has not been accused of profiting personally from these activities. Nevertheless,
the cloud of scandal which consumed the institute on his watch reflects poorly on his leadership,
to say the least. Sachs resigned as director of the institute on 25 May 1999, even as the US Justice
Dept were investigating their Russian operations. Harvard shut down the scandal ridden institute
in January 2000, but not soon enough to avoid a Justice Dept lawsuit charging Institute personnel
with fraudulent misuse of USAID funds. Harvard settled the case out of court for $26 million-
a mere wrist slap considering the damage the institute had done to the Russian economy and to
US-Russia relations. Oddly, Tthe Russian scandal left no perceptible marks on Prof Sachs' reputation.
The Soros empire was short lived. By 1998 federal investigators in the US were scrutinizing
billions of dollars in illegal transfers flowing out of Russia through the Bank of New York and
other large banks. As the magnitude of the pilferage began leaking into Western Media, foreign
aid and foreign investment slowed to a trickle. Everything finally came to a screeching halt on
"Black Monday", 17 Agust 1998, when Russia was forced to devalue the ruble and default on its
debt. Rep Jim Leach, head of the House Banking Committee, announced Sept 1, 1999 that that the
Russia scandal could prove to be "one of the greatest social robberies in history". Based on preliminary
inquiries, Leach declared that he was "very confident" that at least $100 billion had been laundered
out of Russia, an unknown portion of which may have been diverted from the IMF and other foreign
aid loans.
Journalist Anne Williamson, appearing before Leach's House Banking Committee, explained to
a panel of stunned congressmen how so many US taxpayer dollars had managed to go missing in Russia.
She told the committee that the Clintons had managed to set up an "International Patronage Machine".
Clintonites in the guise of "consultants" to the Russian Govt requested and received loans, virtually
at will, through such International lending agencies as the IMF, the World Bank, the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank. Few questioned the loans, said Williamson,
because the Clinton administration had designated Russian "privatization" a "national security"
priority. Much of the money simpply vanished into offshore accounts or the NYSE. Other monies
were invested in Russian junk bonds, privatization auctions or other lucrative schemes. A handful
of inside players, Russian and American alike, got rich, while the average Russian- not too mention
the US taxpayer- got fleeced.
Soros insists that his own investments in Russia were squeaky clean. this is debatable. His
privileged access to Kremlin officials and friendly oligarchs helped lubricate many deals. Williamson
notes that Soros invested in Russia's second largest steel mill, Novolipetsk Kombinat, and in
the Russian oil firm Sidanko. Joining Soros in these purchases were the Harvard Management Co,
which invests Harvard Uni's multi-billion dollar endowment fund. Soros and Harvard Management
purchased shares in Sidanko and Novolipetsk in 1995, through rigged elections. Technically speaking,
the bidding was closed to foreigners. Soros and Harvard sidestepped the no foreigners rule by
making their purchases through the sputnik fund - an investment group tied to the powerful, corrupt
Russian Oligarch Vladimir Potanin.
It all comes out in the karmic wash, argues Soros, because once he has executed a deal and
made money, he can use his profits for the "betterment" of humanity- as he sees it.
Contrary to what most supposed "experts" in Western Media claim about that period, Russia was
still a relatively wealthy country when the Soviet Union broke up. That soon changed once the
Harvard Boys, Clinton Insiders, Rothschilds, Soros, Russian crooks, Jewish "Russian" crooks, Yeltsin
etc got themselves into position.
Russia was basically looted as the article described via all sorts of corrupt schemes and scams
and the country was plunged into a decade of economic and social destruction, the scale of which
is hard to comprehend. Entire industries disappeared, factories were gutted, salaries weren't
paid for months, State assets got were stolen for chump change by oligarchs who were funded by
the usual scheissters (Rothschilds, Euro nobility, Soros etc).
The country was well on the way toward fragmentation (which is exactly what the perpetrators
and their insider thieving connections were hoping for.)
The process of destruction only really ended once Putin got into power. And that's why the
media and the Western Oligarchy hate him so much.
Ozzy Bon Halen
Russia was basically looted as the article described
Actually, it was a condensed chapter from a book called
The Shadow Party.
I couldn't find some of the info in it anywhere else on the webs, so I decided to type it in manually
and post it. I heard that there is a book called
Sale of The Century that's pretty good, too. I haven't gotten around to reading that one yet,
though.
rasputin
I lived through several years of Yeltsin, and many people were literally starving -- not to death
of course, but being able to afford only basic staples. But the problems didn't start with Yeltsin,
it all started going to shit with Gorbachev.
Afaik the Soviet Union peaked socially in the late 50's and 60's. What had basically happened
was that this generation who matured by that time were tough, smart, hard working people - they
had to be, since they somehow survived the Bolsheviks, WW2 etc. That generation worked miracles.
They won the war, they worked incredibly hard, incredibly fast and made phenomenal progress against
the odds with regards to infrastructural upgrades, technology & science, rebuilding the country
etc etc.
What happened from the 60's or so was that the leadership became old and tired, they became
more out of touch with the times and the general population. Things started stagnating, corruption
increased etc. By the time Gorbachev got into power the system was already in dire need of overhaul
and new ways and ideas.
Gorbachev set out to achieve this but he went about things the wrong way and attempted to make
too many radical changes too fast. Some of his hair brained schemes (whether this was done deliberately
to cripple the country or just out of stupidity) like the alcohol ban lead to major discontent
and unrest. Furthermore, and far worse, Gorbachev and many in his circle somehow got into bed
with Western Globalists . I don't know where and how exactly this started, and I don't have
much information to source this claim, but if one looks at how the Soviet Union ended up by the
1990's it's the only logical explanation.
Gorbachev and his people - through a combination of idiocy, incompetency, delusions of grandeur
and treachery - screwed the Soviet Union. The West moved quickly to pay off the leadership in
former Soviet Republics (Ukraine in particular) to not remain in a Union State with Russia. In
Russia, Yeltsin and the Jewish Oligarchy (funded by Rothschild & Globalist Kikery, just like the
Communists were in the 1917 Revolution) somehow got into power after Gorbachev lost his grip on
power and the rest is history.
Khruschev (a khakhol) was a disaster. Brezhnev (another khakhol) was pretty bad either. Gorbachev
is from the south of Russia too, kind of a weak person who got on top as a compromise figure.
January 26, 2012: "I paid a huge, huge price for going after George Soros," Glenn Beck told
Shadow Party
co-author Richard Poe. "But I ain't dead. And quite honestly, I thought
that was an option. I said on the air, at one point, if I show up dead, check Soros!" (
WATCH
THE VIDEO
)
The Shadow Party
shines a light on the hidden world of multibillionaire
George Soros. It explains how he uses his philanthropic activities as camouflage for
covert political operations in many countries.
Soros has undermined currencies,
subverted elections and overturned governments all over the world. Now he is
targeting the United States.
GLENN
BECK: THE PUPPET MASTER GEORGE SOROS
November 9-11, 2010
In November 2010, Glenn Beck aired a three-part
investigative series called "The Puppetmaster George Soros." Drawing heavily on
The Shadow Party
, a book by David Horowitz and Richard Poe, Beck accused
billionaire George Soros of using his global network of philanthropies as a
front for covert operations. He accused Soros of overthrowing governments in
several countries, through economic sabotage and disruption of elections.
Finally, Beck charged Soros with using these same techniques in an effort to
destabilize the United States.
I think Sutton starts with Trotzky. But what he says is that Wall Street is agnostic, all they
care about is making money. I think that there is no doubt about that.
If Marine Le Pen's victory should mean capital leaves France and comes to the US they might
vote Le Pen.
Very grievous consequences, especially with regard to the beginning of the war, followed Stalin's
annihilation of many military commanders and political workers during 1937-1941 because of
his suspiciousness and through slanderous accusations. During these years repressions were
instituted against certain parts of our military cadres beginning literally at the company
- and battalion-commander levels and extending to higher military centers. During this time,
the cadre of leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East was almost
completely liquidated.
The policy of large-scale repression against military cadres led also to undermined
military discipline, because for several years officers of all ranks and even soldiers in Party
and Komsomol cells were taught to "unmask" their superiors as hidden enemies.
(Movement in the hall.)
It is natural that this caused a negative influence on the state of military discipline
in the initial stage of the war.
And, as you know, we had before the war excellent military cadres which were unquestionably
loyal to the Party and to the Fatherland.
There is more in his speech on Soviet lack of preparedness.
Khrushchev lied : the evidence that every "revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) "crimes"
in Nikita Khrushchev's infamous "secret speech" to the 20th party congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is provably false
from p85
As Kozhinov points out, Khrushchev's accusations here can be turned
■round on his own thesis. Historians do not blame President Roosevelt
for (ailing to foresee the atlsck on Pearl Harbor. Therefore to blame Sta-
lin for not foreseeing the precise time and place of the Nazi attack is to
Ul prey to the "cult of personality", to believe Stalin was supposed to
bre superhuman abilities and inexplicably failed to use them."<>
The Soviets could not declare a mobilization because that was universally
understood as a declaration of war. It was precisely such a mobilization
that had set off the First World War. It would have given Hitler the op-
poctunity to declare war, leaving the USSR vulnerable to a separate deal
between Hitler and the Allies. And in a plan for "Operation 'Ost'" drawn
up in 1940 German General>Major Marks make the regret^l remark that
The Russians will not do us the favor of attacking us [fixst]."ii7
Ihe Soviets could not rely upon British warnings* for the British clearly
wanted to set Hider against the Soviet Union and weaken both, if not use
die opportunity to make peace with Hitler against the Soviets, as many in
the British establishment wanted.
Marshal K.A. Meretskov, no admirer of Stalin, believed the situation im-
mediately preceding the war was very complex, impossible to predict. His
memoirs were published after Khrushchev's ouster, in 1968. Zhukov,
who had been demoted in disgrace after the war by Stalin and had helped
Khnishchev attack Stalin in 1957, thought the Soviet Union under Stalin
had done everything it could to prepare for the war.
"... But Brezhnevite equilibrium consisted precisely in "decentralizing" power to local "barons" who would then support the faction in the center that gave them most power. ..."
"... When Gorbachev tried to recentralize decision-making in order to promote his reforms, he was obstructed at all levels and eventually figured out that without the republican support he could accomplish nothing. This is why, as Suraska writes, at the last Party congress in 1991, he outbid his competitors (Yegor Ligachev) by formally bringing all regional party bosses into the Politburo and thus effectively confederalizing the Party and the country. ..."
"... She sees the beginning of the end of the Army's role in Politburo's decision, strongly promoted by Andropov (then the head of KGB), not to intervene in Poland in 1980-81. Andropov's position (according to the transcripts of the Politburo meetings) that "even if Poland falls under the control of "Solidarity" [non-intervention] will be" (p. 70) was grounded in the belief that every Soviet foreign intervention (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) reinforced the power of the Army and thus, if KGB were ever come on top, Army must not be in the driver's seat. ..."
"... In perhaps the most original insight, Suraska deals with the ideology of Gorbachev and the first entirely Soviet-raised and bred generation that came to power in the mid-1980s. They were influenced by post-Marxist thinking where democracy or its absence were simple external (or non-essential) features: democracy was a sham since the "real power" resides elsewhere. ..."
"... In the penultimate chapter Suraska quickly and very critically reviews different theories that purported to explain the Communist state: modernization theory, totalitarianism, bureaucratic theory, are all found wanting. ..."
"... Both eviscerate the state, take over its functions, impose arbitrary decision-making, and do away with the division of powers. Anarchic and despotic features are thus shown to go together, moreover to be in need of each other. ..."
The break-up of the Soviet Union was one of the most unusual events in history. Never before had
an empire this powerful and vast given up its power and allowed the dissolution of its internal core
(the Soviet Union) and its tributary states (Eastern Europe) so quickly and without a fight. The
Ottoman empire went into a process of disintegration that lasted several centuries and was punctuated
by numerous wars, both with western powers and Russia, and numerous struggles for national independence
(Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria). The Habsburg empire dissolved after four years of the hitherto largest
conflict in history. The same is true of the Russian empire and the Hohenzollerns'. But the Soviet
Empire gave way almost entirely peacefully and without a fight. How did that happened?
A slender volume by Wisła Suraska (
How the SovietUnion disappeared , Duke University Press, 1998) tries to answer the question.
It is important to explain what the book is not. It is not a book about Communism and economics.
It does not try to answer (at least, not directly) the question about successes and failures of Communism
nor does it deal with economics at all. It is remarkable that the book does not contain a single
number. It is a book written by a political scientist and it focuses on internal political determinants
of the Soviet collapse.
It is a very well and clearly written volume. The key conclusion of Suraska, enounced in italics
in the last chapter, is that the break up is due to "the general failure of communist regimes--
their inability to build a modern state " (p. 134). It is "the state weakness, rather than
its omnipotence [that] stalled communist project of modernization and, most notably, Gorbachev's
perestroika" (p. 134). Lest somebody believe that Suraska is a partisan of state power, let me explain
that what she means is that the arbitrary nature of Communist state, overseen by the Communist party,
prevented it from ever developing a responsible and impersonal machinery of Weberian bureaucracy.
Such a machinery that follows well-known and rational rules cannot be established if the power is
arbitrary. And without such a machinery, the project of modernization is doomed.
But this still does not explain why the country (the USSR) broke up. It broke up, she argues,
because of a Brezhnevite equilibrium that-lacking a functioning centrally-controlled state apparatus
and forsaking the use of terror-consisted in the creation of territorially-based fiefdoms. The power
at the center depended on having peripheral supporters and these peripheral supporters gradually
took over most of the local (in the USSR case, republican) functions. They could be dislodged only
by the application of mass terror as when, under Stalin, the center actively fought the creation
of local centers of power, either by "purging" the leaders or by shifting them constantly between
the regions in order to prevent accumulation of power. But Brezhnevite equilibrium consisted
precisely in "decentralizing" power to local "barons" who would then support the faction in the center
that gave them most power.
When Gorbachev tried to recentralize decision-making in order to promote his reforms, he was
obstructed at all levels and eventually figured out that without the republican support he could
accomplish nothing. This is why, as Suraska writes, at the last Party congress in 1991, he outbid
his competitors (Yegor Ligachev) by formally bringing all regional party bosses into the Politburo
and thus effectively confederalizing the Party and the country. But even that proved too little
too late as the largest unit, Russia under Yeltsin, became, together with the Baltic republics, the
most secessionist.
Suraska rightly adds to this vertical de-concentration of power the ever-present wariness and
competition between the Party, the secret services (KGB) and the Army. The triangular relationship
where two actors try to weaken and control the third contributed to the collapse. She sees the beginning
of the end of the Army's role in Politburo's decision, strongly promoted by Andropov (then the head
of KGB), not to intervene in Poland in 1980-81. Andropov's position (according to the transcripts
of the Politburo meetings) that "even if Poland falls under the control of "Solidarity" [non-intervention]
will be" (p. 70) was grounded in the belief that every Soviet foreign intervention (Hungary 1956,
Czechoslovakia 1968) reinforced the power of the Army and thus, if KGB were ever come on top, Army
must not be in the driver's seat.
The ultimate weakness of the Party could be, as Suraska writes, seen in the final denouements
in the Soviet Union and Poland: in one case, the top party post went to a head of the secret police,
in the other case, to the head of the Army.
In perhaps the most original insight, Suraska deals with the ideology of Gorbachev and the
first entirely Soviet-raised and bred generation that came to power in the mid-1980s. They were influenced
by post-Marxist thinking where democracy or its absence were simple external (or non-essential) features:
democracy was a sham since the "real power" resides elsewhere. "Armed" with this belief and
the 1970 ideas of convergence of the two systems plus (in my opinion) millenarian Marxist view that
Communism represents the future of mankind, they began to see no significant contradictions between
the two systems and trusted that even the introduction of democracy would not affect their positions.
Thus, in an ironic twist, Suraska, who is thoroughly critical of both Marxist and post-Marxist theories,
credits the latter (p. 147) for bringing to an end the Marxist-based regimes.
In the penultimate chapter Suraska quickly and very critically reviews different theories that
purported to explain the Communist state: modernization theory, totalitarianism, bureaucratic theory,
are all found wanting. Suraska's conclusion, stated in the beginning of this text, is then expounded
in the last chapter revealingly entitled "Despotism and the modern state".
There, in a final note
worth pointing out, Suraska discusses Communist rejection of the state and its rules-bound procedures
(which make Communists ideological brethrens of anarchists) and compellingly argues for the complementarity
of "council ("soviet") democracy and central planning.
Both eviscerate the state, take over its functions,
impose arbitrary decision-making, and do away with the division of powers. Anarchic and despotic
features are thus shown to go together, moreover to be in need of each other.
When I was asked about the upcoming lecture "Why did we get the collapse of the USSR so wrong?"
by Emeritus Professor, the former Director of Australian Defense Intelligence Organization (DIO),
former Head of Strategic Studies Center at ANU etc etc
Paul Dibb,
I looked at the announcement
– and replied that it will be a typical Russophobic
hate-session, but this
time led by a real professional. I had had my reasons – after all, this was not going to be the first
presentation by
SDSC
on "Russian" topic and the previous lectures /seminars I attended were usually fun – if not scary.
Fun , because there you could hear "expert" opinions about Soviet Union/Russia not very different
from the
Diary of American Boy or , if you were lucky, you even could participate in an exciting academic
discussion on a topic such as eg. "Which side would likely to win in a direct confrontation of
a highly trained but very humane and moral military force (eg. NATO) with an untrained, truly barbaric
military units completely devoid of any humanity and moral (eg. the Russian Army)?". Scary,
because the above question was asked by an ADFA staff member hardly a month after the vivid pictures
from Abu Ghraib prison
and reports of rapes and indiscriminate killing of civilians in Iraq by American Army and
British troops leaked to the public. The same bright ADFA staff of course would ignore the fact
that the US Marines suffer not only from understandable lack of brain but also from
incontinence or, for example, what sort of
military documentary
the US Secretary of State finds
Hillariously entertaining. And that was why such discussions were scary – they made me wonder
about the intellectual and educational level of the people charged with the defense of the country
I live in and, in fact, love, and made me worried about the "defense force" who seemed were convinced
that eg. there was nothing Russia and the Russians wanted more desperately than to occupy all Anglo-Saxon
countries – and especially, Australia- presumably, with the intention to feed them all after the
conquest, as Russia did feed most Soviet Republics in her not-so-recent past.
So that was what I fully expected when I went to listen to Professor Dibb – another bucketful
of Russophobic bullshit from yet another
"Russian"
expert who knows about Soviet Union much more than any of the Soviet citizens of any rank or
profession ever knew.
I was not disappointed after I entered the lecture hall - there, on two large white screens, a
projector showed the lecture title with a colorful photo of – yes, Kursk submarine, of course. Not
Buran/Energia, not
Soviet RD-180 installed on current
US Atlas
– the same old Soviet RD-180 which according to some sources
Pratt and Whitney attempted
to but were unable to manufacture on US soil themselves even after being sold all licenses and technology.
Not
VA-111 "Shkval", not
S-300, not even R-36M2
(SS-18), but an ill-fated submarine…. The only part missing was the Australian news trade-mark
phrase "Russian-built.." – an important piece of information about equipment manufacturer, which
for some reasons is never used to report accidents eg. with
Boeing 747. For those who do not know – the photo at the beginning of this post is not what you,
perhaps, thought – the photo was taken inside of the
USS St. Antonio . This one shows quality of the welds in the submarine's oil lubricating system.
Perhaps, I should have put a photo of an Australian Collins Class submarine instead. Sorry, professor
– I know this is not the way to a constructive discussion, I just show you how some things may look
from a different perspective. So, the picture on the lecture hall screen promised the usual – I knew
what to expect .
And I am very, very pleased to say that I was completely and totally wrong. You see, I do not
frequently meet people in Australian academia, who are not afraid to have their own opinion, especially
when this opinion is not officially "approved". Most of what professor Dibb said about Soviet Union
was, certainly, not an officially approved "line". Even today. And it was mostly what I would have
said myself. Publicly. Not everything and not the same way, but most of it. Make no mistake – it
would not be correct to classify Paul Dibb as a "friend" of Russia or , especially, of the Soviet
Union. No, far from it Perhaps, it would be correct to call him an "enemy by profession", or maybe
a "professional enemy" , where the key word would be "professional". In other words, it was his job
to be an enemy of the Soviet Union and by extension – of Russia. I am not sure if it was his conscious
choice, but that was what he was and still is. However, to be a professional enemy is not the same
as to be a professional fool, who cannot think, who cannot and does not want to see beyond officially
approved "propaganda" headlines in Sydney Morning Herald (more about "professionals" of that sort
below). Paul Dibb, certainly, was and is not one of them. As I said – he was and
is a professional, capable of making
his own judgments and capable
of staying on the neutral ground where it counted. My respects.
There were things in Paul Dibb's presentation about Soviet Union which I would agree with. For
example, his observation that in many respects living standards of ordinary Soviet citizens ~ 30
years ago were not much higher than in some modern days so-called third-world countries. But I would
have also asked who was to blame for that? The communists? Maybe. But they were hardly alone. More
likely that it was also the result of almost 80 years of concerted efforts of the world's most economically
developed nations to make life in the Soviet Union as miserable as it was possible. For example,
by forcing the evil Russkies to spend a quarter of their entire GDP on defense. Or by not helping
them when they needed it until it was obvious that they would manage themselves. I would add that
in my opinion, it were precisely the efforts of the democratic "west" which largely shaped the "evil
face of Soviet communism" and discredited the idea that to live a decent life, it was not necessary
to steal from or rob the fellow humans, especially under pretense that this what "democracy" and
"freedom" were about.
Of course, there were also statements in Dibb's presentation , which I would would want to challenge.
For example, about the actual severity of corruption in the former Soviet Union. As always in such
cases, there is an implied reference point – presumably, it is the
Australian Mining Sector?. Maybe Australian academic system? Oh, well, next time. Maybe in the
next life. Then, when it happens, the debate would be along the line comparing cash payments of bribes
(eg. as in modern Russia) with the demands of compulsory contributions to a restricted access account
in a perverted Australian version of
Favor Bank . I would argue that the latter system, it seems, is far more efficient in eliminating
employment of literally each and every "outsider" or not a family member who is actually capable
of doing something. Especially, in
Australian "science". With the obvious consequences – the quality, in the latter case, of the
research. Because with Favor Bank system you are not anymore talking to a "scientist" who gets
"a pleasure of finding the things out" as you might happen to assume from his or her job title.
Instead, you are forced to deal with a financial investment banker. You simply would not understand
each other if you are going to talk to a banker about science or Universe or the
meaning of life. Nor will you be able to impress the financial speculator with the results of
your scientific research – he or she simply won't understand what you are talking about. Professor
Dibb did mention several times the difficulties he had trying to obtain a coherent point of view
from various "experts" on Soviet Union. This was one of the reasons it was difficult or even impossible
– because Dibb assumed he was talking to professional "sovietologists", while in fact they
all were primarily professional investment bankers. To compare, the Soviet higher education
system always had "normal" ways completely open – if you were up to the challenge.
And the challenge was a big one . Professor Dibb did say few cautious words about the quality
of Soviet scientists in what he called "hard sciences" – he said, "it was (usually) the first class".
No arguments about this, "usually" it was, but, perhaps, not necessarily on the average.
The Soviet education in the "hard" sciences was unquestionably broader than "western", usually
ridiculously narrowly specialized requirements. The result was two-fold. It was incredibly difficult
to actually master everything which was required from a student at the top level. Almost impossible.
But those who tried hard and were apt to the task, eventually gained, at least to some extend, that
magic ability to see the whole of science.
That something, which cannot be taught, but links very different fields of scientific knowledge
together. The whole picture. Maybe, in most cases incomplete (or very much incomplete – like (perhaps)
mine) and imperfect – but still the whole picture of the physical world. This ability not only to
link seemingly disjoint facts into a simple and coherent picture – in other words – to create a new
knowledge, but also to think independently and more importantly, to work creatively and successfully
in , again, seemingly, very different fields. That was for those under the Soviet system who had
motivation and who could do it. The other students simply gave up. So the product of the Soviet higher
eduction was a bi-modal distribution of "quality" of scientists , like the one on the sketch below
(solid curves). What Australian and "western" educational system produces is shown as a dashed curve
for comparison. Yes, this is my own, personal opinion. I lived and worked under both systems long
enough and I have compelling reasons to believe that I am not entirely wrong in my estimates. You
want to disagree? Go and try to talk to almost any "professional " Australian scientist about science.
In most cases, initially you will get a puzzled look followed by cautious questions mostly about
who you are (he or she tries to figure out whose account you are planning to make a deposit to) and
then you will hear something like "this is not my field" – even when it actually is.
Fig.1 Approximate distributions of the "quality" of scientists employed in the
Soviet and Australian academic research systems. The red arrow near a sharp step on the "Australian"
curve marks a "creativity threshold" on the horizontal axis – the boundary, beyond which an individual
gains the ability NOT to follow "consensus".
Well, of course, there are other interesting discussion topics which were not present, but would
not be unrelated to what professor Dibb said in his lecture. Many other things. Some only tangentially
linked to the topic of the Soviet Union, but close to the topic of the quality of higher education
or academic research in Australia.
For example, such as how capitalism affects science? If you ask what I think – in the long run
capitalism kills true scientific research completely and irreversibly. Simply because when science
becomes a private business, it does what
Milton Friedman described as a single social duty of any business enterprise – it maximizes the
profit. And historically, the cheapest way to maximize profit had been elimination of the competition.
By any possible means. In this case, starting from making the "academic" system effectively closed
for "outsiders" without a password to an account in Favor Bank, and finishing …yes, with a monopoly.
Example of the latter trend? Sure – look at the recent "outbreak" of (actually encouraged) large-scale
"collaborative" grants approved by ARC – of
course, at the expense of the individual applications. You would never believe – apparently nowadays
the genius prefer to work in a crowd. And in Australia.
Another tangential topic would be "democracy" in scientific research. Not the sort which the US
usually brings to the less fortunate nations around the world without asking if these nations would
prefer to eat better under a less "democratic" form of government. No. I am talking about the sort
of "democracy" when a group of scientific "businessmen", the owners of private "scientific" enterprises,
is given the right to choose competitors …. to themselves. As it happens (sometimes) on the new academic
staff selection panels (see eg.
here for an observation by
V. I. Arnold). I am sure that you – as well as I do – have not the slightest doubt that the selection
panel in this case will always select the strongest possible candidate, so he or she would, perhaps
in the nearest future, beat them in getting say, the same ARC grants. Or promotions. Or a position
if there are cuts, simply because he/she is better and deserves it more . A related sub-topic would
be a question about the sort of future "scientists", a higher educational system where each and everyone
employed is primarily a professional Favor Bank investor , can possibly produce …
But lets go back to professor Paul Dibb and his presentation. In fact, in answering his title
question – "Why did we get the collapse of the USSR so wrong?" my views and his, perhaps,
are not so different. Because of the quality of the available "analysts", of the professional "researchers".
In fact, it was due to the failure of the entire modern "western" academic education system which
made people in those "professions" so narrowly specialized – and as a rule , specialized in investment
to Favors Bank, rather than in their designated fields, which made them unable to think "outside
the square" (or , rather outside a straight guiding line in this case), unable to generalize and
as the result – not able to predict and even to understand what was and is happening on the territory
of the former Soviet Union. That is why.
And thank you, professor – your lecture was very good and , as you can see – thought-provoking
– as a truly good lecture should be.
For those who managed to read this post to the end – a simple question: did the training and more
importantly – the staff selection system/criteria currently practiced in eg. political sciences in
Australia, changed sufficiently, so now we can really trust the"opinion" of Australian "experts"
and "advisers" on geopolitical matters? Such as eg. establishment of permanent American military
bases controlled exclusively by Americans on Australian territory? Another food for thought?
Post Scriptum
Of the many side issues, the reasons for Soviet presence in Afghanistan in 80s were mentioned
more than once. The "why" it had happened has many answers, eg. one of them is provided by Z. Brzezinsky
in his book The Grand Chessboard, another is below.
"..I'll never forget one particularly chilling illustration of the power of structure in
international politics. It occurred in a private meeting with a high-ranking member of the Soviet
embassy, a few months after the Soviets had sent troops into Afghanistan. The official talked,
eloquently and with great sincerity, about how the U.S.S.R. had been the first to recognize the
country after its founding. The U.S.S.R. had been the first to come to its aid, repeatedly, when
there was internal strife or instability. Beginning in the late 1970s, as threats from guerrilla
factions increased, the ruling government asked for increasing Soviet assistance.
Modest assistance led to greater needs for broader help. Itcame to a point, the
official explained, where "We really had no choice but tointervene militarily."
from Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, New York, p.34
UPDATE
Independently thinking people do deserve receiving the credit for their bravery & independence.
Here you go – Paul Dibb now writing in The Australian something
completely opposite to what he wrote few years ago – namely, that US military bases & live active
duty US combat personnel on Australian soil are a sure blessing for Australia & the whole region.
It seems that the Australian "yes-sir, where is my money? " analytical "expertise" does find its
ways better than WD-40 – and well into the retirement age it seems.
Russia's president Vladimir Putin. 'One cannot disagree that the admission of the Baltic states, and earlier discussions of the
possible accession of Georgia and Ukraine, have been used by Putin's administration to fuel his popularity,' writes James Rodgers.
Timothy Garton Ash (There
is another Russia, 20 April) makes some interesting points, but misses others. While true that some "Putin understanders" do
seek to "excuse all" when looking at Russia today, there are also pitfalls in adopting the opposite approach. Nowhere does the article
mention Nato expansion. One can agree or disagree as to the wisdom or otherwise of Nato's policies in eastern Europe since 1991.
One cannot disagree that the admission of the Baltic states in particular, and earlier discussions of the possible accession of Georgia
and Ukraine, have been used by Putin's administration to fuel his popularity.
James Rodgers
City University London (and Reuters TV Moscow 1991-93; BBC Moscow 1998-2000 and 2006-09)
Nato's eastward expansion and the continued development of a US missile defence system in eastern Europe have contributed
to heightening tensions in the region. Russian military announcements and actions should be understood in that context, especially
considering that at the end of the cold war, the Warsaw pact was disbanded, while Nato increased its membership. A new government
should carry out an evaluation of Trident's relevance to current threats in this year's strategic defence and security review,
but the alternative doctrine Paul Mason seeks (Russian
subs are circling, but what should Britain's nuclear deterrent be?, 20 April) in response to Russian foreign policy must
be a commitment to peaceful relations and a process of de-militarization and nuclear disarmament.
The non-proliferation treaty review conference in May is the opportunity for a new PM to resume relations and revive disarmament
negotiations, building on Obama and Putin's successful New Start treaty and setting out a willingness to scrap
Trident, alongside a commitment to seeking resolution of
conflicts through the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the UN, rather than the cold war relic of Nato.
Kate Hudson
General secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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matsb Jul 9, 2020 at 3:39 pm
Baker III are just discernible to the trained ear.
Another one quite likely to have been cultivating a quiet exhalation was Hongkong and Shanghai Bank boss Sir William Purvis.
Peter Seaman:
Oswald Howe, Jr:
Southeast Bank:
Bankers Trust:
White & Case:
UBS, Lugano:
Indosuez:
THE KESWICK-JARDINE CONNECTION
Jardine Fleming is also listed in the same document as a "role player", a few lines beneath the name of Tony Buckingham – the high-profile head of Executive Outcomes. In an accompanying financial report it is revealed that EO used account number 600774426 at Jardine Fleming Bank Limited, located at Port Moresby, Hong Kong. The account, rendered as at 15 May 1998, held a balance of US$36 million, and included Tony Buckingham among those authorized to sign cheques on the account.
APARTHEID'S MISSING BILLIONS
Christian O. Bruch/ laif Benjamin Bidder
Chris Gloag/ WirtschaftsWoche
Mischa Japaridze/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of DER SPIEGEL.
Charles Dharapak/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
490 9:39 PM
Gorbachev Called Coward, Traitor by Former Comrade By VIKTOR K. GREBENSHIKOV May 28, 1992 12 AM
7 hours ago It's quite stunning that in the 'Land of The Free' the police routinely steal
citizens wealth as they want to. I'm not sure even the Robber Baron's in Europe hundreds of
years ago were that blatant.
11 hours ago Lebensraum ?
11 hours ago This has been the policy since the Clinton years. Nothing new here. 
12 hours ago
(Edited) This Janusz Bugajski dude is a generic Russophobe of Polish descent. His irrational
hatred of all-things Russian is typical of the rabid Catholic Poles who've invaded Orthodox
Christian Russia multiple times over the last millennia.
1978: The year
today's world was made
'Sex is a gift of
God': Pope Francis shares benefits of 'passionate' love, slams pornography
Biggest rift in
modern Orthodox history? Russian Church won't work w/ Constantinople-chaired bodies
After Magnitsky: Dead
lawyer's boss Browder and his legal hurdles – now in US
Russia slaps
travel ban on 5 US ex-officials over 'legalization of torture'
Key
Magnitsky case witness may have been poisoned – report
– as a truly good lecture should be.